Anomalous Opinions
Apparently James Lovelock is saying that democracy will have to be “put on hold for a while” in order to deal with climate change.
I don’t need to write much, I can refer my readers to the answer I gave previously the last time this idea was raised.
I would just add that the idea that democracy is a good way of managing everything except the climate seems about as likely as the idea that it’s a good way of deciding everything except MP’s salaries.
In my previous post on the future durability of the AGW scare, I mentioned the reason why scientists tend not to view climate sceptics as presenting a legitimate scientific viewpoint. I took the opportunity of a wild kick at my other favourite target, democracy:
“If scientists treat creationists and the like with respect, and argue honestly and fairly, they will be screwed by elected politicians.”
Because I was off on a tangent, and not giving the argument the separate post that it deserves, I didn’t provide any evidence that this attitude really exists among scientists.
As it happens, I picked up Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” from the library at the weekend. Imagine my smug self-satisfaction, then, when I read the following this morning on page 91
In parts of the United States, science is under attack from a well-organized, politically well-connected and, above all, well-financed opposition, and the teaching of evolution is in the front-line trench. Scientists could be forgiven for feeling threatened, because most research money comes ultimately from government, and elected representatives have to answer to the ignorant and the prejudiced, as well as to the well-informed, among their constituents.
Dawkins is putting that forward as an excuse for scientists to make public statements that they don’t believe – in this case for being overly sympathetic to Christianity, in order to keep moderate Christians as allies against creationists. He considers it an insufficient excuse – “The real war is between rationalism and superstition”, but he believes that some scientists are concealing their real views for tactical reasons in the war against fundamentalists and “elected representatives”. I think he is right.
The fundamental point, which I’ve touched on on a number of occasions, is that if you want to be a scientist in a democracy, where “most research money comes ultimately from the government”, as Dawkins says, then you have to be a bit of a politician. That comes through just as strongly in Phil Jones’ cri de coeur in today’s Times – “I am just a scientist. I have no training in PR or dealing with crises.”
I really don’t believe that more than one in ten of the warmist scientists would spin, lie and conspire in the way they have just to support their pet theory against scientific opponents – even with the stakes as high as they are in terms of funding and career opportunities. They would see that as a betrayal of science, and their consciences would not allow it.
But The Discovery Institute is not a scientific opponent – it is an anti-scientific opponent. Its dishonesty and ulterior motives disqualify it from participating in the normal scientific process according to the normal rules, and in dealing with it, scientists subordinate the scientific process to political tactics.
The key fact about the climate debate is that, because of where the initial scepticism came from, many scientists saw it in the same light as intelligent design. As I wrote yesterday, once they had made that assumption, they were trapped: if you believe your opponents are enemies of science, then stronger arguments from the enemy spur you not to greater doubt, but to greater determination. Also, since the more politically aware bodies in science closed ranks against climate sceptics, they found support largely among that minority more accustomed to working with the political right. The association of climate sceptics with minor right-wing think tanks and a Republican senator confirms in the mainstream scientists the view that they are dealing with a political enemy, not a scientific opponent.
I wrote in my giving-up-on-politics post, “not only do my good arguments not win against my opponents’ bad arguments, my good arguments do not even win against my allies’ bad arguments.”
The problem that causes is that the arguments most likely to persuade the public that you are right, are likely at the same time to persuade the well-informed that you are wrong.
We are seeing the knock-on effect of that situation. In order to win over the ignorant and indifferent, prominent people on both sides of the dispute are employing arguments that are weak, irrelevant, or downright dishonest. Such techniques achieve successes, but at the cost, on both sides, of convincing the opponents more strongly of their own rightness. And, both convinced of their own rightness and dismayed by their opponents’ undeserved popular successes, each side becomes more unscrupulous still in response.
The really difficult question is; does all this mean that the scientists were wrong to ‘go political’ over evolution? Once they had arrogated to themselves the right to decide that evolution was true and they needed to do whatever was necessary to keep teaching it, was an overreaching such as is happening over climate inevitable?
