Bolivar and South American "Limited Success"

I continue to work my way through the Mike Duncan "Revolutions" podcast series. I recently got through his series on Simon Bolivar and the revolutions in the Spanish Americas. 

These are excellent, and I highly recommend them. In this post, I'm perhaps going to be a bit harsh on Duncan, but don't let this deter you. Duncan is an excellent storyteller, and exceptional at condensing the disparate strands into an easy-to-follow story that has an amazing amount of useful information per unit time. He has a basic liberal bias, but this is fairly easy to subtract. 

One of the ideals I got out of Moldbug (and also in Ernst Junger's Eumeswil) is that you should aspire to understand the present as a historian living in on Mars in 300 years time would understand our present situation. That is to say, everybody is dead and gone, the nations and causes evoke no immediately strong emotions. You just want to understand what happened and why, and what it teaches you about how the world works. 

It is hard to do this with much of modern history. Ancient history has this a lot more, of course - the Greeks are utterly alien, for instance. As John Dolan put it, when describing the Iliad - the Greeks enjoyed cruelty. They found cruelty hilarious. And if you don't understand this about them, you'll never get the story. But if the only way you can get the appropriate distance is to travel so far back in time and setting, it's hard to know how much any of it actually maps clearly to the present. This is why the ideal is so elusive - disinterested knowledge of something that the year and place of your birth forces you to take a very active interest in. 

For an Anglo reader, Spanish American independence is well worth studying, because it's almost as close to the Martian ideal as you're going to get in the modern world. It's not your war. Neither the monarch, the colonial power nor the colony are in any sense "your" monarch or "your" country. There is an odd tension people sometimes get from being weaned too much on moronic Manichean versions of history, where one somewhat feels the need to "pick a side" in the story, rather like a foreigner moving to America and deciding on a random NFL team to support (I know several people who did this, incidentally). And while this instinct of picking sides in history not generally useful, I think it is useful to consider the question of who acted wisely, who acted foolishly, who could have achieved a better outcome if they had acted differently, and if you were a random elite civilian at the time, who would you have chosen to support. 

Guiding you in this, of course, are your general abstract principles - in my case, things like support for central authority and skepticism of proponents of radical leftist change. But how much should that commend Ferdinand VII to you specifically? It's not totally clear. I think anyone with monarchist leanings will probably lean towards supporting the monarchy before things go to hell. But what about afterwards? As I said about the French revolution, at some point the fastest and best path back to strong central authority for France was not restoring the House of Bourbon, but rather ... elevating Napoleon. 

When evaluating the wars of Spanish American independence, it's hard not to judge things in part by the character of Simon Bolivar. He really is a singular figure in terms of his sheer force of will. He famously swore an oath on Mons Sacer, the location of the Secession of the Plebs in ancient Rome, to liberate his country of Venezuela or die trying. He was not joking. He managed to remain stalwart even in the face of repeated setbacks and failed attempts. It is a little bit unclear how to count the number of times he was exiled after failed attempts at independence, but it is at least three. 

-After he had played a large part in the military victories leading to the First Republic of Venezuela, when it collapsed after the earthquake of 1812 (not just due to that, obviously, but it doesn't help when people interpret it as God's divine wrath for declaring independence), he had to flee to Curacao, and later to Cartagena in New Granada (modern Colombia). 

-He got exiled a second time after the Second Republic of Venezuela was crushed by the Royalists, and the forces he led were massively defeated. He fled to Jamaica, narrowly avoided an assassination attempt there, and moved to Haiti

-From Haiti, he led a failed attempt to re-invade Venezuela in 1815, but was defeated again in particularly embarrassing fashion, and had to return to Haiti again in exile a third time. 

-And at the end of his life, he was about to be exiled to Europe, but managed to die before this happened. 

Suffice to say, when I reflect on his situation in 1816, after three failed attempts at this thing called independence, it's fair to say that most people might be a mite discouraged. But not Bolivar. It is impressive how much you can accomplish as an organized and brave member of the elite with an absolutely single-minded focus, and a willingness to die in the attempt. 

A lot of this is Bolivar himself, though, and perhaps not something that's easy to emulate. In one of those great admissions against interest, as the lawyers say, his sometime-ally-and-sometime-opponent Francisco de Paula Santander put it this way:

His force of personality is such that on countless occasions when I have been filled with hatred and revenge, the mere sight of him, the instant he speaks, I am disarmed, and I come away filled with nothing so much as admiration.

Bear in mind that the narrator here is no wilting flower - he was the hero of the Battle of Boyaca and later president of Gran Colombia. It's sort of like how everybody smart was blown away at how smart Von Neumann was. 

Bolivar was so magnetic in his personality that, in Duncan's retelling, his personal insistence was the driving force behind the creation of Gran Colombia, a country that was a union of modern Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and parts of other countries too. It seemed like nobody else was much interested in the idea of a grand centralized republic. Everyone else saw independence mostly as an opportunity for the circulation of (local) elites, where some group gets to become the leaders of a smaller new country, rather than being subordinated in a larger one. It's a testament to his sheer force of will that he conjured this country into existence for 12 years, despite most other elites having a very lukewarm attitude to it. But eventually he encountered a problem that he couldn't brute force through will alone.  

As a general, his track record was somewhat hit and miss, and it's not obvious from casual empiricism what his actual wins above replacement would be. He liked reckless and bold assaults, and sometimes these worked extremely well (like the Magdalena campaign) and sometimes they worked poorly, like in his assault on Ocumare de la Costa in 1816, which wikipedia, not usually one for hyperbole in these matters, describes as "a debacle". 

I think Duncan reads him correctly in the following sense. He is an impressive guy, with huge balls, a broad and far reaching vision, and an absolute willingness to sacrifice everything to achieve it. He left a very large mark forever on his country. Duncan's description at the end of the series, which we'll return to, is this:

More than any other single man (Bolivar) represents the entire process of South American independence, and without question he is now mostly remembered as a romantic hero of an adventurous age, the details of the man himself little remembered or even needed. And in this way too he is like Washington, mythologized to the point of abstraction. But I hope as we've slogged our way along with him now over the past 27 episodes, across mountains, in grasslands and through deserts and through freezing cold, in the city, in the country, through victory and defeat, aiming for glory, getting it, losing it, and then winning it again, that we can appreciate him as a man riding through difficult times, trying to take the world he inherited and turn it into a world that he dreamed of. 

He was indeed. But this much is also true of Hitler, and Stalin, and Pol Pot, and Lee Kuan Yew, and Julius Caesar, and Napoleon, and George Washington. It marks him for "greatness" in the sense of enormity, and overall impact on history. But it leaves open the other version of "greatness", of actually doing good. By their fruits shall ye know them. When you are the leader of a country, you no longer get to claim that you meant well. You no longer get to claim that you tried your best, and were mistaken. And you definitely don't get to claim that the fact that you felt you were doing the right thing is an excuse for unforeseen consequences. History's judgment is severe, and rightly so. When millions of lives and whole nations are on the line, you have to be right, and you have to succeed. You also deserve to be judged against reasonable counterfactuals. What else would have happened, absent your choices? 

Let's start with the counterfactual. The obvious counterfactual to independence is ... not independence. That is, the continuation of the Spanish rule in the Americas. Like with the Haitian revolution, the Spanish American revolutions are very hard to imagine without Napoleon overthrowing the Spanish monarchy. Also as in the Haitian revolution, a lot of the early revolutionaries establish local juntas in their cities as a way of supposedly declaring their support for Ferdinand VII, against the French monarchy of Joseph I (Napoleon's brother), whom Napoleon imposed on Spain in 1808. This makes it all very deniable, means almost everybody local will be minded to agree with some parts of what you're pushing early on, and also means that it's not clear whether allegiance to Ferdinand himself requires allegiance to the various governments claiming to rule Spain in opposition to Joseph I, such as the Supreme Central Junta or the Cortes of Cadiz. 

In terms of its relation to the martian ideal, Duncan's re-telling of Roman history was excellent, because it's very easy to have intellectual distance. Duncan's re-telling of the American revolution was mostly lame, because he can't (or doesn't want to) liberate himself from the standard propaganda. In the  American Revolution, the complaints of the patriots were ridiculous, but Duncan had to repeat them anyway. He never seriously addressed the rebuttal of those complaints by the Loyalists. As Moldbug pointed out, the strongest of these is Thomas Hutchinson's Strictures upon the Declaration of Independence. I don't know anybody that has read that document and come away with the impression that the complaints of the Revolution were anything other than a complete joke. 

