Post-Democracy

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A capitalist elite that happens to capture a considerable chunk of rent, funded via taxes out of national income, will dominate the discourse on what constitute public goods. They will then claim the rent as a reward for providing these public goods. In actuality, the rent paid may have little to do with the marginal cost of public good provision, and more with how large the tax stream can be. Thus, they will both have a (private) stake in increasing the taxable base, and yet a (private) stake in supporting the inviolability of this stream of rent.

The East Asian industrializing states stumbled their way into this solution; it’s basically the dynamic of pro-growth crony capitalism with entrenched on-the-table distribution of the returns to growth, rather than under-the-table corruption.

The battle between Obama and McCain was about as bare-knuckles a fight as we’ve seen in quite a while.

And the latest battle was a doozy too.

Yes, the suspense was very nearly unbearable.

“Obama and McCain was about as bare-knuckles a fight as we’ve seen in quite a while.”

The real question is why the US political scene has become so polarised about, essentially, nothing. In the UK all the main political parties are essentially identical but at least no one pretends that anything is at stake in our general elections.

The really equal point in the last UK elections was the one all the commentators ignored: that Clegg formed a coalition with the Tories, but that he could equally well have formed a coalition with Labour (and chose not to for reasons of pure realpolitik). The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this was that the basic ideologies of all the political parties were the same and so it doesn’t really matter what party you go into coalition with, but the commentariat wilfully chose not to draw that conclusion.

The only outliers in the UK political scene are parties that offer constitutional change (the SNP, UKIP). No one, at all, offers any real choice in terms of economic policy.

Crouch himself had a little blog about this last week:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2013/02/09/five-minutes-with-colin-crouch-a-post-democratic-society/

@7

“The real question is why the US political scene has become so polarised about, essentially, nothing”

I don’t think it’s about “nothing.”

Do you know how many Republican candidates(incliuding Mitt) got upset that the government was supplying food to people during the last election?

Food.

The stakes are quite high, but I think that like people have learned to just ignore the fact that 20,000+ children die each day from easily preventable and treatable diseases, the folks who are paid to natter about politics have learned to ignore the suffering that occurs in states the Republicans are in charge of.

Bruce,

Without a candidate as talented as Obama, we’d be living in McCain’s second term.

Or maybe Sarah Palin’s first.

An election where two-three percent of the voters changing there minds changes the results are is a close run thing.

I doubt Hillary vs Krispy Kreme will be a walk in the park for the Dems.

ponce: “The stakes are quite high”

Are they? Are they indeed? There’s a lot of empty prattling about raising taxes on the wealthy, followed by raising taxes on workers. The banksters have immunity; the whistleblowers are prosecuted. $800 million of “stimulus” and $4 trillion of increased debt, and unemployment and underemployment still very high amid a faltering recovery, and declining wages. Instead of torture, we have murder-by-drone — there’s a policy contrast for you. A lot of empty rhetoric about the value of education, but little notice that it comes at the price of debt peonage. A health care reform designed to please for-profit insurance companies and service providers, which has done nothing but accelerate health care inflation in a country with the most expensive health care in the world?

The U.S. has a predator state focused on facilitating rent extraction, particularly from intellectual property. Check out the price of a textbook — and the Obama administration enthusiastic prosecution of grey market entrepreneurs, who import identical textbooks from abroad, where the price is a fraction of what it is here. Or the price of pharmaceuticals. Usury in credit cards and payday loans is big business. Apple has actually been gradually increasing the price of songs sold thru their iMusic store — keep in mind, that the cost of operating the iMusic store is a tiny fraction of what it once cost to deliver CDs at a comparable price point per song. Monsanto wants the Supreme Court to prevent farmers from planting any seed they’ve tainted, which is every seed. And, instead of doing something about global warming or peak oil, we’re poisoning the ground water in a mad dash to burn away natural gas in the most frivolous kicking the can down the road.

Yes, the stakes are quite high, indeed.

Bruce,

” The banksters have immunity…”

On January 1st of this year, the tax on capital gains increased 58%, from 15% to 23.8%.

“If you think that Brown and Cameron were offering the same economic programme, you have a very different criterion for similarity than I do.”

Ed Miliband has made it clear that he will continue David Cameron’s “austerity” programme if elected.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/11/17/uk-britain-labour-idUKTRE7AG22D20111117

Keir: there’s type and degree. Widespread outsourcing of the public sector to large private companies would be one obvious area of continuity, and PFI was Brown’s baby. Similarly, the Browne Review into higher education was initiated by Mandelson under Labour (and deliberately taken off the table during the election campaign). I have no doubt that higher ed policy under Brown would have been quite similar. Ditto, protecting the City from EU attempts at regulation. Schools policy: a proliferation of academies ….

If your point is that fiscal policy wouldn’t have been as stupid, well fair enough.

I don’t think you can regard neoliberalism as a genuine set of theories, produced by real thinking people, but which failed when implemented. It’s much better to see it as an incoherent but useful set of ideas that was very successful in facilitating the outcomes that those who adopted the ideas wanted. Neoliberalism was never really serious (it was always saucer-cult stuff) but was harmless as long as it stayed in books like Hayek’s that almost nobody read. It became dangerous when wealthy and powerful people realised that it could function as an ideological camouflage for ideas that, if presented squarely, would have been rejected by everyone.
It served three main functions. The first was the weakening of the state in the long term. It did this by redefining the state just as a provider of services, at the lowest possible price. This led to functions being taken away from the state, which meant it became weaker and so less able to do its job. This led to artificial pressure for “reform”, which in turn weakened the state further. Start again from the top.
Second, as a consequence, the creation of large patrimonial networks controlled by the same people, extracting rents for providing the same services that the state previously provided free, or at minimal cost. These days, many people have no alternative but to go through these networks, and as we do they become stronger and the state becomes weaker.
Third, the result has been to drain politics of most of its substance. Almost the only issue now discussed is how services can be provided more cost-effectively (usually cheaper). Much of the political debate that existed until the 1970s has simply vanished. In turn, this makes people reluctant to vote, since they see no point in doing so. It also means that governments which might feel tempted to be activist no longer have the mechanisms to act.
If you think this sounds like Africa, it does. Recent writing on African politics is probably a better guide to what’s going on in western societies today than any number of economic treatises.
This all looks like a great success to me, the more so since most people are not even aware of how the trick has been pulled off.

