I don't understand this essay. Especially this bit:
"A reduction of politics to the clash of “liberalism” and “illiberalism” might be a hangover from the twentieth century’s ideological conflicts. Adherents of resilience should instead see populism as a challenge to be met rather than a Manichean foe to defeat; this would demand policy reform and discovery of the deeper resources of freedom."
We are clearly living through a time of renewed conflict between liberalism and illiberalism. Indeed, this is the first time in history when those labels are as completely descriptive as they are now. 200 years ago many people celebrated the USA as a bastion of liberalism, but the USA was still a slave state at that time. Nowadays the liberal countries are formally committed to liberalism in a clean, straightforward way. They are no longer encumbered by slavery and feudalism, and other remnants of the pre-liberal era. And by contrast, Russia, China, North Korea and Iran are clearly, openly, creating a new Axis to fight for an illiberal agenda. These 4 nations also have some allies in the West, such as Orban in Hungary. Orban literally said that his goal was to build "an illiberal democracy." Those were his words.
During the 20th Century it was common to talk about the clash between capitalism and Communism, but nowadays the clash is clearly between liberalism and illiberalism. This conflict does not belong to the past, it belongs to the future. And because this crisis is so new and urgent, it makes sense to use urgent rhetoric when talking about. The writer of this essay seems to be engaged in wishful fantasy, suggesting that if we stop talking about the crisis as a crisis, then it will cease to be a crisis. This is the reasoning that children use when they want to avoid facing up to an unpleasant truth. The reality is that this conflict exists, and it will likely dominate foreign and domestic politics for the next 30 years.
He seems to be saying that we need a broader array of policies and perspectives to deal with illiberalism than simply a one-dimensional spectrum of “liberalism” and “not liberalism”. We could take their concerns into account without agreeing with them. For example, I support immigration but that doesn’t mean that it’s unambiguously good. If it’s not handled properly it can lead to racial inequality and poverty like our broken system does now. Instead of building a giant, expensive, and porous wall, we could assimilate them without sacrificing too much of their culture as well as pay attention to the conditions that made them flee their home country. Globalists accuse nationalists of supporting 1930’s-era classical fascism and nationalists accuse globalists of establishing a one-world oligarchic government. I support the existence of nation-states but I believe that global unity should counterbalance national unity. You’ve acknowledged that liberalism and democracy aren’t necessarily the same thing. That’s why we see some libertarians argue in favor of monarchy or establish “white intentional communities”. Liberalism seems to be tilted slightly in favor of individual rights while conservatism seems to be tilted more to the community without going over into tyranny. Acknowledging liberalism’s failures isn’t the same thing as discrediting it.
This essay says almost nothing about immigration. The only time the word appears is in this sentence:
"Efforts to tame crime, manage immigration, and improve outcomes for blue-collar Americans could be seen as part of this bigger project."
That's not much. I didn't read this essay having much to say on the subject of immigration.
About this:
"We need a broader array of policies and perspectives to deal with illiberalism than simply a one-dimensional spectrum of “liberalism” and “not liberalism”.
I'd actually go in the opposite direction. To suggest that the difference between liberalism and illiberalism is one dimensional is to suggest there is a long spectrum between the two poles. In mathematics, one dimension can be infinitely long. Applied to liberalism and illiberalism, suggesting it is one dimensional suggests that there are many shades of gray in between the two poles. That might be true in terms of the accidents of history -- we could reasonably say that Poland in 2016 had a liberal constitution but was moving in an illiberal direction.
But when it comes to people's attitudes towards liberalism and illiberalism, I don't think the situation is one dimensional, but rather, I think it is binary. Most of the people I've met in my life either want a liberal society or they want an illiberal society. There isn't any gray area inbetween. The only time I've met a person who was 50/50 was when someone was young and confused. Then they might say something like "I think society should respect peoples individuality but I also think the government should make everyone go to church on Sunday, so they can learn some morals." Obviously those ideas can't be reconciled, such a person is simply confused. They hold a set of desires which they have not found a way to resolve, nor have they yet realized how contradictory those ideas are. Such people typically grow up and become more consistent over time, one way or the other, becoming either liberal or illiberal. That is, eventually, either they want the government to force people to go to church on Sunday, or they want the government to respect peoples individuality. At the level of the individual, people tend to favor one side or the other. Either they have a basic respect for an individual's right to movement, employment, speech, due process, security and political participation or they don't. Calling this "one dimensional" actually exaggerates how many choices there are. In fact, there are only 2 choices.