In the US revolution, Duncan knows the actual complaints against the previous colonial order and leans into them as best he can to try and make the case. Whereas in Spain, it seems much more of a required formality to address briefly - it's not his background, there's nothing in there that makes for an interesting story, and he doesn't have a great deal of energy for it. There are the usual problems of enforced monopolies on trade with the mother country, and pro forma stuff about stuffy elites from Europe running the show to the chagrin of local elites. Notably, there aren't the long list of complaints about the evils and abuses of slavery that accompanied his descriptions of the causes of the Haitian revolution. It is left as an exercise for the reader to infer whether this was because a) Spanish slavery in the 18th century was much more humane than French slavery in the 18th century, or b) because, ex-post, the slaves played a pretty minor role in the Spanish American revolutions, and almost none of the action seems to easily fit a narrative of slaves as the central protagonists taking revenge on their cruel former masters.  

So there were some problems with Spanish America, but they seem pretty trivial. Even more so than Haiti, it seems that despite the occasional uprising beforehand, it's very hard to imagine anything getting off the ground without the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy. 

You can say, fine, once it got overthrown though, it's probably not possible to put things back the way they way. And this has quite a lot of truth to it. But Ferdinand VII was restored in 1813, and made a concerted attempt to re-assert Spanish control. It's not hard to imagine that it could have all been restored, even if it's hard to imagine it all continuing along uninterrupted the whole time without it coming from a counterfactual that has nothing to do with Bolivar or Spanish America at all, and everything to do with Napoleon. If the monarchy were restored, it's also easy to imagine gradual and peaceful paths to devolution of power that look more like Canada or Australia, not that this had to happen necessarily. The more important question, though, is would this restoration of the Spanish monarchy have been a good thing? 

The most astonishing fact about Bolivar is to look at the system he wanted to impose in his vision of Gran Colombia. He wanted a grand unified country, ruling over large tracts of Spanish America. The whole continent would be divided into perhaps four large countries. He wanted a strong central government, rather than a federal system that devolved power to the local regions. He wanted a strong executive, rather than dominance by an elected body like Congress. And remember, mind you, that he wanted this system so much that he tried to impose this vision against the expressed wishes of most other local elites.

What system is this describing?

It's describing the God damn Spanish monarchy! In every major respect, other than the birthplace and ruling location of the man at the top of the pyramid (and some of his local elite advisors), he is describing the system they previously had. Sure, there is a new lifelong president to capture the rents at the top, and a different process for choosing that person (once! he wanted lifelong appointments) but how much difference does this make? If you personally get to be the monarch, sure it makes a big difference to you. But Bolivar does a better than average job of indicating that he actually didn't aspire to be a peacetime president for life (though plenty of contemporaries doubted these protestations). Sure, even so, let's assume he got the top job. What's in it for everyone else? Who cares if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice?

Bolivar's ridiculous conceit, for which everyone paid very heavily, was that he could smash all the existing institutions and their history and force of inertia, and somehow expect that he could approximately impose the same conditions back up again, except with the Peninsulares, the Spaniards of Spanish birth, replaced by the Criollo, the Spaniards of America birth. But it doesn't work that way. Once the political VIX spikes up, it stays high for a very long time. All of the people you've been leading in this coalition to overthrow the existing order have very different ideas about what they're hoping to get out of the new regime. It's very far from obvious that they'll be contented to be put back into essentially the same circumstances with a new guy in charge. 

This is the first damning indictment on Bolivar. 

But this is the realm of hypotheticals - the what could have been. Let us at least stick to the factual, rather than counterfactual. What was?

I'm going to start here with Bolivar's own assessments at the end of his life, because he made two, a few months apart. On his death bed, he has this to say:

"Colombians you have witnessed my efforts launch liberty where tyranny once reigned. I have labored selflessly sacrificing my fortune and my peace of mind. When it became clear that you doubted my motives I resigned my command. My enemies have toyed with your confidence, destroyed what I hold sacred my reputation and my love of Liberty.  They have made me their victim and hounded me to my grave. I forgive them. As I depart your midst my love for you impels me to make known my last wishes. I aspire to no other glory than the consolidation of Colombia. If my death can heal and fortify the Union I go to my tomb in peace." 

Hmm, it seems to be hinting at some bad stuff going on, but there's definitely an optimistic veneer that warms the heart of anyone raised on stories of the American revolution. What else did he say though, in his letter to Juan Jose Flores, at that time President of Ecuador (Troy McLure: Hi, I'm Ecuador! You may remember me from such recent polities as the collapsed Republic of Gran Colombia).

1. America is ungovernable.

2. He who serves revolution plows the sea. 

3. All one can do in America is to leave it. 

4. The country is bound to fall into ungovernable chaos after which it will pass into the hands of  an undistinguishable string of tyrants of every color. 

5. Once we have been devoured by all manner of crime and reduced to a frenzy of violence, no one, not even the Europeans, will want a subjugate us. 

Or, as he put it elsewhere around the same time:

"There is no such thing as good faith in America. Treaties are worth little more than the paper they are printed on America. Constitutions are pamphlets, elections an excuse for war. Liberty has dissolved into anarchy, and for me life has become a torment."

Why would he give such a grim assessment?

Because the country had been through over 20 years of butchery, chaos and civil war! Duncan has a habit of throwing in one-off lines that are incredibly jarring but then never referring back to them in hours and hours of narrative. One of them (from memory) was that the process of independence killed roughly half the population (I think of Venezuela). That seems like a fact worth emphasizing more! I ran out of energy to track down exactly which line in which of the 27 episodes it was that he claimed this, or what specific region or time he has in mind, or what source. I am lazy. But the flip side here is that this is a fact that ought to be repeated every 30 minutes. "And then, the Second Republic of Venezuela was inaugurated, and by this time historians estimate the cumulated death toll of this experiment to be XXX".  Wikipedia is telling me the death toll is 600,000 for the wars of Spanish American independence, and while this applies to more than just Venezuela, it's a pretty reasonable number compared with the estimated population of Venezuela of 710,000 in 1810, with Colombia contributing maybe another 500,000, plus the other regions. So the "half" is looking dicey unless quite limited in geography. But can we agree that this cost of 600,000 corpses and decades of chaos is worse than the deadweight loss imposed by a trade monopoly and the other grab bag of abuses?

Nor was Bolivar merely an unwitting or accidental contributor to this. His hilariously named "Admirable campaign" where he led armies from New Granada against Royalist-held Venezuela involved him famously declaring a war to the death, where any Spanish-born civilian that didn't support his side was liable to be killed. This contributed mightily to the atmosphere of butchery and brutality that surrounded these campaigns. To take another reading of the atmosphere of these conflicts, consider the "Legions of Hell", the mixed-race Pardo army led by Jose Tomas Boves. Wikipedia charmingly describes their exploits thus:

Most striking to his contemporaries, however, was that he allowed his llanero soldiers to engage in a class and race war against the landed and urban classes of Venezuela, fulfilling the latter's fear, since 1810, that the revolution could devolve into another Haitian Revolution. ... Boves's army became feared for its liberal use of pillage and summary executions, which became notorious even in this period when such actions were common on both sides of the conflict.

But don't forget, the Spanish imposed trade monopolies!

And it's worth emphasizing that none of this was even what got Bolivar depressed at the end of his life. Rather, it's that once all these costs had been paid, and independence actually established, all these political projects kept collapsing into further wars, first against the remaining Royalist forces to drive them out over years and years, but then it quickly devolved into coups and wars between different generals, and wars between the newly independent countries in the region. 

It rather follows the immortal words of Brad Pitt in Se7en:

You're right. It's all fucked up. It's a fucking mess. We should all go live in a fucking log cabin.

But Duncan can't quite see it this way. He almost can. He can narrate the individual events just fine. But the sheer scale of the horror is something you need to keep reminding yourself of - that all these glorious civil wars of butchery between previously amicable groups of civilians are in fact monstrous and probably avoidable evils. Instead, the unironic use of the word "liberation" throughout the narrative, and the also unironic use of the word "treason" to describe the actions of generals who rebelled against Bolivar's rule, shows that Duncan just can't help identifying with the revolutionaries. He loves the idea of plucky natives throwing off the brutal yoke of colonial despotism, and so he can't bring himself to ever say cleanly what seems to me to be the obvious conclusion - that all of what we call "the struggle for independence" was in fact an atrocious disaster from start to finish, a horrible decades-long calamity besetting the region, whose disastrous consequences were, if not entirely predictable, then at least highly probable. This straightforward assessment is to be found nowhere in the Duncan description, and you in fact need to work quite hard as a critical listener to piece together this obvious summary.