Chris – that last is quite a big difference. If things had gone differently in 2010 I’d now be cursing Lib/Lab austerity with the best of them, but at least in that scenario we wouldn’t have a government with a positive commitment to shrinking the public sector and (at best) manifest indifference to the hardship caused as a result. There would also have been a level of basic competence in government which now seems worryingly scarce (see Damian McBride’s blog for much more on this).

I don’t think representative democracy is dead. I’d advocate voting Labour next time, just as I did last time, just as I advocated voting for something left of Labour the time before that (when Labour were going to win anyway). The broadening of the range of issues covered by an unshakeable elite consensus, accompanied by an inexorable drift to the right of the Overton Window, are real and scary phenomena, but I don’t think they’ve triumphed.

And this from Hidari is just silly:

Clegg formed a coalition with the Tories, but that he could equally well have formed a coalition with Labour (and chose not to for reasons of pure realpolitik). The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this was that the basic ideologies of all the political parties were the same and so it doesn’t really matter what party you go into coalition with

No, the obvious conclusion to be drawn from this is that party C has some policies (and realistically achievable medium-term goals) in common with party A (in its current form) but others in common with party B (in its current form). Same as it ever was. A lot of this “politics is dead!” stuff seems to boil down to “radical politics isn’t easy!”. I do think radical politics is less easy than it was even ten years ago, on the other hand.

“A lot of this “politics is dead!” stuff seems to boil down to “radical politics isn’t easy!””

I’m sorry I am confused by this. What have the electoral shifts and arrangements, based on no real ideological differences but purely and solely to seize and hold power, of the Labour-LibDems and Conservative parties, got to do with radical politics?

Incidentally it is simply and obviously false that the situation we are in now is “the same as it ever was”. Even within living memory the 1983 election in the UK was clearly ABOUT something. Foot and Thatcher differed, and not about trivial lifestyle issues either, but about fundamental and key economic issues. I am not saying that election was perfect, anything but, but it was clearly a real democratic election. Going even further back, George McGovern clearly had a very different vision of the future of the US than Nixon.

“Ultimately, IF THEY REALLY WANTED TO, voters could change things substantually.”

Don’t call me “Substantually”!

Hidari – two (related) points. Firstly, the fact that the Lib Dems had a realistic chance of allying with either the Tories or Labour tells us nothing about the Lib Dems except that they’re neither to the right of the Tories nor to the left of Labour. It certainly doesn’t tell us they’re a vacuous bunch of power-hungry opportunists who wouldn’t know political principle if it bit them (although this has turned out to be the case). Just about any multi-party electoral system has small parties which can form more than one possible alliance; to interpret this basic piece of electoral logic as a sign of the death of politics is, well, silly.

As for the leap from “radical politics is hard” to “politics is dead”, the thought process I’m describing goes something like “radical ideas are difficult if not impossible to get into mainstream circulation, therefore all the mainstream parties are basically the same, therefore politics is dead”. It’s a genuine problem, but massively overstated. There is an elite consensus on what’s politically possible and what isn’t, and it is narrower than it used to be. But, on one hand, it was never all that broad – universal basic income, nuclear disarmament, abolition of the monarchy, worker ownership of the means of production, all the really good ideas have always been beyond the pale. On the other hand, the space that’s left to us now is narrow, but it’s not non-existent – there’s still an inch between Labour and the Tories, as Richard Neville said, even if the location of that inch has moved six feet to the right since his day. I’ve got faint, glimmering hopes for Ed Miliband, but in a way that’s not even the point; I’d take David Miliband over Cameron – even a NuLab government wouldn’t be quite as smug, vicious, arrogant and incompetent as this lot.

It’s not that I disagree as such with the statements/description of the current state of democracy, I’m just wondering when this democratic heyday was that we are now supposed to be “post”.

Chris: NHS & Social Care Act; crazy local govt policy; deranged war on housing benefit claimants; killed school building programme; everything has to be an academy (after Brown rowed-back from that).

Also, we dodged a bullet on letting Murdoch take full control of Sky. If hackgate had dropped three months later, Jerry Cunt would have sold him the farm and we’d have Fox UK.

Phil,
quick question – why do you think AV is not better than FPTP? It gives you options you don’t have in FPTP, it stops what happened in the US with Gore/Nader from happening at a local level (i.e. people can make a protest vote without it backfiring). I can’t believe rational people voted against, but out of dislike for Liberals. No matter how you rationalise it, it is surely an emotional decision. Saying it is not your ideal system, is just irrelevant. It is better than what you have.

My main argument for it, is it allows minor parties to grow – and so provides competition to keep duopolies honest. Australia just has never been inclined to the sort of extremism that is a blot on US politics. The combination of AV and compulsory voting (which forces the tweedledum/tweedledee voters to vote and so dilutes the influence of zealots) keeps it that way.

Phil,
to give an example of what really happens in Australia – imagine a left wing constituency, where the labour party machine puts up a right wing candidate. And a beaten left-wing candidate runs as an independent. In the UK that would elect a Tory. In australia the left-wing independent would have a real chance.

I’m curious as to how, or to what extent, the notion of a “post-democratic system” differs from the systemic features identified by Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers as intrinsic to “capitalist democracy” in their incisive little book, On Democracy: Toward a Transformation of American Society (1983). As the title makes plain, they were focusing on the American case, nonetheless, I think many of their points are generalizable, especially in a time and place where neo-liberalism sets the economic terms and conditions of globalization. I’m also wondering if the argument finds any value in discriminating between “welfare state” regimes (liberal, corporatist, social democratic, etc.).

Politicians and parties simply don’t need public support any more in the way that they used to.

What is the evidence for this? Or for that matter can we get a clearer statement of the claim: Politicians and parties [someplace] don’t need public support any more in the way that they did [at some point in time]. The responsiveness of political systems seems like something that varies quite a bit from place to place. Things may have shifted one way in the Netherlands over the past 30 years, but in another direction in Mexico or Chile.

I’m surprised that no one has quoted from George Scialabba’s essay “Plutocratic Vistas”.

” America is a plutocracy. Freedom House has long published a comprehensive international index of formal democracy, which the U.S. State Department found extremely convenient during the Cold War. If anyone today published a similarly careful and thorough index of effective democracy — a measure of the degree to which governments solicited and responded to public sentiment rather than money in the formation of law and policy — the United States would surely rank as low as many Communist tyrannies ranked on the Freedom House index.

