Direct Democracy

[Student of Trinity]

The countries that became totalitarian in the 20th century weren't republics on the American model, but they weren't representative of democracy in general, either. They were all bad cases of different kinds. Their examples are dire enough to make it pretty clear that bad democracy is dangerously vulnerable, but they don't show that the American constitutional obsession with separation of powers is the only safe alternative.

 

On the other hand one has to admit that a 'functioning democracy' is apt to be a bit of a true Scotsman.

[Goldengirl]

re:Economics

 

I stand vindicated that my basic thesis, that "it's hard for governments to determine how much their stuff is worth" holds. Adding a little more on the education discussion, though, it's interesting because average lifetime earnings has a correlation with higher education, but it has a much higher correlation with the average lifetime earnings of a person's parents. These three things are all obviously related, as richer parents can afford to give their kids a better education, but it still casts a lot of doubt on the concept of social mobility. And on the military discussion, markets are amazingly efficient at establishing value. Without a market for a military (refer to my previous post as to why there can't be a market for national defense) then there really is no good way to establish the "value" of national defense, security, and such. Thus, we only have a series of methods for estimating, with full knowledge that these are only approximations but also with full knowledge that we have to have some sort of idea, even if it's just a ballpark figure.

 

If this is true (I haven't done the math), it probably had less to do with systems of government than the other factors you mentioned, as well as outside influences like invasion and colonialism.

 

That said, nations that try to adopt democracy with a strong executive do seem to have a spectacularly high failure rate, if we're judging success by honest elections and peaceful transfer of power.

 

I don't think it's a stretch to say that colonialism is a failure of government, from the colonizers' point of view. I've not been in that position, and if anything I'm more the benefactor of colonial relations as an American citizen, but I believe that the historical records and modern testimony can back me up on this statement.

 

Tying this argument in with colonialism, a lot of the issues with governments that have a adopt a strong executive are rooted in colonial issues. In (formally) decolonized parts of the world, the process of nation-building is exacerbating. Take Nigeria for example, which I'm going to take as a representative case for Africa. Of course, with any representation, there will be misrepresentation, so bear in mind this is not the perfect example, merely one I'm familiar with. Like most African countries, it has a colonial history in which borders were drawn more-or-less arbitrarily in regard to the actual divisions between existing polities. And, like many African countries, native Nigerians were not given much say in their own government; they were subjects of the British empire, not necessarily citizens. The old systems of government from pre-colonial Nigeria (though to call that area Nigeria before its colonization is problematic, since it's a term invented by the British government for the colony) were dissolved. After attaining independence from the British, the Nigerians had the difficult task of building a government from scratch. The important idea being that they could establish any type of government that they wanted (and indeed, they established a few different types after various periods of civil war and unrest). They failed, irrespective of the constitutional model, due to more historical reasons of being victims of imperialism.

 

There are two pertinent counterexamples. The first was a settler colony in which the settlers had a large degree of self-government, namely the thirteen original colonies that later formed the United States. Their self-government was able to give them two important assets as they formed a national government under the Articles of Confederation and later the Federal Constitution. First, they retained previous forms of government, as colonial governments became state governments, to give themselves a sense of historical legitimacy. Second, they had a wealth of experienced statesmen who were able to lead the state. The second example was a colonized state in which the colonial subjects actually made up the bulk of the bureaucracy. As a British colony, India did not have the same degree of autonomy as the American colonies did, but they still were politically active. This experience in running a government and executing its roles and tasks proved invaluable in maintaining stability, and since Indians had had experience with political organizations such as the Muslim League or the National Congress that meant they were able to provide charismatic leaders. Indian independence neither began nor ended with Gandhi.

 

These case studies essentially go to prove the point that there are a lot more issues in whether a country becomes a failed state or not than just their political systems.

[Alorael at Large]

A benevolent dictatorship by an extremely capable dictator has maximal efficiency and flexibility. It's just that it's really hard to get and guarantee continuation of such government. Traditionally dictators have been or rapidly become incompetent and/or corrupt. Failing that, they're eventually succeeded by someone incompetent and/or corrupt. Democracy tries to hold back the risks by blunting everything. An extremely capable elected official has less power to get things done. An extremely capable and evil elected official has the same limitations. The ideal balance between efficiency and protection isn't obvious, nor is it obvious to me that there's a one-size-fits-all-cultures solution. America is not, for all the griping, a failed state, though, and the rest of the world also has its problems.