Obviously, when it comes to individual political policies, there you end up seeing a very wide range of views. I would agree that ordinary political policy is multi-dimensional and in society we see many different factions who want "different items off the menu" so to speak. And we can talk about various ways to give different kinds of representation to the various factions who want to see a different mix of policies. That's a reasonable conversation. And we can talk about how the political parties often fail to represent the views of large groups of people, who want something inbetween what the various parties are offering.
But all of those conversations simply assume liberalism. After all, you cannot talk about improving the political process in an illiberal society, since the political process has been shut down and no longer exists. And, in an illiberal society, you cannot talk about how some group of people wants an unusual mixture of policies -- if that group of people wants to go out and complain about their lack of political representation, then they will all be sent to prison for 30 years. You have to assume a liberal society before we can have a conversation such as "This group supports gay rights but wants to limit immigration and expand the police to better fight crime, where is the political party that represents their point of view?"
But on the fundamental question of liberalism versus illiberalism, I think most people are binary. They are on one side or the other.
And this is actually the same quote from Achen and Bartels that I used here on Demodexio:
"Just as important, if not more so, is that the moral valence of participation has, as Tocqueville predicted, swept all before it. Reputable people no longer express the distrust of direct democracy that the Founders consistently emphasized. Instead, what the political scientists Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels call the “folk theory of democracy” commands broad and. usually unquestioning support. The folk theory “celebrates the wisdom of popular judgment by informed and engaged citizens”; it assumes that, almost by definition, more public involvement will produce more representative and thus more effective and legitimate governance."
So, for sure, we are quoting the same sources and making the same arguments, as you said.
"James Madison and the other Founders were right to reject both direct democracy and elite rule. Instead, they insisted on a hybrid of both, believing that the two together would achieve better representation and better governance than either could achieve on its own."
We need a name for this. "Liberal democracy" is too broad and covers too many ideas. We need a name for the specific idea that democratic accountability needs to be balanced by respect for the skills of specialists. I personally think "demodexio" would be a good name for this, "demo" for the people and "dexio" for skill.
Thank you again for recommending this article. Most of their comments overlap with the ideas of Achen and Bartels, published in their book Democracy For Realists. Regarding the ignorance of voters, I quoted Achen and Bartels here at length:
About what Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes have written here:
"Always empirically questionable at best, the populist-progressive idea that more participation will reliably improve either the products or the popularity of governance has taken a pounding in recent years, to the point where it is basically untenable. The populist model assumes that voters are better informed, more rational, and more engaged than is the case—or ever will be."
For sure, that is one of the main themes that I've focused on too. It's the main idea I tried to express in "Progressives continue to sabotage themselves with inaccurate ideas about how democracy works"
But in my essay I also looked to European examples of party organization for exemplars we could import. In particular, the organization of the German CDU and the French Socialist Party (during the 1970s and 1980s) are things we need to study.
Relative equality is an important value but absolute equality can lead to resentment against those who are genuinely superior in character or intellect. Political philosophy is already full of ideas that are radically libertarian and egalitarian, such as communism and different types of anarchism. Truly innovative ideas could find ways to combine professionalism and expertise with public participation. It doesn't take much creativity or imagination to simply abolish government rather than think of new ways to increase democratic accountability. I believe that human beings tend to feel safer in hierarchical communities that are both close-knit and hierarchical. I’m not an expert in anthropology, but indigenous people seemed to live in societies with a limited hierarchy and everyone knew the chief personally so it was more intimate and they could be deposed at any time if they weren't doing their job properly. I believe that income inequality should be limited but intellectual inequality isn't as bad as long as everyone is given the same opportunity. I believe that we need other forms of evaluation of expertise besides just SAT scores. Maybe ordinary people can participate in voting on laws or even writing laws as long as there's an element of mediation and supervision. Senators don't read everything they vote on because it's literally thousands of pages long. Maybe mediated crowdsourcing can help with that. I believe that the principle of subsidiarity is a sound policy. It states that power should be delegated to the most local level wherever possible. Have you ever heard of sociocracy?