In truth, American democracy has been a long time dying…”

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=795&fulltext=1&media=#article-text-cutpoint

Henry, I am heartened that a number of posters are arguing about FPTP, AV, PR because I think that perspective is much more germane than the “post-democracy” idiom. As I understand it, Michels-Crouch argument (have not read the Crouch book) confuses the importance of intra-party democracy and “systemic” democracy, the latter does not depend so much on the former. I take Anthony Downs arguments about the relation of ideology and representative democracy over Michels any day of the week: what keeps parties oriented to the concerns of the their constituents (i.e, the venerable client-agent problem) is electoral competition in a multi-party context (and no, Britain doesn’t really qualify – God knows the US doesn’t).

In short, voters have to have enough alternative choices so they can discipline parties at the polls that diverge from their platform or ideological “soft contract” without making the election of ideological enemy likely. This largely depends on the number of parties (and that on PR). Two many parties can have adverse effects on democracy as well, but a system where two parties can compete for the loyalty of left constituents is superior in promoting democratic culture and participation in a number of ways (including that of reducing of ongoing internecine nonsense). [In the US, to cite the extreme counter example, it is part of case law that politicians cannot be sued for lying during a campaign – let alone ignoring their own party platform].

There are other non-political, sociological issues at work in the “culture” of democracy which have a lot to do with the rhythm of social movements, the decline of community, media, etc., but these are probably more intractable and long-term problems and to some extent peripheral to what Stross et al are talking about.

The UK is a “two and a half-party” system , not quite as dysfunctional as the rare two-party unicorn but it shares many of its failings (the number of parties largely due to FPTP/smd – in other Brit-derived systems bicameral legislatures play a role as well). In the American context, I find it annoying that a certain variety of left commentator insists on bashing the DP over the head for not being a better zebra when in fact it’s a giraffe, not knowing perhaps that American political parties are not parties at all. This is due to the structural features of the American system, and said features have a myriad of consequences (most of them bad for democracy and the voters of all countries). So sectarian DP bashing is a distraction but the facile mainstream touting of the American political institutions (i.e., ignorance of the alternatives) is worse.

@48,

Well, the point about inter- vs post- democracy was that it seems to me that the current coniition of the political process not producing results is the more usual state of affairs. We’ve had such periods in the past, and always come out of them, sometimes with violence as you point out, but also sometimes without. Sometimes the usual mecahnics of peaceful political change start to work again, there are meaningful choices for a period, the electorate makes one such choice from among real alternatives, and then we have another inter-democratic period of inertia and unchallengable consensus on the basics. Inertia, though, is self-defeating, because blind, so eventually the consensus from the last period of functional democracy breaks down from crashing into realities internal or external it can’t cope with, and we start the cycle over.

Phil @52
“One of my main arguments against it is that it doesn’t – at least, it doesn’t allow them to grow as represented political forces in their own right, independent of any influence they may bring to bear on the major parties.”

This is only partly true. If the major parties where as crazy as the Republicans are in the US – then smaller parties would grow to significant factors. And in Australia we have seen over time considerable growth and schrinkage of smaller parties.

I find your analysis of “plurality” a bit confusing. It seems as though you treat voters as totally committed to one option or another. I like to put it this way – in Australia we don’t elect the most popular party – we elect the least unpopular party. I think this is in fact a superior way of looking at what you are doing when you vote in an election.

For an example of a party growing under AV look at the greens in Australia.

It seems as though you treat voters as totally committed to one option or another. I like to put it this way – in Australia we don’t elect the most popular party – we elect the least unpopular party.

This is an odd argument to put forward on a thread about the increasing homogeneity of political parties! And I fail to see how the same system can encourage minor parties to grow and encourage voters to make trade-offs and settle for the least-worst – the latter sounds like a model of how to suppress minor party growth. Imposed on a two-and-a-half party system like the English one, it would have been particularly malign – every constitutency would have been a “two-horse race”, forever.

It’s true, AV is effectively an unpopularity contest, and as such it delivers some very chancy results – a lot depends on the mechanics of elimination and vote-redistribution, which in turn depends on exactly who gets exactly how many preferences (I talked about some examples on my blog). It’s not at all clear how AV would have any more democratic legitimacy than the present (awful) system.

“Going even further back, George McGovern clearly had a very different vision of the future of the US than Nixon.”

And yet turnout was higher in 2008 than in 1972. Hard to the defend the thesis that “the parties are the same so nobody cares anymore” given that.

I thought women got legal right to equal pay (in the US context) in the 1963 “Equal Pay Act”, which rolled into the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Yes, in the US. The US=/= the world, and the US does not represent the entirety of democracy.

Also the 1970’s in particular were an amazingly important decade for women’s rights, especially in the western world, but in the world in general. There’s no denying it. Frankly, I think Glen Tomkins had just forgotten that it happened, because it didn’t happen to men.

Glen@44
“For the US in particular, I would say that we had democracy from the Revolution until the election of 1800, then from 1860 to 1866, then from 1932 to 1940, then 1962-1968.

Rather than periods of democracy, I would have called them periods of one-party rule. Not that I was or would have been against the political action of the time, but I wonder if you’re not talking about periods when action was taken, precipitated by crises and subsequent to long (democratic?) debates. It still takes a crisis to break the hold of the oligarchy and move the Overton window.

SamChevre 02.11.13 at 4:24 pm

” I thought women got legal right to equal pay (in the US context) in the 1963 “Equal Pay Act”, which rolled into the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Gawd.

I am with Katherine @33, wondering when the golden age of democracy occurred. Was it when bosses ruled the big cities? When Daley allegedly stole the election for Kennedy? When Nixon used (abused) the power of the presidency to beat McGovern? When Eisenhower ruled over a nation that believed in the right of white southern citizens to engage in lynchings with impunity?

Is democracy really the issue? Since Reagan and his “rising tide” propaganda, we have developed a system that privatizes profit and socializes loss. Sam Walton’s WalMart is rewarded for building an empire on the backs of its employees – minimum wage workers, with too few hours to qualify for health insurance. Guess who pays when they’re sick? Government. http://huff.to/YSKnbG And their reluctance to cover employees is not new to Obamacare…. http://nyti.ms/Vcf6kv

reason @ 28: You read my remarks @12 and @15 as cynical?!?

That’s singularly odd. I would say I was being righteous or idealistic, in response to cynicism.

ponce, with, “Aging pseudo philosophers doing a bunch of handwaving about political decline was stale two thousand years ago.” was cynical. Mao Cheng Ji may have been cynical, with, “I’d say it’s as democratic as it ever was; smoke~filled rooms and all that. What it is is post~ideological, post~political. Market capitalism, baby!”

