Who thinks who is a threat to democracy? (Part 1)

Some possible theories (which I don’t necessarily believe, just that they are possible explanations to be assessed against the observed behaviour:

A. The dems don’t actually believe it, and it’s all hype. Consider this a variant of the lesser evil argument. If you think the electorate hates you, and your sales pitch as that your opponent is even worse than you are, you have to make out that your opponent is really really bad.

B. Bullshit, in the Harry Frankfurt sense. Politicians of all stripes are just saying stuff with no concern over whether it is actually true, or what the consequences would be if it were true.

C. Revealed preference for Trump. Suppose that the dems are kind of opposed to Trump, but really really hate the left of their own party, such as Bernie Sanders. To the extent that they’d prefer to destroy the republic, or have actual Nazis in power, rather than concede to the left of their own party.

I seem to recall Douthat called himself an ultramontanist in his youth. That he might be dicking around now because a threat to democracy doesn’t bother him much seems well within the realm of possibility. Let’s start with facts, not wishful thinking about an imaginary Douthat in an entirely different world.

First, to your question “is there a better D strategy to save democracy than just trying to win?” the answer is yes: namely trying to maximize the number of people in positions of power who will not go along with the destruction of democracy.

This is only equivalent to “just try to win” if you believe every, or almost every, R is about equally likely to go along in the event. But we know that’s not true from the experience of January 2021: a bunch of (at least nominally Trump-supporting!) Republicans, from Brad Raffensperger to Aaron van Langevelde to the Rs in Congress who voted to certify on 1/6, were essential to saving democracy then. And to take maybe the most clearcut case, there is no universe where supporting John Gibbs over Peter Meijer in the MI-3 primary increased the likelihood of having someone in that House seat who will defend democracy.

On the triangulation strategy question, there’s at least one practical reason to think it’d be worth risking demoralization of the D base to capture more swing/independent/unaffiliated voters: the D base is very inefficiently distributed for Electoral College impact. That’s not fair, but that’s the game we’re playing.

You take the man who kicked Chunky Reese Witherspoon out of bed seriously?

Douthat is a Lunatic, Catholic troll in a troll of a publication.

Some Dems, including the DCCC, gave to MAGA candidates in primaries

Show me where the DCCC made financial contributions to MAGA candidates in primaries.

Of course Douthat is wrong. But understandably so, because “the centre-left needs to become more rightist to win an election” is established wisdom among centrist and centre-right journalists all over the developed world, and no centre-left election loss caused by insufficient turnout of their disillusioned voter base will ever make them reconsider that.

Re MAGAs not thinking they are fascists:

First, a defining characteristic of the right-wing is to divide the people into those that count as real people and those that don’t. It is therefore easy for Rs to believe that they aren’t actually doing an authoritarianism but are promoting the Will of The People, because to them The People are only those who are like them and think like them; everybody else isn’t a Real American. To this can be added the ease with which we can today select only like-minded news sources and social media bubbles, so that it appears to them as if virtually everybody is very conservative, and therefore the libs must be a tiny minority holding power only through manipulation and trickery.

Second, hardly anybody understands what any of these words mean anyway: fascist, nazi, liberal, communist, socialist, capitalist, democracy, or republic. The median R’s understanding of terminology is limited to the idea that the first five of these are Bad and therefore they must be interchangeable labels for what the other side wants. Of course I can’t be fascist, fascist is a label for something bad, and it isn’t me who is bad, it is them. Even supposedly more educated people often seem to think that to count as a fascist you have to follow the playbook of a specific historical fascist movement in every idiosyncratic detail, that a worker who is in favour of free markets is a capitalist, or that communist China can’t be a republic. Because their understanding of political terminology comes from cultural osmosis from other ignoramuses, not from look stuff up in a reliable book.

As an aside, whenever I read about Trump being a danger to democracy, I would like to add it isn’t just Trump but the entire Republican party and its supporting media sphere that are a danger to democracy in the USA. There is no reason to assume that if Trump died tomorrow, the R primary voters wouldn’t merely pick the next leader and continue seamlessly along the current trajectory. The desire to pick ever more extremist candidates, to seed the judiciary with hacks, to destroy the regulatory capabilities of the state that protect the weak from predatory or neglectful companies, to make it harder for minorities and the R’s opponents in general to vote, to gerrymander, to militarise the police, and mass incarceration of the poor and of minorities, all of that preceded Trump’s candidacy by decades and will long outlive him.