 

In fact, given the remarkable competence (and somewhat lesser but still remarkable benevolence) of the American politicians responsible for the creation of the United States, it may be that they stumbled by brilliance and dumb luck on an unusually stable and long-term effective form of government. The best? Maybe not, but then again, it may be. It has flaws, but it's a remarkable piece of work for a first (well, second) attempt at fashioning democracy nearly ex nihilo.

 

More succinctly, I'm sure American democracy isn't perfect, but I'm not sure anyone's going to come up with obviously better solutions.

 

—Alorael, who considers vulnerability to robot overlords an asset. They can optimize benevolence and efficiency. Everyone should be aiming to become the Culture.

[Student of Trinity]

That's what the robots want you to think.

[Edgwyn]

Alorael's 2nd and 3rd paragraphs made me post this:

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. Sir Winston Churchill

[Cairo Jim]

Funny that you mention that quote. I was thinking of it this entire topic. I wasn't expecting someone to beat me to it.

[Kelandon]

In fact, given the remarkable competence (and somewhat lesser but still remarkable benevolence) of the American politicians responsible for the creation of the United States, it may be that they stumbled by brilliance and dumb luck on an unusually stable and long-term effective form of government. The best? Maybe not, but then again, it may be. It has flaws, but it's a remarkable piece of work for a first (well, second) attempt at fashioning democracy nearly ex nihilo.

The more I study law, the more I come to appreciate that we're in not the second version of American democracy (after the Articles of Confederation) but about the fourth or fifth version. The Founders screwed up a lot of stuff at the beginning. And I mean really basic stuff, like the top Electoral College vote-getter becoming president and #2 becoming vice-president (rectified by the Twelfth Amendment, or else Mitt Romney would be VP right now). We don't have the same Constitution that we did in the 1790s. We've amended it 17 times since the early years, and some of the amendments (especially the Fourteenth) have been really fundamental.

 

Arguably, we don't even have the same system of government. In the first half of the twentieth century (well, starting in the nineteenth, but slowly at first), as the economy became more complicated and government took more responsibility for dealing with its ups and downs, the U.S. started creating agencies with specialized expertise in particular areas. These agencies are all theoretically within the executive branch, but the independent agencies (the Fed, SEC, etc.) don't really report to the president or anyone else. They're often described as a "fourth branch" of the federal government, constituted much like the third branch (the judiciary, by presidential appointment and approval by the Senate) and similarly independent.

 

Heck, even the current system of electing the president dates to the early 1970s. After the Twelfth Amendment in 1804 changed the top-two system into a system of running mates, suffrage was expanded via Jacksonian democracy in the 1830s (not just landowners) and the Fifteenth and related Amendments in the 1860s and later (not just whites) and the Twentieth Amendment in 1920 (not just men), and a winner-take-all popular vote to decide the electors for the Electoral College didn't become popular until around the 1820s or so. But the current caucus/primary system that actually determines party nominees took shape after the Democratic National Convention of 1968, which was a disaster for the Democratic Party and led to the conventions just being celebrations that ratified what the voters had already done, instead of being the main vehicle for choosing a candidate.

 

Throughout all of this, there has been a system of divided powers, both federal-state-local and legislative-executive-judicial(-administrative), which you might called the "American system" in a broad sense. But the nature of those powers and the means by which they are granted and exercised has changed radically over time. So if the American system has any brilliance to it, it's not because someone back in the summer of 1787 was amazingly prescient; it's because new generations have reshaped the government to their needs over and over again.

 

(Also, as a historical matter, the Constitution wasn't ex nihilo. There were democratic town meetings dating back to the 1600s in the Americas, and the states had constitutions that predated and influenced the federal Constitution.)

[Student of Trinity]

How flexible is the system now, though? The ERA failed to be ratified by enough states, which was just ridiculous. And it must seem to a lot of people that the US could really use some stricter campaign finance laws, even though it is indeed flagrant tyranny to forbid citizens to do whatever they want with their own money, especially if all they want is to buy airtime to express their own views, just like somebody standing up on a crate in Faneuil Hall to be heard way back when, only bigger. So this would probably take a constitutional amendment, which would be bitterly resisted by everyone with a vested interest in the current freedom, which is practically everybody with any voice. Or do I misunderstand the system as it stands?