I don’t have to answer that question – I can just blame the problem on democracy, the only system which makes convincing the ignorant and indifferent an essential part of everything from studying the climate to putting on a museum exhibition.
Via JoNova, there has been a large shift in opinion against global warming in the UK.
There has been a lot of triumphalism on the sceptic side – James Delingpole talking about the “imminent death of the AGW scam”, and so on – but I think it is misplaced.
I would guess that the surge in scepticism in Britain owes a lot more to the exceptionally hard winter than to the revelations from East Anglia or the antics of Pachauri, none of which have made very much impact on the public.
The cold winter is not insignificant, of course. It may be just normal variation, but the popular presentation of AGW has mysteriously ignored the fact that the temperature changes they are talking about are barely even measurable, and nowhere near enough to actually notice compared to ordinary year-to-year variation. Therefore, while a cold winter in Britain tells us nothing about climate change as described in the journals, it is a clear falsification of global warming as it has been presented by the media since the 1990s
That is why the media has been uncharacteristically open to both sides during the present kerfuffle. Various scientists are scrambling, not for sake of the movement, but for their own jobs. The movement itself can just sit this out and wait. The IPCC isn’t going away (even if Pachauri does), nor are the politicians who have made climate concern a key part of their image. They’ll wait until summer, and if they get a warm one in the USA and Britain, they’ll crank up the machine again. They won’t bother arguing the toss about tree-rings, Indian glaciers or Chinese weather stations, they’ll just brush it all off as petty troublemaking in the face of the overwhelming threat. And the media will take sides, as they always do, on the basis of which politicians they want to gain and which they want to lose from the whole process.
The exposure of climate science’s guilty secrets, then, will not stop the process in the short term. In the long run, it may have an effect. As I discussed before, it has allowed some people who never believed the exaggerations to say so in public. This in turn may persuade a future generation of politicians that global warming is not what they want to attach their reputations to. For the Obama/Cameron/Milliband generation, it is too late. In a democracy, being indecisive is worse than being wrong, and they cannot afford to change their positions now. But the next decade’s politicians are constructing their positions now, and the choices they make will drive the media landscape of the 2020s.
Ironically, one of the biggest causes of the original AGW error cascade, as Eric Raymond calls it, was George W Bush. For the rank and file in the world’s science departments, Bush was pretty much the most despised figure in history, because of his association with fundamentalist Christianity and the resulting policies, above all against Stem Cell research. To the typical scientist, the theory that the president was attacking climate science because he was in league with oil interests was so intrinsically likely that it wouldn’t make sense to even question it. This was the man who prohibited park rangers from denying young-earth creationism at the Grand Canyon. From that point on, any criticism at all of global warming was presumptively an attack on science itself on behalf of religion and commerce and was to be dealt with on that basis, not studied and reasoned with as if it was part of a real scientific debate. The controversy fell into the pattern of the evolution/creation controversy, rather than the pattern of arguments over Dark Matter or Psychoanalysis. That attitude still persists, and will be very hard to shift, because once it is established, then evidence which strengthens the deniers, while it might start to persuade some of the faithful, will produce in most of the faithful a renewed determination to defeat the anti-science enemy which has become more dangerous through the unfortunate developments which have increased its appeal. Thus the error cascade is perpetuated.
The difficult thing is that I sympathise with these people. I can understand why they are doing what they are doing, and I can’t see a way to shake them out of it. They have learned over the decades that if they treat creationists and the like with respect, and argue honestly and fairly, they will be screwed by elected politicians. And they are applying that lesson. If they didn’t just happen to be wrong, they would be doing the right thing.
The theory has been going around recently that dealing effectively with climate change is impossible due to democracy. I think it may have been triggered by an article in Der Spiegel, published in a translated form at Roger Pielke Jr’s blog.
As a sceptic of both global warming and democracy, I have no dog in this fight. If Climate Change means we have to ditch democracy, that’s OK with me; on the other hand, if democracy means we can’t do anything about climate change, that’s just fine too. Nevertheless, the intersection of the two obsessions that this blog seems to have settled on demands my attention.