History suggests that Ross I-would-do-anything-for-love-but-I-won’t-Douthat (as I believe Belle once referred to him) almost never produces arguments worth seriously engaging with and this is just more of the same. Exactly what concessions should be made? Give up on trying to mitigate climate change? Give up on trying to prevent the Gini coefficient from rising as high as possible towards a world where Douthat might become a literal court jester? Give up on trying to remember that American history is not an unbroken story of the greatness triumphs and decency of white men, generously bringing the other races and the other gender along with them? It’s not like we can go all conference of Yalta with the Republicans here; they’re not on the other side of the world from us.

There’s not necessary common ground between the so-called “sane conservatives” and either supporters of democracy in general or the Democratic Party in particular. A big part of Trumpism is making the cost of defecting as high as possible, even if the benefits of being on side are nebulous. So conservatives inside politics have every incentive to play along even if they’d like to speak up (the Neimoller approach… wring your hands in private, try to persuade anyone wanting to take action not to, then afterwards if you survive wring your hands in public about what a cowardly facilitator of evil you were). More specifically, the number of “sane Republicans” who’ve been de-selected suggests that the cost of being such is high.

Voters may or may not choose sanity in the privacy of the polling booth. Assuming they can, as various existing attacks on democracy seem to be less than completely ineffective. Lots of chances for collective punishment of districts that vote the wrong way even if that has no effect.

But really, what would voting Democrat gain the average Republican non-Trumpist? Can someone lay out the constituencies and what each would gain? It seems to me that far too often their choices are between Trump running amok and only giving them some of what they want, vs Democrats actively working against their interests as they see them.

I believe that Trump is a huge threat to democracy and that most people don’t act like he is a huge threat to democracy in the sense of working very hard on alliances to keep him out.

Part of the problem is that the word ‘ally’ seems to have become confused with other words like ‘vassal’ or ‘servant’. Allies work together on common goals and go their separate ways on differing goals. A common refrain I hear from all over the map is “you aren’t a real ally unless you help us with very extreme things” But that isn’t how allies work. They help you on the things that help for the common goal.

The other problem is that people seem to have a difficult time even talking about prioritizing goals. When you’re trying to deal with an existential crisis like “the end of democracy” it is ok to put other things on hold for a few years. So Republicans probably have to deal with far more pro-choice advocates than they would normally be comfortable with, and Democrats might want to slow down a bit on maximalist medical transition for people under 18 issues. You can fight those battles later.

The fact that no one is really willing to put any of those off till later strongly suggests that either they don’t believe Trump is a real threat or they don’t know how to be partners in a coalition that doesn’t consist of only yes-men. (Or both).

Reading through the growing discussion now, I must admit that I am confused how an alliance of ‘sane Republicans’ and Democrats would look like or even work. It is a two-party-system, so virtually every contested election is R (sane or not) versus D. Republican candidates who don’t toe the line get primaried. End of. There is no way that a ‘sane Republican’ can really do something for an alliance and stay the second half of that phrase.

The only way to break the fever would be for the Republicans to lose election after election, by humiliating margins, for at least twelve years, until they are so demoralised that they shift back to the centre in the hope of winning elections again. But for that to happen, the USA would need a different media ecosystem, a different electoral system, a more competent and confident Democratic party, and probably a different electorate.

In searching for a reply to Joe Biden’s Philadelphia speech, rather than engaging in the bloody self-wounding that occurs when we listen to the abyssal nihilism that erupts from the mouths of the iniquitous rogues’ gallery of alt-fact Trumpite mental and moral degenerates, we can instead note that the late, great David Graeber had already penned his reply to Biden some fifteen years ago.

The following quote is from David Graeber’s essay “There Never was a West: or, Democracy Emerges from the Spaces in Between” which can be found in his collection of essays entitled “Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire” (2007)

“1) Almost everyone who writes on the subject assumes “democracy” is a “Western” concept that begins its history in ancient Athens. They also assume that what eighteenth- and nineteenth-century politicians began reviving in Western Europe and North America was essentially the same thing. Democracy is thus seen as something whose natural habitat is Western Europe and its English- or French-speaking settler colonies. Not one of these assumptions is justified. “Western civilization” is a particularly incoherent concept, but, insofar as it refers to anything, it refers to an intellectual tradition. This intellectual tradition is, overall, just as hostile to anything we would recognize as democracy as those of India, China, or Mesoamerica.