I may have some instinctive support for the Royalist side, though I try to not let this sway my read of the story too much. But I don't know if Duncan makes the same attempt, or if he's just not very successful, or if his spin is just more jarring because it fits the modern hysterical and religious love of democracy and anti-colonialism, neither of which I share. His narrative has a strong sense that the revolutionaries are in some sense "our guys", even if they're not really our guys in any meaningful way and the only overlap is an unreciprocated sense of ideological overlap. It's rather akin to the way that Israeli conservatives are "our guys" for American conservatives - their victories don't actually get you anything concrete, but somehow you like them anyway and take vicarious enjoyment in their victories.

Bolivar, despite having a number of admirable character traits, comes across as someone so conceited with himself and his vision that he never seemed to notice that the carnage all around him was directly attributable to the schemes he was trying to implement. But it is always thus. A narcissist can feel shame, but never guilt. 

How do you reconcile these aspects of Bolivar's legacy? His force of personality, his revolutionary success, and his total failure to bring about his political vision, other than the narrowest definition of independence? One answer is just that it is easier to break things in war than to build them up. It is easier to tip over the apple cart of the existing order than it is built a nation. Credit where credit is due - it is not actually that easy to tip over the apple cart either, and Bolivar pulled off something that very few men would have been able to achieve. But more importantly, if one is actually a martian and if one actually doesn't care about any of the players involved or the causes involved, the immediate lesson is similar to the one from the French revolution - as your first order concern, all you want is to not have everything go off the rails. You do not want to be around for a revolution. 

Instead, the Duncan reading is that this is a noble endeavor that somehow worked out badly. It is not "I am a bad person". It is not even the narcissist's defensive cop-out when cornered- "I am not a bad person, but I somehow did a bad thing." No, it's even more risible - "I am a good person, and I actually did a good thing, notwithstanding that it led to very bad outcomes". The goodness, in other words, is measured only in the nobility of my convictions, and the warm, airy adjectives that get attached to the whole affair. At one point, he charitably assesses it thus:

Everything in South America always seems to be defined by those words - limited success.

Duncan is no fool though, and he's funny and perceptive in describing the outcomes. He just can't see the connection to the rest of the story. I find his summing up at the end great and revealing:

Now there is simply no way to account in any meaningful way for the subsequent 200 years of South American history. But Bolivar's final depressed vision of the future proved prophetic. 'The country is bound to fall into ungovernable chaos, after which it will pass into the hands of an undistinguishable string of tyrants of every color.' And that seems to about cover it. Ambitious warlords and treacherous politicians ensured that the nations Bolivar liberated never really enjoyed stability or unity of purpose. And the same was true across South America as for both the remainder of the 19th century and most of the 20th century, South America was racked by constant strife. Foreign wars and civil wars, annexations and counter-annexations, revolts, invasions, insurrections, repression, bankruptcy, and then let's do it all over again. In a macro way South America mirrors the course of Haiti, with its government and economy unstable, and at the mercy of European and North American merchants bankers and politicians who saw South America as a resource to be exploited not co-equal partners in the project of Western Civilization. 

If this is "limited success", I would hate to see what failure looked like.

In other words, Duncan can summarize the problems very pithily. But for him, these are problems that occur in spite of the revolution, not because of the revolution. No, they are the result of other forces - "ambitious warlords" and "treacherous politicians" and "European and North American merchant bankers and politicians". The latter being especially hilarious, because they play the most trivial of parts in this story up to now. Instead, they just sound like a cliche designed to appeal to what John Dolan called the liberal version of American exceptionalism - that America is uniquely responsible for all the evils in the world. It never seems to occur to Duncan that if this stuff happens for 200 years, maybe Bolivar himself was setting up the conditions of chaos and disorder into which it was extremely likely would step such a string of ambitious warlords and treacherous politicians and European and American merchant bankers. Maybe, indeed, we should actively fault the man who was instrumental in creating these conditions. 

In the end, Duncan ends up having the same assessment of anti-colonialism that, ironically, one of Joseph Conrad's characters in Heart of Darkness says about colonialism - that the idea alone redeems it.

At a certain point, however, when all your predictions keep being wrong, and those of all your critics keep being right, maybe your idea was just fundamentally mistaken. This is certainly true for anti-colonialism in the modern era. For the colonialists at the time, their perspectives are, if not lost to history, then certainly lost from the easy-to-find sources. There would be a great and tragic story to be written from the perspective Spanish Royalists, correctly assessing the nightmare that was coming, and watching their chances slowly slip away. But for the most part those men don't have names or stories - they are just the masses of "Spanish forces", where by the end even their leaders aren't considered important enough to describe in any detail.   

And after narrating such a dismal and grotesque tale, Duncan's final description of Bolivar is a great summary of so many of the intellectual pathologies of our time. 

I hope that... we can appreciate him as a man riding through difficult times, trying to take the world he inherited and turn it into a world that he dreamed of. Even if that project in the end only met with those fateful words, "limited success", he had done the one thing he had set out to do. He had liberated his country.  

He sure had.

Reader, you should pray, to whatever Gods you believe in, that nobody liberates yours. 

The Button C Option

As I've been forced to contemplate recently, otherwise sensible people in America love democracy. They'll look at the ridiculous farce that is the way government actually runs, and agree that it's a total goat rodeo. They'll reflect that their interactions with government are usually maddening, kafka-esque exercises in surrealism. And boy howdy will they vent at long length about the apotheosis of the US voting system, the current occupant of the White House.

And yet, when all that's done, they'll be genuinely shocked when you tell them you didn't vote, on principle, and that the whole idea strikes you as stupid.

In many ways, the tragedy is not just that people have such a misplaced, sentimental attachment to the current system.

Rather, the tragedy is a lazy form of status quo bias, where people can't conceive of any alternative to the status quo, unless it's already been tried. They fall back on that maddeningly stupid Churchill quote about democracy being the worst system of government except for all the rest.

As a side bar, whenever people say this, I like to remind them of what else Churchill said on the subject of democracy. He wrote an imagined conversation with his late father, Sir Randolph Churchill, which he only wanted to be published posthumously.

"War", he [Randolph] said, sitting up with a startled air. "War, do you say? Has there been a war?"
"We have had nothing else but wars since democracy took charge."
"You mean real wars, not just frontier expeditions? Wars where tens of thousands of men lose their lives?"
"Yes, indeed, Papa,", I said. "That's what has happened all the time. Wars and rumours of war ever since you died."
"Tell me about them."
"Well, first there was the Boer War."
"Ah, I would have stopped that. I never agreed with 'Avenge Majuba'.
...
It must have taken a lot of soldiers. How many? Forty thousand?'
"No, over a quarter of a million."
....
"But what happened in the Boer War?"
"We conquered the Transvaal and the Orange Free State."
"England never should have done that. To strike down two independent republics must have lowered our whole position in the world. It must have stirred up all sorts of things."
...
"What flag flies in Strasbourg now?"
"The Tricolor flies there."
"Ah, so they won. They had their revanche. That must have been a great triumph for them."
"It cost them their life blood", I said.
"But wars like these must have cost a million lives. They must have been as bloody as the American Civil War."
"Papa,", I said, "in each of them about thirty million men were killed in battle. In the last one seven million were murdered in cold blood, mainly by the Germans. They made human slaughterhouse pens like the Chicago stockyards. Europe is a ruin. Many of her cities have been blown to pieces by bombs. Ten capitals in Eastern Europe are now in Russian hands. They are Communists now, you know - Karl Marx and all that. It may well be that an even worse war is drawing near. A war of the East against the West. A war of liberal civilisation against the Mongol Hordes. Far gone are the days of Queen Victoria and a settled world order. But having gone through so much, we do not despair."

He seemed stupefied, and fumbled with his matchbox for what seemed a minute or more. Then he said:
"Winston, you have told me a terrible tale. I would never have believed that such things could happen. I am glad I did not live to see them."

Tell me, dear reader, when you compare the above passage to his celebrated one-line quip, which one seems closer to a raw, honest assessment of the matter? And which one sounds like a punch line to gin up the rubes?

The most important starting point, which I'm always trying to find different ways to impart, is to dislodge the idea that we've exhausted all possible alternatives in the search space of types of government.

Suppose we have an evolutionary process, where different places find different types of government, and the more successful ones reproduce and crowd out the weaker ones.

If we had that, then perhaps we would observe what we find today - the seemingly richest places tend to all love voting.

But to be convinced that you're at an optimum, you need to have faith that there actually is a genuine search process across the range of governments. That the prevalence of democracy is the result of a genuine optimisation, not just military imposition.

To my mind, I see shockingly little experimentation with genuinely different forms of government, even at small scales.

And when one does find stuff that seems pretty good, and doesn't fit the modern narrative of how to produce strong governance (British Hong Kong, Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore, the late Austrian Empire), for some reason that doesn't raise any curiosity as to whether these might work in the modern west, or what other variants might be possible.

