Never has there been a prudent, intelligent and well-informed democratic electorate

Monday, March 1st, 2010

The mainstream American conservative or libertarian does not trust the Press, Mencius Moldbug says:

This person is not at all sure about how he wants to purge the Press; but, broadly, he would like it to disappear as a business, ignoring the facts that (a) privileged access to inside information will always be a good business (see under: Reg FD), and (b) if the “MSM” blows this advantage so completely that it fails as a business, it has a thousand and one ways to continue operating as a nonprofit.

The democratic conservative or libertarian believes that his government is bad because it pursues the wrong policies; it pursues the wrong policies because its elected officials are the wrong people; and its elected officials are the wrong people because they were elected by bamboozled voters, miseducated by information sources 1 through 6 as described above.

Here is a question you can ask any conservative or libertarian. Granting that the MSM, today, is not supplying the People with accurate information, causing them to support misguided and counterproductive policies: when did this become true? When did it start?

If the American people of 2010 are, by and large, misinformed by their own journalists, until what date were they well-informed and capable of properly fulfilling their democratic function? 1980? 1960? 1930? 1910? If considering dates between 1856 and 1900, I recommend first consulting this historical sketch by Charles Francis Adams, Jr.
[...]
UR’s answer to the question is, of course: never. Never — neither in the age of American democracy, nor in the Athens of Cleon the Tanner — has there ever been anything like a prudent, intelligent and well-informed democratic electorate. None of these three criteria has ever been achieved, least of all the third. Not in the 20th century, not in the 19th, not in the 18th, and not in the 5th BC.

As for the self-enforcing constitution, the magic parchment that compels all to abide by natural law, without any force of sovereign compulsion that could become corrupt, it strikes me as even more fantastic and impossible than democracy itself. When government becomes corrupt, to cry for its absence is only natural. Nothing is more foul than a corrupt government. But as for natural law, nature’s first is this: she abhors a vacuum. Paper cannot rule. Some person or persons are always in the throne, or fighting for it. I prefer the former condition.

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The Most Influential Person in History You’ve Never Heard Of

Monday, March 1st, 2010

The most influential person in history you’ve never heard of, Dennis Mangan says, is Rudolf von Havenstein, the German central banker who brought about the Weimar hyperinflation of the early 1920s:

I believe that there are a couple of important lessons from the story of von Havenstein. One comes from the fact that the man was a patriot and an aristocrat, i.e. he always thought that he had his country’s best interest at heart. Despite that, he created one of the biggest economic firestorms ever to hit a civilized country. Admittedly, he faced some very tough choices, with Communists and Rightists battling in the streets, unemployment at record highs, industrial production plummeting, and Germany owing a huge war debt to the victors of WW1.

The second lesson from his story is the difficulty in ceasing to print money once it has already begun. It’s frying pan or fire, take your pick.

Any resemblance to our current situation is purely coincidental.

If you glance at a graph of German price levels in the early 1920s, you immediately notice that they form an exponential curve — on a log graph, where constant inflation is a straight upward-sloping line. For inflation to “work” it has to be unexpected inflation — hence the ever-increasing slope. Of course, after a while, everyone expects not only inflation, but ever-increasing inflation, and the whole things becomes futile — but no one wants to make the tough call:

When hyper-inflation gets going, everyone pretty much knows what needs to be done to cure it; but things have to get worse before they can get better. The cure will, initially, make things worse. But, the longer the cure is delayed, the worse will be its effect.

In democratic politics there will be people who claim (from ignorance, or dishonest power seeking) to cure the problem without pain, without having to go through the period where things are worse. So the political incentive is to delay the cure, and let somebody else take the flak.

Even if you do the right thing and succeed, then the judgment of popular culture may go against you. e.g. There is no real doubt that Margaret Thatcher saved the UK economy. The evidence is that her administration reversed decades of relentless relative economic decline. But the cure was very painful, because so long delayed — and Thatcher is (by many on the left and centre) remembered for the pain she inflicted — the economic recovery and a couple of decades of propserity are simply taken for granted.

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Business and Amusements

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Athenians, just before their great city-state’s decline, split their time between business and amusements:

Their business consisted in listening to the adulation of their orators; their amusements, in listening to the adulation of their poets: for Socrates proved, in the same Dialogue in which he showed so fully the destructive influence of orators, that even of that grave and magnificent art, Tragic Poetry, the aim was simply to gratify the spectators; since, while it does not avoid things which are pleasant but bad, it does avoid things disagreeable but useful. Poetry on the stage is then a kind of adulatory rhetoric addressed to a popular assembly composed of men, women, and children.

It is related that Solon, after hearing Thespis in one of his own compositions, asked him if he was not ashamed to utter such falsehoods before so large an audience? And when Thespis replied that there was no harm in saying and doing such things merely for amusement, Solon indignantly exclaimed, striking the ground with his stick: “If once we come to praise and esteem such amusement as this, we shall quickly find the effects of it in our daily transactions!” This applies still more strongly to the subsequent comic writers. The event seemed to confirm the truth of the great Athenian legislator’s opinion.

