"The most unreasonable things in the world become most reasonable, because of the unruliness of men. What is less reasonable than to choose the eldest son of a queen to rule a State? We do not choose as captain of a ship the passenger who is of the best family.
This law would be absurd and unjust; but because men are so [absurd and unjust] themselves, and always will be so, it becomes reasonable and just. For whom will men choose, as the most virtuous and able? We at once come to blows, as each claims to be the most virtuous and able. Let us then attach this quality to something indisputable. This is the king's eldest son. That is clear, and there is no dispute. Reason can do no better, for civil war is the greatest of evils." (Pensée no. 320)
Perhaps Thomas C. Schelling, in the spirit of Pascal, would say that a focal point or psychological salience helps to create an equilibrium solution to the succession problem. Monarchy is no longer a focal point solution. Instead, people have come to trust periodic elections as the focal point, largely because most people have come to believe that democracy expresses "the will of the people". A focal point defined by an illusion?
The focal point is important, but I think your quote from Pascal really hits the nail on the head in subtle way. The eldest son of the king works because it is "indisputable". Everyone knows ahead of time who the eldest is, and so when the time comes no one can argue. The Schelling point is strong because everyone knows and knows everyone knows, and no one is surprised.
Elections work just about as well as everyone knows how the process works even if the outcome is a bit of a surprise on the day. Whether or not it is the will of the people is sort of irrelevant, so long as the rules are accepted (I suspect the "will of the people" line mostly served to justify doing very questionable things by the elected officials). The trouble arises when it is not indisputable that the process happened the way it is expected to. That makes for a very weak Schelling point. Our current process is very lax about quality checks and enforcing oversight, which makes people much less willing to accept any outcome in the manner of the Schelling point. It is as though the king has 5-6 kids of about the same age, and really bad record keeping about which one was born when.
In reality it never is a choice between individuals, nor a choice at all, just the illusion of choice created by the most rich and powerful vested interests. The chump they choose is the one most easy to manipulate and least effective. Of course Trump was a ‘system fail’, an outlier, hence the meltdown among the vested interests. It is self-delusion that we have actually moved on from the days when the People got the king who had support of the most rich and powerful barons. Even a quick look at history shows the ‘hereditary heir to the Throne’ on many occasions didn’t make it but the barons’ choice did. We just call what used to be absolute monarchy, representative democracy. New bucket; same old sh1t.
The framers of the Constitution had the right idea, but they blew it by not following through fully. The best part of Article i of the Constitution was the provision for how Senators are chosen- by state legislatures. They should have had the House appointed by the legislatures, and the Senate appointed by the governors, and keeping the Presidency a more or less direct voter choice through the Electoral College process. The framers main error was that the federal government was loosened from state government control. Every ill that afflicts us today arises from the fact the federal government has become far too powerful without any effective checks on its power.
Biden sucks, but let's all try to remember he was the least worst candidate in the democratic primary. The rest were radical progressives and socialists, Biden was the "moderate" candidate supported by the people as opposed to the party activists who would have chosen Elizabeth Warren or someone like that.
What people most hate about Biden is that he's a senile old man that lets the people around him run things and that has resulted in a presidency much more progressive than what people hoped for in the election. The one truly independent decision he made that his party didn't like, pulling out of Afghanistan, was his bravest and best.
Trump's opponents were all failed retreads (a Bush, Romney clones). The runner up was Ted Cruz, a thoroughly detestable character with all the same personal baggage as Trump and no vision. Trump was the only one to even admit the Iraq War was a mistake. He was clearly the best candidate in the bunch.
Of the people being offered in the primaries, the best are getting chosen. If you think the talent pool on offer is bad the problem lies outside primaries, and probably wouldn't improve if you eliminated them.
2) You do not actually believe that if an election was stolen that the other side should just let it happen. This flies in the face of having peaceful transfers of power where you can kick out low performers.
Technical debates on voting regulations in super close elections that are corrected before the next election are perhaps a case where this idea has merit, but to endorse capitulating to out and out fraud is wrong.
3) The only way you are going to curtail the administrative state is if a popular president gets elected and does it. The administrative state (and the party elders) are not going to pick such a person.
Black people backed Biden. When he won in South Carolina because of an endorsement from a black politician. Several dem politicians dropped out and endorsed him after that.
Hillary won in 2016 because of black people too.
The white liberal vote is split between many flavors of progressivism, but blacks continue to vote as a unified block.