So along those lines, here's a Holmes thought experiment that I find works quite well to at least get people thinking.Take a generally educated person, liberal or conservative, and present them with the following.

Suppose we have an election, and there are several buttons you can pick.

Button A gets you Hillary Clinton as president.

Button B gets you Donald Trump as president.

Button C randomly selects a CEO of an S&P 500 company, and (assuming they're willing), makes them president, with another similarly chosen CEO as vice-president. (If you want to be be more stringent, require that their firm's stock return has beaten the S&P 500 Total Return Index for the past 5 years)

Button D is the same as Button C, except it also gives the new CEO-president essentially dictatorial powers - they have a fixed term of office, but they can do everything they could do as a corporate CEO, including setting budgets, firing anyone they want, determining organizational policy - the whole lot.

These are the options on offer.

Me? I'm a Button D guy.

I can definitely see the argument for Button C.

But I'm utterly mystified as to why anyone would pick Button A or Button B.

Actually, this is not quite true - most major companies are chock full of pozz and stupidity, as hilariously documented by the twitter feed Woke Capital. So maybe a CEO would be more leftist, and if someone wanted to argue strongly for Trump instead of Button C, I could understand.

Nonetheless, I think we can agree that to most people, Buttons C and D present as fairly compelling possibilities.

Meanwhile, the Holmes experiment is a very minimal modification to the current one. Take the options from the last presidential election, which everyone was so jazzed up over. And just add a few more. Nobody likes them? Nobody votes for them! Problem solved. As the economists say, what we have is simply a degenerate case of the Holmes plan (for both meanings of the term "degenerate", as it turns out).

But both Buttons C and D select for several very good things.

First, competence. The person is actually able to run a major corporation.

Second, they don't actually want the job. Anyone desperate enough to go through the total farce that is the years long presidential selection process is probably so narcissistic and desperate that I don't think I want them to actually be in charge. It's a variant on the Groucho Marx quip - the club shouldn't let in anyone too desperate to be in the club.

Third, (and this is something that the right probably has to grudgingly admit) gravitas. This is something always worth emphasising to Dems. Whether you like Trump or hate Trump, it is hard not to see him as a significant step down the road towards President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho from the movie Idiocracy. The guy appeared on WWE, for crying out loud. Meanwhile, Marcus Aurelius wrote one of the classics of stoic philosophy as a personal journal that he didn't intend anyone to see, while leading active Roman military campaigns. I'm just saying, it wouldn't hurt to aim a little higher in terms of kingliness.

And fourth, (this is more Button D specific), simply having unified authority and responsibility would be such an improvement on the current debacle that I'd be willing to roll the dice (literally) on which competent executive gets to run it.

But if you decide Button D is too risky - hey, I understand! That's why I'm willing to compromise on something moderate and reasonable, like Button C.

And in my experience, a surprisingly large fraction of educated people will agree that Button C would be a superior technology to our current system.

Which gets to the point, that I like to drive home.

We could actually have Button C if we wanted to.

There's no technological obstacle. I'll write the code that scrapes the list of names and draws from the Excel random number generator. It won't take take me long.

And if you're willing to seriously contemplate Button C, why are you so attached to the nonsense that we have now? Why do you keep unthinkingly repeating that democracy is the best system of government possible?

In case it wasn't obvious, I don't at all think that either Button C or Button D is anywhere near the best we can do.

But they're not crazy. And if they spur people to think of better variations... mission accomplished.

Chesterton’s Fence and Democracy

Among those passages that resonate with those of a conservative temperament, one of my favourites has to be Chesterton’s Fence.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

Do not, in other words, argue from a position of ignorance. It is not enough to know what you dislike about some existing arrangement. You have to know its strengths, especially those which might have justified the policy’s existence. This is the engineer’s version of the Ideological Turing Test. You need to be able to make the best case possible for the existence of the status quo. Only then will you know what is being given up.

As I have written about in these pages before, I find the democratic process to be ridiculous. It seems incredibly unlikely that this is the optimal way to govern a country, but since it’s been imbued with a religious and moral sheen, not many people are able to think seriously about the possibility of getting rid of it, let alone what might replace it (other than braindead answers like ‘tyranny’). As a result, there is extraordinarily little experimentation with genuinely different forms of government.

So we know what we don’t like. But we have to pass the Chesterton Critique. Do we know why democracy, at least in its modern incarnation of the civil service state, works as well as it does? Do we know what aspects we might be losing? This is especially important, because we need to know what kind of traits to try to include in a replacement system. Or if it’s not possible to include all the benefits, we need to know what should be included in the costs column of any reform.

Now, this is different from the Ideological Turing Test, because we are not asked to give the answer that its supporters will give. This is likely to be faulty and delusional. Rather, we want the engineer’s answer, like Maine. We want to know what defense Machiavelli might make. We want to know, in other words, not the democrat's defense of democracy in America. We want to know the reactionary’s defense of democracy.

Here is one answer. I propose to make another.

Democracy holds out the fig leaf of minor, token power to all citizens. Individually, you have a voice. “Your voice matters!”, it cries out. Of course, everyone knows that individually their voice doesn’t matter, but collectively perhaps their voices do matter.

That is the fiction. I, and Moldbug, suspect that the people’s voices collectively don’t matter that much. The permanent civil service and the rest of the cathedral hold most of the levers of power. We are, of course, about to see this idea tested in the Trump Presidency. I forget who exactly wrote this (apologies!), but if Trump wins and proceeds to rule, then Moldbug was wrong. It’s entirely possible, and something on which I’m agnostic (though my best guess is that it won’t happen).

But let’s take the Moldbug hypothesis for now. Voting collectively doesn’t matter. Why might it be useful to keep this mechanism in place?

One trick that the makes of air conditioners for office buildings figured out a while ago is that people have endless fights about the temperature of offices. At almost any temperature, some people find it intolerably cold, and others are roasting. But oddly, people got much happier when they had entirely fake thermostats installed. My office has one. There’s a temperature dial you can fiddle with, and even a button you can press that causes a light to come on for 30 seconds, just to show that it’s hooked up to something, if not actually the air conditioner. On further reflection, it's preposterous. What exactly is this button meant to do? Is it an 'on' button? If so, do I need to press it every 30 seconds, because it keeps going off.

But having these buttons and thermostats there makes people feel like they’re able to do something. It channels their complaints and rage, which previous would have been directed at each other, management, facilities and whoever else, into fiddling with a harmless switch, which they never quite know if it actually does anything or not. Even if they suspect it doesn’t, periodically they’ll fiddle with it, because why not try anyway? Maybe it's the mysterious button, perhaps I need to press it in addition to fiddling with the thermostat. Your voice matters for office temperature!

Voting for candidates in an election is the fake air conditioner switch of the political world. Instead of throwing rocks at the police, or burning down the capital, or plotting a coup, people keep fiddling with their individual political thermostat. This channels their energy into harmless pursuits. But it also increases actual satisfaction, even given the current policies! Often, people aren’t able to accurately perceive the world around them, so may not even know exactly if things have changed. But if they can do something, and see some minor visible effect in the world around them, such as the thermostat being higher or one of “their guys” in charge, they feel happier.

But viewed in this light, it’s easy to see that not all forms of voting will be equally successful at generating this pattern. A key part is that the choice space of actions must be fairly crude, and the measurement of consequences rather difficult. Direct democracy, such as through ballot initiatives, is very destabilizing in this regard. When citizens can form their own specific formulations, firstly they demand quite specific things (“No gay marriage in California”), which are easy to tell if they’re not being implemented. As a result, when the powers that be decide that the peasants’ games have gone too far, they must be explicitly cracked down on, when judges remind people who is actually in charge. Do that too often, and people might figure out that the thermostat isn’t actually connected to anything.

But if you only give people a periodic choice every four years, and they only get one single ‘A or B’ choice placed in front of them, AND their choice is only to launder what they want done through the will of a president or prime minister, who may or may not have been sincere, may or may not have just changed his mind after voting, may or may not have had enough support from within his own party… well, it suddenly becomes very hard to show definitively that the voting didn’t make any difference.

And so the system is stable. Dissent is channeled into harmless outlets, and it stays there because nobody can every quite prove that the outlets are indeed harmless.

But even more than that, there’s a genius that comes from the nature of voting itself. Specifically, it’s a participatory act. And not only that, it’s costly. You have to get off your butt, drive to the primary school, and fill in the damn form.

