Quo Vadis GOP?

[crazy canuck]

As Grumbler would say, quoting this for future reference.

Pascal's OVB's Wager.
If the Chinese take over the world then he has proven his reliability to our new overlords.
If they don't....well, free country innit? :p

More to the point, American politics is at a very precarious moment. If democracy in the US fails, it will very much be because of people like Otto.

[DGuller]

I do wonder if Covid was our Chernobyl

Of course the fascinating thing is many people, including me, thought it might be China's. And yet, one year on, can people think of any weaknesses in the Chinese system that's been revealed by this pandemic? I can't to be honest - which is not what I expected or thought this time last year. It is certainly a form output legitimacy in some way.

The picture looks quite different in Europe and the Americas.

I think the west has frankly become too democratic and too egalitarian. I have little doubt 1950s or 1960s America would have performed much better than China on handling covid (even 1950s America vs modern day China.) The reason has nothing to do with technology, legal differences or etc. It's entirely cultural. We had a culture in America where most people respected authority back then. We were a democratic society, but one in which a system of experts and elites kinda ran things, and ordinary people participated in selecting leaders but mostly understood "there's people far smarter and far more capable than myself who should run things and make most of the important decisions, and on most issues I'm going to do what they say." Everyone is their own expert now, their own constitutional scholar, their own pastor, their own scientist etc. This makes us incredibly sensitive to viral disinformation efforts.

China actually has a lot of viral disinformation efforts too, but they have a unifying understanding that you listen to and do what the government says. And the government's coronavirus response was largely ran by experts willing to do what was necessary to halt the virus's spread. In the United States (and I'll extend this to much of the west) we have a bunch of people who have gotten out of the habit of doing what they're told.

I think they key question is:  where common people smart enough to leave many things to elites, voluntarily, or did things get left to elites because the system wasn't truly democratic and the common people had no practical say in it?

[crazy canuck]

You are leaving out the more obvious option.  Elites lied to non elites.

[Razgovory]

You are leaving out the more obvious option.  Elites lied to non elites.

How is that different than any other time?

[crazy canuck]

You are leaving out the more obvious option.  Elites lied to non elites.

How is that different than any other time?

I think there are two significant differences.  First, where Otto sees weakness in American become "too democratic" I think having non white male elites elected to office makes it much more difficult to pull off the kind of things an all white all male governing elite could get away with back in Otto's imagined better world.  Second, government throughout Western Democracies has become more transparent through a number of reforms made since the 50s and 60s.

[Josquius]

I guess I can see a problem in the way democracy is setup and where technocracy has its advantage.
Just compare government to the business world.
Businesses have teams of people doing research into what customers want and then they have marketing people selling them this stuff.
In a way political parties could be seen to work the same... With one key exception : the classic apocryphal  Henry Ford quote "if I asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses".

What you have is trump and the like directly promising to deliver these faster horses because its what people are demanding (having first told them that despite never having encountered a horse in their life this is a huge problem).
What you instead need is the government to hear the peoples moans about immigrants or whatever it may be and who does the research to figure out what the actual problem behind this is and then tackles that....
However in a democratic system the promise to find and fix the actual problem is a much harder sell to anyone who can't apply critical thinking (a lot of people) than promising simple solutions to common sense simple problems.

Then you've all the various groups who can see the populist bollocks for what it is but figure they can bend it to their advantage providing even more complications. ..

[crazy canuck]

I guess I can see a problem in the way democracy is setup and where technocracy has its advantage.
Just compare government to the business world.
Businesses have teams of people doing research into what customers want and then they have marketing people selling them this stuff.
In a way political parties could be seen to work the same... With one key exception : the classic apocryphal  Henry Ford quote "if I asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses".

What you have is trump and the like directly promising to deliver these faster horses because its what people are demanding (having first told them that despite never having encountered a horse in their life this is a huge problem).
What you instead need is the government to hear the peoples moans about immigrants or whatever it may be and who does the research to figure out what the actual problem behind this is and then tackles that....
However in a democratic system the promise to find and fix the actual problem is a much harder sell to anyone who can't apply critical thinking (a lot of people) than promising simple solutions to common sense simple problems.

Then you've all the various groups who can see the populist bollocks for what it is but figure they can bend it to their advantage providing even more complications. ..