Listening to their own clever hipsters, the Athenians had little idea where they were headed:

On a certain day in the year 424 before Christ, the comedy called “The Clouds,” which Aristophanes had written against Socrates, was performed at Athens. If a stranger at Athens on that day, after visiting the fortifications, the arsenal, the port, and the docks of the Athenians, and hearing the enumeration of their present revenues and of the projects for their future increase by the conquest of Sicily and other countries, had then gone to the theatre and listened to the witty but false and scurrilous representation given by the satirist of the philosopher — in which the only man of that time who had the courage and the wisdom to tell the Athenians the truth as to their political condition, is held up to public ridicule and obloquy, as the representative of those Sophists whom he lived only to refute — the stranger would hardly have thought that the fabric which was so fair to look upon, combining so much material splendour and so much intellectual activity, was already sapped to its foundations, and in a single century from that time would be nothing but a ruin.

Posted in Andrew Bisset, Policy | No Comments »

America’s Displaced Protestant Establishment

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Steve Sailer has been rereading Professor Samuel Eliot Morison’s three-volume Oxford History of the American People and thinking about America’s displaced Protestant Establishment:

Morison (1887-1976) was himself a leading member of the Protestant Establishment (liberal Boston Brahmin wing). His extraordinary career as a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian (for his biography of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, for which he had organized a research expedition by sailing ship from Spain to the New World) turned middle-aged fighting naval officer exemplifies how an old-fashioned Establishment that self-confidently viewed itself as holding its country in trust for its posterity felt it ought to behave.

Of course, you aren’t supposed to think like that anymore. Hence, the top people now treat America like a short-term transaction rather than a long-term investment.

I was reminded of Morison when I read neoconservative David Brooks’s thoughtful February 18th New York Times column, The Power Elite, about the historic shift in clout from what he calls the “inbred” Protestant Establishment to what he somewhat deceptively designates as the new “meritocratic” elite:

“Sixty years ago, the upper echelons were dominated by what E. Digby Baltzell called The Protestant Establishment and C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite. … Since then, we have opened up opportunities for women, African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics and members of many other groups.”

(As I wrote at the time, what Brooks is really talking about is the rise of the Jews. For example, Jews make up a mere 2% of the population, but 35% of the 2009 Forbes 400 and half of the 2009 Atlantic 50 ranking of the most influential pundits. That’s a lot more “inbred” that the Protestant Establishment — perhaps 60% of Americans were white Protestants in 1910. Indeed, even as late as the 2008 Presidential election, white Protestants cast some 42% of the votes. They went overwhelmingly for McCain.)

And, according to Brooks, it’s not even clear that this more “smart and hard-working” new elite is actually providing us with better leadership:

“Fifty years ago, the financial world was dominated by well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons. … Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century ago?”

According to Brooks, one reason is that

“[T]ime horizons have shrunk. If you were an old blue blood, you traced your lineage back centuries, and there was a decent chance that you’d hand your company down to members of your clan. That subtly encouraged long-term thinking. Now people respond to ever-faster performance criteria — daily stock prices or tracking polls.”

Of course, the old blue bloods weren’t thinking just of handing down their companies, but also of handing down their country.

This now obsolescent multigenerational perspective inspired the central scene in the 2006 period movie about an uber-WASP CIA agent played by Matt Damon, The Good Shepherd, which was directed by Robert De Niro and scripted by Eric Roth. In a 1961 conversation between with a mafia don (played by De Niro’s old buddy Joe Pesci), Roth’s dialogue spelled out even more graphically than Brooks’ column the new elites’ combination of resentment toward and grudging respect for the past’s Protestant Establishment:

Joseph Palmi: “You know, we Italians have our families and the church, the Irish have the homeland, the Jews their tradition … What do you guys have?”

Edward Wilson: “We have the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.”

Morison, the last Harvard professor to ride his horse to work, embodied that sense of long-term responsibility.
[...]
To Morison, American liberalism was invented by his ancestors, the descendants of the Puritans. As he made clear in his Oxford History, rudimentary versions of most American progressive movements, including civil rights for blacks, feminism, and the rudiments of the ideology of environmentalism (Thoreau’s Walden), were up and running in the greater Boston area by the 1840s.

In other words, American liberalism was invented by the oldest and most socially respectable hereditary elite in the country’s least ethnically diverse region, and imposed from the top down.

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How Insurgencies End

Monday, March 1st, 2010

A new RAND study examines how insurgencies end:

It compares a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 89 insurgency case studies with lessons from insurgency and counterinsurgency (COIN) literature.

While no two insurgencies are the same, the authors find that modern insurgencies last about ten years and that a government’s chances of winning may increase slightly over time. Insurgencies are suited to hierarchical organization and rural terrain, and sanctuary is vital to insurgents. Insurgent use of terrorism often backfires, and withdrawal of state sponsorship can cripple an insurgency, typically leading to its defeat. Inconsistent support to either side generally presages defeat for that side, although weak insurgencies can still win.

Anocracies (pseudodemocracies) rarely succeed against insurgencies. Historically derived force ratios are neither accurate nor predictive, and civil defense forces are very useful for both sides. Key indicators of possible trends and tipping points in an insurgency include changes in desertions, defections, and the flow of information to the COIN effort. The more parties in an insurgency, the more likely it is to have a complex and protracted ending. There are no COIN shortcuts.

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