So let’s take the argument, attributed to David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith, that democracy is incapable of taking the collective action made necessary by the threat of climate change. I haven’t read their book, so I am dealing with a summary of their ideas, for instance from these articles by Shearman.
The weakness of the global warming argument doesn’t necessarily invalidate the claim that democracy is unequal to the challenge it presents. To defeat it on that basis, you would have to show either that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is not just untrue, but impossible, or else that the determination of democratic governments to take any measures necessary short of action is primarily the result of well-founded doubts about the science.
Take these in order: first, is it possible that some such threat as global warming is claimed to be could actually be true? I would say that it is much less likely that some such threat would materialize than that a false threat would be promoted by opportunists, but I cannot say that it is impossible. The global warming scare itself cannot be dismissed out of hand (despite the attempts of some sceptics to to so), but can only be ruled out on the basis of a close look at the evidence.
So we can go on to ask the second question: if AGW or something like it were actually true, would the political structures that we have make it impossible for the necessary collective action to be taken?
It’s plausible, but, at least in the brief articles if not in his book, Shearman does not make that case. He relies on the fact that meaningful action has not, in fact, been taken by democratic governments. That might be, as he says, because they’re not capable of it, but it might equally be that the stalemate is the result of opposition from those who, in my view correctly, believe on the basis of the evidence that such meaningful action is not in fact warranted.
Assessment of this issue is complicated by a feature that global warming alarmism shares with other religions: many people even at an individual level say they believe it but act as if they don’t. I’m not sure it makes much sense, descending into familiar arguments about cheap talk versus revealed preferences, to ask what such people “really” believe, but I think one has to say that to some degree they are unpersuaded by the evidence, even if they say otherwise. Given that, there is still the possibility that the doubt which they have but deny is not reasonable doubt, but is founded on a psychological unwillingness to internalise inconvenient truths.
If this contradiction were limited to the common people, it would be a point in Shearman’s favour. The plebs are not fit to govern, therefore the wise must rule them. However, the inconsistency seems to me to be just as widespread among the powerful as among the mob – I have previously observed, for instance, that investors do not rate sea level rises as significant in their valuations of commercial property.
So for me, Shearman’s argument fails, unfortunately. I suspect that, despite its faults, our democratic governments (in the sense of old democracy, of course) would be able to take sufficient action on climate change, were it really necessary. The reason they are not taking such action is that it is not necessary. The reason they say it is necessary, while not actually taking it, is that they are are lying as usual.
The real link between democracy and global warming is quite different, and is adequately summarised by my guru Mencius Moldbug. In short, the global warming scare and its associated bureaucratic outgrowths are the sort of thing you would expect a democracy to produce – indeed, the kind of thing they always have produced.
The scare originated in democratic countries, spread through democratic countries, and has only been accepted by non-democratic countries after they were pressured or bribed to do so by democracies.
There’s nothing new here, but I think I can put it more simply and clearly than I’ve managed to do before.
Obviously many “democratic” governments exist, and when we normally talk about democracies, these are what we mean. What I’m talking about here is the theoretical idea of democracy, where policy is controlled by the voters. This is the distinction I made previously in Two kinds of democracy.
Political systems can be changed, either by invasion, overthrow from within the territory but outside the government, or subversion from within the structure of the government itself.
All governments devote a large part of their effort and resources to protecting themselves against being changed. It can be assumed that any governments which do not do so, get changed.
To protect the political system, the government needs to correctly identify the threats that exist to it, and devote sufficient resources and attention to resisting them. The chief premiss on which I base my argument here is that this is hard.
If those inside the government structures do not have the freedom of policy to protect the system, they will be unable to do so and the system will be changed. Most commonly, it is subverted from within, until those within the system do have the ability to hold onto power.