I didn’t think I was being cynical at all. I want my fellow Americans to want change, and to recognize when they haven’t gotten it. Cynical is giving up on any possibility of change in an idealistic direction, and grounding that apathy in assertions of debased human nature. I believe in the possibility of improving human institutions. At the moment, in American politics, cynicism may be less important than an unfounded belief that profound change has happened. After national elections, in which the balance of partisan power changed not a whit, there’s a strange euphoria on the left, matched by despair on the partisan right, and there’s no concrete basis for either feeling, beyond observing the feelings: the left is euphoric because the right seems dis-spirited, and vice-versa. Meanwhile, a profoundly anti-liberal, anti-democratic and destructive policy course continues its march, without much criticism or opposition. And, what I find oddest of all, much of the left-of-center in my personal acquaintance, seems to combine profound satisfaction that “the country has changed” with a conviction that not much can be done about any serious problem, and that shades, at times, into the conviction that, since “Obama can be trusted”, well . . . whatever . . . .

As for institutional voting structures, I don’t think any particular scheme is an obviously dominant strategy, or ideal. Ultimately, political systems have to resolve disputes to choices, and reconcile the populace to the legitimacy of those choices. There’s a reflexive loop between the system, say, of voting, and the kind of coalitional and electoral strategies, which are adopted, and it is the strategies in play, which ultimately determine whether the political system is adaptive to circumstances and responsive to broad, popular interests. Sometimes, changing the institutional system can help to break up a dysfunctional strategic pattern, but that doesn’t imply any static ideal. (The smorgasbord policies of multi-party, multi-polar polities can foster party-forming strategies that erode legitimacy and devolve the state and whole society into paralyzed division, even in a small country like the Netherlands or Belgium. I hesitate to even imagine the result in a vast country like the United States, lousy with disparate subcultures. The two-party system broke down in one region in 1860 and 600,000 died.)

FPTP two-party systems in the U.S. and the U.K. have often been remarkably good at producing both adaptive, incremental change, and reconciling people to the legitimacy of reforms. Two-party systems do have the feature that both parties do tend to gravitate to a moderate center, and to compete around a legitimated policy consensus. It is rare for the parties to remain at loggerheads, or for alternation in office to result in anything, but subtle policy revision and, of course, dampening corruption to a dull roar. Each Party’s coalition is necessarily broad, and strategic competition keeps the Parties circling each other in an endless series of flanking maneuvers. Big issues will divide both Parties, and attract both Parties. And, that’s often been a good thing. It was a good thing, when both Parties tried to prove their Progressive bona fides, and both Parties sought to enact Civil Rights reforms. It is useful when partisan competition to rotate offices, fuels useful criticism and pursuit of corruption.

At the moment, the Party system is not being usefully adaptive, in U.S. politics, imho, and corruption, and cynicism, is being fed. I don’t think that’s attributable to a feature of the voting system, or something that the voters, however motivated, will find it possible to change, for the time being. (Not cynicism on my part, I think; sober assessment.) The so-called “upper-middle-class” of moderately rich folks, who supply professionals, technocrats, managers and leaders, including politicians and “activists”, have been co-opted and are occupying a space of anxious, detached, resentful complacency. Their socially liberal and neoliberal ideologies don’t let them think very deeply about why the system doesn’t work well, and so far, the system hasn’t failed them, even if it does seem to be fraying from distant edges, where the poor, working and merely middle-class are experiencing a declining standard of living and increasing economic jeopardy.

There’s really not much chance of any politician or political movement gaining much traction with a serious populist appeal in the U.S., at the moment. Not because such appeals don’t find a receptive audience — in fact, even the most tepid populist rhetoric gets a roaring response from the beleaguered majority of the population, as Obama demonstrated several times during his campaign against Romney, when he wanted to adjust the poll numbers ever so slightly, and warn Romney away from effective appeals or critiques. (The extreme vulnerability of Romney to populist attacks made it possible for Obama to minimize his resort to populist appeals, making a precisely calculated, low-margin victory also low-risk. People, who think Romney ever had a chance were simply not paying attention.) No, the problem is that almost no one in the 10-20% wants to make genuine populist appeals; the few, who are willing, are easy to marginalize in the corporate media. The liberal-left regards such appeals as inherently “racist” and would prefer the unwashed, with their guns and bibles, go away, and the right fears “class warfare” (with economic substance) more than it enjoys stoking anti-liberal tribalism via Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. This is a problem that goes much deeper into the American socio-economic strata than the two-party system, per se. It’s a fatal infection for almost any political organizing, and would condemn a six-party system, just as it seriously handicaps trade unions and grass-roots organizing and non-profit membership organizations. Class consciousness of this kind isn’t a randomly spontaneous emergent phenomenon; it is an attitude actively cultivated by giant business interests and the plutocracy, and fed by the pervasive greed, which I think was unleashed by lowering marginal income tax rates at the same time that neoliberal reforms undermined the quality of organizational governance. The 10-20% are sorely lacking in empathy, but well-stocked up in the righteousness & resentments department.

The simple, now historical, fact is that the People did throw the bums out, resoundingly, in 2006 and 2008 — two tsunami elections. But, they got few, if any policy reversals. So, on the evidence, no, even IF THEY REALLY WANTED TO, voters could NOT change things substantially. No political movement or party is willing to give them the choice to change most of the things that matter, economically and politically.

Knowing that what we do has consequences is the opposite of futile cynicism. Knowing that what we do has consequences is the basis of human power. But, it follows that failure, if the word means anything, has consequences, and the consequences of the failure of 2008-9 weighs heavily on the U.S. and the world — even more because so many labor to deny that failure, and those, inevitable, consequences.

69, why is it cynical? Liberal democracy, especially a two-party system, is a mechanism for signaling popular dissatisfaction. Things don’t go well – throw the bums out, try a new management. That part still works. But that is not a mechanism for social change. Grassroots politics is. Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters, brandishing baseball bats. The marchers, the rioters, the Panthers. The brownshirts, for that matter. Isn’t that pretty much what you’re saying too?

People who argue that “people have the power” rarely go into specifics of answering the questıon; “Really. In that case who, precisely, should the people vote for?”.

Surely the answer is _whoever would come into prominence on the grounds that they were likely to win because they were the person that many people were going to vote for_?

I suspect the key issue with democracy at the moment is simply that polling and other advertising techniques gives the political process the same kind of spooky ‘decision made before you were aware of it’ that you see when you hook someone up to a brain scanner and ask them to raise their arm ‘any time they feel like’. Which somehow always happens to be a fraction of a second after the machine sees the relevant neurons start firing…

Well, let’s see. Bush really wanted to invade Iraq and did. Gore vocally, and famously, opposed doing so. Obama strongly opposed the war in Iraq and ended it. McCain passionately supported it and bitterly opposed ending it. We’re seeing the same fault lines in Afghanistan now. We had a faction strongly advocating war with Iran, which again Obama opposed and which didn’t happen. Ditto Syria, if news reports are to be believed.