The Kingdom of France had peaceful transitions of power for 800 years ( 987 - 1791) In this period there were only 2 dynastic crises. One when the kings of England claimed the crown by virtue of descent from a French princess, which led to clarifying the law of succession as Salic law and the other when the crown was inherited by the protestant Duke of Bourbon, who was from a minor branch of the Capetians that descended from Saint Louis which had lived 300 years before him. The crisis was solved by Henry III abjuring Protestantism in 1589.
So the trick is not democracy. On the contrary disputed elections are a common source of conflict. The trick is having a law that can't be changed by the people currently in power which is difficult because having power makes them able to change laws.
Excellent point. The idea that the law was largely distributed as a power to the states and that constitutional amendments were required for most federal legislation should have saved us from this caprice; but...
It seems that a democracy also creates the conditions for rule of law. Perhaps a way of saying this is that democracy creates a system that not just allows a peaceful transition of power, but *anticipates* a transfer of power, and this moderates domineering behavior by one party. Eyeballing the WJP Rule of Law Index, it looks like everyone topping the charts is a multi-party democracy except Singapore (an outlier in all sorts of ways).
I disagree with your Al Gore condemnation, he mostly appealed to the Supreme Court and then abided by their decision. That counts as peaceful transition of power in my book.
He was the original election denier. And he and other Democrats continued to talk as if he were the true winner. I voted for him, but the moment he challenged the results, I regretted that vote.
I don't see how this position is consistent with the peaceful transition of power. If elections can be stolen and then go unchallenged then the incentives are simply to shift the timeline of when the violations happen. A candidate beating and threatening voters to vote for him gaining power shouldn't count as a peaceful transition even if it ends up with him with the most votes and the other party conceding. If submitting a complaint to a higher authority and then abiding by their decision doesn't count as peaceful then you simply shift the power center from the titular holders to those who count the votes- and those people won't ever give up that power.
Nixon conceded in 1960. If any election was stolen, it was that one. I think that the correct response is to transfer power but campaign for election reform going forward.
I'm perfectly willing to agree that edge cases where things were legal but not fair in close elections can be conceded and reformed.
I don't know much about whether 1960 was stolen or not.
I'm just asking what the falsifying case for your thesis is?
What level of fraud justifies resistance? Is there any level of fraud that justifies resistance? If Biden declared he got 99% of the vote and that henceforth he could do whatever he wanted, would that be "too much"?
If elections are so fraudulent that nobody can expect power to change hands, aren't they left only with violence? If you care about preventing violence, you should care about elections being enough on the up and up that people believe in them.
Throughout the last two years, many things were done that I didn't even think officials had the power to do in our society. My sympathies were far more with people who resisted this, physically if necessary, even if it was illegal to do so, then with people that meekly submitted. That isn't to say every perceived injustice should spark resistance to authority, but everyones got a line somewhere.
> We can have a functioning democracy that does not reflect the popular will.
No you can't. For that matter, you can't have a functioning anything (oligarchy/autocracy/etc) that doesn't, at a fundamental level have popular support. What I mean is, even in a country like Russia or China the regime, broadly considered, enjoys popular support. Perhaps Putin or Xi might be taken out and shot, but the replacement leader won't change the *regime*. From the perspective of the potential effect on 1B or so Chinese citizens, replacing Xi with another CCP functionary is quite a bloodless affair.
Now, it's certainly true that a ruthless dictatorship can survive with less popular support by repressing its people. But most of the time, they don't. Most dictatorships can't survive long-term mass repression.
Another way to say this is that at an extremely deterministic level, most every government reflects the popular will in the same way that Stigler suggested the economy is always in equilibrium.
What I'm saying is, you can't just throw out "popular opinion". Over the longer run, the ONLY way to have a stable regime with peaceful, stable transfer of power is to follow the popular will.
Note also, that "the popular will" can largely be reduced to economic opportunity and security. It's not whatever the latest poll says.
Maybe I'm more likely to be subject to political violence in China (though in the US, various leaders chomp at the bit to display their eagerness to screw me over based on how I look), but I'm dramatically less likely to be subject to plain old-fashioned economically motivated violence than I am in the US. In China, I'd have a reasonable expectation that the school I send my kids to will make a good faith effort to educate them. In the US, that depends.
Both the weak and strong theories of democracy miss the mark. The "will of the people" is largely to have a good, comfortable life. It's a fundamentally non-political desire, which makes sense because the majority of people are fundamentally apolitical.