 

On the other hand, maybe the law isn't the right tool for this job, anyway. Maybe it could just become a mass cultural movement to start despising and ignoring political ads, to the point where buying airtime was counterproductive for candidates, and campaign contributions became nearly worthless.

[Lilith]

On the other hand, maybe the law isn't the right tool for this job, anyway. Maybe it could just become a mass cultural movement to start despising and ignoring political ads, to the point where buying airtime was counterproductive for candidates, and campaign contributions became nearly worthless.

 

if voters start basing their vote exclusively on information they learned through media that can't be influenced by money, they're going to have even less information than they do now

[Student of Trinity]

Hmmm. That may be so. Maybe tremendously un-ad-like ads that exude overwhelming down-to-earth common-sensical sincerity and are only aired once will win campaigns, and cost a hundred million dollars to produce.

 

But maybe that'll just be too much of a crap-shoot, and nobody will spend that kind of money on such chancy things.

 

Anyway, I'm not sure that voters' lack of information is such a problem with American democracy. They could probably get by with quite a bit less, and still make good choices.

[Lilith]

my point was more that there's going to be some basis on which voters make their decisions and that basis is likely to be open to manipulation by anyone with enough money, because in the end being able to make people do what you tell them to do is what it means to have money in the first place. i mean congressional staffers already routinely edit wikipedia to create a more favourable impression of their bosses. any system is going to have weak points where capital can wedge its way in. it's very good at that. so the kind of mass cultural movement you're imagining here would more or less have to amount to the overthrow of capitalism. now don't get me wrong i'm all for that but it's kind of easier said than done

[Student of Trinity]

I think this is cynicism by hand-waving. Money always talks, but the volume at which money can shout is not infinite. A little bit of corruption around the edges may be inevitable, but that doesn't mean you can't do better than systemic and completely legal conflict of interest on the part of legislators. Suppose for the sake of argument that strict campaign finance laws do work to reduce the disproportionate political power of wealth to some acceptable level; such at least was my premise. Public opinion could in effect enforce such laws without statute, if people simply agreed that no candidates deserved votes if they didn't present neutrally audited records showing modest total spending.

[Lilith]

I think this is cynicism by hand-waving. Money always talks, but the volume at which money can shout is not infinite. A little bit of corruption around the edges may be inevitable, but that doesn't mean you can't do better than systemic and completely legal conflict of interest on the part of legislators. Suppose for the sake of argument that strict campaign finance laws do work to reduce the disproportionate political power of wealth to some acceptable level; such at least was my premise. Public opinion could in effect enforce such laws without statute, if people simply agreed that no candidates deserved votes if they didn't present neutrally audited records showing modest total spending.

 

i'm not handwaving, i'm pointing out that you're basically describing something resembling anarcho-syndicalism, or at least you are if you take the line of thought to its logical conclusion (because any public informed and unified enough to actually do as you describe isn't going to start and stop with campaign finance)

 

i mean seriously, consider what you're actually asking for in reality. in order for people to "simply agree" not to vote for any candidate without neutrally audited records showing a reasonable level of campaign spending, they first need to agree on what counts as a reasonable level of spending and what counts as a neutral auditor, and that auditor itself needs to be kept incorruptible, because otherwise you just have the current equilibrium where competing parties shack up with competing auditors to prove that no, their opponents are the ones who spent more. and you need enough people to agree to vote this way in order to outweigh all of the people who would rather vote for someone they've actually heard of instead of someone they'd have to go out of their way to do research to learn anything about (because that's what happens to a candidate who doesn't spend big, big money to campaign). and if all of that is going on in the absence of state enforcement, how is any of it going to happen short of a wider revolutionary movement? we're not just talking about a random cultural shift, but a change that requires a high degree of coordination throughout society if it's going to be maintained.

[Kelandon]

A more likely approach is something like the Warren-Brown "no Super-PACs" agreement between the candidates in a Senate race.

 

As for how flexible the system is now, well, it's struggling. We have wide disagreement between two sides that have roughly equal political power in our system. The system of checks and balances doesn't allow for much action in those circumstances. If this continues for a long time, we may need to blow through some of those checks and balances (eliminating the Senate filibuster altogether, giving more power to the executive, etc.) — and that itself would represent a change in the system.

 

I'm not necessarily saying that would be the best way for the government to change again, but it is at least one possible way that existing flexibility could be utilized.