If the system is truly democratic, office-holders within the system do not have freedom of policy. Policy is dictated by voters. This is the line I am drawing: I am not attacking some straw-man “perfect” democracy, but any in which the voters can overrule the elite on matters of policy. If they cannot, then it is an “old democracy” and potentially stable.
Voters do not have sufficient inside knowledge of the political situation to choose the policies that will preserve their democratic power. Further, they do not have sufficient interest in doing so – the value of having a vote is in being able to influence policy according to one’s preferences, and that is always likely to take priority over preserving the present system.
There are many examples of democracies voting to get rid of democracy – 1930s Germany and Italy being the best known. What I say is that democracies always vote to get rid of democracy, if not directly, then by not voting to prevent the system being subverted from within. That produces the “old democracy” I wrote about previously, in which the influence of voters is minor, and real power lies in institutions which are capable of perpetuating themselves
There could be an important exception to all this. If the franchise is limited in some way to a distinct minority of the population, then the chief threat to the system is from the disenfranchised. The voters will be well aware of this, and will have a clear and obvious interest in preserving the system which keeps power for their class. Such a system will be more stable than a true democracy with a universal or near-universal franchise.
This breaks down if there is no clear distinction between the ruling class and the disenfranchised. In that case, one faction or other within the ruling class can always benefit by a small extension of the franchise. The result is a ratchet causing the restricted franchise to eventually become universal.
Thus classical and 19th-century democracies were somewhat more stable than new democracies created today. The voters were aware that the current system was what kept them in a privileged position, and were very aware of threats to the system. From the point of view of a voter in a universal-suffrage “young” democracy, democracy just isn’t worth voting to defend.
This doesn’t mean that the fact of there being elections doesn’t have an effect – just that the actual opinions of the voters don’t.
I’ve been on holiday for a couple of weeks, and I expected to write quite a lot here in that time.
The reason I didn’t is that my political thinking has pretty much come to a conclusion. I don’t like it at all, but it’s a conclusion for all that.
When Adam Smith was writing, there were many theories, public and private, about what a business ought to do. Smith pointed out, [drawing from Darwin and Malthus] (edit, yes I really wrote that, oops), that whatever theory they believed, the businesses that survived would be those which aimed at maximising profit, or those that, by coincidence, behaved as if that was what they aimed at.
The situation in politics is that, while there are many theories about what politicians should do, those politicians will succeed that behave as if their aim is to achieve power at any cost. Perhaps historically many politicians had other aims, and the successful ones were those who happened to act as a pure power-seeker would, but now there is sufficient understanding of what path will gain and hold power that those who consciously diverge from the path least will be those who win.
To be clear, I’m not simply talking about electoral politics here. I’m talking about all politics, in non-democratic systems, in the electoral process, and in the wider and more important politics beyond elections, where power lives in media, civil service, educational, trade union and other centres outside the formal government.
The trivial fact – that power will go to those that want it – is reinforced by the more effective co-operation that pure power-seekers can achieve than ideologues. A large number of power-seekers, although rivals, will co-operate on the basis of exchanges of power. The result is a market in power, and that is the most effective basis for large-scale collective action. Those attempting to achieve specific, different but related aims will find it much more difficult to organise and co-operate on the same scale.
Is it not possible, then, to have significant influence, not by competing directly with politicians but by competing with the media/educational branches of the establishment by promoting ideas? The metacontext, as the folks at Samizdata say. It is indeed possible to influence politics by doing that, and that is what libertarians have done for the last half century or so. But I’m not sure it’s possible to have good influence. Certainly some good things have happened because libertarians have changed the metacontext to the point where the things have appealed to power-seekers. But some bad things have happened that way too. The fact is that while the “background” beliefs of the electorate and other participants in politics does have an effect, there is no reason to assume that correct background beliefs cause better policies than incorrect background beliefs.
One of the most depressing aspects of activism is that on the very few occasions when you get someone onto your side, either by persuading them or just finding them, more often than not they’re still wrong. They’re persuaded by bad arguments rather than good arguments. Activism would appeal to me on the idea that I will win out in the end because my arguments are good, but in fact not only do my good arguments not win against my opponents’ bad arguments, my good arguments do not even win against my allies’ bad arguments. The idea that truth is a secret weapon that is destined to win out once assorted exceptional obstacles have been overcome is an utter fantasy.
