Isegoria

The study of the US government deserves its own department — Washingtology:

Washingtology is an applied discipline, like archaeology. Its mission is simply to study the real Washington. This mission requires no engagement with any of USG‘s PR arms. Washingtology is not journalism. It is the study of what Washington is and does — never what it says. Unless that speech is in some sense an action.

One of the few systematic mendacities that I see across the entire spectrum of American punditry is the convention of writing as if political actors personally wrote, or believed, their lines. Of course, all these pundits know that the speeches are composed by teams of professional writers. Nonetheless, they invariably report these speeches as if they were actually personal productions. They never say: “Today in St. Louis, President Obama read a White House speech which called for…” They never say: “Today in St. Louis, the White House called for…” They say: “Today in St. Louis, President Obama called for…” This is a classic Orwellian abuse of English.

Mencius Moldbug on the Obama prize:

To Americans who wonder how anyone could be so tone-deaf as to pull a stunt like this, it has nothing at all to do with the person, Barack Obama. Probably you can blame the Obama White House for not (a) knowing that this was going to happen, and (b) having the sense to prevent it from happening. And the ultimate diagnosis, of course, is American. But today’s symptom is most definitely European.

The problem is that Americans, even progressives, are the people in the world who adore Obama the least. Normally it is advantageous, for continuity purposes, that Europeans love Obama. But it is not advantageous that they love him so much. It is weird, distracting and confusing. In short: off message.

This strange European affection is easily explained. You see, there was once an agency named the Office of War Information, which was more or less the pro-Roosevelt press organized as a government agency. OWI no longer exists, but not because it fell from favor; some of its people went to CIA, some went to State, some went back to pretending to be ordinary citizens. OWI is essentially the bureaucratic ancestor of the “mainstream media” as we know it today.

After the unfortunate events of 1941–45, the surviving Continental friends of these gentlemen were organized into a new industry, the official media of Europe. Even in Britain, those loyal to the new military configuration of the planet were praised and petted, and reproduced intellectually; those who were not so sure grew old, had no students, declined and died. Europe is a Darwinian paradise of information, all adapted to military events. You can be sure that had things gone otherwise, the grandchildren of Celine, Brasillach and Drieu la Rochelle would constitute “European public opinion.”

So the problem is: Europe is gaga for Obama not because the wise Europeans, with their centuries of history, raw-milk cheeses and infinitely subtle wines, have deliberated long on the subject, gazed into their crystal balls and detected the promise and meaning of Obama. Europe is gaga for Obama because Europe, as we now know it, is a propaganda colony of Washington. The pre-1940 Europe is of historical interest only, like the Aztecs.

Every demonstration is an incipient mob, Mencius Moldbug notes:

A demonstration in the political sense of the word says: these people are standing peacefully and holding signs, but they could be screaming like fiends, sacking offices, and giving GS-15s the Princesse de Lamballe treatment. In other words, every demonstration is an incipient mob. To demonstrate is to overawe and intimidate with the threat of potential violence.

Democracy itself encodes the threat of mob violence in the voting process. The State, as always, belongs to the strongest. Democracy models the process of mob violence, guesses who will win by counting heads, awards the state to the probable winner and skips the actual rioting.

When mob violence is no longer a possibility, the threat loses its force, and democratic politicians can be counted on to lose their power to some other structure. Here we see the first fallacy of the “tea parties,” for of course the original Tea Party was exactly that: mob violence. Whereas the suburban white people who showed up on 9/12, contra your daily dose of brown-baiting, could barely lynch a fly. Individual madmen may be among them and probably are, but they are no material for a mob.

Leftist demonstrations, on the other hand, always carry their original implicit threat of mass extralegal action. Dr. King himself, or rather his speechwriters, were masters of this. The line is always: we are demonstrating peacefully, to show you how many people will be in the riot if we don’t get what we want. This threat today is by no means what it was in 1968, but nor is it entirely impotent.

Thus, 9/12 fails as a demonstration of direct power. A million bipeds, even unarmed (and who says they have to be unarmed?) are one of the most dangerous things in the history of the universe. What are the million people of 9/12? A million votes. Which, frankly, is not a lot.