[Lilith]

 

okay i've woken up and i'm not done pointing out problems with the idea. even if it were somehow workable, would it be desirable? it requires that voters prioritise campaign finance reform over almost all other issues (otherwise any electoral hit that a party takes for spending heavily on campaigning would be outweighed by the advantages gained by spending money to publicise their most popular policies). suppose the party that spends far and away the least on campaign finance is openly fascist, while its big-spending opponent is a relatively inoffensive social democratic party. are the people supposed to go ahead and vote for the fascists? (it's all very well to say that in that case the people shouldn't vote at all, but someone's going to be elected, unless you propose that this cultural change will somehow be so complete that literally nobody votes in such a case). a saying about cutting off one's nose to spite one's face comes to mind

[Student of Trinity]

Undermining the power of deep-pocketed donors by getting people to ignore campaign advertising is admittedly a fantasy, but I really don't think it would be all that hard. Only people who actually vote matter for any of this, and those people are the ones who are willing to make at least a small amount of effort. Moreover, the whole point of campaign advertising is to chase quite a small percentage of people, so it wouldn't take a landslide shift in public opinion to have a decisive effect on how politicians spent money.

 

There's no need to vote fascists into office. Just give any party that spends less a bit of a bounce. The mainstream parties will notice immediately, "Hey, those so-and-so fascists got 15% of the vote with their lily-white No Big Money campaign. So they came a distant third, but still, that's way better than they've ever done before. Just imagine how much better we would do with that gimmick — and it would be cheaper, too."

[Lilith]

Undermining the power of deep-pocketed donors by getting people to ignore campaign advertising is admittedly a fantasy, but I really don't think it would be all that hard. Only people who actually vote matter for any of this, and those people are the ones who are willing to make at least a small amount of effort. Moreover, the whole point of campaign advertising is to chase quite a small percentage of people, so it wouldn't take a landslide shift in public opinion to have a decisive effect on how politicians spent money.

 

There's no need to vote fascists into office. Just give any party that spends less a bit of a bounce. The mainstream parties will notice immediately, "Hey, those so-and-so fascists got 15% of the vote with their lily-white No Big Money campaign. So they came a distant third, but still, that's way better than they've ever done before. Just imagine how much better we would do with that gimmick — and it would be cheaper, too."

 

how do you propose to ensure that the people will give the fascists in that situation enough votes to give them "a bit of a bounce" without actually giving them enough votes to put them into office, except through some kind of organised collective action? cultural change on its own is too blunt an instrument to do what you want it to do

 

also, how do you propose to actually run a "No Big Money" campaign? in practice, the actual result of a party not spending money on campaigning won't be that they get a reputation for not spending money: it'll be that nobody votes for them because nobody's heard of them. paradoxically, the best way to give the greatest number of people the impression that you're not spending money is probably to spend money

 

also also, considering that the single best predictor of a US presidental election result is a candidate's relative height, i think you're way way way way waaaaaaay overestimating the amount of effort most voters are willing to put in if you think that any significant number of them are going to do real research on different candidates' campaign spending as opposed to believing what they hear on their TV channel of choice. to make matters worse, swing voters -- the people whose votes that the parties actually have a shot of changing with their behaviour over the course of an election cycle -- tend to be less informed about political issues than people who are rusted on to a party, not more

[Student of Trinity]

Trends like the hypothetical one of despising campaigns that mount too many ads don't happen suddenly all at once, like storming the Bastille. The build up over a few years at least. That's lots of time for the hypothetical cheap-campaigning fascist party to get a noticeable increase in votes, without getting into office. Likewise the response of parties is gradual. No major party is going to change gears after one election and decide to reject all donations for the next campaign. They would (if any of this happened) gradually start running fewer ads, in some markets, because they noticed that saturation was doing more harm than good. If the other party keeps on spending, they're just shooting themselves in the foot: the premise is that people start hating big ad campaigns. Even if they don't remember so clearly whom they want to vote for, they'll know very well whom their voting against.

 

The height thing is almost certainly just silly. When elections are close, and there aren't a lot of data points, there is bound to be some random thing that happens to correlate better with the outcomes than anything else. If it weren't height it would be hair color, or something else. This would be true even if all voters were extremely well informed, as long as opinions were closely enough matched; so it's no evidence that voters are so ignorant that they are reduced to picking candidates by height.

 

Think of this scenario as a form of evolution. Most of your counter-arguments are analogous to some of the straw man arguments against evolution. Just because something would never happen in the way you're imagining doesn't mean it would never really happen.