To say the government is "incompetent" and also concede that "the popular will is more suppressed than ever" as if it's some sort of coincidence strikes me as very odd.
I disagree about which are the worst states. Somalia, South Sudan, etc, would be higher on the list than a repressive autocratic regime. Any place where random acts of mass violence are pretty much daily fare. Civil war isn't a constant threat. Total anarchy is one step worse than even a civil war.
When you have to state that your decision cannot serve as precedent, it means it is wrong. They were preparing to justify anything for the Republicans. Speaking as a Canadian seeing your country disintegrate.
Question is: Do American elections in the 21st century produce a change of power in the Federal government?
I don't think so. So argue all you want about whether the changes on the nameplate are done peacefully, but please notice that the power held and abused by the Federal government only increases
With the popular "will" being manipulated by the political, activist class, it may not be the best thing for the actual population. When power is centralized in the political class and the president can buy votes with 500+ billion in student loan forgiveness at the expense of 70+% of the young non-college people, the system becomes unstable as the government doesn't protect the people from the parasitic political class.
With the government stealing 8.5% of liquid wealth of the citizens then making them pay tax on imaginary profits from interest on savings, we see how the political class is protecting themselves with Cost of Living Adjustment on government pensions while the loot our retirement savings.
In government, personnel is policy. The only sure way for people to express their will is to change the composition of the governing body. So your 'strong' and 'weak' cases collapse together, though I think you are correct that it says nothing about whether the policies being implemented are the correct ones.
Succession crises happen not because they are multiple claimants, because that is always the case, but because none has a strong claim that is recognized as legitimate.
Compare Blaise Pascal on succession:
"The most unreasonable things in the world become most reasonable, because of the unruliness of men. What is less reasonable than to choose the eldest son of a queen to rule a State? We do not choose as captain of a ship the passenger who is of the best family.
This law would be absurd and unjust; but because men are so [absurd and unjust] themselves, and always will be so, it becomes reasonable and just. For whom will men choose, as the most virtuous and able? We at once come to blows, as each claims to be the most virtuous and able. Let us then attach this quality to something indisputable. This is the king's eldest son. That is clear, and there is no dispute. Reason can do no better, for civil war is the greatest of evils." (Pensée no. 320)
Perhaps Thomas C. Schelling, in the spirit of Pascal, would say that a focal point or psychological salience helps to create an equilibrium solution to the succession problem. Monarchy is no longer a focal point solution. Instead, people have come to trust periodic elections as the focal point, largely because most people have come to believe that democracy expresses "the will of the people". A focal point defined by an illusion?
The focal point is important, but I think your quote from Pascal really hits the nail on the head in subtle way. The eldest son of the king works because it is "indisputable". Everyone knows ahead of time who the eldest is, and so when the time comes no one can argue. The Schelling point is strong because everyone knows and knows everyone knows, and no one is surprised.
Elections work just about as well as everyone knows how the process works even if the outcome is a bit of a surprise on the day. Whether or not it is the will of the people is sort of irrelevant, so long as the rules are accepted (I suspect the "will of the people" line mostly served to justify doing very questionable things by the elected officials). The trouble arises when it is not indisputable that the process happened the way it is expected to. That makes for a very weak Schelling point. Our current process is very lax about quality checks and enforcing oversight, which makes people much less willing to accept any outcome in the manner of the Schelling point. It is as though the king has 5-6 kids of about the same age, and really bad record keeping about which one was born when.
Can any reasonable person honestly argue that a system of governance that produces a choice between Trump and Biden is working well? Working at all?
In reality it never is a choice between individuals, nor a choice at all, just the illusion of choice created by the most rich and powerful vested interests. The chump they choose is the one most easy to manipulate and least effective. Of course Trump was a ‘system fail’, an outlier, hence the meltdown among the vested interests. It is self-delusion that we have actually moved on from the days when the People got the king who had support of the most rich and powerful barons. Even a quick look at history shows the ‘hereditary heir to the Throne’ on many occasions didn’t make it but the barons’ choice did. We just call what used to be absolute monarchy, representative democracy. New bucket; same old sh1t.
The framers of the Constitution had the right idea, but they blew it by not following through fully. The best part of Article i of the Constitution was the provision for how Senators are chosen- by state legislatures. They should have had the House appointed by the legislatures, and the Senate appointed by the governors, and keeping the Presidency a more or less direct voter choice through the Electoral College process. The framers main error was that the federal government was loosened from state government control. Every ill that afflicts us today arises from the fact the federal government has become far too powerful without any effective checks on its power.
