If you look at the post-WWII peace and you credit it to democracy and “liberal values”, then you have mistaken correlation for causation.
Historically, it turned out that democracy spread over Europe in the 19th century. In the 20th century, nuclear weapons were developed, enabling MADD. In WWII, the US conquered Europe and covered it with military bases. Worldwide, the US pushes democracy, using its media domination and soft power to install pro-US puppet leaders and acquire client states.
Being a democracy is heavily confounded with being a US client state. The rise of democracies is also confounded by the rise of MADD. These factors make Western democracies look much more stable than they actually are.
What about “kleptocracy”? Again, there are confounds. Non-democratic states are also non-Western states, and have very different cultures. Some cultures are just more nepotistic and have more organized crime than others, and they are going to have corrupt governments regardless of whether they are democratic or not.
If we are going to compare systems of government without context, then I could bring up African democracies. It only makes sense to compare the performance of a system of government within regions.
As a counterfactual, imagine if Britain or France was still a powerful monarchy in the world of MADD. Would a modern Western European monarchy be a mad dog on the world stage? Of course not. It would still been under most of the same incentives as actual Britain and France. Actually, it would probably be a lot saner, because a modern Western European monarchy wouldn’t have any incentive to use mass immigration to pack its electorate in its favor.
With all of these confounds, it’s extremely simplistic to operate under such simplistic associations as “democracy good, authoritarianism bad.” This association is only supported by looking at the post-WWII order and failing to account for US military, nukes, and cultural differences. Statements like “authoritarian countries are dangerous” is absurd propaganda. Is Singapore dangerous? Is Orban’s Hungary dangerous? How about FDR’s dictatorship of America?
Here is a good article to help attain a better understanding of democracies and non-democracies and cut out the propaganda.
If you look over a longer period of time, the rise of democracy encourages ideologically-motivated total war. The French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars revived total warfare from its slumber. Total warfare encourages weapons development and full population mobilization. Now we have the 20th century: WWI and WWII, which took total war to a new level. If you only look at the post-WWII world order, you will miss the relationship between democracy, tribal total war, and weapons development, which could be used to portray democracy as a highly risky system of government. This article takes the opposite position from the original post: that it is democracy, not “authoritarianism,” that has been driving dangerous weapons development all along.
While the modern establishment claims that democracy is the best thing since sliced bread, and responsible for all the peace and goodness in the world, many of the great thinkers of the past had severe reservations about democracy, and any form of popular government. Henry Maine in Popular Government, 1885:
I state the facts, as matter neither for congratulation nor for lamentation, but simply as materials for opinion. It is manifest that, so far as they go, they do little to support the assumption that popular government has an indefinitely long future before it. Experience rather tends to show that it is characterised by great fragility, and that, since its appearance, all forms of government have become more insecure than they were before.
The convinced partisans of democracy care little for instances which show democratic governments to be unstable. These are merely isolated triumphs of the principle of evil. But the conclusion of the sober student of history will not be of this kind. He will rather note it as a fact, to be considered in the most serious spirit, that since the century during which the Roman Emperors were at the mercy of the Praetorian soldiery, there has been no such insecurity of government as the world has seen since rulers became delegates of the community.
Another quote, attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.
And this is the system of government that we should bet the stability of our countries on?
Regardless of whether the readers here find these skeptical theories of democracy persuasive, it should be clear that the virtues of democracy are much more controversial than most New York Times readers believe it to be. Even if I haven’t fully convinced you, you have to admit that currently, most of the people reading this do not have sufficient knowledge to rebut the historical sources I have provided.
If democracy’s benefits are exaggerated, then this error would have serious consequences for catastrophic risk. If the goal is to maximize prestige under the current government, then our policy towards democracy should be to “see no evil,” but if the goal is to actually understand how to run human civilizations in a stable way, we should be more skeptical.
The very election of Trump is evidence that democracy is unstable. If democracy is already overrated and not antifragile, then Trump changing the nature of the US regime doesn’t look so bad, assuming he even succeeds in changing anything. Maybe it’s just what we need. And even if your values disagree with Trump, then you should still be skeptical of democracy, because he was elected.
Trump looks most risky if you think that the status quo was sustainable, but it isn’t. Establishment elites in the West having been waging unnecessary wars abroad, and destroying Western countries by waging economic, cultural, and demographic war against their own middle classes and white working poor in order to reshape the electorate for their needs, while calling anyone who protested a racist or xenophobe. Inside the filter bubble, many intelligent, well-intentioned people—such as EAs—jumped on the bandwagon, believing in the humanitarian and utilitarian rationalizations for these cynical political moves.
Trump is the backlash to this divisive and unsustainable strategy of foreign wars, mass immigration, and domestic culture wars. Clinton would have doubled-down on this policy.
Moving Forward
My advice to EAs would be to attain a better understanding of history and geopolitics before flushing money down the drain of partisan politics. Reading the New York Times and the Economist inside the Overton bubble is insufficient due diligence.
The analysis in the original post is based on a Democrat-leaning media, a Democrat-leaning academy, and unsurprisingly comes to the conclusion that EAs should be financially supporting the Democratic Party. Prior to the election, I’ve seen EAs creating a pseudo-quantitative analysis that found that donating to the Clinton campaign had an expected value of $20k per $1 dollar spent, representing the highest impact cause in EA. This is what happens if you accept a political party’s agenda as your priors: you get mugged.
There are many ways a Trump presidency could go wrong, and he definitely isn’t perfect. But despite his flaws, despite his risks, Trump counterbalances some of the biggest global catastrophic risks right now: cold war with Russia, and European civil wars due to the migrant crisis.