2) Democratic practices—processes of egalitarian decision-making—however, occur pretty much anywhere, and are not peculiar to any one given “civilization,” culture, or tradition. They tend to crop up wherever human life goes on outside systematic structures of coercion.

3) The “democratic ideal” tends to emerge when, under certain historical circumstances, intellectuals and politicians, usually in some sense navigating their way between states and popular movements and popular practices, interrogate their own traditions—invariably, in dialogue with other ones— citing cases of past or present democratic practice to argue that their tradition has a fundamental kernel of democracy. I call these moments of “democratic refoundation.” From the perspective of the intellectual traditions, they are also moments of recuperation, in which ideals and institutions that are often the product of incredibly complicated forms of interaction between people of very different histories and traditions come to be represented as emerging from the logic of that intellectual tradition itself. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries especially, such moments did not just occur in Europe, but almost everywhere.

4) The fact that this ideal is always founded on (at least partly) invented traditions does not mean it is inauthentic or illegitimate or, at least, more inauthentic or illegitimate than any other. The contradiction, however, is that this ideal was always based on the impossible dream of marrying democratic procedures or practices with the coercive mechanisms of the State. The results are not “Democracies” in any meaningful sense of the world but Republics with a few, usually fairly limited, democratic elements.

5) What we are experiencing today is not a crisis of democracy but rather a crisis of the State. In recent years, there has been a massive revival of interest in democratic practices and procedures within global social movements, but this has proceeded almost entirely outside of statist frameworks. The future of democracy lies precisely in this area.”

http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=0700170C80337765E6037B5A7A2EC233

As for examples of what anarchist anthropologists such as Graeber mean when they speak of stateless spaces, we can turn to James C. Scott’s history of Zomia –“The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia”.

“For two thousand years, the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe—2.5 million km2—that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée, epidemics, and warfare—of the nation state societies that surround them.[2][4] This book, essentially an “anarchist history”, is the first examination of the huge literature on nation-building whose author evaluates why people would deliberately choose to remain stateless.
Scott’s main argument is that these people are “barbaric by design”: their social organization, geographical location, subsistence practices and culture have been maintained to discourage states from curtailing their freedoms.[5] States want to integrate Zomia peoples and territory to increase their landholdings, resources, and people subject to taxation—in other words, to raise revenue.[1] Scott argues that these many minority groups are “…using their culture, farming practices, egalitarian political structures, prophet-led rebellions, and even their lack of writing systems to put distance between themselves and the states that wished to engulf them.”[3] Tribes today do not live outside history according to Scott, but have “as much history as they require” and deliberately practice “state avoidance”.[6]”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed

“I basically agree. As dirty tricks, these are very mild. You are literally just making sure the R’s are informed about the candidates. Dirty tricks that involve no lying or even misleading are not very dirty. And the reasons for Dems doing this are completely transparent. They are trying to secure their 1st best outcome – an elected D. They are risking their worst outcome – an elected MAGA nut. But that’s not dirty, it’s just deeming a somewhat higher risk strategy to be optimal.”

Was it still not dirty to do it to Peter Meijer, who voted to impeach Trump?

Timothy Wong,

I am not here to claim some exceptionally democratising influence for a civilisation that can count world-wide colonialism, genocide, and mass enslavement as among its legacies. I am not here to claim that pre-colonial India, China, or indigenous American cultures didn’t have their own anti-authoritarian and self-governance philosophies and practices; of course they had those. And I am not here to defend the idea that history is shaped by the published ideas of outstanding philosophers; instead, there are social/class conflicts, and the winning side picked out of the diverse set of ideas floating around those philosophers who happened to write what they wanted to hear, and that is then later depicted as the Intellectual Tradition that drove everything.

But that all said, your comment is a large number of unevidenced assertions supported entirely by an argument from authority that would work a bit better if I had any idea who David Graeber is and why I should care for his thoughts. The common theme of most of what you quote is that he redefines words to serve his ends.