The US State Department — with its satellites in the “international community” — could rule the Third World, if it wanted to, Mencius Moldbug asserts — but the current situation is a perfect reflection of bureaucratic imperatives:

Bureaucracies tend to maximize their impact. They are often quite shy about expanding their authority, especially if it is formal authority — because once you take authority over something, you have essentially taken responsibility for it. Bureaucracies are not fond of responsibility. Who wants to be responsible for the Third World?

Perhaps the dirtiest secret of decolonialization is that bureaucracies prefer the postcolonial model to the colonial model, “advice” and “aid” to actual rule, because the postcolonial model generates more jobs. Vastly more Westerners are involved in failing to run the Third World, than ran thee same countries successfully when they were colonies.

For example, to run Egypt — a country of 10 million people, then — Cromer had about 1000 British civil servants. If you count all the Western diplomats, development experts, NGOistas, and the like, for whom the present parlous state of Egypt provides employment, how many do you get? A lot more than 1 per 10,000 Egyptians, I suspect. How many Westerners are employed in bandaging and rebandaging the permanent ulcer of Africa? Um, a lot.

The Third World, as a government program, is just another permanent money hole on the balance sheet of the developed world. Just as with any business they operate, governments — Western governments — have turned their colonies into operations whose goal is to employ as many civil servants as possible. Any type of efficiency or success is a menace to these programs, not a boon.

Good government is always small government, and small government does not scale as a jobs program. If you have one Canadian Cromer running Guantanamo City like a startup, there is no room for everyone’s students to go to Toronto and get jobs. You probably don’t need more than a hundred Canadians to rule Guantanamo City. Colonial regimes are simply too good — they achieved remarkable and unprecedented bureaucrat-to-subject ratios.

Whereas if the Canadians say “yes” to the Guantanamo People’s Party, allows elections, and thus replaces the professional Canadian administrators with illiterate Haitian demagogues, they create a jobs boom in the Guantanamo-advising business. For every administrative position that disappears, ten will be created in aid and development assistance. It may not be in the interest of Canada, or Guantanamo City, to bring about this change — indeed, it isn’t. But it is surely in the interest of whatever Canadian agency is running Guantanamo City.

Thus the practical problem with “charter cities” is that no one wants them: not the host regime, not the international regime. For both, they simply work too well. Colonialism had to die not because it didn’t work, but because it worked too well.

Mencius Moldbug has a question for Paul Romer, who is currently promoting the notion of charter cities:

Suppose your good Mr. Castro says yes, and you get your Guantanamo City up and running, with its Haitian population and Canadian proconsuls. It is, of course, a smashing success, with investment galore.

And then, in ten years, a mob of Haitians gathers in the beautifully landscaped central square, wearing coloured rosettes and throwing rotten eggs, all chanting a single demand: democracy for Guanatanamo City. The Canadians, all in a tizzy, call you. It’s the middle of the night in Palo Alto. You pick up the phone. “What should we say?” the Canadians ask. “Yes, or no?”

If they say yes — what, in ten years, will be the difference between Guantanamo and Haiti? If they say no — what do they say next? You’ll notice that you have no answer to this question. Hell has little pity for those who decide to forget history.

The charter-city proposal fails, Moldbug asserts, because it will never be tried, and if it is it won’t work:

Why is the Third World a kleptocracy, rather than a capitalist utopia? Let’s take Cuba, renowned worldwide for the purity of its revolutionary ideology. In their promotion of European and Canadian tourism, the Castros have proven canny, avaricious and unromantic businessmen, fine evidence that they were always just thugs and never believed in the whole caper to begin with. Even without Professor Romer, it’s quite clear that the Chinese model is extremely profitable and effective. Cuba doesn’t need Guantanamo, and it doesn’t need Canadians — it has no shortage of competent administrators. It could set up a special economic zone anywhere. Why doesn’t it?

The answer is that the existence of any such entity would constitute an immediate political threat to their regime. Why does socialism abhor private corporations? Because a corporation is a power structure which is not subject to official authority. In a Communist propaganda state, dependent on the continuous mass adulation of its subjects, no such independence is tolerable.