Cognitive dissonance being what it is, people who have wasted their time filling out a form will convince themselves that the form is actually a really important practical and moral act. Otherwise, why have I been doing it for so long, wasting my time on it? In other words, by making the action slightly costly, people are even more likely to tell themselves absurd stories about how voting can actually change the world.

Now, this is something that is harder to achieve in a monarchy. The King explicitly wants it known that he is in charge. If you dislike the King, stiff $*** – he’s the King, and you’re a peasant. Now, with a sufficiently stable power structure, this is okay. But it means that the peasants have to obey out of either a) inherent loyalty and love for the ruler, and/or b) fear of punishment. Do these right, and they should be enough. But there’s an extra insurance policy of having a system that fools some fraction of the potential mob into thinking that they either ARE already in charge, or can be if they just sit patiently and keep pressing the right button every four years.

Sovereign corporations offer people a different bargain – you can’t choose how the country is run, but you can choose if you want to stay. This may well be fine too.

Again, none of this means that we shouldn’t ditch democracy. We just should know what we’ll be losing, and ponder if there's any way to replicate it in what we'd like to create.

The second large benefit I can see is what I think of in my crude financial terms as the analysts consensus forecast problem, or the wisdom of crowds. Suppose every analyst observes the true earnings estimate with some independent error term. Then the average of many analysts will be more accurate than any individual analyst.

Now, you might think that I am arguing that the average person will be wise in what policies to implement, but that is not my purpose at all. Unlike the analysts version above, not all electors are equally informed about policy. If many of your analysts are morons, you probably want to exclude them entirely.

So what are voters actually good at knowing? Pretty much only one thing – whether their life has gotten crappy recently, or whether it’s improving. They may know something of the specific cause, or they may not. They are unlikely to have much useful to add about how things need to change. But if you just want to find out how the overall realm is going, a vote is not a bad option.

Think of voting it as a button labeled ‘Throw the Bums Out’. By voting for the incumbent, they’re saying they’re happy. By voting for the other guy, they’re not. Not only do you get information about the aggregate answer to this question, but with exit polling, you can approximately figure out who was unhappy, which might tell you why.

The problem for a king is that this kind of knowledge is dispersed over the whole kingdom. It’s the standard central planner’s problem, and why you want to rely on prices. Think of voting as like a very crude version of average opinion for the ‘Do things need changing?’ question.

Of course, viewed from this angle, what we really want is just an opinion poll. And ideally we'd like to ask a lot more detailed questions, rather than just one. Perhaps something more like the census. But if there’s one thing the Trump election showed, it’s that people sometimes falsify opinions to pollsters, especially when they have to answer in person. The trusted anonymity of the polling both means you get a) genuine answers, even if they’re misguided, and b) avoid the sampling error from limited polling.

Now, you definitely don’t want this kind of voting mechanism hooked up to the actual levers of power. But it’s the kind of information that a genuinely benevolent leader would want to collect in some form or another. It doesn’t need to look like voting, but something to achieve a similar effect is probably useful. It helps solve the hubris that comes along with absolute power – when you feel you’re a genius, and all your underlings are sycophants, how will you actually find out if your policies aren’t having the intended effect? Turns out it’s not so easy, until one day you're on the palace balcony giving a speech, the peasants start jeering, and suddenly the jig is up. Woe be to the leader who forgets to find out the real opinions of his peasantry.

These are surely not an exhaustive list. Out of the two broad classes, I think the ‘harmless outlet for dissent’ is considerably more important. But it’s a problem worth pondering.

‘Tear Down This Wall!’ makes for great rhetoric. But it should be the last stage of a lot of reasoning.

On Maine and Moldbug

Continuing my foray into the illustrious brotherhood of the Froude Society, I’ve been reading Popular Government by Sir Henry Sumner Maine.

To read these books is to see the genesis of Unqualified Reservations – not that these books exactly mirror Moldbug, but one can see where some of the ideas come from. Of course, part of what makes Moldbug so fascinating for most people to read is that the ideas are so radically different to what one normally comes across. One of the meta points of Unqualified Reservations, encapsulated in the dictum to ‘Read Old Books’, is that if one reads the same thing as everyone else, one is likely to think the same thing as everyone else. Sufficiently old ideas when sincerely expressed are apt to strike you as more shocking and new than anything else you will encounter.

And the strongest all-pervading sense wherein Maine (writing in 1885) departs from modernity is his willingness to view democracy with the cold eyes of a political engineer. In the starkest terms possible, Maine writes as if the entire democratic process has no moral component whatsoever, either positive or negative. Voting is not a sacred duty, a fundamental right, an ennobling and dignifying symbol of equality, or any of the other hoary notions that today have been attached to the term. So what is it then?

Political liberty, said Hobbes, is political power. When a man burns to be free, he is not longing for the "desolate freedom of the wild ass" ; what he wants is a share of political government.

Can you imagine a more bracing tonic than that? When you say “I want to be free” or wear your “I voted” sticker, you are really saying “I covet political power”. Not so ennobling when phrased that way, is it? There is nothing wrong with power, of course. Someone has to have it. But the pursuit of it is hardly considered a morally virtuous cause.

Democracy, then, is merely one of a number of possible ways of governing the state, whose outcomes should be judged solely on those terms:

There is no word about which a denser mist of vague language, and a larger heap of loose metaphors, has collected. Yet, although Democracy does signify something indeterminate, there is nothing vague about it. It is simply and solely a form of government. It is the government of the State by the Many, as opposed, according to the old Greek analysis, to its government by the Few, and to its government by One. … Democracy is best described as inverted Monarchy.

We have grown up viewing democracy with a diet of rhetoric that resembles the way that a love poem describes a human body. And here, for the first time, is an anatomy textbook. To a modern western audience, this is a somewhat jarring perspective.

Maine is also unsparing in pointing out where the democratic principle, when analysed, fails to make sense. Firstly, if the people are actually wise in their judgments, why do their judgments have to be laundered through the process of first electing representatives, to whom are delegated general decision-making authority? This argument becomes even more forceful as the possibility of online elections makes frequent plebiscites cheaper and more practical. As Maine notes

The arguments of the French Liberal party against the Plebiscite, during the twenty years of stern despotism which it entailed upon France, have always appeared to me to be arguments in reality against the very principle of democracy.

Indeed.

Similar important questions get raised by the existence of second legislative chambers, such as Senates, which have different electoral rules to the lower Houses.

Nothing brings out so clearly as does this class of contrivances a fundamental doubt afflicting the whole Democratic theory. It is taken for granted that a popular electorate will be animated by a different spirit according as it is grouped; but why should there be any connection between the grouping of the People and the Voice of the People? The truth is, that as soon as we begin to reflect seriously on modes of practically applying the democratic principle, we find that some vital preliminary questions have never been settled. Granting that the People is entitled of right to govern, how is it to give its decisions and orders? …
Vox Populi may be Vox Dei, but very little attention shows that there never has been any agreement as to what Vox means or as to what Populus means. 

Maine also has some brilliant analyses of the flaws of direct democracy, though a powerful comparison to the jury system. It is a long passage, but one worth quoting in full:

We have in England a relic of the ancient Popular Justice in the functions of the Jury. The Jury-technically known as the "country"-is the old adjudicating Democracy, limited, modified, and improved, in accordance with the principles suggested by the experience of centuries, so as to bring it into harmony with modern ideas of judicial efficiency. The change which has had to be made in it is in the highest degree instructive. The Jurors are twelve, instead of a multitude. Their main business is to say "Aye" or "No" on questions which are doubtless important, but which turn on facts arising in the transactions of everyday life. In order that they may reach a conclusion, they are assisted by a system of contrivances and rules of the highest artificiality and elaboration. An expert presides over their investigations-the Judge, the representative of the rival and royal justice-and an entire literature is concerned with the conditions under which evidence on the facts in dispute may be laid before them. There is a rigid exclusion of all testimony which has a tendency to bias them unfairly. They are addressed, as of old, by the litigants or their advocates, but their inquiry concludes with a security unknown to antiquity, the summing-up of the expert President, who is bound by all the rules of his profession to the sternest impartiality. If he errs, or if they flagrantly err, the proceedings may be quashed by a superior Court of experts. Such is Popular Justice, after ages of cultivation. 

Now it happens that the oldest Greek poet has left us a picture, certainly copied from reality, of what Popular Justice was in its infancy. The primitive Court is sitting; the question is"guilty" or "not guilty." The old men of the community give their opinions in turn; the adjudicating Democracy, the commons standing round about, applaud the opinion which strikes them most, and the applause determines the decision. The Popular Justice of the ancient republics was essentially of the same character The adjudicating Democracy simply followed the opinion which most impressed them in the speech of the advocate or litigant.

