It will come
as a surprise to exactly no one to say that politics as a human activity is not
very popular of late, and those that practice it for a living (politicians) are
not the most admired or respected of public figures. Not exactly a dazzling
piece of news, as decrying public representatives (even in times when such
politicians were not supposed to represent anybody, as in Imperial Rome or
Classical China) and painting them as a bunch of corrupt, despotic, venal,
unenlightened, cruel, merciless, self-interested, rapacious, short-sighted,
meretricious, duplicitous, power-hungry scoundrels is such an old habit that we
can find it in the first written records (from the code of Hammurabi to the
epic of Gilgamesh, from the Tao te ching to
the Iliad, and from the Rig Veda to
the Bible), and can trace a history of denouncing and despising aspiring
leaders that runs through every single book in the Western canon that has dealt
with the topic. But even within such a rich and bountiful tradition, aggregating
individual decisions to decide the course of collective action (and
participating in such aggregation in an outsized role, as traditional political
representatives are wont to do) is getting an egregiously bad rap lately, as
illustrated by the following examples:
·
Europeans
on immigrants: probably every sane and reasonable person understand that if
your country is in the midst of a vicious civil war (like Syria is currently)
where no faction likely to win it is minimally committed to respect plurality
or human rights, or is just a hellhole run by corrupt autocrats that would
relinquish power under no circumstances even when the combined pressure of
climate change and demographic explosion is leaving less and less to extract
(like most of Sub-Saharan Africa), the only rational alternative open to any
human being with functioning feet is to pack up and leave. Unfortunately,
similarly sane and reasonable persons can legitimately reach the conclusion that
injecting in culturally homogeneous and aging populations an excessive amount
of youngsters from radically different cultural backgrounds may have some deleterious
effect (see the whole of the USA, growing more dysfunctional by the day,
although such dysfunctionality has a number of additional causes that may
require a post of their own to analyze). The solution to such conundrum would
be to coolly determine what percentage of that young (and desperate) population
can be reasonably absorbed (in a continent of 400 million souls there shouldn’t
be such a problem to dilute a few millions of destitute refugees) and how to
responsibly bear the cost of such absorption to ensure the unlucky human beings
that have reached Europe’s soil are either painlessly integrated or kept safely
settled for what may turn out to be many
years since we help stabilize their home countries and they can return.
Instead, what we have is a deal cut amidst the greatest secret by bureaucrats with
no consultation to public opinion to send as many of those refugees to a
semi-democratic country, growing less democratic by the day (Turkey, and don’t
get me wrong, I dearly love it) in the hope that it will be able to keep the
huddled masses indefinitely away from Europe. Not that the lack of consultation
is the greatest sin of the harebrained and absolutely impractical deal, as the
public opinion had been previously led to a state of irrational frenzy about
the fear of the foreigner stoked by an irresponsible press that would have made
such consultation highly problematic and most likely counterproductive.
·
Venezuelans
on how to rule themselves: when people see the economy of a formerly resource-rich
country at the verge of implosion they tend to identify it with the well-known
and well-worn story of a leftist, populist traditional Latin-American Caudillo
that has been for years making promises to the lower rungs of the population
that the latest minimal gyration of the international markets (in the form of a
substantial fall in the price of oil) has made impossible to satisfy. Indeed,
that covers a good part of the situation, completed by a substantial network of
cronies lifted under Hugo Chavez, the predecessor of the current caudillo
(Nicolas Maduro) that have provided the kleptocratic regime a veneer of
legitimacy and support, but it doesn’t exhaust the roots of Venezuela’s
problems. The other side of the coin is the distrust of significant portions of
the population towards the opposition leaders, which they (rightly or wrongly)
see as representatives of the old oligarchic elites that for decades ruled the
country unopposed, in a similarly extractive, crony and kleptocratic way (only
the fraction of the population that benefitted from the extraction of wealth
was different from the one raised by Chavez). Again, the theory of political
action tells us that different segments of the population, or at least the old
elite and the new one, should be able to hammer out a social compact where both
had more to gain than in the current impasse. But instead of that the Chavist
left demonizes the opposition (and puts its most salient representatives in
jail), tries to change the constitution to stay more time in power and
dismisses the recently elected lower chamber after the opposition wins a majority
in it, whilst the non-Chavists (that at least have overcome their previous
mutual distrust and thus present a unified front against the current
government) have failed thus far to convince the lower rungs of the population
that their victory would not represent a return to the traditional upper class
rule and disregard of their needs, so they have been unable to extend their base
of support much further than their current 51%, which seems not enough to
displace the entrenched Chavists.