Obama also raised taxed on the rich and instituted universal health care, both major progressive goals. His Supreme Court nominees are very different from the ones that Bush appointed. There are matters of actual civil rights, as in banning discrimination against gays in the military, gay marriage legalization, and real executive branch policing of discrimination in matters such as voting rights.

Now the radicals will engage in counterfactual fantasies: Gore would have invaded Iraq; McCain, despite his intense devotion to endless war in Iraq, would have withdrawn; health care reform doesn’t count because (whatever); tax raises are unimportant. They’re able to claim that there is no difference because they dismiss any evidence that they find inconvenient, and “difference” is defined as success for radical policy goals. The actual stated public opinions of leaders are irrelevant as evidence; I’ve seen this here numerous times.

The rest of us see one hell of a lot of differences between starting war and ending them, and between the reactionary Bush agenda and that of Obama. Obama doesn’t have a leftist agenda, to use the local lingo, but he does have a liberal one. And it’s very different from the ultra-reactionary republican agenda.

Now it is true that the current mode of government is badly dysfunctional in a lot of ways, and it’s also true that this paralysis prevents a lot of popular programs from being enacted. But that’s a different issue from the bizarre claim that the current administration is the same as the prior one.

Certainly in Australia the idea that there is no difference between the two political parties is madness. Leftists can only argue that the Tories and Labour in the UK don’t differ much if they ignore the plight of the working poor, immigrants, and everyone on housing benefit. This idea of post-democracy doesn’t appear to be founded on anything resembling facts…

@faustusnotes

“This idea of post-democracy doesn’t appear to be founded on anything resembling facts…”

Your critique of the idea doesn’t seem to be founded on anything resembling an accurate grasp of it.

The point, as I understand it, is not that there aren’t differences between the parties but that much of what actually goes on at state level is pretty much immune to those difference since so much actual policy is made outside overt politics and between policy wonks, civil servants and corporate lobbyists. A state that has outsourced so many of its functions to Group4 on long-term contracts may not be one where a change of governing party will make as much difference as one would hope.

Marc @75 could have mentioned environmental policy (e.g. regs. on particulate emissions from power plants, auto fuel efficiency standards etc), where the Obama admin’s policies have differed from what McCain would have done (though perhaps the differences are somewhat less clear on oil drilling, and there still hasn’t been a final decision on the Keystone pipeline, unless I missed it).

@76: Seriously? We know precisely what Gore said about the war in Iraq, and he was viciously attacked for doing so. Many other Democrats were too cowardly to say anything public about it. Bush did a full-court press to get his precious war, and it would have been easy to avoid if there was a president who just wasn’t as determined to get one – let alone one opposed to the idea. And on the other side? What-if speculation.

I raise this point because I see Fox-News level denial operating here. If people can’t even concede that Bush and Gore would have had different foreign policies, what is the point of even having a discussion?

Isn’t it naive to quarrel about who said what? Bush campaigned on “humble foreign policy” in 2000, so perhaps he didn’t actually invade Iraq in 2003? Bush also signed, in 2008, a SOFA, stipulating a full withdrawal by the end of 2011, which is exactly what was implemented by the Obama administration.

inverse relationship to rates of military spending

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_voting_systems_by_country

87, your link has $711 bn for the US ‘military budget’. This link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_military_spending
has the ‘military spending’ between 1 and 1.4 trillion. Big difference.

politicalfootball: as I said, I’m not sure what Gore would have done, I just don’t think the stories that Democrats comfort themselves with have much of a solid basis. As for Obama, well the continuities (and worse!) with Bush’s foreign and security policies look at least as striking as the discontinuities.

“And if they did, they could only do so by suggesting, as you do here, that favoring some kind of military action in some circumstance is tantamount to supporting all military actions in all circumstances.”

Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner. I am seriously sick of having this argument with people like Chris who insist that Al freaking Gore had some sore of master plan to invade Iraq. The man was vice president for 8 years Chris. Was he just biding his time?

Are the Democrats as far from the Republicans as I would like? Not by a long shot but that doesn’t mean they are equivalent.

“No, not equivalent. Democrats prefer bombings.”
They are all the same so vote Republican!

I don’t see why this idea that Gore would have invaded Iraq is so controversial. What else was going to happen to Iraq post 9/11?

reason: “Not when combined with gerrymander they don’t.”

The U.S. two-party system, which has been much less ideological historically, usually manages to defeat gerrymanders pretty fast. The current House Republican majority, is historically highly unusual, for depending on gerrymanders. Normally, the partisan division of seats closely reflects the nationwide two-party partisan vote split. This is because the Parties, for Congressional campaign purposes, are loose amalgamations of State and local parties, and the State parties morph to mirror local circumstances. The Democratic Party is pretty competitive, even in much of the Republican solid south — able to compete for control of the legislature, for example, in Mississippi, the most conservative state in the country; for a while 3 of the 4 Mississippi Congress critters were Democrats — very conservative Democrats mostly, but still voting for and with Pelosi. The Republicans have only managed to exploit gerrymanders, by re-districting more often than the usual decade interval.

We might also note that Obama’s piss-poor leadership performance and failure to deliver what voters wanted in 2009 played a major part in the Republican triumph in 2010, in the House and in many State legislatures. (Mandatory voting, as in Australia, might help a lot, in dampening the pathological strategic potential of low-turnout elections.) Conspicuously, Obama, in his convention acceptance, did not rally Democrats for the Congressional elections, and his campaign organization neglected local candidacies. Ryan was re-elected to the House in a district Obama won, in 2008 and 2012 — the failure to even try to unseat him is telling.

So, the fact that the Parties have become ideologically “pure” and two-dimensional, and the fact that Obama operates at one extreme of the Democratic ideological range, while symbolically appearing to many Republicans to operate at the other, non-existent extreme of the Democratic ideological range, plays a part in the effectiveness of gerrymanders.

The story of the Senate is different, because the gerrymander there, in favor of rural interests, is frozen into the Constitution, unfortunately. But, again, Obama and his conservative allies keep the filibuster in place, greatly exaggerating the pathology. The politics of the filibuster gives them a convenient excuse for the deliberate “failure” to do what Democratic votes want and expect them to do.