This is particularly evident where real-life democracies – a thematic cluster of possible government structures for complex, highly organised states – is through sleight-of-hand redefined as not really democracy, and statelessness is redefined as the “future of democracy”. That is hard to take seriously. I could just as well claim that no existing university is a real university because, say, students are brutally forced into a timetable of courses and lectures, but if I go hiking with my daughter and she learns a few plant species from me, that’s the true “future of university”! No, not having a university isn’t what university means, and not having a government is not what democratic government means.

And, “Western civilisation is a particularly incoherent concept” – how? No evidence or argument. This is like those people in my field who reject the idea of species as useless nonsense because there are sometimes hybrids between very closely related species. But try crossing an oak and a dandelion, or a mouse and a dog. That speciation is mostly a gradual process doesn’t mean that species is a useless concept. Similarly, that societies influence each other and people migrate around doesn’t mean it isn’t pretty clear that the Byzantine empire, Roman numerals, Adam Smith, and the Atlantic slave trade were part of Western Civilisation, but the Inca empire, Chinese calligraphy, the Buddha, and the genocidal campaigns of Timur weren’t.

Re transactional allies: that’s fine, though I cannot remember the last time I’ve seen it. Even outside of dealing with independents or Republicans, the Democrats seem to have trouble doing that in-party which led to paralysis re Manchin before just actually giving him what he wanted in return for other things. When they finally did so it immediately worked but they got much less than he offered a year ago. Are there any transactions you’ve seen proposed on the Trumpism issues?

Your attack ad analysis seems to want to focus on blame rather than utility. I provided an entirely functional critique.

Re ‘first attack ad’ the timing doesn’t make sense. If he won, they could run the same ad one week later, and at much lower cost. Running it directly before the primary gives an overwhelming inference of trying to influence the primary, which you don’t seem to try to address at all.

Re the trans issue, Biden’s administration is pushing it by suggesting the ‘watchful waiting’ psychology approach of exploring non trans reasons for having body dysphoria (rape, incest, and very sharp puberty changes often leading the way) are ‘conversion therapy’ which it outlaws.

Eg https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/06/23/the-biden-administrations-confused-embrace-of-trans-rights

Presumably, J-D, the valence 0f a libertarian arguing “WARNAD” would be the opposite of Timothy Wong’s: “this whole democracy argument is asinine because WARNAD, and so obviously it’s just Dems trying to gain partisan advantage”.

Which wouldn’t provide any light, and would only provide heat if they went on to argue something so batshit it was funny

Also: one of the thrusts of David Graeber’s work (which you should familiarize yourself with) is trying to demonstrate how political horizons have been artificially narrowed through inaccuracies – potted histories, just-so stories, bad scholarship – about the past. The point isn’t “only utopia will do, incremental gains are bullshit”; the point is clarifying how domination works more effectively so it can be combated more effectively. Maybe through incremental progress! But we can’t make slow progress toward a target if we can’t see it.

Alex SL, it’s funny you mention Buddha having no influence on Western Civilization: we know the French monastery where David Hume learned about Buddhist views of the self, truth and empiricism; after this visit, his writing took on deep affinity with these topics’ Buddhist conceptions.

ALEX SL and J-D

As it happens, I am also an Australian like J-D. So let’s take the commonplace descriptive statement “Australian democracy” and attempt to clarify our terms.

Graeber’s point against those such as Joe Biden who view our contemporary historical moment as one in which “democracy is in crisis” is that this is not a crisis of democracy but is a crisis of the State. For Jurgen Habermas and others this can be viewed in part as a “legitimation crisis”. Modern Rightist politics has adopted a militant radicalism which is actively and expressly destructive of state and governmental institutions. “Defund the FBI” “The election was stolen by the QAnon “deep state”” “The DOJ is the mafia of the Democrats” etc

We who live in “the West” do not live in democracies. No national population, nor a fortiori the human species as a whole, is a fully constituted, self-governing demos. We live in capitalist-oligarchical parliamentary republics with some democratic elements which persist in a state of constant threat from the powerful capitalist-oligarchical forces which are the true causative sources of both global and nation-state social power. (I am defining “social power” here in the Left-Weberian sense as found in the work of Michael Mann).