"It states that power should be delegated to the most local level wherever possible."
Perhaps in some cases the most local level possible can be thought of as being local to some issue or expertise, rather than local in the geographic context? As an example, school teachers devote their lives to understanding what school children need, therefore we can delegate a large amount of responsibility to school teachers, when it comes to deciding what the curriculum should be. I'm trying to think of a single case where it was a asserted that a small geographic region had specific educational needs, without the result being deeply reactionary. More so, we live in a highly mobile society in which people bounce around from region to region and even country to country, so how could we justify a government that delegates to small geographic units? The argument in favor of delegation-based-on-geography was stronger a few centuries ago, when society was mostly agricultural and people were tied to the land -- in those days a single family might stay in the same village for 300 years, and so their claim to a right to govern that village in some unique way was a strong one. But nowadays, in American suburbs, people buy homes strictly as investments, they accumulate some equity, then sell the house, then move to a different town and buy a slightly larger home. Few people stay in place for more than 20 years. It's become a natural life cycle for Americans to be born in one town, go away to college in a different town, settle down to raise a family in a third town, and then retire to a place like Florida, or perhaps Portugal. Such people have a very weak claim to be true citizens of whatever districts they temporarily inhabit, and their loyalty to the local place is almost non-existent, aside from a temporary loyalty to the local schools, while they have children in those schools. Given the lack of loyalty to local areas, the argument in favor of geographic delegation has become weak. But in any large, complex system delegation is essential, so we need to look for other dimensions along which we can decentralize. The specialization of skills is an obvious axis of delegation in modern life. If we abolish local, city, and state governments and concentrate all power in the national capitol we can then carry out a program of radical decentralization, delegating all powers to highly specialized committees, and leaving the legislature/executive a hollow shell of its former self, with no power save the power to appoint expert specialists to the committees.
An article that says populism should be seen as a challenge instead of a threat:
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-place-of-populism-in-american-politics
I don't understand this essay. Especially this bit:
"A reduction of politics to the clash of “liberalism” and “illiberalism” might be a hangover from the twentieth century’s ideological conflicts. Adherents of resilience should instead see populism as a challenge to be met rather than a Manichean foe to defeat; this would demand policy reform and discovery of the deeper resources of freedom."
We are clearly living through a time of renewed conflict between liberalism and illiberalism. Indeed, this is the first time in history when those labels are as completely descriptive as they are now. 200 years ago many people celebrated the USA as a bastion of liberalism, but the USA was still a slave state at that time. Nowadays the liberal countries are formally committed to liberalism in a clean, straightforward way. They are no longer encumbered by slavery and feudalism, and other remnants of the pre-liberal era. And by contrast, Russia, China, North Korea and Iran are clearly, openly, creating a new Axis to fight for an illiberal agenda. These 4 nations also have some allies in the West, such as Orban in Hungary. Orban literally said that his goal was to build "an illiberal democracy." Those were his words.
During the 20th Century it was common to talk about the clash between capitalism and Communism, but nowadays the clash is clearly between liberalism and illiberalism. This conflict does not belong to the past, it belongs to the future. And because this crisis is so new and urgent, it makes sense to use urgent rhetoric when talking about. The writer of this essay seems to be engaged in wishful fantasy, suggesting that if we stop talking about the crisis as a crisis, then it will cease to be a crisis. This is the reasoning that children use when they want to avoid facing up to an unpleasant truth. The reality is that this conflict exists, and it will likely dominate foreign and domestic politics for the next 30 years.
He seems to be saying that we need a broader array of policies and perspectives to deal with illiberalism than simply a one-dimensional spectrum of “liberalism” and “not liberalism”. We could take their concerns into account without agreeing with them. For example, I support immigration but that doesn’t mean that it’s unambiguously good. If it’s not handled properly it can lead to racial inequality and poverty like our broken system does now. Instead of building a giant, expensive, and porous wall, we could assimilate them without sacrificing too much of their culture as well as pay attention to the conditions that made them flee their home country. Globalists accuse nationalists of supporting 1930’s-era classical fascism and nationalists accuse globalists of establishing a one-world oligarchic government. I support the existence of nation-states but I believe that global unity should counterbalance national unity. You’ve acknowledged that liberalism and democracy aren’t necessarily the same thing. That’s why we see some libertarians argue in favor of monarchy or establish “white intentional communities”. Liberalism seems to be tilted slightly in favor of individual rights while conservatism seems to be tilted more to the community without going over into tyranny. Acknowledging liberalism’s failures isn’t the same thing as discrediting it.
