Freddie deBoer has just posted a piece about the simplistic condemnation of child restraints in schools in the different states. It’s an excellent piece, imbued with the tempering perspective of Freddie’s own personal experience working with emotionally volatile children.1
I strongly recommend it for its own sake, but I also want to steal a bit of his closing graf. Though I think it’s fair to say that Freddie is a mainstream feminist, he’s also that rare liberal writer who will take on the counterproductive rhetorical tactics of the various wings of the social justice movement. His comments here are applicable far beyond the specific issue which prompted them.
In the broader view, I am reminded of a few sad realities: that American
liberalism2 culture is now synonymous with a juvenile Manicheanism that imagines some perfect world we could achieve if people just weren’t so selfish and evil; that getting showily, publicly angry about problems is more popular than actually attempting to solve them; that there is no issue of such emotional and moral complexity that many people can’t reduce it to a black-and-white caricature; and that we have created a media which has made its financial best interest inextricable from destroying depth, nuance, and complexity. I genuinely don’t know if people believe in difficult choices and intractable problems anymore; they’ve been bludgeoned by the loud noises and shouting we mistake for discussion into thinking that all problems have clear villains and easy answers. I do know that this is no way to run a democracy.
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Good read.
But it leads me to ask, is there a good way to run a democracy? It seems like reality runs against the idea of letting the general populace decide its own fate time and time again. Remember that half the people alive are below average intelligence. Note how easily people fall for logical fallacies and how often emotion trumps logic. Some people mistake visibility for legitimacy, so the loudest voice always gets their vote.
These people vote and frequently overshadow the sane and reasonable portion of the population. Why should career attention-seekers and popularity contest winners get a say in science curriculum or the arts just because they’re up front and yelling loudly?
It does?
o.0
I think you’ll have a hard time making a case, given the scarcity of genuine democracies and the generally dismal record (for the average person) of dictatorships, monarchies, oligarchies, and other forms of authoritarian rule.
But I am curious what your proposal is for an alternative form of government which is superior to democracy.
Older alternatives aren’t all bad. They had their share of golden ages and benevolent rulers. We just tend to fixate on the Caligulas and Stalins. I would argue that the issue with dictatorships and monarchies is the same as with Democracy: Failure to get the right people in the right places.
Democracy’s success, so far as I can discern, is that it limits just how much power the wrong people can seize when they do get through. But that also handicaps the good administrators, rulers, and stewards.
I don’t consider the popularity contests we have currently to be that much better than birthright or military might for choosing who leads us. I don’t have a functioning system to recommend, but it does seem to me that we need to improve selection of representatives at the very least. So maybe a sort of minor meritocracy based on field?
(Sorry if I didn’t reply right. New to this format.)
P. T. Barnum once said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” And there aren’t enough the rest of us to out vote them.
FM,
Let me expand on BG’s point.
“Older alternatives aren’t all bad. They had their share of golden ages and benevolent rulers. We just tend to fixate on the Caligulas and Stalins. I would argue that the issue with dictatorships and monarchies is the same as with Democracy: Failure to get the right people in the right places.”
Oh really. Monarchies, which are inherently hereditary, are renowned for getting the wrong people into those places. And dictatorships, because they lack the spurious legitimacy of sentimental attachment to this or that family, are renowned for the amount of chaos that precedes their establishment and the amount of repression that attends their maintenance.
But let’s go with your right man right place thesis for a moment, to show even very gifted people are so constrained by the demands of absolutism that they are forced into some pretty horrific measures. Let’s look at the case of the Yongle Emperor.
Zhao Yuanzhang established the Ming and became the Hongwu Emperor to re-institute traditional norms after the Mongol occupation. Of his sons two were pre-eminent. The elder died young but left a son, who was quiet and bookish. The younger, Zhudi, was capable and bold. Against his better judgment he went with the advice of his ministers and fixed the succession on this grandson.
On his death the grandson became the Jianwen Emperor. This emperor’s ministers advised him to get his capable uncle as far from the capitol as possible, so he was sent to the northeastern backwater of Yan (where modern-day Beijing stands). Not satisfied with this banishment, these advisors began to make life harder and harder for this prince, until finally the prince’s advisors pointed out that his only chance of survival was to take the throne himself. So he did.
A very accomplished official, Fang Xiaoru http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fang_xiaoru
, was asked to write the inaugural speech but he refused. This was an open challenge to Zhdi’s legitamcy and could not be tolerated. Zhudi personally asked him and still he refused. The standard, and expected, punishment for this kind of conduct was “extermination of nine generations.” He contemptuously retorted, why stop at nine, what keeps you back from ten?” and the Yongle Emperor then had no choice to wipe out all his sons and grandsons and all his male relatives going back to whichever great-great-grandfather made it nine generations, along with Fang Xiaoru’s students and protégés to make up the tenth generation – 864 people in all.
This was the Yongle Emperor, one of the most able men ever to rule in China. He was humane and vigorous and far-sighted. If you were to choose ten best emperors out of all that have ruled China, he would certainly be one. But the system left him no choice but to start his reign with a truly dramatic atrocity.
That was a nice history lesson, but I feel like there’s a fundamental misunderstanding. I said monarchies and dictatorships had this problem. So why explain why they were a problem? My issue is that representative government is a mess when the population is uninformed, ignorant, and emotional.
And I don’t see how giving in to a compulsion to commit atrocity is relevant at all. Unless that was all just another example of why older systems didn’t work out. In which case, I’ve already admitted as much.