Nor is it in the least doubtful that, but for the sternly repressive authority of the presiding Judge, the modern English Jury would, in the majority of cases, blindly surrender its verdict to the persuasiveness of one or other of the counsel who have been retained to address it.

A modern governing democracy is the old adjudicating democracy very slightly changed.

This is one of the great damning critiques of the modern democratic process. It is obvious to all contemporary readers what a travesty of justice it would be to substitute the modern jury system for the old one. It is also quite apparent that Maine’s final point is right – modern voting for the president looks a lot like ancient Greek justice. Is the fate of an entire people less important than the fate of a single defendant?

It is the interest in these kinds of possible modifications that makes the engineering side of Maine most apparent. While Maine is highly skeptical of democracy by the standards of modernity, by the standards of Moldbug he is actually an optimist. He thinks that democracy can be improved, and its weaknesses at least tempered by good design. For instance, he is optimistic about representative government relative to direct democracy – as he notes, “the effect was to diminish the difficulties of popular government, in exact proportion to the diminution in the number of persons who had to decide public questions.” Similarly, Maine is also enthusiastic about US State constitutions which specify formal procedures for their amendment. This is viewed as being a superior process to the ambiguity of the British process.

With the benefit of 130 years of hindsight, of course, it is easier to observe the failure modes that Maine didn’t foresee. What if, instead of formally amending the constitution, legislatures simply passed laws that exceeded the initial bounds, and then further appointed compliant judges who were on board with the ruling ideology and believed in things like ‘living constitutions’?

Or, more radically, what if the ruling party simply decided to replace the electorate through mass immigration? This has been the story of the latter half of the 20th Century. Maine understood the incentives to modify the franchise, but modifying the population itself was a leap of imagination that even he didn’t consider.

And this is where the comparison with Moldbug becomes instructive. Moldbug is a pessimist about the entire democratic process. Cthulu swims left, as the now famous expression goes. Democracy is, in other words, a fundamentally left wing phenomenon that will sooner or later produce left wing outcomes. As a result, the failure modes themselves are inevitable (according to Moldbug), not merely possible. The franchise will never be stable, as the incentives to expand it will always be present. Maine, for instance, speaks with some praise about Belgian suffrage restrictions that limit the vote to those with an education. That this would be desirable seems highly likely. But would it be stable, even if it were passed? This is the crucial question which Maine doesn’t address, and which Moldbug does quite forcefully in the negative. And when suffrage gets expanded, the decisions will shift to the lowest common denominator, or be usurped by the constant meddling with public opinion. On this last point, Maine agrees – with the mass franchise, leadership will be by “the wire-pullers”, a wonderful description of modern democratic leaders and political operatives. But Maine doesn’t get to the point of outright condemnation. To an engineer, the building that is the American constitution has survived a lot longer than what would have been predicted, and so must have something going for it. In the later stages of the US Empire, this may strike us as optimistic, but we can’t fault Maine for not foreseeing the entire future.

But the comparison with Moldbug is not universally to Moldbug’s advantage. Because, despite the large overlap between their worldviews, the two writers have one important philosophical difference. If Maine is an engineer of government, then Moldbug is more like a scientist of government. A scientist aims to develop a theory that will help him understand the world, from which practical results can then be deduced. An engineer views scientific knowledge as a means to constructing something durable, but it is only a means to an end. Kludges and rules of thumb are acceptable to engineers, but are anathema to scientists, to whom they represent only incomplete understanding.

The engineering side of Maine, which overlaps with the historian side of Froude, depicts political power as something not entirely subject to formula. One can shape it and set rules, but, like an engineer’s buildings, governing structures will eventually collapse, despite the best of intentions. In particular, the question of who holds true power in Maine's descriptions is often difficult to ascertain at any point in time, and there can be considerable ambiguity on that point. For instance, consider Maine’s description of the history of the powers of the English King:

The powers over legislation which the law recognizes in the Crown are its power to veto Bills which have passed both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and its power to dissolve Parliament. The first of these powers has probably been lost through disuse. There is not, at the same time, the smallest reason for supposing that it was abandoned through any inconsistency with popular government. It was not employed, because there was no occasion for employing it.

As to the right to dissolve Parliament by an independent exercise of the royal will, it cannot be quite confidently asserted to have become obsolete. The question has been much discussed in the Colonies which attempt to follow the British Constitutional procedure, and it seems to be generally allowed that a representative of the Crown cannot be blamed for insisting on a dissolution of the Legislature, though his Ministers are opposed to it. It is probable, however, that in this country the object would be practically attained in a different way.

This is a very different world from the world of absolute power, or even absolute certainty about the distribution of power. Even if a King starts with a given set of powers, according to Maine, he may lose them simply through lack of use. And the most shocking word here is ‘probably’. Maine is implying that because the right to dismiss Parliament hasn’t been tested in a while, we actually don’t know if it still would be followed. His descriptions of how the Cabinet ended up arising out of nothing to effectively set the legislative agenda, while the House of Commons mostly ended up questioning the executive branch, is similarly fascinating and nuanced. You can set up a system in a way, and it can actually work in that way for a while, but then at some point things might change in practice, even as the same nominal roles are all there.

This kind of real world ambiguity and nuance is sometimes missing in Moldbug’s writing. The CEO of a neocameral state is described as being all powerful, subject to the possibility of board dismissal. Presumably he can order half the population shot if he wants, unless the board fires him before it gets carried out. He won’t have incentives to do this, of course, and Moldbug makes a convincing argument that this is the only real bulwark against abuses of authority. But if our CEO deems it to be value-maximising, the power is there. Of course, at the moment our neocameral CEO is only a hypothetical figure, and so it's easy to grant him hypothetical absolute power. But how do we know that things will actually work out that way? The critique of neocameralism that usually gets leveled is 'Do we want this to happen, or will it lead to undesirable outcomes?'. But there's a second possible question - 'Even if we do want this, can we actually create it?'. I don't mean rhetorically that it's obvious that we can't, merely that it isn't a given.

In other words, when the rubber hits the road, if the CEO gives the order to fire on the crowd at the football game because he thinks it will increase shareholder value, do the security forces actually shoot? And what happens next if they don't? Until you're a CEO commanding a drone army, there’s only human beings all the way down, and either they follow, or they don’t. Sometimes, you just won’t know until you give the order. And this is a problem that, no matter how much we might like it, I suspect we can’t simply engineer away with cryptographically locked weapons. Moldbug is brilliant, don’t get me wrong, and his imagination of how different forms of government might work is second to none. But there is sometimes an absolutism in his descriptions of how governing arrangements might work that doesn’t seem to fit Maine’s descriptions of the nuances of actual power.

Of course, with the extra century's knowledge to guide us, Maine sometimes falls victim to the same trap, he’s just enamored of different restrictions. In particular, his praise for the way that the US Federal Constitution sets out specific enumerated powers and structures (relative to the ambiguity of the British system) seems to have been optimistic even at the time. If he'd written the book after FDR, I suspect there's a few sections that might read quite differently.

And if there is a general delineation of where Maine seems to be more optimistic about how formal arrangements can limit and define government structures, it is regarding America. His analysis of Britain notes much of the deterioration of democratic governance, and he hadn't yet witnessed the full decline of the previous American governing structures (other than the Civil War, which he addresses relatively briefly, and seems oddly to think of as merely a temporary disruption to the same basic structure). Noting the big difference between the two countries, Maine attributes the relative success and consistency of American governing arrangements to the fact that its powers and structures were formalised, while Britain's were mostly established through tradition and tacit understanding. With the benefit of hindsight, this makes Maine overestimate how much the formal structures actually prevented the same trends, as opposed to perhaps just delaying them somewhat, or maybe even not achieving that. It turns out the piece of paper didn’t restrict government power after all, as Moldbug has been at pains to point out.

But doubt not that Maine is brilliant, and his depictions of the folly and stupidity of the democratic process are incisive and illuminating. Skip the travesty of election coverage these next two weeks and read some Maine instead.

Your Opinion Doesn't Matter

In the psychology of the west in the 21st century, two characteristics predominate.

First, this is the age of democracy.

Second, this is the age of narcissism.

And the coexistence of both does not seem to be a coincidence.

As far as I can tell, the actual value of holding regular elections is to flatter the conceit of the individual voters so that they feel important and don't revolt. Look at these powerful people, groveling to you, promising you things! They're in a VFW Hall somewhere in Ohio, eating terrible rubber chicken, nodding and pretending to care about your concerns. Some day they'll be president, but right now they're kissing your @$$. Admittedly, all the voting you did in the past somehow didn't manage to solve your problems, but surely this time will be different.

