What do I think about today’s election? Basically the same thing I think about every election. For starters: I hate politics, both popular ideologies are insipid, the main parties’ differences are primarily rhetorical, politicians are evil, voters are irrational, and democracy is rule by demagogues.
P.S. Whether or not you choose to participate, I strongly advise you to build a Beautiful Bubble.
READER COMMENTS
Bedarz Iliachi
Nov 6 2018 at 12:45am
Problem with bubbles is that they are liable to burst. It is the evil American politicians and irrational American voters that have enabled a more than average stability to bubbles. But it can not be guaranteed.
It would be an interesting exercise to see if a community under severe stress, say Leningrad under siege or Armenian villages of Musa Dagh (Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel) that decided to implement strict communism and abolishing private property–food rationing etc, how do you analyze the situation and economics in libertarian terms? Would you still insist on private property and libertarian economics or would an emergency shift to common property justified under the circumstances?
Shane L
Nov 6 2018 at 5:25am
Not arguing with Bryan’s thoughts on the Republican-Democrat dichotomy in American politics, but no vote at all is indistinguishable from political indifference, while a vote for a losing third party at least sends a message. I am always surprised to see groups like libertarians render themselves irrelevant by boycotting elections.
I gather rising small parties can influence policy without ever being in power, by nudging ruling parties to adopt their policies in order to undercut their support; see conservative parties embracing environmental policies to undercut rising Green movements, for example.
Alan Goldhammer
Nov 6 2018 at 8:18am
Shane writes, “I gather rising small parties can influence policy without ever being in power, by nudging ruling parties to adopt their policies in order to undercut their support; see conservative parties embracing environmental policies to undercut rising Green movements, for example.”
One only need go back to the 2000 Presidential election and look at the impact Ralph Nader’s candidacy had. Certainly, the Nader votes in Florida were critical and perhaps even those in New Hampshire.
David Ray
Nov 11 2018 at 8:52am
Yes it sends a message, but one component of that message is “By my participation, I recognize the legitimacy of this process.”
nobody.really
Nov 6 2018 at 10:48am
As Churchill remarked, democracy is the worst form of government yet devised–except for all the others. This observation led Churchill to become more engaged in democracy–arguably to great effect. It leads Caplan to the opposite conclusion.
Caplan informs us that the world fails to conform to his expectations. Of course, the world fails to conform to everyone’s expectations. Everyone else changes to confront this new information; we call this “maturing.” Caplan withdraws into a bubble–a bubble wholly dependent upon the outside world he prefers to judge than to understand; we call this “libertarianism.”
Mark Z
Nov 8 2018 at 12:24am
I find such platitudinous defenses of democracy intellectually empty. Democracy is no more morally superior than any other form of government because its composition is just as arbitrary. Why do people from Alabama have a say in how Oregon gets governed, but people in British Columbia don’t, even though British Columbians areguable have more in common, interest and value-wise, with Oregonians than Alabamians do, and I bet most Oregonians would rather let British Columbians decide their fate than Alabamians. So when one says, let the majority decide, the majority of what? Well, some polity whose boundaries are decided by the accident of history, the milittary superiority of some predecessor state over another, or, at best, by the consent of a few leaders who’ve been dead for a few hundred years. In short, the right of the majority of the nation-state you live in to dictate your affairs is every bit as morally arbitrary as the right of any hereditary king who derives such a right from the fact that his father was king and his father before him.
And sure, liberal, parliamentary democracies have a good track record practically speaking, but that’s more because of the ‘liberal’ and ‘parliamentary’ part of it. Just compare less democratic 18th century parliamentary Britain with more democratic revolutionary France. This system of government works precisely because it shackles the activity of government and leads to stability, not because the people are wise.
I hate it when people talk about democracy like it’s the essential ingredient that makes this country relatively functional. It’s not. We should sing praises of separation of powers, federalism, and checks and balances first. I’d rather live in a non-democratic country that has those features than a democratic one that lacks them any day.
nobody.really
Nov 8 2018 at 2:16am
And thus the better form of government is…?
And democracy is inconsistent with separation of powers, federalism, and checks and balances because…?
For example…?
As you praise 18th century Britain for promoting stability, do you also praise contemporary Britain? And if not, what does this say about putative stability of 18th century Britain?
Who said anything about people being wise?
Last I checked, every one of those 18th century British parliamentarians were also people. What makes a system in which the people (wise or not) have no say in picking their leaders (wise or not) preferable to a system where they do?
That said, I largely share your perspectives, if not your conclusion. For example, I favor a judiciary that is not democratically accountable. But I don’t regard these criticisms as a rejection of democracy, but as a preference for certain features of government that are wholly consistent with (but not always included with) democracy.
Nevertheless, I suspect democracy has features you value that you overlook.
First, I like stability, too. Democracy is the mechanism by which we persuade people that the rulers exercise power legitimately. Is this legitimization all just a fairy tale, a national myth? Who cares? The point is not that the story is true; the point is that it succeeds in persuading (most) opponents of government to channel their frustrations into ballots rather than bullets. An autocracy with perfect separation of powers, federalism, and checks and balances will still lack this mechanism for legitimization, and thus will be prone to violent overthrow.