The U.K. scheme — FPTP single-member parliamentary system with persistent and sometimes locally viable 3rd parties, and low voter turnout — seems extremely problematic to me. Gerrymanders, there, even undeliberate ones, with the most idealistic non-partisan intentions among those drawing the lines, can have profoundly undemocratic effects. Both Thatcher and Blair governed with minority electoral support. Not having to marshal a coalition that can command 50.1% (Labour seems to need less than 40% of actual voters; and considerably less than 30% of the potential electorate.) can enable a Party to be more coherent ideologically, but other forces have pushed Labour away from ideological differentiation.

We had eight years under a Democratic administration when Iraq was sanctioned and bombed. Very little positive was actually done to resolve the problem Iraq posed post the Gulf War. I’d imagine, with a few differences, the same would have been true under 8 years of a Republican administration. That problem would have existed for any President. Without major policy change any US president was going to intervene strongly in the Middle East post 9/11. Iraq was going to be central to any US policy in the region. (And I’m not sure what the PNAC proves, parts of which were signed into law under Clinton)
What Gore had to say when out of office, (selling himself to the world his political career all but over), is no more important than what he said when actually running for election/in office. Such as in 1992:

“Bush deserves heavy blame for intentionally concealing from the American people the clear nature of Saddam Hussein and his regime, for convincing himself that friendly relations with such a monster were possible, and for persisting in this effort far, far beyond the point of folly,”

I’m not saying he *would* have done it, just that there’s a strong possibility he would have. And ‘moderate’ Democrats would be better of acknowledging this fact and to stop writing of all opponents as lunatics, evil Republicans and radicals

Mao Cheng Ji @ 71 Yes, yes, yes. Historically, American politics has been driven more through the mechanisms of mass-membership-movements independent of the two Parties, as by the two Parties, themselves. Masonic and masonic-like organizations, Temperance, women’s suffrage, abolitionists, populists, local business organizations, labor unions, professional associations, the National Rifle Association, the environmental movement, the Civil Rights movements, feminist organizations, gay rights, farmers’ lobbies, ethnic and religious organizations, and on and on. The radical decline of social affiliation in American society since the advent of television and the breakdown of subcultures, which accelerated across the 20th century, has left the whole political process, without enough non-elite input and influence. This is a deeper malady than the Parties.

pjm @ 86 I think parliamentary systems can have some adaptive advantages over the American Congress and strong President scheme, which is clumsy and getting pretty long in the tooth — we haven’t redrawn many state boundaries in the last century, and that entails some serious governance problems, too. But, I’m skeptical of multi-party, especially for a continent-sized country — for the U.S., multi-party is likely to be regionalized — with one-party and two-party State systems driving regional competition, without national parties, and that could be very destructive. As long as legislation requires 51%, you end up with something like two competing coalitions, regardless, and it’s not clear than the excluded-middle groupings do anything good for the process or legitimacy.

On pjm’s other point, however, I’m in complete agreement. Elites will emerge in every political system — can’t live with them and can’t live without them. The elites have horizontal relationships among themselves, which compete with their vertical dependence on the masses. To the extent, that elites can use horizontal cooperation to undermine their own vertical dependencies, democracy suffers.

So, yeah, what I said above to Mao Cheng Ji. And, yes, a significant factor, as Mao was hinting, in whether elites remain responsive to the needs and interests of the masses, is whether they feel there is a threat from below, including a potentially violent threat. The 19th century British parliament, though entirely the creature of an hereditary landed aristocracy, was, at important margins, responsive to the popular will and adaptive to rapid social and economic change, because the elite genuinely feared violent revolution (which, given that much of the population was concentrated in cities, and in pretty desperate straits and near starvation much of the time, was not unreasonable, and, of course, a great mass of people would not have been kept in such Dickensian misery in an enormously rich country, which wasn’t being ruled by a narrow oligarchy, like an hereditary aristocracy).

I take anacyclosis pretty seriously, and the prospects for a sharp rise in political violence and social unrest in the U.S. seem quite strong, for a variety of reasons.
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/savvy-scientist/cliodynamics-a-science-for-predicting-the-future/545

rf @ 102 : “The big issues are largely predetermined.”

Now that’s cynical! It is also how much of the American public rationalizes its political ineffectualness. The largest part of the pundit class is pre-occupied with synthesizing exactly this kind of willful blindness. Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias have learned to do it, with remarkable earnestness. It is at least as important a strand of pundit stupidity as unexamined privilege.

“1 Bush’s foreign policy evolved in the context of 9/11, I don’t think the idea that he ‘really wanted to invade Iraq’ removed from that context makes sense..”

To clarify this, and then I’ll give it a rest. I’m not denying the fact that certain members of Bush’s administration and those close to it wanted a war pre 9/11, and that they played a large role in pushing the war, making the possibility of war more likely in a Bush admin .. just arguing that the idea that Gore would have carried out a similar policy (with support from the Democrats liberal interventionist hawks) isn’t absurd

What, the US invaded Iraq because a dozen of third-rate intellectuals published a letter? What are you, Michael Rivero?

“What, the US invaded Iraq because a dozen of third-rate intellectuals were hired to direct US foreign policy.”

I fixed that for you.

There are strong and weak forms of the claim that modern democracies don’t present real choices. There are certainly aspects of public policy where the political spectrum is substantially narrower than public opinion. In the US, gun control; the war on drugs; free trade; and deregulation would all be examples. And they are significant ones.

However, a lot of the discussion here appears to be centered around a much stronger claim: that there is no meaningful difference between major parties at all. It’s in this context that things like the Iraq war are relevant.

At one level, a classification that ignores real and important differences is not useful, and the inability to recognize them does not lend credibility to a cause. At the other level, you can simply miss important transformations in politics.

For example, I see huge changes afoot in US politics. There are major changes in social attitudes – about the roles of women, racial and sexual minorities. Young people have very different political attitudes than older ones. Things like gerrymandering and filibusters are signs of extreme weakness, not strength, for reactionary politics here. But you wouldn’t be able to sense these deep shifts if you couldn’t tell the difference between the Republicans and Democrats in the US…

“No, not equivalent. Democrats prefer bombings.”
They are all the same so vote Republican!

Why are you mocking the claim that Gore would have launched a bombing campaign against Iraq? Clinton planned three, and launched two, during his second term (Desert Strike, Desert Thunder, Desert Fox).

Maybe there’s something really perverse about how we (me included) use the word ‘invade’ instead of ‘wage war on’ or ‘attack.’ For all we clash over this, I do trust MPAVictoria to have the world’s best interests at heart, but mocking someone for pointing out that Democrats have a longstanding policy of bombing Iraq is stone cold awful, and I think it illustrates the problem with setting ‘invade’ as the standard candle.