[Lilith]

Trends like the hypothetical one of despising campaigns that mount too many ads don't happen suddenly all at once, like storming the Bastille. The build up over a few years at least. That's lots of time for the hypothetical cheap-campaigning fascist party to get a noticeable increase in votes, without getting into office. Likewise the response of parties is gradual. No major party is going to change gears after one election and decide to reject all donations for the next campaign. They would (if any of this happened) gradually start running fewer ads, in some markets, because they noticed that saturation was doing more harm than good. If the other party keeps on spending, they're just shooting themselves in the foot: the premise is that people start hating big ad campaigns. Even if they don't remember so clearly whom they want to vote for, they'll know very well whom their voting against.

 

The height thing is almost certainly just silly. When elections are close, and there aren't a lot of data points, there is bound to be some random thing that happens to correlate better with the outcomes than anything else. If it weren't height it would be hair color, or something else. This would be true even if all voters were extremely well informed, as long as opinions were closely enough matched; so it's no evidence that voters are so ignorant that they are reduced to picking candidates by height.

 

Think of this scenario as a form of evolution. Most of your counter-arguments are analogous to some of the straw man arguments against evolution. Just because something would never happen in the way you're imagining doesn't mean it would never really happen.

 

you're imagining ways that society could change and missing all the feedback mechanisms that keep things as they are.

 

in particular, the part of your post that i've bolded is not a particularly likely outcome: instead, a party finding itself in such a position is more likely to spend more money to find ways to be able to do just as much advertising as ever while making it look less like advertising, or on public relations campaigns to reverse the cultural trends toward dislike of advertisements. the owners of capital have a shared class interest in maintaining the importance of capital as a source of power, and any threat to that will be recognised as class treason and punished by other capital owners (in particular, by news media, think tanks, credit rating agencies and other organisations that exist to propagate ideology). look at the rise of the Tea Party in the USA and its eventual reabsorption into the Republican mainstream to see an example of this in action: anything resembling an actual working-class movement (even a reactionary one) that threatened to arise from it was co-opted by the capital-owning class when it could be and shouted down when it couldn't. historically, the only time the ruling class have loosened their grip on the people is when they've been forced to by revolution or the imminent threat of revolution, as in the case of the New Deal.

 

societies evolve, yes, but they evolve in accordance with their material conditions. as long as humans breathe an oxygen-rich atmosphere we're going to have to be able to tolerate oxygen; as long as society's ruling class is made up of those who control capital, having and using capital will be important for political power. if you don't like that, work to overthrow capitalism. i don't mean that as a defeatist statement but as a sincere invitation.

[Student of Trinity]

I think the sincere invitation is the problem: you're a naysayer provocateur. You want proletarian revolution to be the only solution, so you squint harshly at every alternative. If you think that's fair game, wait till someone tries it on you. Proletarian revolution is a far more vulnerable target for naysaying than any wishful tweaking of capitalist democracy.

 

As long as society's ruling class is made up of those who control capital, having and using capital will be important for political power.

 

That's a tautology, and in the past it hasn't stopped the enactment of lots of measures that rich people didn't like. Populism is also a force, and there's nothing to stop it from gaining some ground against money at some point, so that the preponderance of capital control in political power is somewhat reduced. You could call that a partial overthrow of capitalism, but I think that would be silly, since defining capitalism as pure plutocracy is a straw man fallacy.

[Kelandon]

SoT, there's no way that what you're describing could happen. Look at Ohio in 2012. People were sick to death of being contacted about the presidential election, but saturating the market with even more ads and more GOTV efforts worked.

 

You may not like Lilith's phrasing, but the fact remains that people will not spontaneously adopt popularly-policed campaign finance reform. It runs directly contrary to virtually 100% of campaign experience in the past couple of centuries of American politics.

[Student of Trinity]

Sure, what I've been describing would definitely be a reversal of all historical trends, and I'm not trying to argue that it's inevitable, or even likely. I just think it might be possible. Things change. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

 

Collective behavior is always like that. It's an immutable law of nature and always will be, until suddenly it was just a bizarre whim of those strange people in the past. Collective behavior isn't just arbitrary. It happens for reasons; but the reasons and the behavior add up to a huge and complicated system that can and does suddenly change, generally in ways that seem obvious in retrospect but were not foreseeable in advance.