Second, in the absence of a mechanism for accountability to the public, autocracy will not long remain perfect. The virtue of democracy is not its perfection, or lack of arbitrary qualities. Rather, the virtue of democracy, like the virtue of science, is the mechanism for continual refinement. Which other systems have that?
RPLong
Nov 6 2018 at 2:47pm
I know a million dead Indians who would have rather that Churchill stay out of his democracy’s business entirely.
The thing I find surprising about election season in America is the extent to which people seem to believe that voting is the main, best, or most effective way to participate in a democracy. I believe that teaching economics to hundreds if not thousands of students, widely publishing great and well-researched books promoting one’s preferred policy choices, regularly writing for the popular press and one of the most widely read economics blogs on the internet, and making frequent television appearances and public speaking engagements in which one argues convincingly for one’s policy choices is a far more effective way to participate in democracy than merely casting a vote once every couple of years.
If we all lived in such a “bubble,” touching so many thousands of people, the world would be a much better place. Thanks, Bryan Caplan!
nobody.really
Nov 6 2018 at 3:15pm
HA! Touche, my friend.
mbka
Nov 7 2018 at 4:34am
I find this kind of thinking very misguided.
Look at it this way: politics is the art of finding compromise between various often opposing interests in the public sphere. Democratic politics is a typically unbloody, and therefore preferred, way to achieve this balance or compromise. You aren’t supposed to “get what you want” nor is there such a thing as a rational voter or a “people’s will”. Exactly as there is no “fair” price. There only is a market price.
Every single politician, even Trump, especially Trump, has to play to other politicians, to his supporters, and to non-supporters, to keep and win over supporters, win arguments, win elections, win cooperation. It’s gruelling and exhausting and I wouldn’t want to do it but I have respect for those who excel at it. Some pandering to be expected, but not all politicians are as ruthless as Trump. Generically, politics is the art of the best compromise and (Bismarck) the art of the possible. Of course it would all be a lot easier and cleaner if we only had philosopher-kings or enlightened dictators, right? Or would it? In the absence of those, we have to deal with politics, and hopefully the democratic kind.
One more thing, and that is contra philosopher-kings or enlightened dictators. In The Enigma of Reason by Mercier and Sperber, the authors make the point that people are quite bad at reasoning and that reasoning has likely evolved to foster the ability to convince others: to be able to get social support. Likewise they argue that people usually don’t find out the best way of doing things unless they can argue about it. If this sounds a lot like court room discovery, the price system as a discovery method (see Hayek), or … deliberative democracy … it is for good reason.
Arguing works.
Mark Z
Nov 8 2018 at 12:39am
This assumes that the best way to argue or convince is to reason, which, in my experience, is far from the truth.
In any case, I would actually more or less agree about politicians. I think Bryan is wrong that they’re usually evil. But this is because I think most of the terrible things they do, ultimately, trace back to the people, the voters. Politicians do bad things because voters tell them to do bad things. Voters, however, prefer to use the politicians they voted for as scapegoats than accept responsibility.
Our system could be much more democratic. A democratic dictatorship would be more democratic, more attuned to the will of the people, without these pesky institutions getting in the way and obstructing the general will. But democratic dictatorships tend not to stat democratic for long. It’s the undemocratic characteristics of liberal democracy that allows them to stay liberal democracies. The key value, imo, of deliberative democracy isn’t that it yields particularly useful information, like the price system, but because, as long as everyone is busy arguing with each other, as factions and interests and institutions are fighting with each other, no one person, group, or institution can egregiously oppress the people in general (relative to other systems, at least). In other words, the genius of the Madisonian system isn’t that it’s great at finding solutions; it’s that it ties the states hands so that people can live their lives freely and improve them gradually outside the state without having to worry about the state getting too intrusive (while of course leaving the state just capable enough that its citizens aren’t at the mercy of other states).
mbka
Nov 8 2018 at 3:50am
Mark Z
completely agreed – people conflate freedom and democracy, but the “old” liberal thinkers, and thinking especially of Tocqueville here, saw the danger of totalitarian democracy. Freedom is about having uncoerced areas of individual actions, and democracy is about having a more or less inclusive system to decide about who should be able to coerce and what areas they should be coercing. There is nothing in a democratic decision to make it automatically right just because it came from a majority.
Actually here I disagree. There are sound theoretical reasons why deliberative democracy should lead to better outcomes on average (!!): it’s because the deliberation if conducted by a wider circle and therefore averages more distributed knowledge.
On reasoning itself, it’s not so much that reasoning being necessarily the best way to convince others. But, but trying to convince others is forcing an exchange of the widest range of possible reasons – some “reasonable”, some demagogic etc and in the process, on average, one would expect a better chance to find good reasons. This, even though the arguers themselves are confirmation-biased, self interested, and only interested in winning the argument. So in the end I do see it as a marketplace-of-ideas type of outcome with competition leading mostly, if not always, to better results.
I find Sperber and Mercier very convincing on reasoning – here is an ungated and short pdf version of the gist of the argument: Sperber Mercier 2011 , here an FT article 2017.
Warren Platts
Nov 7 2018 at 3:04pm
YEah! We should have a constitutional monarchy instead of a democracy!
A Country Farmer
Nov 9 2018 at 12:13am
The Beautiful Bubble has become a sort of life template for me now, and the 10 Steps to a Beautiful Bubble a 10 commandments.
Comments are closed.