1) Primaries are not the problem
Biden sucks, but let's all try to remember he was the least worst candidate in the democratic primary. The rest were radical progressives and socialists, Biden was the "moderate" candidate supported by the people as opposed to the party activists who would have chosen Elizabeth Warren or someone like that.
What people most hate about Biden is that he's a senile old man that lets the people around him run things and that has resulted in a presidency much more progressive than what people hoped for in the election. The one truly independent decision he made that his party didn't like, pulling out of Afghanistan, was his bravest and best.
Trump's opponents were all failed retreads (a Bush, Romney clones). The runner up was Ted Cruz, a thoroughly detestable character with all the same personal baggage as Trump and no vision. Trump was the only one to even admit the Iraq War was a mistake. He was clearly the best candidate in the bunch.
Of the people being offered in the primaries, the best are getting chosen. If you think the talent pool on offer is bad the problem lies outside primaries, and probably wouldn't improve if you eliminated them.
2) You do not actually believe that if an election was stolen that the other side should just let it happen. This flies in the face of having peaceful transfers of power where you can kick out low performers.
Technical debates on voting regulations in super close elections that are corrected before the next election are perhaps a case where this idea has merit, but to endorse capitulating to out and out fraud is wrong.
3) The only way you are going to curtail the administrative state is if a popular president gets elected and does it. The administrative state (and the party elders) are not going to pick such a person.
One possible rebuttal is that the primary system is so unpleasant that it deters the better candidates from running.
Maybe, but I think there are plenty of reasons people don't want to go into politics these days.
Let's just think what an election where party insiders did the choosing. We would have had Jeb Bush vs Elizabeth Warren. Is this an improvement?
I though the party insiders backed Biden. They definitely didn't want Bernie Sanders, and I don't think they wanted Warren either.
Black people backed Biden. When he won in South Carolina because of an endorsement from a black politician. Several dem politicians dropped out and endorsed him after that.
Hillary won in 2016 because of black people too.
The white liberal vote is split between many flavors of progressivism, but blacks continue to vote as a unified block.
The Kingdom of France had peaceful transitions of power for 800 years ( 987 - 1791) In this period there were only 2 dynastic crises. One when the kings of England claimed the crown by virtue of descent from a French princess, which led to clarifying the law of succession as Salic law and the other when the crown was inherited by the protestant Duke of Bourbon, who was from a minor branch of the Capetians that descended from Saint Louis which had lived 300 years before him. The crisis was solved by Henry III abjuring Protestantism in 1589.
So the trick is not democracy. On the contrary disputed elections are a common source of conflict. The trick is having a law that can't be changed by the people currently in power which is difficult because having power makes them able to change laws.
Excellent point. The idea that the law was largely distributed as a power to the states and that constitutional amendments were required for most federal legislation should have saved us from this caprice; but...
It seems that a democracy also creates the conditions for rule of law. Perhaps a way of saying this is that democracy creates a system that not just allows a peaceful transition of power, but *anticipates* a transfer of power, and this moderates domineering behavior by one party. Eyeballing the WJP Rule of Law Index, it looks like everyone topping the charts is a multi-party democracy except Singapore (an outlier in all sorts of ways).
I see primaries as a central culprit.
we do have efficient markets without democracy about the interiors if companies. customers choose with their wallets.
let party insiders optimize the slate. and voters will elect from the packages offered.
with primary, voters get raw, unoptimized packs. a worse selection of options.
I disagree with your Al Gore condemnation, he mostly appealed to the Supreme Court and then abided by their decision. That counts as peaceful transition of power in my book.
He was the original election denier. And he and other Democrats continued to talk as if he were the true winner. I voted for him, but the moment he challenged the results, I regretted that vote.
I don't see how this position is consistent with the peaceful transition of power. If elections can be stolen and then go unchallenged then the incentives are simply to shift the timeline of when the violations happen. A candidate beating and threatening voters to vote for him gaining power shouldn't count as a peaceful transition even if it ends up with him with the most votes and the other party conceding. If submitting a complaint to a higher authority and then abiding by their decision doesn't count as peaceful then you simply shift the power center from the titular holders to those who count the votes- and those people won't ever give up that power.
Would you want someone to concede even if it was obvious the election had been stolen?
Do you believe that would reinforce the peaceful transfer of power in the long run?
Would it reduce or increase future fraud?
Would it lead to more accountable and effective government?