As a result, even if you do achieve marginal influence by working for policies or ideas that would be widely beneficial, your success is likely to backfire. The other players in the game are working for the narrow interest of identifiable groups and, as such, are able to mobilise far greater resources. They also are willing to trade with other power seekers, which improves their effectiveness further. The idealist is not able to do that, because the idealist obtains only the particular powers he wants to keep, whereas the politician grabs whatever power he can, even if it is of no use to him, and that which is of no use to him, he trades. The only way to do that is to get whatever power you can, which is my definition of a politician.
It still feels like there is something noble in working for better government, even if the project appears doomed. But there isn’t. After all, most utopians from anarchist to fascist to Marxist are working for better government, but we oppose them because their utopias are unachievable and their attempts to get there are harmful. Your ideas don’t work because they’re flawed, my ideas don’t work because politics is flawed. Hmmm. Why are my ideas better than yours, again?
And that is the final straw. In truth, I have never been an activist. I have neither appetite or aptitude for practical politics, which after all is basically a people business, but I used to believe it was interesting to look in isolation at the question of what those with political power ought to do with it, so as to make the government as good as possible, in a vaguely utilitarian way. What brings my political efforts to an end is the realisation that that is meaningless. A political theory based on the assumption that a government will act in the general interest once it understands how to do so is as useful as a theory based on the assumption that the world is flat and carried by elephants. Politics has given me some entertainment over the years, but not as much as Terry Pratchett has.
If I am going to assume that governments work in the general interest, once they understand how to do it, I might just as well assume that industrialists work in the general interest, in which case all my clever arguments about the value of private property rights for resolving opposing private interests are completely irrelevant.
It’s amusing that of all the posts on this blog, one of the most important turns out to be one that I thought at the time was unimportant: this one, originally driven by my musings on Newcombe’s Paradox.
Almost all significant propositions are, implicitly or explicitly, of the form IF {some hypothetical state of the world} THEN {something will result}. In politics, the hypothetical frequently involves some person making some decision. The proposition therefore needs to take into account whatever is necessary for that person to actually make that decision – and the other effects of those necessary conditions may well be more significant than the stated result.
I came very close to making all the connections back then, even raising the significance of my facetious “if I were Führer” form of putting political propositions. I am not Führer, and never will be, and neither will anyone like me, and all my political logic collapses on that just like any other proof premised on a falsehood.
Where does that leave me? I am no longer a libertarian – I find libertarian arguments just as correct as I always did, but they are of no relevance to the real world. I could continue to comment here on the stupidities that people accept from various politicians, but I would be doing it in the same spirit as if I were judging the team selection of a football club – in full awareness of my own impotence and irrelevance. Maybe I will. It would make more sense to take up something useful, like gardening.
I can also attempt to benefit humanity by encouraging others to detach from politics as I am doing. Someone has to have power, and if you think you can get it and you would be good at it, by all means go for it. If not, then leave well alone. Be one of the ruled, and pursue whatever aims you choose without the illusion that you have the right, the duty or the capability to change the policies of the rulers. Embrace passivism.