I am not sure about your distinction between the group that determines what people want and the marketers.  There has been a lot of ink spilled describing manufactured demand which is all about convincing people they do need something, then making it so it will fail/become outdated quickly so that the public believes they must have more of that thing.

Not exactly the best model for government.

[Josquius]

I am not sure about your distinction between the group that determines what people want and the marketers.  There has been a lot of ink spilled describing manufactured demand which is all about convincing people they do need something, then making it so it will fail/become outdated quickly so that the public believes they must have more of that thing.

Not exactly the best model for government.

Completely the opposite.
Marketing rarely works in convincing you that you need something you absolutely don't need. The furthest that tends to go is upselling with useless features (e.g. Tongue brush bits on a toothbrush).
Regardless this "you really need x" thing is completely the opposite of "people have problems with y and need a solution to be developed for it"

[Razgovory]

I am not sure about your distinction between the group that determines what people want and the marketers.  There has been a lot of ink spilled describing manufactured demand which is all about convincing people they do need something, then making it so it will fail/become outdated quickly so that the public believes they must have more of that thing.

Not exactly the best model for government.

Completely the opposite.
Marketing rarely works in convincing you that you need something you absolutely don't need. The furthest that tends to go is upselling with useless features (e.g. Tongue brush bits on a toothbrush).
Regardless this "you really need x" thing is completely the opposite of "people have problems with y and need a solution to be developed for it"

I am very skeptical of this.  I "absolutely don't need" all kinds of stuff.  This computer I'm using isn't needed.  It's not like I have a job that requires it.

[Josquius]

I am very skeptical of this.  I "absolutely don't need" all kinds of stuff.  This computer I'm using isn't needed.  It's not like I have a job that requires it.

Hierarchy of needs.
Entertainment is on there.

[Razgovory]

You are leaving out the more obvious option.  Elites lied to non elites.

How is that different than any other time?

I think there are two significant differences.  First, where Otto sees weakness in American become "too democratic" I think having non white male elites elected to office makes it much more difficult to pull off the kind of things an all white all male governing elite could get away with back in Otto's imagined better world.  Second, government throughout Western Democracies has become more transparent through a number of reforms made since the 50s and 60s.

I don't agree with Otto but I know where he's coming from.  I think we may have a bit too much transparency in politics.  In particular I think letting cameras in the Congress may have been a mistake.   The unfortunate truth is that the US government has never really functioned that well to begin with.  There have been several occasions where extreme partisanship made the US government dysfunctional, on one occasion disastrously so.  For the US government to function there needs to be "Republican virtue".  All governments fail when a large fraction of the population stops believing in it.  Unfortunately the US constitution make it more susceptible to this than other democratic governments in the world.

[Berkut]

I think complex work demands some kind of ability for those doing the work to have the freedom to now have their every move examined under a microscope by people who are either not qualified to judge it, or actively interested in judging it in poor faith

How you balance that with the obvious need for transparency and disclosure is a hard problem.

[The Minsky Moment]

What's interesting is that as the legislative branch has become increasingly transparent, the executive has become more opaque, which is really backwards. Because Presidential advisors are ubiquitous, everything can be covered in blanket assertions of privilege. Tranparency into the legislative process is fine and dandy, but not that essential because the product - legislation and floor vote counts - is public anyways.  But all sorts of policies can get carried out in the executive branch in effective total secrecy.

[Razgovory]

The big problem with televising Congress is that encourages Congress people to make incendiary statements and take extreme positions so their soundbites will end up on the news or so they get invited on partisan political shows on MSNBC and Fox News.  Nuance and civility are not rewarded but extremism is.  It's not a good dynamic.

[Jacob]

I think complex work demands some kind of ability for those doing the work to have the freedom to now have their every move examined under a microscope by people who are either not qualified to judge it, or actively interested in judging it in poor faith

How you balance that with the obvious need for transparency and disclosure is a hard problem.

Yeah.

I think the answer lies in building a culture - both a political culture and a national culture at large - that values fair play, honest competition, and considers rule breaking and abuse of power serious issues.

On one hand that's a facile answer, but the key is that while process and policy can help it's also about creating and valuing leaders with integrity. And that's a long term, from the roots type solution - so the opposite of easy.