Gyroscopic Investing

2.5.1: And democracies are more stable?

Yes, yes, oh God yes.

Imagine the US presidency as a dynasty, the Line of Washington. The Line of Washington has currently undergone forty-three dynastic successions without a single violent dispute. As far as I know, this is unprecedented among dynasties – unless it be the dynasty of Japanese Emperors, who managed the feat only after their power was made strictly ceremonial. The closest we’ve ever come to any kind of squabble over who should be President was Bush vs. Gore, which was decided within a month in a court case, which both sides accepted amicably.

Pointedstick wrote: Yes, I've been really blown away by the intellectual honesty and rigor, too.

It seems to me that he focuses a lot on monarchy because it's one of the weakest of the neo-reactionary arguments. As he points out, a lot of supposedly stable monarchial dynasties were riven by rebellions, succession-via-murder, etc. A lot of them murdered large numbers of their own people or directly caused them to be killed. And they certainly killed millions of people in other countries.

I think some other things are  more valid. Their social critiques are thought-provoking in many ways. And I think the criticisms of democracy are spot-on.

5.4.3.2.1: Still, isn’t the fact that progressivism was responsible for this sort of zealous and hateful social justice movement is a point against it?

I identify the worst parts of the social justice movement as basically reactionary in their outlook, even though from a coalition politics point of view they have been forced to ally with progressives.

Chief in this assessment is their strong beliefs that some topics should be taboo and bowdlerized from society. In the old days, you would ban books because they talked too much about sex. In the new days, we laugh at their prudishness, but still seriously debate banning books because they are “demeaning towards women”? or “trivialize rape culture”?. The desire to ban books that promote different sexual norms than we ourselves promote hasn’t changed, only the particular sexual norms we are enforcing.

The same is true of race. In the old days, we would ban books that insulted the King or the upper classes. In the new days, we ban books that insult the poor, or disprivileged or disadvantaged classes. Again, the desire to ban books insulting the classes we like doesn’t change, only to which classes we afford this privilege.

Real Progressivism is Enlightenment values – like the belief that free flow of information is more important than any particular person’s desire to “cleanse”? society of “unsavory”? ideas. Real Reaction is the belief that free expression isn’t as important as making sure people have “the right”? values. Upper-class white Reactionaries will try to enforce values protecting upper-class white people. Lower-class minority Reactionaries will try to enforce values protecting lower-class minorities. Whatever. They’re still Reactionary.

[...]

The conservative nature of social justice isn’t surprising if you, like me, believe the liberal/conservative divide mirrors a self-expression/survival divide – more simply, whether or not you feel safe. As society becomes more economically and politically secure, we expect it to become more liberal and progressive. But we also expect the subgroups of society that are least secure to remain conservative, and to continue to use conservative strategies to protect themselves in their unsafe environment. Those subgroups are women and minorities.

Because more liberal white people are more likely to be tolerant toward minorities and the poor, minorities and the poor are by political necessity forced to ally with liberal parties. But when we are able to separate issues out from political coalition-building and self-interest, the natural tendency of economically and physically insecure minorities to be more socially conservative shows itself. Black people are more religious, more likely to support amendments banning gay marriage, and more likely to oppose stem cell research, abortion, and out of wedlock births.

If you do not like certain extreme versions of social justice, then fighting their Reactionary memes favoring poor minorities with your own Reactionary memes favoring rich whites is unlikely to work. At best you would just end up with two angry clans demanding more power for them personally; more likely financial and signaling incentives will prevent rich whites from wanting to take their own side in a conflict and everyone will just ignore you.

MachineGhost wrote: Eh, what "large numbers" of people accept this neo-reactionary junx?  I've never even heard of the term before now and I'm no wallflower.

The way the FAQ is written it reminds me of adolescent garbage from Usenet (the stupid questions, that is).

Okay, I tried to slog my way through that FAQ but got bored around the 40% mark.

There's nothing special about monarchy other than that it lowers the volatility when the Big Cheese listens to minorites.  Democracies inherently do the same without confidence being eternally in question.

Libertarian666 wrote: It isn't necessary to believe in the divine right of kings to favor constitutional monarchy over democracy.

MachineGhost wrote:

Libertarian666 wrote: It isn't necessary to believe in the divine right of kings to favor constitutional monarchy over democracy.

What the hell is a "constitutional monarchy"?  Is that like a figurehead position ala England?  We don't have a anarchronistic monarchy in this country anyway, so are you proposing we somehow set up some people as aristocrats without the Divine Right of Kings? 

The fact is we're not going back on the Magna Carta.  This year is the 800th anniversary.  We're not overturning eight centuries of peon liberty just so some extremists get their fetish to be masochists.

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But second, and more important, a democracy provides a Schelling point. A Schelling point, recall, is an option which might or might not be the best, but which is not too bad and which everyone agrees on in order to stop fighting. The President might not be the best leader. But he is very clearly the leader.

The importance of this cannot be overstated. The history of the world before democracy was a history of legitimacy squabbles. Some were succession squabbles - the king's psychotic younger son wants to seize the throne from the king's feeble-minded older son, or the Grand Vizier wants to murder the Sultan and start his own dynasty. Others were peasant revolts, where everyone just decides at the same time that they hate the king and decide to have a bloody civil war to overthrow him. Democracies get to avoid that.

In the six hundred fifty years between the Norman Conquest and the neutering of the English monarchy, Wikipedia lists about twenty revolts and civil wars, all the way from the Barons' Wars to the War of the Roses to the English Civil War. In the three hundred years since the neutering of the English monarchy and the switch to a more Parliamentary system, there have been exactly zero.

China is justly hailed as doing much better than the West with this because of their idea of the Mandate of Heaven, but even they collapsed into multiple feuding states around a dozen times in their history, for a total death toll in the tens of millions. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which I reviewed recently, famously begins: "The empire, divided, seeks to unite; united, seeks to divide". For the vast majority of human history, there was this fatalism that there was going to be a civil war that destroyed your state, it was just a question of whether it happened tomorrow or next century.

In a non-democratic form of government, you're always going to have someone thinking they have more of a right to be in charge than the guy who's there now. In a democracy, the criterion for legitimacy is an objective and easily verifiable one - they got the most votes in an election. If there's any dispute, you can just hold another election. As a Schelling point, it's hard to beat.