The Reactionary Case for Democracy
- Nietzschean Liberalism. The Nietzschean part consists of the following beliefs.
- Just as intelligence, a moral sense, aesthetic appreciation, and other factors place humans above animals, some humans are in a very deep sense better than other humans.
- Society disproportionately benefits from the scientific and artistic genius of a select few. An important goal of government and public policy is to channel their energies in productive directions and leave them free to pursue their missions.
- As confirmed by modern behavioral genetics, heredity is the dominant force behind human variation.
- Egalitarian ideology and concerns over what is called “social justice” are primarily driven by ugly instincts, namely envy and feelings of inferiority.
- While all rational beings must be utilitarians to some degree, everyone has non-utilitarian commitments. The best ones put an emphasis on beauty, freedom, and progress, rather than pleasing supernatural beings, fealty to some “natural” order, the glorification of imagined communities like nations, or equality of outcomes.
- Nietzscheism must be tempered with classical liberal insights, rooted in economics, political science, history, and psychology. The main ones are as follows.
- Markets and democracy are the best forces ever discovered for pushing ahead with the creative destruction necessary for human progress.
- Even extremely flawed or limited human beings can still have much to contribute to society due to the miracle of the division of labor. There is thankfully no need therefore to turn towards ideas that involve incapacitating or repressing large numbers of people, with the relatively few criminals among us being the exception.
- Human nature is not so bad that collectivist and egalitarian ideologies are always going to be prevalent among the masses. They simply need to be protected from cancerous ideas that make them a threat to progress, which come from both the right and left. Somewhat paradoxically, democracy does a pretty good job of this relative to other systems.
- One of the most consistent findings from political science is that elections are to a large extent determined by the state of the economy. Therefore, at the very least, democratic leaders have an incentive to care about making their citizens wealthier and not going too far in running, or in some cases, extinguishing, their lives.
- As RJ Rummel’s study of mass killings has shown, when governments massacre their citizens in massive numbers, they’re practically always dictatorships.
- The second argument for democracy is that it’s a way to ensure peaceful transfers of power, a virtue that is easy to take for granted in the first world, even though it solves a problem that has been a major source of civil strife throughout history.
- Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed.
- A libertarian and a hereditarian, Hoppe argued that monarchy is a superior form of government because, while a democratic leader has an incentive to loot the country and only seek out short-term gain, a king will want to maximize growth and pass on a strong and healthy realm to his offspring. Sounds good in theory. A look at the historical record, however, shows that, in general, political and economic liberalism have gone together. I think part of the problem with Hoppe’s theory is that it gets the story of incentives wrong. In a world where a dictator had a 100% chance of passing on his realm to an heir, then it might make sense. But authoritarian leaders end up having to spend much of their time figuring out how to stay in power, and they usually determine that it’s better to rule over a poor and miserable country than to try to maximize economic growth and potentially have your head on a spike. This is why North Koreans don’t have the highest living standards in the world, despite having a hereditary system of government. Three generations of the Kim family so far have decided that the best way to stay in power is to keep their nation starving and isolated, and they’re probably right on that front. The Gulf Arab monarchies interestingly made a different calculation, and that has worked out relatively well, but it required a lot of luck, namely the existence of the American global empire and being fortunate enough to sit on a sea of oil.
- Even if dictators had the right incentives to maximize wealth and stability, which they seem not to, this only brings us back to the information problem. Authoritarians have a terrible time getting accurate information about what is going on in their countries, and knowing what to do with it. This is of course a problem with democracies too, but it seems to not be as bad there. Last year, an important paper showed that if you compare reported GDP growth to what you can see from lighting in satellite data, dictatorships have much better official numbers than what can be verified.
- One of my favorite examples demonstrating how democracy succeeds through simple heuristics on the part of voters comes from the 2020 Democratic primaries. The stock market tanked when Bernie Sanders won Nevada, and then shot up after he dropped out. Most Americans agree with many of Sanders’ socialist views. But if he ever became president, he’d have to govern reasonably or the economy would collapse and he and his party would soon be swept out of office, even if each individual policy he adopted had majority support
- In many ways, dictators are more subject to mob rule than democracies are, because they limit the impacts of markets and therefore remove a check on mass sentiment. Polls show the governments of China and Russia constantly having higher approval ratings than those of Western democracies. Those countries are in a sense then actually more “democratic” than the US, which is why they make such terrible decisions
- China
- Then the government showed a series of pathologies that could be traced to its authoritarian system. The Zero Covid policy came to be personally associated with Xi Jinping, and was held on to for way too long. Chinese growth has slowed down. Its birth rate has collapsed, or maybe they just started reporting their numbers more accurately, again demonstrating the information problem that dictatorships have. Xi now talks about “shared prosperity” and nationalist goals as more important than growth, which is the kind of thing stupid politicians in the West say, but market forces and elections thankfully prevent them from implementing their ideas.
- In many ways, polarization and decentralization are great strengths.
- Bryan Caplan has said that markets do good things that sound bad, while governments do bad things that sound good.
- Given the obvious and massive economic benefits that result when people move to more productive countries, it is restrictionists who have the burden of showing sufficiently negative higher-order effects, and they’ve never been able to do that.
- Accepting liberal institutions is part of a general recognition that it’s too much to ask for people to have the right ideas, whether you put your faith in the masses or a technocratic elite. The best results have generally come from government being limited, and leaving a wide space for individual choice. Rather than reflecting the will of the people or any such nonsense, democracy is chaos, and chaos is the midwife of progress.
Man Needs Sex and Violence, Not Top-Down “Meaning”
- The point here is not to stress complacency. Societies have problems, and people of intelligence and goodwill should work to solve them. While religiosity doesn’t seem to have much of a relationship to happiness, wealth clearly does. So, as banal as it sounds to say, it’s good to promote economic growth. But to try to improve society by consciously trying to give the masses a larger purpose leads to, at best, ineffective solutions to problems, and at worst, tyranny, chaos, and world wars. This was probably the best insight of Buckley-era conservatism. Rather, it is better to shape institutions and laws so that they create incentives for more productive and pro-social behavior. We need a cultural norm in which deep thinking about the nature of existence and where humanity is going is considered the responsibility of a select few of unusually high intelligence and mental stability. For everyone else, sportsball is good enough.
- Right lacks the institutional guardrails to contain Groyperization. The culture of the Left is shaped by elite institutions, like universities and major media outlets, in addition to labor unions, professional associations, and nonprofits.
- If you’re a conservative now who isn’t an ethnonationalist, you’re just completely outmatched. The other side has the numbers and the energy, and there is such a thing as the internal logic of a movement. Democrats once made their entire moral universe center around oppressed minorities, so one couldn’t expect them to stand up to pushy black trans activists around 2020. The equivalent for the right now is the young male who is racist, angry, and sexually frustrated – the Groyper. People like Trump and Vance can’t denounce them, nor can supposed intellectuals like Yoram, because Fuentes is just the undistilled version of what they’re selling, which is white grievance, showmanship, and anti-liberal posturing.
- The combination of Low Human Capital, the decline of gatekeeping, and news as entertainment model is a powerful one.