E.g. all the powerful forces of the Murdoch empire are currently being employed to crush a tiny news and opinion website called Crikey that the vast majority of Australians have never heard of, let alone read. Lachlan Murdoch’s reputation has been defamed and damaged according to that upper-bourgeois wanker by a single article that was read by people that could only number in the hundreds at most. And so millions will be spent to crush this independent news website into the dust. Is this indicative of what would occur if we lived in a “democracy”? Do we in actuality live in a fully constituted, self-governing demos? Or is our situation and condition more truthfully described as the typical machinations of the 500 year old Capitalist World-System as described by Immanuel Wallerstein and his school of World-Systems Analysis?

Happily, I and J-D are citizens of Australia and as such are not subjects (in the monarchial sense of the term) of the British Monarchy. And yet we still strain under that yoke. Within living memory, Australians were drafted into British imperialist wars. A democratically elected Prime Minister was dismissed by an Australian Governor-General in a manner which is far better described by Carl Schmidt than could be described in whatever terms would be employed by a conceptual, blank-slate innocents such as Scott Morrison, notwithstanding the powerful profundity of that man’s intellect.

But Graeber’s point is that the history by which we became citizens and were no longer subjects was of necessity a bloody and at times regicidal revolutionary history against the preponderant force of anti-democracy which was the default setting of the majority of the previous historical periods.

And we are not there yet, if ever we will be.

“It seldom wins and then by the skin of its teeth. It crawls, it goes into hiding but keeps on, putting down its quickly drying track on the historical landscape, on documents and boundary lines, amid building sites and ruins, in drafty doctrinal structures, far from well-situated theories, skirting retreats and silted revolutions.
“What do you mean by the snail?”
“The snail is progress.”
What’s progress ?”
“Being a little quicker than the snail…”
“… and never getting there, children.”

Gunter Grass, “From the Dairy of a Snail”

(continued in next post).

J-D at 30.

There’s a big difference between saying, “It’s a Republic, not a Democracy, thus all your complaints about its undemocratic features are invalid,” and “the construction of the State, as the State, makes democracy (nearly?) impossible.”

The first is a defense of the status quo. I first heard it as an explanation of why the federal government in the US could not and should not interfere with Jim Crow because in a republic, “states rights” rule.

The second is quite the opposite of a defense of a status quo. In fact, it is a claim about the possibilities of the State, that (I hope I’m not putting words in Timothy Wong’s mouth here) dreams of revolutionary change.

You may think anarchists are nitwits. Most people do. I don’t, as it happens. Nonetheless, I never mistake an anarchist for a libertarian Republican.

Hope this helps. Also read the Graeber. It’s fun and good to think with.

both sides do it,

I would be very interested to learn where I even so much as insinuated that Buddha had absolutely zero influence on Western civilisation. Note my argument that it makes sense to talk of species even if there are sometimes hybrids between species (or a bit of introgression, to strengthen the analogy). That argument presupposes the existence of some exchange and intermediates, but limited to the degree where the larger entities still maintain their own core characteristics.

Re Graeber, it doesn’t matter who he is. If somebody quotes the scientist I most highly respect in the entire world as making the unsupported statement that the world is flat, that still wouldn’t be an argument, much less correct. I am reminded of a certain Catholic apologist who considers any argument settled for good once he has cited Aquinas’ opinion on the topic in question.

Timothy Wong,

@36:

That is an enormous number of words only to repeat the aforementioned fallacy of “toddler and adult are meaningless concepts because there is not a single second where you instantly turn from one into the other”.

@37:

I am fully aware that Murdoch has more influence on political decision making than you or me, and I am all for breaking up his conglomerate and taxing billionaires out of existence. However:

If our fellow Australian voters wanted, they could give the Greens, or whatever hypothetical party you could imagine who would, if elected, implement everything you wanted, 151 MPs and half the senators at the next election. I know it is hard to accept that they simply don’t want to do that, because I feel that same way about our fellow Australians in their majority not wanting e.g. to get serious about climate, but that is the reality. They are humans with their own agency, and nobody forces them at gunpoint to watch Sky News or to drive their SUV to the shops. Most to the point, nobody forces them at threat of prison to vote for the parties Murdoch supports. That right there is what makes this a democracy as opposed to a dictatorship. That is simply what that word means, even if a billionaire owns media in that democracy and even if there is conscription (which, again, the voters could all change with a single election), and you or Graeber do not get to unilaterally change that meaning any more than libertarians get to change the meaning of inflation or of theft.