The slogan for all this nonsense is 'your opinion matters'. This comes in minor variants like 'your voice matters' or 'your vote matters', but the 'opinion' version is the favored generic variant. This is because 'opinion' requires the least possible effort on your part - you don't have to yell, like with a voice, or heaven forbid actually do something like waste an hour on some Tuesday in November. Your thoughts alone are so valuable that the powerful cannot wait to turn to you in order to hear them.

This is an obvious lie, easily identified as such.

The first clue is this exact phrase is frequently used by spam marketers trying to get you to click on online polls. It's almost like they've figured out that people are susceptible to empty flattery about the importance of their political opinions, and use this to infect their computers with malware. Hey, if they'll turn up when the government pulls this nonsense, why not us too? You can hardly blame them for thinking this, not least because they tend to be right.

But more importantly, the idea that your opinion matters violates the poker rule of relative naivete. The old advice in poker was that at every table, there is a mark - a rube or fool who doesn't know how to play the game, and that people will target to make money off. Play a few hands at a table. If after that time you haven't figured out who the mark is, the mark is you, and you should probably leave.

So in the game of politics, do you know who the mark is? Do you know who is being conned in the political process? Doubt not that professional politicians know who they think is being conned. The rich donors know who they think is being conned. The professional political advisers and lobbyists know who they think is being conned. Admittedly, they may not agree with respect to the position of each other - like in any poker game, overconfidence is rife, and most people think they're the best player at the table.

But they also all agree that one of the people clearly being conned is you, John Q. Citizen voter and taxpayer. And be honest - you don't have a clear idea of who is being conned, do you Citizen? Should this concern you? I feel it should.

I do like asking ardent demotists if their voice matters. They usually laugh, knowing the inherent ridiculousness of the question, but are reluctant to explicitly disclaim it.

Not only does your voice not matter individually, your voices barely even matter collectively. The permanent establishment of the civil service, courts, media and universities will continue on their merry way regardless. This is why you can elect Obama and find out, puzzlingly, that eight years later Guantanamo is still open and Americans are still dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. And this is in foreign policy, where the president apparently has the most freedom of action.

But in case the appeal to the importance of your ideas fails, there is a second plank of appeal to the importance of voting - that it is your civic duty. And people who may scorn the first appeal nonetheless seem susceptible to the second. To wit, voting shows how noble and civic-minded you are. Do you love your society? Then waste an hour of your life pressing a button for whichever of the two fools on stage you happen to detest less. Surely you are too responsible to not vote, citizen?

It's narcissism all the way down.

When I started reading more reactionary literature and being convinced by the arguments therein, it was oddly relieving to find out that my opinion does not matter. One no longer needs to feel personally involved or aggrieved by any of the nonsense of the political process. I feel no need to waste any more hours of this short and rapidly passing life worrying about exactly what Donald Trump did or didn't say in the most recent news cycle.

That's for the marks who feel that their vote matters.

This may sound like a call to passivism, that nothing at all matters, but it is not.

Your actions may very well matter. This is particularly true if enough of you act together.

But pressing the button for Kang or Kodos every four years seems unlikely to be one such action.

No Exit, Part 2: Coups

Last time I tackled the question of exit, we talked about the feasibility of secession, and how I thought that scenario would play out (short version: not likely, because the government will use the courts to pre-emptively squelch any peaceful way of achieving it).

But the other exit possibility is to take over some other crummy country via a coup. How might that play out?

Let's ignore the question of the logistics of the coup itself. This is hard to judge - on the one hand, there are lots of possible basket case countries out there to target. But the leaders of those countries, even if their countries are ramshackle, will likely have a lot more manpower on the ground. Taking over from the outside is likely to be hard. Just ask Sir Mark Thatcher.

The more interesting question would be what happens afterwards if you actually succeed, and set up your reactionary state in some or other Godforsaken part of earth? Could such a state survive? Would the US let it?

Like in the case of secession, it's hard to tell, because there's no direct example to compare.  One has to go off various different responses to similar cases.

Given that one is presumably limited to taking over a basket case country, the first point to note, which may seem trivial, is that the political fallout from the US would probably vary greatly with the ethnicity of the host country.

Put simply, the west would simply not stand for a white unelected leader of an African country. Just ask Ian Smith or P W Botha. The West treated Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa with a hateful vitriol that they never quite mustered for the Soviets, and those places were still partly democratic. Unless you were able to immediately turn yourself into North Korea, mostly self-sufficient and able to threaten to bring the crazy,  you could expect the full fury of the US to destroy you as soon as they could.

Unelected whites ruling over blacks simply sets off too many slavery alarm bells. Of course, if pressed nobody would say that's it's actually morally preferable for unelected whites to rule over Hispanics, South-East Asians, or Pacific Islanders. But the modern world being what it is, I somehow doubt that a coup in Fiji or Honduras would trigger quite the same visceral response.

Even better, pick somewhere dysfunctional that's  full of vaguely white people (Belarus? Turkmenistan?), or have a person of the same skin color (and ideally the same nationality as well) to lead the coup. That would help neutralise the imperialism/racism angle. The world would still be pissed, but at least you'd take away their biggest propaganda card against you.

Would that be sufficient? Hard to say, but probably not. The State Department may not actually assert control over the entire planet, but they sure as hell don't like it when you do things without consulting them first.

My basis for thinking this is the response they had to a grimly hilarious story from last December where a bunch of Ghanaian-born US citizens decided to launch a coup against the dictator of that country.

Seriously, check out this great long report on it from the Guardian. It's amazing stuff. The whole thing is like something from a Steve Sailer content generator - invade the world, invite the world. There's even a bizarre government-funded diversity angle, as one of the main financial backers of the coup made his money through getting government grants to build "affordable housing" projects in mostly white areas of Texas.

Meanwhile, the main focus of the article is about a man called Njaga Jagne, about whom the Guardian can speak more freely since he died in the coup attempt. He was a US National Guard member who served in Iraq. Iraq, as you'll no doubt remember in between the never-ending reports about ISIS, was the US's way of bringing the glories of multiparty democracy to a ramshackle dictatorship in the Middle East, as part of the crucial 'Bombing Muslims for Freedom' campaign.

Well, unfortunately Njaga imbibed the democracy Kool-Aid a little more deeply than the powers that be wanted him to. Hey, if it's such a good thing to turn dictatorships into democracies, surely the US government would be happy if I did this myself, right? After all, they've already employed me to do this once.

Yeah, it turns out, not so much.

The first problem, it seems, was plotting the coup on Facebook. Good thinking! Nobody else could infiltrate that. Things went as well as you might expect when they turned up

He and Njaga went with the team that approached the front door, while Faal went with the team taking the rear. The plan was for Njaga to fire his M4 rifle once in the air as a signal to their Gambian collaborators. But when the shot went up, the guards out front instead opened fire on him.

Afterwards, the survivors came to the bitter conclusion that they had been betrayed. But by whom? They blamed Sanneh’s moles. Some also wondered why Faal had turned himself in so quickly. But Faal told me that when he was flown back to the US and told his story to FBI agents, they indicated they had been aware of the plot all along. He claims that without prompting, they held up a picture of Njie, and asked: “Is this Dave?”

In May, the Washington Post reported that the FBI had visited Sanneh at his home in Maryland prior to his departure, asking why he had purchased a plane ticket to Dakar. The agency alerted the State Department, the Post reported, which in turn “secretly tipped off” an unnamed west African country – generally presumed to be Senegal – in the hope that it would intercept Sanneh. The coup plotters suspect that the information instead ended up in Jammeh’s [the dictator's] hands. 

Huh! It's almost like the State Department doesn't like people engaging in freelance foreign policy.

Also, how dumb do you have to be that when you're being asked questions by the FBI about the purpose of your coup-related plane trip, you aren't able to piece together the possibility that something has gone wrong in the op-sec process?

Amid the frantic uncertainty, Sigga [Njaga's sister] called the US embassy in Banjul. “They were more focused on saying, ‘If your brother is involved, it was a crime,’” she said. 

You don't say.

Talk about some stone cold diplomacy - the dead guy's sister is on the phone, and you're focused on imparting the message that the Federal Government plans to indict his corpse.

It all seems quite reminiscent of the police response to the Texas secessionists - woe be to the people that threaten the hegemony of the US Federal Government.

When the US says that it's important that all the countries of the world become democratic, what they mean is that it's important that the US make them democratic, on the US's terms.

This is very different from, say, the Russians organising a referendum for the people of Donetsk in the Ukraine to vote if they'd like to become part of Russia. THAT kind of democracy is far more problematic.

And some random pissant US National Guardsman deciding to create democracy himself in Gambia? That, my friend, simply will not fly.

I quite enjoyed the Moldbug quip that:

[T]he phrase "international community" could be profitably replaced, in all contexts, by "State Department," without any change in meaning.