In more kleptocratic regimes, such as are found in Africa, the problem is even simpler and cruder: everyone in government steals. Anyone in government who does not steal is a threat, because his hands are clean while everyone else’s are dirty. He might go to the Americans, and they might make him President. And any enterprise which cannot be stolen from is a threat, because every other enterprise will demand the same privilege.

If Professor Romer expects these types of regimes to cede him a tract of uninhabited land, he is dreaming. All Third World nations are saturated with anticolonialist religion, which will trivially recognize his proposal for exactly what it is, and provides the best possible basis for directing political violence against it. That’s how the Third World got to be the Third World, after all.

The English word for “charter city” is colony, Mencius Moldbug notes:

The fundamental observation of colonialism is that non-European societies thrive under normal European administration, at least in comparison to their condition under native rule. This observation was obvious during the colonial period. Since, it has only grown more so — at least, to those who can handle the truth.

If this observation is “condescending,” so is Professor Romer’s proposal. If it is invalid, so is Professor Romer’s proposal. If it is neither, Professor Romer’s 18 minutes should be invested in introducing, explaining, and defending the original observers — not on passing it off as his own “radical idea.”

The most casual inspection of history reveals the observation’s truth. By any comparison with colonial government, precolonial regimes provided extremely poor service. Spend a little time with the Ashanti or the Mahrattas. So have postcolonial regimes. Rent a room at the Grande Hotel Beira sometime. If you remain trapped in your outdated, 20th-century thinking and prefer statistics to intuition and narrative, the observation is still so obvious that it is impossible for me to imagine any set of governance metrics which could conceal it.

Moreover, Professor Romer’s other distinctions are obviously without substance. The claim that there is any serious distinction between a “colony” and a “charter city” founded on “uninhabited land” is preposterous. Many great colonial cities, such as Bombay, Calcutta, and Singapore, were founded on uninhabited land. So in general were the original colonies of the antique era — the Phocaeans didn’t conquer Marseilles, they created it.

And so was Hong Kong, a Crown Colony of the British Empire. Which, built on uninhabited land, by some miracle survived almost intact into the 21st century. It is not that the fluke of history which preserved this living fossil “reduced world poverty.” It’s that the destruction of all the world’s other Hong Kongs — ie, “decolonialization” — created “world poverty” as we know it.

More precisely, decolonialization created the Third World. The project of Professor Romer’s own intellectual and political establishment, the American and Americanized “scientific” experts in growth and development. What we need here is not a “radical idea.” It is a simple apology. Alas, hell will freeze over before.

Moldbug cites Time magazine’s Come Back, Colonialism, All Is Forgiven:

“The river is the artery of Congo’s economy,” [river-raft "pilot" Malu-Ebonga "Le Blanc" Charles] says. “When the Belgians and the Portuguese were here, there were farms and plantations — cashews, peanuts, rubber, palm oil. There was industry and factories employing 3,000 people, 5,000 people. But since independence, no Congolese has succeeded. The plantations are abandoned.” Using a French expression literally translated as “on the ground,” he adds: “Everything is par terre.”

In 1955, Time described the Boom in the Jungle:

There was plenty of darkness in the Congo during the 19th-century “scramble for Africa,” when Baudoin’s great-granduncle, Leopold II, staked out his monarchical claim to the uncharted Congo Free State. Leopold’s rubber gatherers tortured, maimed and slaughtered until at the turn of the century, the conscience of the Western world forced Brussels to call a halt.

Today, all has changed. Nowhere in Africa is the Bantu so well fed and housed, so productive and so content as he is in the Belgian Congo.

In little more than a generation of intense economic effort, the Belgians have injected 20 centuries of Western mechanical progress into a Stone Age wilderness. The results are staggering: in forests, where 50 years ago there were no roads because the wheel was unknown, no schools because there was no alphabet, no peace because there was neither the will nor the means to enforce it, the sons of cannibals now mine the raw materials of the Atomic Age.