I would also love to see you build, or even only blueprint, a complex society in which there are no power imbalances or rules enforced by the state whatsoever. If I understand you correctly, your ideal is not to have a complex society in the first place. The problem is, as your earlier quotes about the Zomia people having had to flee (!) already correctly hinted at, that people living in anarchy tend to lose against the larger and better-equipped militaries of states. Even without outside conquest, stateless anarchy is not a long-term stable state because any group of sufficiently motivated thugs can re-instate a proto-state. Thus we are also not seeing a crisis of the state. The state will remain a state even if a fascist takes over because democratic institutions have lost legitimacy, and in a stateless chaos, every warlord’s or drug baron’s gang of goons is a proto-state ready to grow over centuries, through inescapable institutional logic and social pressures, into a complex state just as did the Frankish tribal kingdom that formed after the collapse of the Roman empire.

The question is therefore only, do you help defend the highly organised state where the population has the power to decide what happens (be it through election of a party, through plebiscites, or some other institutionalised processes), or do you let a Trumpist take over and ensure that the population loses that power? Turning everything into anarchy is not an option, because it will in the long run be replaced by a state, very likely a dictatorial one.

@
‘Turning everything into anarchy is not an option, because it will in the long run be replaced by a state, very likely a dictatorial one’.

But there are (STILL) a lot of Americans -(and Glenn Greenwald) who always believed that by
‘entirely burning down the house –
out of the ashes
will
be rise –
a better one’
And some of my friends – who thought that Trump would help him into joyful anarchy
are thoroughly disappointed that he didn’t succeed.

Douthat seems to be saying: now, more than ever, triangulate, to be extra sure you win. But triangulating – running to the middle – is not invariably the way to be sure you win. You can de-motivate your own base and run into other coalition trouble trying that way. Because you give up stuff.

I think this is a bit thin. “De-motivate your own base” may (or may not) be a consideration at times, but not if Trump is running in 2024. Look at the huge turnout in 2020. Just as Trump could murder someone in broad daylight and RWers would still vote for Trump, Biden could [my imagination fails me] and LWers (and many non-LWers) would still vote against Trump.

Alex SL at 41 “Turning everything into anarchy is not an option, because it will in the long run be replaced by a state, very likely a dictatorial one.”

This claim irks me and it’s worthwhile to me to unpack my reasons.

Interestingly, one of my priors is the Buddhist (Soto, American, many others) tenet, “Everything, without exception, changes.” So to say that one form of social of organization will be replaced by another is trivially true. Unless we’re contemplating the end of history, each form of social organization will eventually be replaced by some other. To suggest that one form of society is worse than another because it will change into something else doesn’t make sense.

Another of my priors is from Beckett, “People are bloody ignorant apes,” so I tend to imagine that most change will be for the worse. However, experience shows that sometimes change is for the good. For a while, anyway. I’m glad, for example, that the terrorist system, Jim Crow, is gone.

In other words, you can plug in any form of government in the claim and get something lots of people will find plausible. It won’t be “true,” though, even in the little-t sense. It’s a form of received wisdom.

The claim isn’t received wisdom because it’s backed up by centuries of close observation of how societies work. And it’s not received wisdom because it’s logically true. It’s more like “socialism is bad because no one would have incentive to work.” It derives from our culturally conditioned prejudices, and it serves a rhetorical purpose.

In the Republic, for example, Socrates said the democracy inherently leads to tyranny. His goal was to get his interlocutors to agree that aristocracy, ruled by philosopher-monarchs, is the most just of possible constitutions. Anybody who’s ever been to a philosophy department meeting knows better. However, if you can frame the argument to figure reality as a choice between an Anglo-American philosophy department and Stalin, well, “Yes, this certainly must be more just, Socrates.”

All this does not, of course, “prove,” that the goals, and methods, and purposes of anarchism are “True.” What it suggests is that received wisdom is of little use in sorting these things out.

More succinctly: In the long run, we’ll all be dead.