The US did bomb Iraq in December 1998 and early 1999, while Clinton was President. Obviously that doesn’t count as invading, for technical reasons (gods am I ever sick of hearing the phrase “boots on the ground” ten times a day). But this kind of thing absolutely should count as waging war, and it’s awful to brush it off dismissively or turn it into a wisecrack. The completely plausible continuation of this bombing regime under a Gore Presidency certainly counts as Gore [hypothetically] waging war on Iraq.

My fucking gods, it’s not all about the election. Clinton waged war on Iraq. True. Gore would have waged war on Iraq. True. Bush invaded Iraq, which was orders of magnitude more destructive and more costly. True. Would a Gore presidency have invaded Iraq? I dunno, nowadays I think he would have done roughly one-tenth that amount of violence by committing to the war in Afghanistan most of the forces, bombs, etc. that Bush used in Iraq. Basically I imagine a role reversal: the Afghanistan War would be the Big Debacle overshadowing everything, and Iraq would be the not-getting-talked-about place getting bombed all to hell. Is that disputable? Sure. Is it nuts? Nah.

Do I know nothing of why the US invaded Iraq and really am not qualified to speak on this subject? Oh FFS. Should I bring up that PNAC helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act, which Clinton signed? Should I bring up PNAC’s role in Operation Desert Fox, which Clinton spearheaded? Should I start spewing connections illustrating just how cozy Gore and PNAC really were? Or can we maybe, maaaaybe, recognize that this is a terrible irrelevant road to walk, since it’s not All About The US Presidential Election? (AAUSPE?)

Projecting so vote Republican at somebody is always a dangerous, needless, and constraining reflex, but all the more so when discussing the scope or constitution of democracy itself.

” There are certainly aspects of public policy where the political spectrum is substantially narrower than public opinion. In the US, gun control; the war on drugs; free trade..”

I thought these are three policy areas which (ordinarily) have quite strong public support in favour of the status quo?

Bruce @ 103 It is a fair point as to whether a continental size country would politically cohere under a proportional parliamentary system. But I think this begs the question of whether voters would care more about national unity or the provision of a robust safety net (though the voters who would care most for the latter have been systematically disenfranchised). But given that you admit in some ways ppd is more flexible I am not sure how it could be any worse than the existing (exceedingly baroque) system.

I cite Lazare again in suggesting the American system’s mostly likely end-game scenario would revolve around regional secession, do New York and California really want to be held political hostage by the South and the “Empty Quarter” (though of course, because state governments are mostly reflections of the national institutions with all their flaws, one could reasonably expect a state like New York needs to clean up its own act first, redressing the imbalance the legislative power of upstate v NYC).

On Democratic views on Iraqi WMD from late 90s to 2002 this is worth a look, and will (probably) be last I’ll say on the topic (via Phil Arena)

http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/wmdquotes.asp

“If you look at raw public opinion there has always been a surprisingly large reservoir of opposition to free trade in the US. ”

Latest polls still have support for trade in the majority among all political classifications, with ‘not sure’ second highest. I agree that perhaps on the specifics of the WOD, trade and guns people have more nuanced (or just as likely no) views..but they tend to support the policies in general terms afaict

Both those quoted statements are just qualifiers, rf.

The very first word in the second sentence, after your copy and paste, is “but”!

they aren’t!

Stephen @ 114

Britain, workshop of the world and leader of the industrial revolution, was the superior or close rival of the United States, for honor of being the richest country in the world, throughout the 19th century. Not rich, by the standards of the 20th or 21st centuries, perhaps, but it was a country, where the concentration of wealth was extreme, and the feverish accumulation of capital into the hands of the few combined with the conquest of empire, to leave very little benefit to servants or factory workers, and even less to Irish peasants. Averages do not tell this story adequately, and estimates of inflation over a period of decades are necessarily spurious. (Regardless of any other aspect of living standard, daily calorie requirements were, if anything, significantly higher for people in the 19th century than in the developed world today).

Things changed dramatically in the course of the 2oth century, particularly after the Liberal landslide victory of 1906, and even more so after the world wars, but at the beginning of the 19th century, Parliament was constituted as it had been since the reign of Henry VI, with scarcely any change at all, since the restoration of Charles II in the 17th century. The House of Commons was elected on property qualifications, with no boroughs added to represent the great cities of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Sheffield, and Commons was dominated by the landed gentry and the corruptly chosen representatives of great magnates. (The Duke of Norfolk, Earl of Arundel, recusant before the 1829 emancipation of Catholics and therefore absent from his own seat in Lords, had eleven seats in the House of Commons in his gift.) The House of Lords, of course, was entirely composed of titled hereditary aristocrats, most possessing large estates.

The Great Reform, enacted in 1832, with one-third of the 19th century already gone, began a process of incremental reforms, which gave the franchise to, maybe, 15% to 20% of adult males. The Second Reform, sponsored by Disraeli, further extended the franchise in 1867, two-thirds of the 19th century complete, but still fell short of enfranchising a majority of all adult males; other features of the new electoral system may have actually increased upper class domination of actual membership in the House of Commons.

I am going to attach a classic excerpt from Barbara Tuchman’s Proud Tower in a subsequent comment. It is a wonderful essay, that begins with a description of the last Conservative government, that of 1895.

@MPAVictoria “I am seriously sick of having this argument with people like Chris who insist that Al freaking Gore had some sore of master plan to invade Iraq. The man was vice president for 8 years Chris. Was he just biding his time?”

And where do I insist on that? I actually say that I have no idea what Gore would have done. I’m not saying that he would have, I’m saying that your confidence that he wouldn’t have doesn’t have a sound basis.

@134: Lieberman, Kerry, Clinton….all actually supported the Iraq war. This is an existence proof that Democrats could, and did, come out in favor of the war even when in opposition. Gore, by contrast, opposed the war under the same circumstances. This is conclusive evidence to me that this opposition was genuine.

Incidentally, there are suggestions in Pollack’s The Threatening Storm that Gore was furious with Clinton for not taking more aggressive action against Saddam (because this would leave Iraq as a continuing problem for President Gore).