Belgian brains and Bantu muscle have thrust back the forest and checked the dread diseases (yaws, sleeping sickness, malaria) which sapped the Bantu’s strength. In some areas, the Congo’s infant-mortality rate is down to 60 per 1,000 — better than Italy’s figure. More than 1,000,000 children attend primary and secondary schools — 40% of the school-age population (compared with less than 10% in the French empire).

The Belgians taught the Bantu to run bulldozers, looms and furnaces, to rivet ships, drive taxis and trucks. Girls with grotesque tribal markings etched into their ebony foreheads sell in shops, teach in schools, nurse in hospitals. Already thousands of natives in the Congo’s bustling cities earn $100-$150 a month — more than most workers in Europe, and small fortunes by African standards. They buy sewing machines, phonographs and bicycles in such profusion that Sears, Roebuck has recently put out a special Congo catalogue.

The Belgians compare the Congo with the state of Texas, though in fact the Congo is bigger and far richer in its natural resources. The Congo’s gross national product has tripled since 1939. Money is plentiful. Belgian investors take more than $50 million a year in dividends alone. Once the Congo depended exclusively on mining and farming; today it manufactures ships, shoes, cigarettes, chemicals, explosives and photographic film. With its immense reserves of hydroelectric power (a fifth of the world’s total), the Belgians expect the Congo to become “the processing plant for all Africa.”

The Congo boom makes its cities grow like well-nourished bamboo shoots. In six years the Negro population of Elisabethville has jumped from 40,000 to 120,000, Costermansville from 7,000 to 25,000, Stanleyville from 25,000 to 48,000. But the pride of the Congo is Leopoldville (pop. 370,000), a bustling, modern metropolis that is spreading along the south bank of Stanley Pool (see map).

Leo, as the Belgians call it, has tripled its population in the past six years.

These colonial regimes were by no means perfect:

But to assert that their average quality of government service was anything but far better than either their predecessors, or their successors, is a political distortion of history which I have no trouble at all in comparing to Holocaust denial. Far more people were murdered in decolonization and postcolonial violence than in the Holocaust. Moreover, only a few fringe nutcases deny the Holocaust — whereas anticolonialism is a core tenet of everyone’s college education. Oops.

What does the decline in homicide rates look like? It’s been going pretty steadily downward for the past few centuries:

What we would do is write down a system of differential equations that claimed how two or more groups of people interacted with each other — say, “criminals,” “law-abiders,” and “police” — and fool around with them until they produced a solution that would show cycles or oscillations around an overall downward trend.

Mencius Moldbug reacts to such scientism:

Hari Seldon rides again!

What I would do is to write down a sentence in English. This sentence would say: Europe became generally more orderly from 1500 to 1900, and generally less orderly from 1900 to 2000, especially after 1950.

If you wanted to know why, I would say: because order is a product of coherent state authority, and coherent state authority generally strengthened from 1500 to 1900 and generally weakened after 1900, especially after 1950.

And if you wanted to know why this happened, I would say: read some history. It’s a story, not a spreadsheet.

Much of the confusion arises because “modern” to the ordinary intelligent reader means post-1900 (as in “modernism”), whereas as a technical term it is often used to mean post-1500. Thus, in the “modern” era to the ordinary reader crime has been rising vertiginously — eg, 4700% in Britain.

He goes on:

Presumably you’ve never read any Theodore Dalrymple.

Actually, though, I think a better read would be a bound book of newspapers, English or American, from any year before 1960 or so. Have a look at how they report crime. I believe I’ve suggested this experiment to you before — I hope you’ll try it sometime. Any good library will have one.

For example, I was in a used bookstore once looking at copies of the Napa Valley Journal from 1940. On the top of the front page — German armies were pouring through France. On the bottom of the front page — police had arrested a man who was wanted for passing a bad check in Fresno.

To make it as retarded as possible, what I’m saying is that if you applied pre-1960 standards of journalism to post-1960 crime, every newspaper in America, every day, would look like an issue of the Gotham Globe: MURDER SPREE PARALYZES CITY. And, of course, the public would react accordingly. That’s public opinion for ya.