Nixon conceded in 1960. If any election was stolen, it was that one. I think that the correct response is to transfer power but campaign for election reform going forward.
I'm perfectly willing to agree that edge cases where things were legal but not fair in close elections can be conceded and reformed.
I don't know much about whether 1960 was stolen or not.
I'm just asking what the falsifying case for your thesis is?
What level of fraud justifies resistance? Is there any level of fraud that justifies resistance? If Biden declared he got 99% of the vote and that henceforth he could do whatever he wanted, would that be "too much"?
If elections are so fraudulent that nobody can expect power to change hands, aren't they left only with violence? If you care about preventing violence, you should care about elections being enough on the up and up that people believe in them.
Throughout the last two years, many things were done that I didn't even think officials had the power to do in our society. My sympathies were far more with people who resisted this, physically if necessary, even if it was illegal to do so, then with people that meekly submitted. That isn't to say every perceived injustice should spark resistance to authority, but everyones got a line somewhere.
What's your red line?
"refusing to accept the outcome of the elections in which they were defeated, Al Gore and Donald Trump undermined the peaceful transfer of power. "
The is absolutely ridiculous "evenhandedness." Gore went to court and when he lost on a partisan vote in SCOTUS did exactly as you suggest.
> We can have a functioning democracy that does not reflect the popular will.
No you can't. For that matter, you can't have a functioning anything (oligarchy/autocracy/etc) that doesn't, at a fundamental level have popular support. What I mean is, even in a country like Russia or China the regime, broadly considered, enjoys popular support. Perhaps Putin or Xi might be taken out and shot, but the replacement leader won't change the *regime*. From the perspective of the potential effect on 1B or so Chinese citizens, replacing Xi with another CCP functionary is quite a bloodless affair.
Now, it's certainly true that a ruthless dictatorship can survive with less popular support by repressing its people. But most of the time, they don't. Most dictatorships can't survive long-term mass repression.
Another way to say this is that at an extremely deterministic level, most every government reflects the popular will in the same way that Stigler suggested the economy is always in equilibrium.
What I'm saying is, you can't just throw out "popular opinion". Over the longer run, the ONLY way to have a stable regime with peaceful, stable transfer of power is to follow the popular will.
Note also, that "the popular will" can largely be reduced to economic opportunity and security. It's not whatever the latest poll says.
Maybe I'm more likely to be subject to political violence in China (though in the US, various leaders chomp at the bit to display their eagerness to screw me over based on how I look), but I'm dramatically less likely to be subject to plain old-fashioned economically motivated violence than I am in the US. In China, I'd have a reasonable expectation that the school I send my kids to will make a good faith effort to educate them. In the US, that depends.
Both the weak and strong theories of democracy miss the mark. The "will of the people" is largely to have a good, comfortable life. It's a fundamentally non-political desire, which makes sense because the majority of people are fundamentally apolitical.
To say the government is "incompetent" and also concede that "the popular will is more suppressed than ever" as if it's some sort of coincidence strikes me as very odd.
I disagree about which are the worst states. Somalia, South Sudan, etc, would be higher on the list than a repressive autocratic regime. Any place where random acts of mass violence are pretty much daily fare. Civil war isn't a constant threat. Total anarchy is one step worse than even a civil war.
When you have to state that your decision cannot serve as precedent, it means it is wrong. They were preparing to justify anything for the Republicans. Speaking as a Canadian seeing your country disintegrate.
Question is: Do American elections in the 21st century produce a change of power in the Federal government?
I don't think so. So argue all you want about whether the changes on the nameplate are done peacefully, but please notice that the power held and abused by the Federal government only increases
With the popular "will" being manipulated by the political, activist class, it may not be the best thing for the actual population. When power is centralized in the political class and the president can buy votes with 500+ billion in student loan forgiveness at the expense of 70+% of the young non-college people, the system becomes unstable as the government doesn't protect the people from the parasitic political class.
With the government stealing 8.5% of liquid wealth of the citizens then making them pay tax on imaginary profits from interest on savings, we see how the political class is protecting themselves with Cost of Living Adjustment on government pensions while the loot our retirement savings.
Democracy is the will of the majority.
So is gang rape.
In government, personnel is policy. The only sure way for people to express their will is to change the composition of the governing body. So your 'strong' and 'weak' cases collapse together, though I think you are correct that it says nothing about whether the policies being implemented are the correct ones.
Succession crises happen not because they are multiple claimants, because that is always the case, but because none has a strong claim that is recognized as legitimate.