 

(These platitudes, for example, may be due to the fact that I've spent much of today discussing spontaneous dynamical transitions with some of my students, and sketching out a theorem that we hope to publish. See, none of you could have foreseen that. Alas, many of you probably could have foreseen that I might post something somewhat like this, however. As our theorem states, it's all about just how vague you're willing to be. In particular, you should be getting more vague as time goes on. I'm here to help with that.)

[Lilith]

I think the sincere invitation is the problem: you're a naysayer provocateur. You want proletarian revolution to be the only solution, so you squint harshly at every alternative. If you think that's fair game, wait till someone tries it on you. Proletarian revolution is a far more vulnerable target for naysaying than any wishful tweaking of capitalist democracy.

 

"maybe people will just gradually stop doing what they've always done" isn't actually a "solution" or "alternative" in any meaningful sense though. i mean if you at least had some kind of praxis for how to get there from here i'd hear you out but i get the sense that you don't. whether you like the end results or not, socialist revolutions at least have the advantage of having happened historically for identifiable reasons and being models that it's possible to work off

 

Collective behavior is always like that. It's an immutable law of nature and always will be, until suddenly it was just a bizarre whim of those strange people in the past. Collective behavior isn't just arbitrary. It happens for reasons; but the reasons and the behavior add up to a huge and complicated system that can and does suddenly change, generally in ways that seem obvious in retrospect but were not foreseeable in advance.

 

weren't you the one who said that if you can't explain a system in simple terms then you don't understand it?

[Edgwyn]

The socialist revolutions that most quickly pop into my mind have all resulted in a ruling class that controls the majority of the country's capital and less social mobility than most capitalist societies.

 

That said, I am not sure how to reduce campaign spending, with the evil not being the actual spending, but the quid pro quo that it buys.

[Lilith]

The socialist revolutions that most quickly pop into my mind have all resulted in a ruling class that controls the majority of the country's capital and less social mobility than most capitalist societies.

 

for all its flaws the USSR produced a better society than anything Russia's seen before or since. in the present day Cuba and Venezuela are both doing very well for themselves considering the immense and concerted efforts by the USA to destroy and discredit them

[Alorael at Large]

The USSR produced horrific disaster as well, and the people I know who actually lived under Soviet government despair over the state of Russia but still think it's preferable. Yes, there are issues. Yes, there are oligarchs and there is starvation and unemployment. But Soviet government was reliably bad and intermittently really bad.

 

—Alorael, who will note that most socialist revolutions have not been the revolution Marx describes. Scandinavia isn't either, but it's managed to approach socialism from the non-revolutionary angle with good results. Not Marxist paradises by any means, of course, but still unacceptably pinko by red-blooded American capitalist standards.

[Kelandon]

Sure, what I've been describing would definitely be a reversal of all historical trends, and I'm not trying to argue that it's inevitable, or even likely. I just think it might be possible. Things change.

"Conceivably possible in some future eventuality" is not exactly a meaningful contribution to a discussion, though. Too many things are at least remotely possible indefinitely in the future.

 

That said, I am not sure how to reduce campaign spending, with the evil not being the actual spending, but the quid pro quo that it buys.

Quid pro quo corruption is, frankly, not the issue. That's already illegal, and bans on that have been upheld as constitutional. If there are problems there, they are with enforcement.

 

The issue is the structural defects that huge amounts of campaign expenditures create: legislators spending more time fundraising than working on policy, enormous barriers to entry, outsized power of very wealthy special interests to influence via an invisible primary the range of views that voters can choose between, etc.

[Sudanna]

SoT, I think you're getting way too attached to your uninformed idle speculation. It's okay if something you said turns out to have been very silly. Trying to argue in its defense is not going to make it any less silly. It will actually make you look silly.

[Edgwyn]

While I do not necessarily disagree that the USSR government was the best that Russia every had, a government that killed off so many of its own people and oppressed so many more still does not seem like a prize. While the US government did a lot to discredit/destabilize/destory the Castro government in Cuba during the early part of his reign, other than maintaining a very week trade embargo, Cuba has been ignored by the US for the last 20-30 years. That has not stopped many people from choosing to escape the workers paradise and move to the US. As to Venezuela, that only "immense and concerted efforts by the USA to destroy and discredit them" in "the present day" seem to have been purely an invention of Chavez to keep himself in power, justify his ruining of their economy and purchasing of arms and improving his street cred. Venezuela has really been ignored by the US, and saying that it is doing well is a huge stretch.