I once told this line to a friend of mine who actually works for State. He laughed and said it was mostly true, in the inimitable way of diplomats in private circles who are glad to have an excuse to partially acknowledge from the mouths of others things that it would be imprudent for them to note themselves.

The international community takes coups very seriously, citizen. So if you're going to plan one, you need to think not just about how to take over, but how to resist the full might of the US government once you do. There are no partially sovereign nations. Either you have the ability to tell the US government to go screw themselves, or you don't. It would serve you well beforehand to figure out which of the two categories you fall into.

It's the US Government's world. We just live in it.

No Exit, Part 1: Secession

The two broad political ways that reactionaries talk about changing one's circumstances are voice (influencing the political environment where you are) and exit (leaving for a different political environment).

As far as I can tell, one of the main distinctions between conservatives and reactionaries is that the latter believe that voice is mostly a dead end under current political arrangements. There is little to hope for from the democratic process, except perhaps as a longshot mechanism for abolishing the democratic process itself. As a result, politics quickly becomes uninteresting, except as a sideshow and a freakshow. When one abandons the conceit that one's voice matters, why in the name of all that is holy would you voluntarily watch three hours of Republican candidates' debates? Have you read all the great books already? Is there really nothing else better on Netflix?

Okay, so what of exit?

Well, this can take several forms, none of them particularly likely.

At the mild end is moving to another, more acceptable, state. Though this presupposes you can find one to your taste (maybe Texas) that will stay that way (whoops, cancel Texas - with current immigration patterns, anyone want to wager on it still being a red state in 20 years?). The slightly more interesting version of this is the Free State Project - get enough like-minded people to move to one small state (in this case, New Hampshire) and vote to change it. You're still under the Federal Government, but it's a start.

But what else? Move to a more reactionary-minded country? That seems an even harder mission than moving to a liberty-minded US state. Singapore, perhaps? Maybe. But if there's one thing that the Arab Spring taught us, it's that the State Department takes a very fickle attitude to allies that don't quite toe the liberal democratic line. At the moment, they tolerate Singapore. I would be less confident that this will continue to be the case for the next 50 years.

The more interesting options involve a combination of voice and exit - find some existing piece of land to make into a new country, and run it as you like.

At a first glance, this seems hard, but more promising than the alternatives. There are a range of ways to find a piece of land to govern and turn into a sovereign entity. They vary considerably in practicality. At one end, one can create new land with a bunch of rafts in the middle of the ocean, like the seasteading guys. I think this shows how eager people are to build a new sovereign land - they're willing to fudge the whole 'land' bit to make it happen. The relatively small number of people who choose to live on boats in the ordinary course of events shows you that this ain't exactly plan A, except under very dire circumstances.

More likely you're down to two options. You can take an existing functional part of America and try to secede. Or you could take over an existing crappy country by a coup.

The $64,000 question, of course, is whether Washington would let either of these things happen.

Since both are a long way from happening, it's hard to get a definite answer. You need to dig around to see the reaction to fringe possibilities and try to extrapolate.

One that caught my eye was the following from February this year:

Feds raid Texas secessionist meeting

...Minutes into the meeting a man among the onlookers stood and moved to open the hall door, letting in an armed and armored force of the Bryan Police Department, the Brazos County Sheriff's Office, the Kerr County Sheriff's Office, Agents of the Texas District Attorney, the Texas Rangers and the FBI.

...In the end, at least 20 officers corralled, searched and fingerprinted all 60 meeting attendees, before seizing all cellphones and recording equipment in a Valentine's Day 2015 raid on the Texas separatist group.

...He acknowledged he used a "show of force," grouping officers from city, county state and federal law enforcement to serve a search warrant for suspicions of a misdemeanor crime. He said he had worries that some extremists in the group could become violent, citing a 1997 incident when 300 state troopers surrounded an armed Republic leader for a weeklong standoff.

This is very revealing. There is absolutely no logistical need to involve 5 separate law enforcement agencies to process a non-violent meeting of 60 people on the suspicion that they committed a misdemeanor offense. But they wanted to display the full power of the government, at all levels, to those who were under the impression that Their Voice Matters™ - you will have no support from existing power structures, even in Texas. They absolutely did not want to just send in the FBI to stoke possible paranoia about the Feds.

Of course, the separatists' actions seemed tailor-made to produce exactly this outcome:

The raid was a response to legal summons sent by Republic of Texas members to a Kerr County judge and bank employee, demanding they appear in the Republic's court at the Veterans and Foreign Wars building in Bryan the day the officers stormed in.

Jesus Christ, talk about stupid. With allies like these...

The current secessionist group made themselves obvious targets by threatening government officials. This is a fast way to not only tar yourselves as possibly criminal, but also to eliminate any sympathy among local law enforcement, some of whom might otherwise support the 'Texas Pride' angle of secession. You threaten judges, and don't expect blowback from every single cop in the country?

The motto should be 'we just want a vote on the issue'. That is much harder to argue against.

If Washington has one possible Achilles Heel, it is the following: they are not fully immune from their own propaganda about the nobility of the democratic process. Hence, if you actually get a vote to pass, resisting it becomes considerably harder.

Suppose, in other words, that the separatists actually manage to get Texas to hold a referendum on seceding, and it passes. With what language will Washington condemn the decision? How will they justify their desire to squelch the voice of the people? Do they not believe in Democracy, source of all that is good and right in the world?

The EU, while not strong enough to force countries to stay in against their will, is at least willing to display open contempt for the democratic process. The US, so far, is only willing to do so using the Supreme Court.

In 1860, the answer was straightforward - "F*** you, you don't get to leave".

Do you think they still have the stones to say that, and back it up? I truly don't know.

I think they would worry where the next move in the chess game went - should the State of Texas attempt to engage in forced secession, would the Feds be willing to send in the army to shoot the place up with the TV cameras rolling, firing on US citizens?

For obvious reasons, they prefer to fight this preemptively as a law enforcement action, not as a military action. We're not invading, old chap, just sending in the police to arrest some crazies who broke the law. In 1860, there wasn't an FBI to send in to arrest Jefferson Davis, hence you needed to send in the army.

By contrast, it is much easier today to co-ordinate with the police to squelch secessionist movements early on, but much harder to us the military to stop them once they get going.

When events get to a certain level of seriousness, even the police become very apprehensive about shooting. See: Cliven Bundy




It's not just the US military that is shy about civilian casualties. If you're from the Federal Bureau of Bureaucratic Bureacracy, do you really want to be the guy who gave the order to shoot a man on horseback waving a US flag in front of TV cameras? That absolutely will not end well for your career.

But the Cliven Bundy supporters had one big advantage that a secessionist movement lacks - they only had to defend the status quo. In other words, show up with guns, call the news crew, and dare the Feds to make the first move.

(The other advantage they had is that, extremely mercifully, they had the good sense and collective discipline to not shoot or explicitly threaten any government officials. You'd think this would go without saying, but apparently not. These guys were at least decently media-savvy - the numerous US flags were a very nice touch to make the Feds look like the bad guys).

The secessionist movement, by contrast, has to actually convince people to implement a big change. Hence, anyone opposing a secessionist movement has the easier task of delegitimising the movement before it gets going to just cement the status quo. And the fastest way to do this is to transform it into a question of legality before the vote takes place.

In other words, find some Texas federal judge to declare the purported referendum illegal and unconstitutional before the vote actually happens. This will give any sympathetic law enforcement agencies free reign to arrest those who continue to take steps towards holding the referendum at all. And now, the secessionists, even if armed, have to defend their right to have an illegal vote that the Constitution (peace be upon it, even if it's living) forbids, without even knowing whether they'd win the vote, should it actually occur.

This achieves two things. First, it reduces the number of people still willing to push for (now illegal) secession. And secondly, it gives a strong propaganda angle to convince people who are on the fence about the whole thing - you can bet your bottom dollar that the New York Times would be pulling out all the stops to convince the marginal rube voter that these are just a bunch of crazy armed criminals. Don't you know they're willing to do stuff that's illegal? (Forget that it was the American War of Independence, not the American Court Case of Independence). But convince enough people of their crazy illegal status, and the best case scenario is mass arrests. The worst case scenario is Waco #2 on a much bigger scale if someone pulls the trigger first and events spiral out of control.

If the Achilles heel of Washington is that they struggle to challenge the righteousness of a democratic election, the Achilles heel of secessionists is that they struggle to abandon their allegiance to the Constitution, even just Anthony Kennedy's interpretation thereof.

The problem for secessionists, I fear, is that in any likely secession timeline, the second question will necessarily get resolved before the first one.