This essay says almost nothing about immigration. The only time the word appears is in this sentence:
"Efforts to tame crime, manage immigration, and improve outcomes for blue-collar Americans could be seen as part of this bigger project."
That's not much. I didn't read this essay having much to say on the subject of immigration.
About this:
"We need a broader array of policies and perspectives to deal with illiberalism than simply a one-dimensional spectrum of “liberalism” and “not liberalism”.
I'd actually go in the opposite direction. To suggest that the difference between liberalism and illiberalism is one dimensional is to suggest there is a long spectrum between the two poles. In mathematics, one dimension can be infinitely long. Applied to liberalism and illiberalism, suggesting it is one dimensional suggests that there are many shades of gray in between the two poles. That might be true in terms of the accidents of history -- we could reasonably say that Poland in 2016 had a liberal constitution but was moving in an illiberal direction.
But when it comes to people's attitudes towards liberalism and illiberalism, I don't think the situation is one dimensional, but rather, I think it is binary. Most of the people I've met in my life either want a liberal society or they want an illiberal society. There isn't any gray area inbetween. The only time I've met a person who was 50/50 was when someone was young and confused. Then they might say something like "I think society should respect peoples individuality but I also think the government should make everyone go to church on Sunday, so they can learn some morals." Obviously those ideas can't be reconciled, such a person is simply confused. They hold a set of desires which they have not found a way to resolve, nor have they yet realized how contradictory those ideas are. Such people typically grow up and become more consistent over time, one way or the other, becoming either liberal or illiberal. That is, eventually, either they want the government to force people to go to church on Sunday, or they want the government to respect peoples individuality. At the level of the individual, people tend to favor one side or the other. Either they have a basic respect for an individual's right to movement, employment, speech, due process, security and political participation or they don't. Calling this "one dimensional" actually exaggerates how many choices there are. In fact, there are only 2 choices.
Obviously, when it comes to individual political policies, there you end up seeing a very wide range of views. I would agree that ordinary political policy is multi-dimensional and in society we see many different factions who want "different items off the menu" so to speak. And we can talk about various ways to give different kinds of representation to the various factions who want to see a different mix of policies. That's a reasonable conversation. And we can talk about how the political parties often fail to represent the views of large groups of people, who want something inbetween what the various parties are offering.
But all of those conversations simply assume liberalism. After all, you cannot talk about improving the political process in an illiberal society, since the political process has been shut down and no longer exists. And, in an illiberal society, you cannot talk about how some group of people wants an unusual mixture of policies -- if that group of people wants to go out and complain about their lack of political representation, then they will all be sent to prison for 30 years. You have to assume a liberal society before we can have a conversation such as "This group supports gay rights but wants to limit immigration and expand the police to better fight crime, where is the political party that represents their point of view?"
But on the fundamental question of liberalism versus illiberalism, I think most people are binary. They are on one side or the other.
I don’t know if you’ve seen this article already, but it contains many of the ideas in this substack.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/more-professionalism-less-populism.pdf
And this is actually the same quote from Achen and Bartels that I used here on Demodexio:
"Just as important, if not more so, is that the moral valence of participation has, as Tocqueville predicted, swept all before it. Reputable people no longer express the distrust of direct democracy that the Founders consistently emphasized. Instead, what the political scientists Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels call the “folk theory of democracy” commands broad and. usually unquestioning support. The folk theory “celebrates the wisdom of popular judgment by informed and engaged citizens”; it assumes that, almost by definition, more public involvement will produce more representative and thus more effective and legitimate governance."
So, for sure, we are quoting the same sources and making the same arguments, as you said.
Also, about this:
"James Madison and the other Founders were right to reject both direct democracy and elite rule. Instead, they insisted on a hybrid of both, believing that the two together would achieve better representation and better governance than either could achieve on its own."