This column by Bret Stephens is interesting in the light of this OP and discussion:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/06/opinion/biden-speech-maga-republicans.html

Stephens differs from Douthat in that he is what we could loosely call a libertarian conservative (abortion is OK; what he thinks are “high” taxes are not). He has been full-throated in his view that Trump represents a threat to democracy in the US. He has never played the equivalence, or “what about,” game: in one of his columns (I’m paraphrasing) he said that torching a courthouse in Portland is wrong, but it is simply not in the same league, or the same kind of threat to the future of the US as a country, as what happened in Washington on January 6. He voted for Biden.

Nevertheless, Stephens shares Douthat’s concern that what should have been a presidential address concerning a very real and serious threat, an address that should have appealed to a broad base of citizens–who might otherwise disagree on abortion, global warming, or guns–was instead shabby and partisan, equating right wing views on abortion and global warming and gay marriage with the anti-Semitic marchers in Charlottesville and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. It’s as if Liz Cheney didn’t prove that one can hold all kinds of views that are anathema to the left and still care quite sincerely about democratic institutions and the peaceful, lawful transfer of power.

I agreed with Douthat that Biden and the democrats are not really taking the Trump threat seriously–that it is just another issue that can be used to raise funds and galvanize the base. But Stephens makes the point more clearly when he says that Biden is equating and confusing small-d democracy with big D Democrat policy, some of which, like gay marriage, is a relatively recent addition to the Democrat agenda. And Stephens seems more credible than Douthat, because, far from down-playing the importance of January 6, he believes that Biden and his party are not taking the Trump threat seriously enough.

All of this matters, I think, because if you don’t have a functioning democracy, and the other rights that we associate with it, then your opinion on abortion, global warming, gay marriage, and guns, is simply not going to matter. It will be moot.

PatinIowa,

(With apologies to J-D for continuing this thread.)

I don’t know about priors, because I am not being Bayesian with history, but my toolkit is science, and although I am not a historian, I would apply the same logic here: there are general ‘laws of nature’ that determine how things will most likely play out; and there are things that just aren’t possible because they provably don’t work.

For example, in the absence of magic potion, a self-governed ‘stateless’ village is predictably toast when the Roman empire thinks it would make a nice addition to the provinces; but it might have a better chance of not being conquered if it is already part of a larger, highly organised state that can field a professional army on par with the conquering legions.

That is not received wisdom, it is deducing most probable paths of institutional evolution from historical data points.

Alex SL

I’m sure you see the problem with these two claims, taken together:
“I am not a historian.”
“That is not received wisdom, it is deducing most probable paths of institutional evolution from historical data points.”

Okay. Give me one historical data point: Show me an instance of an anarchist polity that became tyrannical.

Being conquered by a larger entity may or may not count. Iran was relatively democratic in 1953 compared to what it became after the US helped overthrow its elected government. I don’t believe that that proves that democracy is an inferior system to whatever the Shah represented (tyranny, in my view). Do you?

One more time: the aim of the Wengrow/Graeber book is this: if you look closely at the historical data points, you’ll find that our account of how societies develop has become a master narrative that obscures a far more various and complicated historical record. According to them, the variety and complexity offer hope for effective political action in the future. It’s a big book, and I’m sure many historians are subjecting it to a great deal of scrutiny. However, I’m always willing to listen to historical accounts that start with, “The story isn’t as simple as you think.”

Whatever else is true, to return to the OP, we’ve got lots of data points that suggest that more or less democratic societies can become tyrannical. Whether your impulses are anarchist, socialist, social democratic, or whatever, that’s the concern of the moment.

(By the way. Peter Frankopan’s “The Silk Roads,” another very large book, offers many accounts of the clashes of empires, of course including Roman legions. I don’t think it bears a great deal on this discussion. I do think it’s a terrific read.)

I note that Murc’s request at 11 – “Show me where the DCCC made financial contributions to MAGA candidates in primaries.” – has received no answer, and it is easy to see why not: because the claim that Holbo made, that the DCCC “gave to MAGA candidates in primaries” is demonstarably false. John Holbo, don’t you agree that pundits making false statements have a responsibility to retract them and offer an apology?

@11

“Show me where the DCCC made financial contributions to MAGA candidates in primaries.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/27/meijer-dccc-trump-primaries-00048104