Mein Gott in Himmel

[pecunium]

I think I just chased a couple of people out of the Peet's I'm in. They were talking politics, basically encouraging each other in their support of McCain. Which was whenI heard her (early twenties, still living at home, going to college; but ready to be done with it) say, "He's such an amazing orater, but I'm not sure he believes what he says, and that's really scary, because that's how Hitler came to power"

Which led to me to pay more attention... and when I heard her praising Palin, and saying she wanted to ask Obama supporters how they could compare the experience of the two... I went over and told them how and why.

The shocking thing... when I listed the qualification, including eight years in the Illinois Senate, and the con-law professorship and the Editor of the Harvard Law Review... she thought I was listing Palin's credits.

When I said that was Obama, and listed her failings in Wasilla, her companion (mid-twenties, male) said, "Well I guess you know who you're votong for."

They didn't look all that pleased when I said, "I was only anwering the question you asked," and went back to my work.

And they gathered up their things and left.

Comments

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

There is some interesting insight to be had in books like James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=wisdom+of+crowds&x=16&y=23) on when and under what conditions large numbers of people make optimized decisions. And by optimized I mean - better decisions than those made by the oligos or "aristos."

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that looks very interesting indeed.

Happily, the local library has it...

I think the question itself is painfully etched into my mind.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

You mean, the question about the viability of democracy itself?

[shunra.livejournal.com]

The question of whether large groups can exceed the wisdom of oglios or aristos for a reliable and extended period.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Although certain single reigns of single rulers seem to have been okay, the inevitable power grab periods between rulers - well, I can imagine mud hut economies (and pre-Elizabethan England is easily includable as a mud hut economy) surviving them, but not societies more complicated. The English, I think, agreed, which is part of why they moved, post-Elizabeth, to a more democratic system, and why they prospered after doing so. Also, when I look at the ancient periods, the democracies (limited and caveated as they were) seem to have functioned better.

I would rather, for example, live in parliamentary Germany than oligarchical Brazil.

And in fact, I invite you to suggest an oligarchical state you think is running better than a democratic one.

The democracies do appear to do better for larger numbers of people, and thus also to do very well for the rich within them. The rich have a tendency, though, to go goose-killing and limit, if not destroy, democratic and parliamentary institutions where they can.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

You've invited me to defend a position which I do not hold. I respectfully decline to do so.

Parliamentary German is indeed better aligned with my values than oligarchical Brazil - but all too recently a German democracy descended into tyranny. Has Brazil?

The U.S. is currently offering equal voting rights to people who think that Palin may have edited the Harvard Law Review and people who may have edited the Harvard Law Review. Krugman pointed out today in his blog (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/not-about-the-financial-crisis/) that "a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate."

In an ideal world, a functioning democracy is clearly best. Our world seems to fall short of the standard I set with the adjective "ideal".

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

"The U.S. is currently offering equal voting rights to people who think that Palin may have edited the Harvard Law Review and people who may have edited the Harvard Law Review."

Yes.

But can that be changed by limiting voting rights?

I look back over all my replies to you, and they're culpably rife with generalities. So I apologize that my response here is yet another one. It's this: people get smarter with resources when they have them. People historically do seem to want to chuck away responsibility whenever it's given them (much like the Rights in the Bill, defensively titled Inalienable).

When the perceived pie of resources is shrinking, authoritarian tendencies increase. That's why I think governmental forms can't be looked at in the abstract. They're related to the culture, AND to the general economic conditions of the culture.

If real wages have been shrinking since the 70s, what do we think people's political ideas will be like? Wealth makes liberals. The best way to make more liberals - I think it's to make more wealth. The rest is censorship and power struggle. Unless I'm wrong?

[shunra.livejournal.com]

We are clearly on the same wavelength - we both want to increase the power of the people by empowering the people. For example, by increasing the wealth and well-being by, for example, evening the distribution of power-in-the-form-of-money and power-in-the-form-of-education.

Problem! Our culture violently objects to more equitable distribution of power-in-various-forms. The only way to enforce it, when electoral preference has repeatedly demonstrated this objection would be a short-and-temporary seizure of power. Only...

...Is the only way to make more liberals by dragging them, kicking and screaming, into a situation where a more liberal point of view makes more sense than an authoritarian one?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

hrmn.... I'd be happier, I think, if we consider the problems with measuring the, "success" of those ancient democracies. How many lived in Athens? How many had the vote? What was the chance of getting it, if one didn't possses it?

In a lot of ways, on the surface, Sparta posssessed democratic institutions, pity the helot who seemed above his station.

A lot depends on 1:the ability to gain the franchise and 2: how those who don't have it are treated.

Better to be a transient in Sparta then in Athens. Better to be a slave in Athens than in Sparta.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Or is your question about how long a Democracy can maintain?

I think that question is a great deal more complicated and culture-specific. One thing that helps a society maintain a democratic system is a basic level of, well, liking for themselves as a culture. The English have always been really proud of being English, so it isn't hard for them to want all English people to do well, and, as a whole, better than other people who are not-English. Many of the European countries have this going for them, which is why their more socialist practices seem to work okay.

America has, if you look at our history, always been pretty cavalier towards Americans. That's actually putting it charitably. We have a culture that suggests it's meet and right that we hate and kill each other, and that hating and killing each other (and, at lesser levels, lying to and cheating each other) is the best way to secure our optimum well-being.

I think that realization is the one to be had, more than a generally pessimistic view of democracies in general.

It may be because we're young as a nation and a culture. France and Britain (and Germany, and etc.) have HAD their periods of wanting to slaughter their own in the millions. Maybe it's part of a larger culture cycle we haven't been through yet.