Heck, during this period, America’s fourth-largest city lost pretty much its entire decent, law-abiding population, who fled due to crime. Said city is now a ruin.
[...]
This isn’t hysteria we’re looking at here. It’s precisely the opposite. It’s anesthesia. How do you anesthetize a population? When it reacts normally, convince it that it’s being hysterical.

A commenter going by Zimmern adds some anecdotal evidence that most of us should be familiar with from talking to our own parents or grandparents:

I know it’s anecdotal and not empirical data, but this post led me to ask my dad about his experience growing up in Washington DC in the 50s and 60s with respect to crime, violence, safety, etc.

People never locked their house doors nor their cars. And people would leave their car keys in the ignition after parking their cars. Not just at home, but when they would park their cars at stores and elsewhere outside the home. And if someone’s headlights were accidentally left on, passersby would just reach in and turn them off out of courtesy. I believe a commenter at Steve Sailer’s mentioned this as well. During high school, he would often hitchhike to school. And he actually hitchhiked across the country and back several times, both with friends and without, to visit friends/relatives, just to travel, just for kicks, etc.

Segregation was still in effect in DC for at least a portion of my dad’s upbringing, and this is a major variable of course, to say the least.

The past is a different country, that’s for sure.

Anomaly UK draws a distinction between two kinds of democracy:

What we have in Western Europe and America I call “Old Democracy”. It has parties and regular elections, which are carried out fairly, and it also has powerful non-party institutions of civil service, law and media which stabilise the whole edifice. These powerful institutions get their power mostly from tradition — from the fact that they have had power for a long time and are widely respected as such.

These systems of government are very different from those created by a pro-democratic revolution or a pro-democratic invasion. Those normally produce “Young Democracy”, in which power is concentrated in elected institutions.

One cannot argue for or against democracy without distinguishing these two forms. Their merits and faults are quite different.

Old Democracy is the system of which it is tiresomely said, that it is the worst form of government ever tried, except for all the others. The claim is irritating but more than plausible — the most successful governments of the last hundred years, leaving aside a few city-state tax havens, have been of this kind.

Young Democracy, on the other hand, is what Old Democracy purports to be. The voters can vote for what they want, and they get it. Any theoretical, rather than empirical, defence of democracy applies to Young Democracy, not Old Democracy.

Young Democracy, however, is highly unstable. If the people can vote for what they want, then before long they will vote for “Strong Government” which will put an end to free, fair elections. The best case for a Young Democracy is that the unelected institutions solidify power and it becomes an Old Democracy before that happens.

The faults of Old Democracy are more subtle. It is not controlled by the electorate, but neither is it independent of the electorate. The effect of the electorate’s limited power of choice is not catastrophe, but the slow expansion of the bureaucracy into every area of life, along with a slow decline of effectiveness in everything it does.

The endpoint of Old Democracy is the utter bankruptcy of the state and its collapse under the weight of its ineffective functions. I don’t think that has ever happened in the West — economic growth has kept up with the growing cost of government — but I would expect it to look something like the end of the Soviet Union. which I do not classify as an “Old Democracy”, but which in its late stages shared many of the characteristics of a very old Democracy.

Alternatively, it might not be coincidence that economic growth and the expansion of the state keep pace with each other. It may be that Old Democracy exercises just as much waste as the economy can afford. The growth of the state is not an inevitable process of Old Democracy per se, it is its inevitable response to economic growth. Old Democracy would therefore be stable in the long run.

Supporters of Democracy switch between the two as it suits them:

Thus a commenter at [Mencius Moldbug's Unqualified Reservations] was able to say

You like to offer up weak, fledgling democracies that collapse into dictatorships as arguments against democracies, but really they’re just arguments for creating democracies that can stand up to the overly ambitious sociopath and his cronies.

But a democracy that can stand up to its new leader is one that can stand up to the voters — i.e. an Old Democracy. The implication that it is voter power which protects democracy from tipping into totalitarianism is the opposite of the truth.