My Leader, Ian PJ, has dug up the “Letter for Posterity” written by popular author Dennis Wheatley in 1947, and tried to claim him as a Libertarian.It will hardly do. Wheatley was at the very least conservative, and I would happily claim him as a reactionary with only slight reservations.In particular, he had no respect for mass democracy. His letter (available in full as an 11-page pdf from the BBC) disposes of it in a couple of paragraphs:… But the voice [of the people] was stilled by the coming of the electro-machine age, as the new inventions enabled the professional politicians of all parties to get into direct touch with every community, however remote. First came the electric press, enabling a million or more copies of a newspaper to be run off in a single night — and enormously improved arrangements for distribution. Then came the wireless telegraph — which swiftly developed into radio, with a five times a day news service which, by means of a cheap receiving set, could be picked up in every home. And these were followed by the cinematograph which soon became one of the most insidious weapons for political propaganda. The result was that instead of forming their opinions by quiet thought and reasoned discussion, the bulk of the people took them ready made (from so called “informed” sources) …Quite.And before you ask, no, blogging doesn’t help. What led to the centralisation of opinion-forming was not the necessity of centralisation – such as has been attributed to the capital costs of printing and broadcasting – but the possibility of centralisation: the fact that the most immediately attractive ideas could reach everyone at once, unfiltered, and gain credibility from their momentum.(Do not imagine that I wish to reimpose the filters on the flow of ideas: it can’t be done, and it shouldn’t be done. I don’t want to control the opinions of the masses, I want to ignore them.)So, no, Ian, Wheatley would not think all the better of us for being “committed to peaceful change through the ballot box”. He would think we are wasting our time.Unfortunately, his prescriptions are not optimistic, unless you accept his assertion that when we are killed fighting for our freedom against the state, we will be reborn with “a finer, stronger personality” as well as being an example to others. (The problems of being an atheist and a reactionary are a subject I’ve been meaning to write about for a while).Back to Wheatley’s non-libertarianism; if we have any historical model of libertarian government, it is probably Whig Britain at the end of the 19th century. Here’s what Wheatley’s recurring hero the Duke de Richleau says about the classical liberal movement, in a scene set in 1906The main plank in the Liberal platform has for long been Free Trade, and with it they have won the votes of the masses in the towns because, on the face of it, their policy means cheap living. But go a little deeper into the matter and you will find that it has another altogether different aspect. The great strength of the Liberal party lies in the industrial north, and the money to finance industry comes from the rich manufacturers and the old Whig families who have invested their wealth in commerce. They are very shrewd people, and they know that if they can bring the cost of living down they will then be able to force down wages and derive bigger profits from their factories.
“Vendetta in Spain”, Dennis Wheatley, 1957 ISBN 0-09-004660-9 p.153
I mentioned slight reservations about Wheatley’s reaction – simply, he is too soft. In the letter, he defends Kings being answerable to an aristocratic class, and even to the will of the people when that was not short-circuited by mass communication.
For two years now I have been hanging on the words of Mencius Moldbug, who’s analysis of the politics of our time (Unqualified Reservations) I find almost completely persuasive.
Having advanced a vision of government by for-profit corporations, MM has at last started to lay out the path by which we can get from democracy to responsible, effective, secure government.
His answer so far validates both my high estimate of his understanding, and my pessimism. The logic is completely sound.
The problem with government is politics – the fact that no government can aim primarily at the welfare of the population, or for that matter even at its own profit, when it is constrained most of all by politics to do whatever is necessary to hold off rivals for power.
Anyone who attempts to improve the government, in any aspect, by any method, is committing politics and is therefore part of the problem. MM gives us a steel rule – that in order to become worthy to hold power, the first requirement is “absolute renunciation of official power”.
Will this approach – passivism – work? It doesn’t seem likely. But, it doesn’t seem likely that activism will work either. I’ve said before, long shots are all we’ve got
Passivism appeals to me. I even put forward my own version when I refused to sign a petition calling for Gordon Brown to resign. But I have not completely abandoned activism, albeit in the form of half-hearted engagement with the least effective activist movement imaginable.
Since passivism is the prerequisite to step 1 of the procedure for reaction, and since 9a implies at least a 9b, there may be something I can do to bring about a better government. When I find out, I will consider it here.
Previously on Anomaly UK, I have discussed Rights and the relationship between rights and Mob Violence
I am brought back to these subjects by a programme I happened to catch last night on BBC4, about the Miners’ Strike.
The point I had previously missed, but has to be taken into account, is that a mob of protesters is generally recognised to have additional rights beyond those that exist in law.