The old establishment wasn’t working, and it was never as stable as it was cracked up to be. Continuing those trends would have led to countries falling apart, and even worse leaders than Trump growing out of the ashes. Trump is the kick-in-the-pants for all of us—on every side of the political spectrum—to figure out what’s next.
Part 3 of 3. Read Part 2 first.
Authoritarianism and democracy
If you look at the post-WWII peace and you credit it to democracy and “liberal values”, then you have mistaken correlation for causation.
Historically, it turned out that democracy spread over Europe in the 19th century. In the 20th century, nuclear weapons were developed, enabling MADD. In WWII, the US conquered Europe and covered it with military bases. Worldwide, the US pushes democracy, using its media domination and soft power to install pro-US puppet leaders and acquire client states.
Being a democracy is heavily confounded with being a US client state. The rise of democracies is also confounded by the rise of MADD. These factors make Western democracies look much more stable than they actually are.
What about “kleptocracy”? Again, there are confounds. Non-democratic states are also non-Western states, and have very different cultures. Some cultures are just more nepotistic and have more organized crime than others, and they are going to have corrupt governments regardless of whether they are democratic or not.
If we are going to compare systems of government without context, then I could bring up African democracies. It only makes sense to compare the performance of a system of government within regions.
As a counterfactual, imagine if Britain or France was still a powerful monarchy in the world of MADD. Would a modern Western European monarchy be a mad dog on the world stage? Of course not. It would still been under most of the same incentives as actual Britain and France. Actually, it would probably be a lot saner, because a modern Western European monarchy wouldn’t have any incentive to use mass immigration to pack its electorate in its favor.
With all of these confounds, it’s extremely simplistic to operate under such simplistic associations as “democracy good, authoritarianism bad.” This association is only supported by looking at the post-WWII order and failing to account for US military, nukes, and cultural differences. Statements like “authoritarian countries are dangerous” is absurd propaganda. Is Singapore dangerous? Is Orban’s Hungary dangerous? How about FDR’s dictatorship of America?
Here is a good article to help attain a better understanding of democracies and non-democracies and cut out the propaganda.
If you look over a longer period of time, the rise of democracy encourages ideologically-motivated total war. The French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars revived total warfare from its slumber. Total warfare encourages weapons development and full population mobilization. Now we have the 20th century: WWI and WWII, which took total war to a new level. If you only look at the post-WWII world order, you will miss the relationship between democracy, tribal total war, and weapons development, which could be used to portray democracy as a highly risky system of government. This article takes the opposite position from the original post: that it is democracy, not “authoritarianism,” that has been driving dangerous weapons development all along.
While the modern establishment claims that democracy is the best thing since sliced bread, and responsible for all the peace and goodness in the world, many of the great thinkers of the past had severe reservations about democracy, and any form of popular government. Henry Maine in Popular Government, 1885:
Another quote, attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler:
And this is the system of government that we should bet the stability of our countries on?
Regardless of whether the readers here find these skeptical theories of democracy persuasive, it should be clear that the virtues of democracy are much more controversial than most New York Times readers believe it to be. Even if I haven’t fully convinced you, you have to admit that currently, most of the people reading this do not have sufficient knowledge to rebut the historical sources I have provided.
If democracy’s benefits are exaggerated, then this error would have serious consequences for catastrophic risk. If the goal is to maximize prestige under the current government, then our policy towards democracy should be to “see no evil,” but if the goal is to actually understand how to run human civilizations in a stable way, we should be more skeptical.
The very election of Trump is evidence that democracy is unstable. If democracy is already overrated and not antifragile, then Trump changing the nature of the US regime doesn’t look so bad, assuming he even succeeds in changing anything. Maybe it’s just what we need. And even if your values disagree with Trump, then you should still be skeptical of democracy, because he was elected.
Trump looks most risky if you think that the status quo was sustainable, but it isn’t. Establishment elites in the West having been waging unnecessary wars abroad, and destroying Western countries by waging economic, cultural, and demographic war against their own middle classes and white working poor in order to reshape the electorate for their needs, while calling anyone who protested a racist or xenophobe. Inside the filter bubble, many intelligent, well-intentioned people—such as EAs—jumped on the bandwagon, believing in the humanitarian and utilitarian rationalizations for these cynical political moves.
Trump is the backlash to this divisive and unsustainable strategy of foreign wars, mass immigration, and domestic culture wars. Clinton would have doubled-down on this policy.
Moving Forward
My advice to EAs would be to attain a better understanding of history and geopolitics before flushing money down the drain of partisan politics. Reading the New York Times and the Economist inside the Overton bubble is insufficient due diligence.
The analysis in the original post is based on a Democrat-leaning media, a Democrat-leaning academy, and unsurprisingly comes to the conclusion that EAs should be financially supporting the Democratic Party. Prior to the election, I’ve seen EAs creating a pseudo-quantitative analysis that found that donating to the Clinton campaign had an expected value of $20k per $1 dollar spent, representing the highest impact cause in EA. This is what happens if you accept a political party’s agenda as your priors: you get mugged.
There are many ways a Trump presidency could go wrong, and he definitely isn’t perfect. But despite his flaws, despite his risks, Trump counterbalances some of the biggest global catastrophic risks right now: cold war with Russia, and European civil wars due to the migrant crisis.
The old establishment wasn’t working, and it was never as stable as it was cracked up to be. Continuing those trends would have led to countries falling apart, and even worse leaders than Trump growing out of the ashes. Trump is the kick-in-the-pants for all of us—on every side of the political spectrum—to figure out what’s next.