“Not surprisingly, it was Vice President Gore and his staff who remained most interested in the regime change plan, or at least an aggressive containment policy, to head off the possibility of future Iraq crises if they inherited the White House in the 2000 elections.” (p. 99)

Bruce Wilder @99
I think you are misunderstanding the point about gerrimanders. As David Brin has pointed out – gerrimanders are an incubent protection scheme. They actually – as you correctly point out and he has also – don’t necessarily affect the two party result reliably. But they do change the inta-party dynamics considerably. Faced with more competitive electorates, representatives will look more like their typical voter – faced with uncompetitive electorates they will look more like their party faithful. (AV also does much the same thing by way). Brin’s solution is open primaries (or else joining whichever party has control of your local electorate). But that seems to me means that you have to have a say in INTERNAL party matters. It seems to me better to find a way to give voters an alternative to the two parties. A static two-party system is also vulnerable to corruption (as any static power system will be). The value of competition is not just limited to markets.

@reason #139 “Hear, hear” on the importance of competition in political systems (and what I take to be a closely related remark your made earlier about “duopolies”). Competition in proportionally represented multi-party systems usually means that parties actually adhere to and enact their platforms and conform to their constituents expectations (the sad things is how few Americans realize the outrageous-ness that does this not happen here – as a result popular political participation is restricted to “judging character” because the parties are too diffuse and variable to bother judging and on top of that have to compromise to hurdle super-majority obstacles in the legislative process).

The one thing I don’t often hear in process-oriented critiques of American politics is how much legislative structural obstacles contribute to political de-mobilization and disenfranchisement. People participate in social movements for material and moral reasons, the American system frustrates in both those dimensions (materially because of the aforementioned obstacles – in addition, prior to 1940 the courts played a central – though perhaps redundant- role in beating back social reform). In America, for many decades before similar trends in Europe became apparent (for much different reasons I would argue), limited participation, often legally enforced but also encouraged through the artifact of truncated, conservatively-biased debate paired with a grossly inefficient/slow legislative process. Low participation and a logic of disenfranchisement have always been an institutional part of the American system, not some exogenous “culture” variable.

The US system could be ‘fixed’ by the elimination of Gerrymandering. This would allow the House to be a popular representation of regional voters. Currently the house is a popular representation of regional party members. The Senate serves the useful purpose of providing a voice for regional areas. This division provides both power for popular vote support and power for regional constituencies.

“Ditto Syria, if news reports are to be believed.”

Going back to this for a minute. If you read the report in the New York Times it doesn’t really lead you to think Obama’s Syria policy would be significantly different than McCain’s:

“But senior American officials have said that the White House was worried about the risks of becoming more deeply involved in the Syria crisis, including the possibility that weapons could fall into the wrong hands. And with Mr. Obama in the middle of a re-election campaign….

.. Some administration officials expected the issue to be revisited after the election. But when Mr. Petraeus resigned because of an extramarital affair and Mrs. Clinton suffered a concussion, missing weeks of work, the issue was shelved.”

I don’t doubt that McCain would have been more involved in Syria, and have had a somewhat different approach to the Arab uprisings, but I don’t see how those differences would have led to a significantly different outcome than we have today. He probably wouldn’t have been able to implement a no fly zone early on in the conflict, wouldn’t have used ground troops and although he might have directly armed the rebels earlier, this is probably going to happen anyway, and more than likely wouldn’t have made a difference to the conflict.

On keeping a presence in Iraq, and going to war with Iran, neither of these seem overly realistic outcomes from a McCain presidency. There has been a good bit written about Obama’s approach to Iran, and the difficulty he has had in substantially changing US policy. Even if really he wanted to (for example)

http://www.aucegypt.edu/gapp/cairoreview/Pages/articleDetails.aspx?aid=258

So sure in some respects, primarily domestically, the Presidency might matter, but you’re overstating the case if you extend that to FP, especially in the Middle East. (And particularly in this case)

Bruce Wilder @131 and 132

You are, as always, lucid, eloquent and often well-informed. But when you write that Britain “throughout the 19th century [was] not rich, by the standards of the 20th or 21st centuries, perhaps, but it was a country, where the concentration of wealth was extreme, and the feverish accumulation of capital into the hands of the few combined with the conquest of empire, to leave very little benefit to servants or factory workers, and even less to Irish peasants” I cannot see much congruence between your views and reality; at least, _throughout_ the nineteenth century. Are you really arguing that servants and factory workers were not very much better off at the end of the nineteenth century than at the beginning – or indeed, Irish peasants? Or that the concentration of wealth was extreme in Britain by nineteenth century standards? Was it really that much better than in the US in the Gilded Age, allowing for the enormous acreage of free land available in the US?

As for the long and delicious quotation from Barbara Tuchmann: I admire her rhetoric and have a few doubts about her command of facts. One would not realise, judging from her description of Salisbury’s first cabinet – which I freely admit was the highwatermark of late aristocratic Conservatism- that it included WH Smith, the newsagent and bookseller, or that later reorganisations brought in Joseph Chamberlain the Birmingham businessman, Charles Ritchie from a family of jutespinners in Dundee,George Goschen from an Anglo-German merchant family (and champion of the University Extension movement), Henry Matthews, a Catholic lawyer, born in Ceylon and educated in Paris, Akers-Douglas, son of a Kentish parson, or Robert Hanbury, a Staffordshire coalowner.

Competent, many of them were. Well off, mostly (but compare US politicians of the same vintage). Aristocratic, come off it.

And Tuchmann was tilting the balance somewhat. Look at the cabinet before Salisbury’s: HH Asquith, son of a Yorkshire wool merchant, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, a Glasgow wholesale and retail draper, AJ Mundella, a Nottingham hosier, son of an Italian refugee, Arnold Morley, an Nottingham manufacturer and publisher, Henry Fowler, a Wolverhampton solicitor, James Bryce, son of a Belfast lawyer, George Shaw-Lefebvre, son of a London barrister, John Morley, a Lancashire journalist.

Not, I think, aristocratic rulers keeping the lower classes penned in Dickensian squalor. Was there, indeed, any Dickensian squalor in Britain by the end of the nineteenth century?

“Was there, indeed, any Dickensian squalor in Britain by the end of the nineteenth century?”

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/exhibition/dublin/poverty_health.html

Yes, I am trolling you. Kind of..

“Without competitive and ideological politics, you can’t really slice and dice political constituencies and reassemble into legitimating majorities without some form of coercion (or false promises).”

Well, I must admit, this sounds vaguely convincing. In the sense: it’s so bad now, how could it get any worse?

When I mentioned Lebanon, I didn’t mean their paramilitary entities; I meant their political system, where all kinds of political and bureaucratic government posts (including, as far as I know, low level public servants) are allocated proportionally to every ethnic and sectarian group. I suspect this might be something many American liberals would like too, in one form or another.