From a legalistic viewpoint, the violent clashes of 1984 were very clear. The government has the duty of keeping the roads open – that has been the case for as long as there have been governments and roads. If a group illegally blocks the road, they must be removed, without more force than necessary, but with as much force as is necessary. If that means charges of mounted police, then send in the horses. If it means tanks, send in tanks. If it means machine-guns, load them up. It is out of the question that the law can be openly defied by violence.
Clearly, that’s not the situation – nobody saw it that way. The horses were controversial, tanks and guns would have been out of the question, while giving up and allowing the strikers to block the road was a real possibility. Nor was the restraint on the government’s actions some irrational daintiness on the part of Lady Thatcher – to have employed sufficient force to make victory in the field certain would have torn the country apart. The Police and Army would have run real risk of mutiny, workers in other industries would have sided with the miners – these were real dangers which put the outcome of the overall dispute in doubt.
Any model of where real power lies in the country, such as I have been attempting to create, is incomplete unless it can explain what rights a mob is understood to have, to form and to break the law without facing any greater force than lightly-armed police.
The limitation of the power of the state is simply that it can’t shoot everybody – it requires a level of voluntary cooperation from the population in general in order to function. But that only pushes the question back – why would rolling armoured cars through picket lines have forfeited that cooperation? It breaks some unwritten rules, but where did they come from?
I wrote in the context of more recent disturbances that rights are acquired by violent precedent – that if a group has won a conflict in the past, they will be assumed to win again, so that conflict is avoided. But that does not cover the case – what is the precedent for the use of military levels of violence against mobs in England not being successful? The chief candidate that comes to mind is the Peterloo Massacre, but that was not really unsuccessful, in that a revolt was averted. 1972’s Bloody Sunday would seem more relevant, being both recent and a case where lethal force used by the government did backfire politically, but I get the feeling that at the time Northern Ireland was seen as more of a special case, being at that time a conflict between two groups in the population rather than one group against the government.
My impression is that Peterloo is the key precedent, and the reason it counts as a defeat for the government is because the British regime in its entirety – from the TUC to Margaret Thatcher herself – is descended not from the government of 1819 but from the protesters of 1819. They won in the end and the measures that the ancien regime used against them are now out of bounds.
In my previous post, I wrote
. It is not controlled by the electorate, but neither is it independent of the electorate. The effect of the electorate’s limited power of choice is not catastrophe, but the slow expansion of the bureaucracy into every area of life, along with a slow decline of effectiveness in everything it does.
That probably needs to be explained more carefully. I’ve talked about the three-way game between civil servants, politicians and voters before, but there’s a lot more that can be said. It’s easy to argue in terms of “Democracy means the people control the government” or “Our democracy is fake”, but the truth is more complex.
To a first approximation, democracy in Britain is fake. The real power lies with the civil service, who have to reach a compromise with other powerful interests in the media, other industry, the universities.
They also have to deal with the politicians who are nominally in charge of them, and who themselves are answerable to the electorate. In theory this is what gives the voters the power.
The politicians want to satisfy the voters by doing popular things, but that only works for them if they can appear successful. If the permanent establishment wants one thing, and the voters want another, the politician will do better in elections by following the wishes of the establishment than by following the wishes of the voters. Because if they do what the voters want, the establishment can make them look bad – everything that goes wrong (and lots of things always go wrong) will look like the politician’s fault if the government is following a policy which the establishment opposes.
What it amounts to is that the fact that politicians are elected is an essential part of the system, which would be very different without it, but that its effect is not to take power away from the permanent establishment to any large degree. The voters have no fine control over policy, but within the permanent establishment (which obviously itself contains factions and differences of opinion) policies which have more appeal to voters will always have a slight advantage over policies which have less.
On this very coarse level, what most clearly gains votes is the expansion of the clients of the state – those on benefits or those in government employment. An establishment policy which cuts government employment will be one which politicians will be able to resist, one which adds them will be very hard to resist. Detailed arguments about economics or technicalities are insignificant in electoral terms compared to that – because the context in which they are presented to the voters is set by the civil service and media.