 

I think that I agree with what I believe to be Alorael's point that countries that have drifted gradually into socialism through their internal legal processes have done better than most of the countries that have had a "worker's" revolution.

[Lilith]

The USSR produced horrific disaster as well, and the people I know who actually lived under Soviet government despair over the state of Russia but still think it's preferable. Yes, there are issues. Yes, there are oligarchs and there is starvation and unemployment. But Soviet government was reliably bad and intermittently really bad.

 

if we're comparing anecdotes then i've got Russian and Ukrainian family, including people who lived in the USSR (hell, including people who fled the USSR), and not all of them would share your assessment

 

—Alorael, who will note that most socialist revolutions have not been the revolution Marx describes. Scandinavia isn't either, but it's managed to approach socialism from the non-revolutionary angle with good results. Not Marxist paradises by any means, of course, but still unacceptably pinko by red-blooded American capitalist standards.

 

i'm always a bit wary about holding up scandinavian countries as a model because while they're better places to live than most of the world if you're a citizen, they're just as tied into global economic forces as any other first-world liberal democracy and so their prosperity is still built upon and dependent upon the exploitation of the global periphery. the USSR is going to look worse by comparison in part because a larger proportion of the harm it did took place within its own borders

[Dikiyoba]

Presumably changing US laws to limit the amount any person, corporation, organization, or special interest can donate to a campaign and to limit the methods and amount of advertising political parties, organizations, and candidates can do is far easier and less risky than a full-scale revolution, though.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Lilith]

Presumably changing US laws to limit the amount any person, corporation, organization, or special interest can donate to a campaign and to limit the methods and amount of advertising political parties, organizations, and candidates can do is far easier and less risky than a full-scale revolution, though.

 

Dikiyoba.

 

less risky, maybe, but i'm not sure it's that much easier: historically, reforms that weaken the power of capital happen as a matter of necessity at times of crisis within capitalism

 

i guess my considered position on reform vs. revolution is that socialists and social democrats work together best when they're at each other's throats: social democratic reforms that make life under capitalism more bearable are most likely to be implemented when social democrats can credibly face down capital and say "it's us or the revolution" (again, see the New Deal). as such, a vibrant and active revolutionary movement is ultimately a good thing for social democrats even if they disagree with its methods or end goals

[Cairo Jim]

The USSR had the one evil as a government. The US still only has 2 evils to choose between. Both seem a bit meh to me.

[Student of Trinity]

Meh; I'm not really so attached to my hopeful speculation. I'm just being a determined advocate for a poor devil who needs one. My default opinion for quite a few years has been that the USA is doomed (not to utter destruction or anything, but to some serious problems) because its rigid constitution will effectively prevent reforms of which the need is becoming ever more pressing. I was trying to bend over backwards to see whether maybe a change in mores could be a viable work-around.

 

Lilith's objections, however, seemed to be cast as general theorems, to the effect that no possible capitalist society could ever adopt campaign finance limits by sheer pressure of public opinion without legal constraint, because the political power of capital is unlimited by definition, or something like that. That seemed to me to be greatly overestimating the admitted difficulties in my scenario. I admit that "conceivably possible in some future eventuality" is so weak a contention as to be pointless, but Lilith seemed to be arguing against even that. My intent was to support something at least a bit stronger, but given Lilith's absolute rejection, I was trying to establish the minimal point first, and then argue from there.

 

I really do think that my scenario could in principle be possible. I was hoping to hear some thoughts about what it might take to make it really happen, or else some counter-proposals of alternative work-arounds for campaign finance reform, such as the No-super-PAC agreements between candidates, that Kelandon mentioned. Telling me that there was no chance at all that the scenario could happen, as long as nothing significant in society changed (short of full-blown socialist revolution), was not the response I expected, because significant social change (of some sort) was precisely my premise.

 

I certainly admit that I didn't (and can't) supply any detailed roadmap for just how to make a sea change in American voting habits. So no, I don't understand this issue. I just don't think that it can be dismissed outright by any simple syllogism about power and capital.

[Jerakeen]

I follow US politics, but I was unaware of this agreement between Brown and Warren. Since superPACS are by definition not supposed to be affiliated with or directed by the candidates or their campaigns, I'm not sure I understand how that could work.

[Kelandon]

I follow US politics, but I was unaware of this agreement between Brown and Warren. Since superPACS are by definition not supposed to be affiliated with or directed by the candidates or their campaigns, I'm not sure I understand how that could work.