Crikey, isn't this cheerful of me. "In the long run, we're all dead."

[shunra.livejournal.com]

My very specific question is "how long can this democracy, of which I am so fond, maintain its current form?"

It is born (among other things) from my life history: when I was four I was removed by my parents from the U.S. and brought to a country that was at the time a socialist one, with military occupation of some 30% of its residents. It took me thirty years (and eight months and six days) to get back home - in March 2001. My early letters to friends and family marveled about the joys of living in a place where one didn't have to have a pat-down search before entering a mall.

A few months later, everything changed. I very much wonder if we will maintain our political structure long.

In the long run, my children and their children will still be alive. I have a stake in the future.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's huge.

As for what's going to happen, any plausible answer, I think, has to take into account a lot of trends, and a lot of factors.

We got really lucky, in a sense, with the double-hit of the Depression and WWII, because in comparatively short-order many people started feeling themselves to be in the same class, all poor together, and then all facing a common enemy together, and then all getting rich together.

This is a really reductive read, and a number of people contend that, economically, it's wrong (Milton Friedman, for one).

But when I look at it, I think, wow. Wealth was shifted from the rich to "everyone," without an overt revolution in which the rich were killed. It wasn't the Russian situation, and it wasn't the French one. We didn't need an ideology of how to take anything from anyone in the community. For a while, we had a figurehead, a father for the fatherland, and - almost miraculously - he didn't seem to want to kill anyone (I'm leaving aside the dispossession of the Japanese, not because it wasn't horrific, but because it's not like FDR got office stumping on the idea, or kept office because he'd discovered it).

And then, as a nation, we became very wealthy.

We were at our most socially permissive in the 70s, which is when we were richest. This is a Marxist read, and I'm not inclined to it ideologically, but I find it kind of staring and incontravertible - we were at our most liberal at our most wealthy. We were at our most socially permissive when it was most plausible that the average individual could financially support him or herself.

And then once the social structures for this were in place, we started loosing money.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

I think it's really obvious that a lot of burning questions that came up in the 70s got deferred through the election of Reagan.

It also seems pretty clear that - and George Lakoff is the one to read on this - the Republicans, as a party, are part of an authoritarian culture. Which is hugely consonant with a lot of American culture, or an idea of American culture. The whole (and now I'm getting vague and cultural) "Where have all the cowboys gone?" "Why did Daddy leave?" thing, that was, I'd argue, a huge personal/cultural wound coming out of the 70s, gets answered by them.

One can argue the good/bad/right/wrong of it, but I think it's necessary to recognize that it's emotionally compelling, maybe even to us as homo sapiens, maybe even more to us as apes. "Where's Daddy?" We want that question answered, the Republican party is good at answering it.

This is my opinion, and it takes the shape of a story, which very fact makes me suspect it: Daddy needs to REALLY BURN YOU before you decide you're better off on your own. But George W has really burned us. I think he's burned us enough for us to really turn to something different. For, in other words, democracy to continue to be possible.

I think many of us - at least, I know I am - are feeling a particular kind of paralysis right now, in these last few weeks before the election. Because it looks like, despite the media scare stories, despite, I think, an unfortunate partiality of liberals toward portraying themselves as DOOMED, it looks like we're going Obama-ward. Not because he's a Democrat, but because he would like to change things. That sounds so vague! But I think you know what I mean - he doesn't seem tied to old antagonisms. In this way, he seems almost to have shot past Generation X into Generation Y, the new silent generation.

Short of some real crime, something like the institution of martial law or very large scale election fraud, it doesn't look like the Republicans can win this time, and many of them seem not to want to.

and, finally:

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

In other words, unless our democracy is already destroyed, we may in the best shape we've been in, in a while. We'll need it, because things will start to get very bad, soon, on many other fronts. And maybe democracy won't hold up then.

But when I hear about girls who think Sarah Palin is Great! The first thing I think is, I wonder what that person's life looks like. Because the one thing I know is, I don't know anything about her. I don't know how she puts her world together, I don't know if she's "just stupid" or if she's been savaged and humiliated into that way of thinking. My mother was.

And we can get into the whole deal of how people have to be responsible for themselves, and how excusable are women, really, for accepting oppression, etc. etc. But - people often let themselves be blackmailed, morally, personally, etc., in exchange for a sense of security. And as frustrating as it is, I don't think that can ever be solved through the application of yet more force.

Thanks!

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for your thoughtful - and very detailed and well-thought-out! - response.

The problem that you allude to in the last paragraph - the sense of security, and what people will do for it - is probably the biggest one these days. To unpack it: in order to feel secure, people seem to want to keep all people they see as "others" far, far away from themselves.

A very successful democracy-killer is a large-scale otherification of persons. It's sort of "divide and conquer", and it happens within a single society. (I've seen it, close-up, both in Israel and in the United States, and read all about how it is put into place in other societies.)

That is the "real crime" that I see - a destruction of the identity of "American" (member of this great experiment) and an imposition of those divisions that cannot be bridged.

Re: Thanks!

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

One of the basic premises a democracy needs, if it is to survive, is the idea that those who vote, are enough like, "me" that I can trust them to not screw "me" over.

Which is why we have the need for a "melting pot", and the British are so, well, British.

Once that sense of trust in the rest of the voters is lost, the nation will have to change, usually for the worse. I ponder leaving the US. Not because I am so dispirited by the presence of Bush, et al., in office, but because of the rabid dogs being unleashed to keep them there. The othering of those who aren't white Xtianists is scary, and is the sort of thing to dissolve the bonds of poltity.

Since I want to have children, and to have them live in a place I think civil, staying here may become something I don't want to do... not for me, but for them.