·
Spaniards
on forming government: I’ll have to get more localist than what I normally
fancy for this one, but it is an interesting application of my overall argument
in this post, so here we go. Since the general elections held in December of
last year, which even with an electoral system designed with the explicit
purpose of ensuring two-party rule (which was seen as more stable when the
latest constitution was drafted than a purely proportional system like Italy’s)
delivered a fragmented parliament, with four relatively mainstream parties (two
roughly to the left and two roughly to the right, if that classification still
means anything, which is dubious, two traditional ones and two very new ones)
unable to obtain majorities combining only with what should be their closest
ideological allies, which demanded either an alliance of a major party with two
minor ones (one to his left and one to his right) or an alliance between the
two major parties. Again, in a rational universe drafting a workable agreement
should have been possible, but in the actual one nothing of the sort has
happened, and the most likely scenario (to be officially sanctioned in three
weeks, unless an unexpected and at this point highly unlikely agreement is
reached) is new elections, this being the first time in the relatively young
Spanish democracy in which the elected representatives of the people show
themselves to be unable to get the minimum votes needed to have a new government
sworn in. The most interesting point, however, is the electorate’s reaction to
such unashamed show of lack of negotiating acumen on the part of the current
batch of politicians. One would assume that they would severely punish such
incompetent representatives, when the popular will has been so clear that what
they expect from them is to forge new alliances and include in their mandate
aspects they collectively believe that had been insufficiently represented
within the old parties (thus the sudden apparition of the new ones). Nothing further
from the truth, as the distribution of the vote according to the latest polls
so resemble last year’s that the most likely scenario would be a similarly split
parliament, where the same negotiators within the same parties would hold
almost the same cards. I imagine each voter irrationally thinks his original
option has spent the last four months defending the banner of reasonableness
and principled ideals, and it is the ones chosen by the foolish rest of the
population which have been partisan, and which have negotiated in bad faith.
Obviously, not all the electors can be right about this one, and it is quite
likely they are all equally wrong.
·
And
of course, the USA Republican party nomination process (and may be the Democratic
one too): at this point most rational voters, regardless of how angry they are
with their current government, with the current direction of their avowed
party, or with the overall direction their society is taking, should have
realized that Donald Trump would be a terrible, terrible general election candidate,
and an even worst president. But not only does he still have a decent chance of
ending up being the nominee, the only realistic alternative is a guy that seems
plucked from a B-series movie whose script showed not a iota of shame or sense
of parody, which wouldn’t have a snowball’s in hell’s chances even if the
democrats decided to nominate a true Muslim communist from Kenya to represent them
come November (according to the voters not exactly flocking under Cruz’s banner
he would actually be the second in a row proposed by the evil Leftists to lead
God’s chosen and most Christian nation, btw). According to my theory of the
organization, political parties are groups of diverse people (not so diverse in
this case, but I digress) joined by the desire to gain power and perpetuate
those that self-identify with their cause. It is surprising, then, to see the
Republicans conscientiously choosing between the two options most suited to
ensure they stay out of the White House, and they eventually lose the Senate
and weaken their impregnable position in Congress, thereby having less power
and thus less opportunities to perpetuate their world view and to advance the
causes of conservatism (which is what their party is nominally about)
What all
these vignettes share is that they highlight the inability of groups to further
their collective interest through the inability of part of them (the
representatives) to negotiate the best deal for the majority (the represented),
the moment that different sub-segments of the latter have to be taken into
account. That’s probably bad enough, but apparently on the other hand you got
this: If only it ever came to pass!
which sounds amazingly inspiring, and if it were ever done (or even half done)
would utterly disprove my theory of a secular stagnation derived from the
coming to a halt of technological progress (you want technology progressing? What
can be more progressive than sending minimal probes to the nearest star?).
Unfortunately, I find it highly unlikely it ever gets done, and I’ll tell you
why right away: current politics. For this to happen it will never be enough that
a few millionaires get together, decide it is a good use of their resources,
that it would be a lot of fun and why the heck not, so they would get it done. The
100 million dollars that Yuri Milner as already pledged (and that many like him
would be likely to pledge) is but small change compared to the real cost of
such a magnificent endeavor. To really see it to completion a lot of public
funds would need to be committed. Probably from multiple nations, which would
then want a say on the design decisions (you know how it works: if I put X
millions, I want companies from my part of the world receiving contracts for at
least 1.2X millions in exchange). Which would then make the costs and timeline
balloon to the grotesque proportions we have grown accustomed to (it should be
obvious to any perspicuous reader that I spent last week in ITER having my
engineer heart broken by seeing how such a similarly magnificent initiative is
at least as likely to fail as to ever get completed because of the shortsighted
and dysfunctional governance structure that politicians imposed as a
precondition to authorizing the budget
for the construction to proceed).
So basically,
politics suck, and they seem to suck lately even more than the historical average,
to the extent that some commentators are ascribing most of the world’s malaises
not to the unavoidable give and take that has to be ironed out in diverse
electoral bodies, but to the existence of a political process by itself,
presenting as enviable alternatives the autocracies that in recent years seem
to have had more economic success thanks to the lack of such hindering process,
that allowed them to decide and impose the better path to continue progressing
towards economic development. I happen to disagree with such a contentious contention,
and to explain why I will need to develop two complementary lines of thought:
·
First,
what is the origin with the legitimate dissatisfaction with the prevalent
political process in the West (representative democracy). To understand such
origin we will need to show what feature of the dominant reason of the latest decades
makes it less and less suitable and less compatible with such a system to
aggregate the preferences of the represented
·
Second,
to what extent the highlighted problems (be them derived from their
misalignment with the age’s dominant reason or form other additional causes)
are exclusive of representative democracy, or can be expected to afflict
similarly other alternative forms of government (and I will deal mainly with
autocracy as an all-encompassing alternative)
·
Finally,
if I can show that autocracy would likely face the same problems, and even
exacerbate them or make them worse, I would like to present my own proposal for
an alternative process of collectively deciding how to better steer society (an
alternative that will surprise no regular reader of this blog)
But such developments will require an
additional post, as this one has run already for too long.
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