That was a concern, but they structured their agreement such that it was less of a problem. Basically, if a Super PAC ran an ad for one side or the other, the promoted side had to donate money to charity instead of buying more ads. So it ended up being counterproductive for a Super PAC to try to advertise for a candidate.

 

The lack of affiliation/coordination doesn't prevent a candidate from publicly announcing stuff about what he/she wants a Super PAC to do (in general terms), and it doesn't prevent the Super PAC from following that. They just can't meet and coordinate directly in private.

[Lilith]

Lilith's objections, however, seemed to be cast as general theorems, to the effect that no possible capitalist society could ever adopt campaign finance limits by sheer pressure of public opinion without legal constraint, because the political power of capital is unlimited by definition, or something like that. That seemed to me to be greatly overestimating the admitted difficulties in my scenario. I admit that "conceivably possible in some future eventuality" is so weak a contention as to be pointless, but Lilith seemed to be arguing against even that. My intent was to support something at least a bit stronger, but given Lilith's absolute rejection, I was trying to establish the minimal point first, and then argue from there.

 

i do think it could conceivably happen, i just think it could only happen in response to a specific crisis rather than as part of a gradual cultural change, because the forces militating against that change would be too strong under ordinary circumstances

 

That was a concern, but they structured their agreement such that it was less of a problem. Basically, if a Super PAC ran an ad for one side or the other, the promoted side had to donate money to charity instead of buying more ads. So it ended up being counterproductive for a Super PAC to try to advertise for a candidate.

 

did anyone ever try having a Super PAC run expensive but ineffective ads for the side they didn't favour as a way to exploit this agreement?

[Jerakeen]

That was a concern, but they structured their agreement such that it was less of a problem. Basically, if a Super PAC ran an ad for one side or the other, the promoted side had to donate money to charity instead of buying more ads. So it ended up being counterproductive for a Super PAC to try to advertise for a candidate.

"That is awesome!" was my reaction to that until I read Lilith's. Lilith, you are evil. And awesome.

 

The lack of affiliation/coordination doesn't prevent a candidate from publicly announcing stuff about what he/she wants a Super PAC to do (in general terms), and it doesn't prevent the Super PAC from following that. They just can't meet and coordinate directly in private.

I'm aware of this. There is also nothing to stop a staffer from "leaving" the campaign and starting a super PAC.

[Dantius]

The so-called "financial crisis" and Snowdengate have convinced me that while representative democracy is still better than outright tyranny, albeit more hypocritical, the time has come for the people to have more of the good stuff, namely democracy.

 

Why is the will of the people somehow not democratic enough, whereas the opinion of a few hundred bankster-sponsored kleptocrats under the surveillance of NSA Pinkerton "security" contractors is law?

 

Pardon my late arrival to this thread; I'm just popping in to say that this is certainly one of the more well-crafted pieces of Spiderweb flamebait I've seen. We've hit pretty much all the high notes- financial crisis, Snowden, banksters/ kleptocrat, NSA, and a nice historical reference with the Pinkertons. For your edification, I'd suggest that future such posts also include phrases such as "extrajudical killings/flying death robots", "Trans-Pacific Partnership", and perhaps "Keystone XL". I give it a 9/10; excellent effort, but falls just shy of perfection.

 

You might also want to try and expand your political reach to try and pick up disenchanted libertarians and Republican instead of simply those left of center in your quest for more voter representation, the Tea Party would be natural allies. Obviously, such people are few and far between on SW, but they are quite common in the larger internet. A sample vocabulary for your perusal is below. Study up, there will be a test:

 

• Unelected Washington bureaucrats!
  
• Pick one (Or several! I don't judge!): {Benghazi, Fast and Furious, IRSGate}
  
• Most arrogant president ever! (Bonus points for "uppity"! Double points for "boy"! Triple for equating Michelle to Marie Antoinette!)
  
• Political cronyism unseen since Nixon!
  
• Blatant disregard for the constitution!
  
• Once said mean things about people in finance!
  

[Alorael at Large]

No, that post provoked a rather civil and interesting discussion. You revisited it days after the talk had died down to provide the first flame it baited. In other words, the flaming is yours and you aren't helping the average quality of discourse. Knock it off.

 

—Alorael, who won't lock the thread because he's always loath to do that in response to one bad actor.

[Sudanna]

It provoked a civil and interesting discussion about how bad of an idea it was, which is pretty much SW's version of flaming these days.