We need a name for this. "Liberal democracy" is too broad and covers too many ideas. We need a name for the specific idea that democratic accountability needs to be balanced by respect for the skills of specialists. I personally think "demodexio" would be a good name for this, "demo" for the people and "dexio" for skill.
Thank you again for recommending this article. Most of their comments overlap with the ideas of Achen and Bartels, published in their book Democracy For Realists. Regarding the ignorance of voters, I quoted Achen and Bartels here at length:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part-1-of
About what Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes have written here:
"Always empirically questionable at best, the populist-progressive idea that more participation will reliably improve either the products or the popularity of governance has taken a pounding in recent years, to the point where it is basically untenable. The populist model assumes that voters are better informed, more rational, and more engaged than is the case—or ever will be."
For sure, that is one of the main themes that I've focused on too. It's the main idea I tried to express in "Progressives continue to sabotage themselves with inaccurate ideas about how democracy works"
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/progressives-continue-to-sabotage
But in my essay I also looked to European examples of party organization for exemplars we could import. In particular, the organization of the German CDU and the French Socialist Party (during the 1970s and 1980s) are things we need to study.
Thank you for the link to the article. I'm going to read it and comment on it next weekend.
Relative equality is an important value but absolute equality can lead to resentment against those who are genuinely superior in character or intellect. Political philosophy is already full of ideas that are radically libertarian and egalitarian, such as communism and different types of anarchism. Truly innovative ideas could find ways to combine professionalism and expertise with public participation. It doesn't take much creativity or imagination to simply abolish government rather than think of new ways to increase democratic accountability. I believe that human beings tend to feel safer in hierarchical communities that are both close-knit and hierarchical. I’m not an expert in anthropology, but indigenous people seemed to live in societies with a limited hierarchy and everyone knew the chief personally so it was more intimate and they could be deposed at any time if they weren't doing their job properly. I believe that income inequality should be limited but intellectual inequality isn't as bad as long as everyone is given the same opportunity. I believe that we need other forms of evaluation of expertise besides just SAT scores. Maybe ordinary people can participate in voting on laws or even writing laws as long as there's an element of mediation and supervision. Senators don't read everything they vote on because it's literally thousands of pages long. Maybe mediated crowdsourcing can help with that. I believe that the principle of subsidiarity is a sound policy. It states that power should be delegated to the most local level wherever possible. Have you ever heard of sociocracy?
Regarding this:
"It states that power should be delegated to the most local level wherever possible."
Perhaps in some cases the most local level possible can be thought of as being local to some issue or expertise, rather than local in the geographic context? As an example, school teachers devote their lives to understanding what school children need, therefore we can delegate a large amount of responsibility to school teachers, when it comes to deciding what the curriculum should be. I'm trying to think of a single case where it was a asserted that a small geographic region had specific educational needs, without the result being deeply reactionary. More so, we live in a highly mobile society in which people bounce around from region to region and even country to country, so how could we justify a government that delegates to small geographic units? The argument in favor of delegation-based-on-geography was stronger a few centuries ago, when society was mostly agricultural and people were tied to the land -- in those days a single family might stay in the same village for 300 years, and so their claim to a right to govern that village in some unique way was a strong one. But nowadays, in American suburbs, people buy homes strictly as investments, they accumulate some equity, then sell the house, then move to a different town and buy a slightly larger home. Few people stay in place for more than 20 years. It's become a natural life cycle for Americans to be born in one town, go away to college in a different town, settle down to raise a family in a third town, and then retire to a place like Florida, or perhaps Portugal. Such people have a very weak claim to be true citizens of whatever districts they temporarily inhabit, and their loyalty to the local place is almost non-existent, aside from a temporary loyalty to the local schools, while they have children in those schools. Given the lack of loyalty to local areas, the argument in favor of geographic delegation has become weak. But in any large, complex system delegation is essential, so we need to look for other dimensions along which we can decentralize. The specialization of skills is an obvious axis of delegation in modern life. If we abolish local, city, and state governments and concentrate all power in the national capitol we can then carry out a program of radical decentralization, delegating all powers to highly specialized committees, and leaving the legislature/executive a hollow shell of its former self, with no power save the power to appoint expert specialists to the committees.