The progressive does not actually believe in the philosopher’s stone of democracy, Mencius Moldbug argues:

The power flow of democracy is simply reversed. Rather than the sovereign People leading and directing their “public servants,” it is the servants who lead and the People who follow. The function of elections and elected officials in a progressive democracy is to educate the electorate, to speak from the “bully pulpit,” to help it become the progressive and enlightened People that it deserves to be. In classic astroturf style.

Thus, elections become simply another propaganda mechanism. If this mechanism fails every now and then, the progressive establishment has more than enough institutional inertia to wait out and defeat any temporary attack of the primitives. No permanent imprint on Washington can be or ever has been left by the post-progressive Right, from McCarthy through Bush. Indeed, in Europe, there is nothing at all like the Republicans, and daily life in Europe seems more or less the same for it.

So there is a sham here. To be fair, this sham is hardly a socialist invention: it is a staple of democracy in all eras. Robert Michels described it well as the Iron Law of Oligarchy, almost a century ago. It seems easy to excuse progressives for merely finding this natural tactical feature of politics, and taking advantage of it.

Edmund S. Morgan explores the idea further, in Inventing the People (1988).

The Platonic guardians of the socialist state, Mencius Moldbug says, persistently prefer bad ideas — but not because they’re bad people:

Why, with its intellectual firepower, can progressivism not self-correct? After all, its public-policy experts are supposed to be scientists. They publish papers — with numbers. Surely this makes them scientists, and science is self-correcting, ie, always right.

Alas. Not everyone who writes papers with numbers is a scientist. The most you can say is that your subject is either a scientist, or a pseudoscientist. Also, while it is correct to note that science can be self-correcting, it is incorrect to assume that it must be, ie, is incorruptible. Nothing whatsoever is incorruptible — certainly not science.

The Platonic guardians of the socialist state — scientists, planners, bureaucrats, or whatever you call them — persistently prefer bad ideas because of the organizational structure of the socialist state. Again, democracy is the fundamental and irrecoverable flaw.

Because socialism is democratic, it distrusts, opposes and tends to destroy organizational structures which are built on (a) hierarchical command, (b) personal responsibility, and/or (c) financial interests. Your socialist state will never produce a structure in which a single planner is responsible for, say, North Carolina; can fire whomever he likes in the administration of North Carolina; and gets fired himself, if North Carolina does not blossom into a subtropical Eden. This is an organizational structure that one might find in, say, the British Raj. It is not democratic in nature, nor socialist.

Instead, the socialist state divides power and spreads it as widely as possible — within itself, of course. Its decisions are not personal, but procedural. A procedure is a better procedure if it cuts more stakeholders into the loop — if it is a more open process. Here we see clearly what the State is doing: it is building a support base from its own employee roster, and it is purchasing support by exchanging it for power. The feeling of being in the decision loop produces a remarkable effect of emotional loyalty, no matter how trivial the actual authority may be.

There is just a slight downside to this: when socialism fails, no one is responsible. No system of ideas, even, can be responsible — for a system of ideas would be an ideology, and public policy is not determined by ideology. Thus many will tell you that economics failed in the crisis of 2008, but no one can possibly do anything about it. Certainly, no producer of economic wisdom in the universities, nor consumer in Washington, need feel even slightly threatened. Tenure is tenure, and civil-service protection is civil-service protection. Our masters serve for life.

Moreover, in an environment where failure confers no punishment, we would expect bad policies to outcompete good ones. Much as islands without predators are dominated by flightless birds. Freed from the need to actually succeed, the bad policies can offer everything to everyone — permanently. But alas, no dodo is forever.

Socialism is the last stage of democracy, argues Mencius Moldbug:

The process may be fast and bloody, as in the French and Russian Revolutions, or slow and mostly peaceful, as in Britain. But it is not generally reversible by any conventional means.

By pouring their talents into the democratic movement, the new aristocracy of progressivism ensured the following results:

First, that bad ideas would blossom and good ones wither and disappear. Progressivism has become a veritable religion of quack goverment. Its policies are always counterintuitive: it preaches leniency as the cure for crime, timidity as military genius, profligacy as the acme of economics, “special education” as the heart of pedagogy, indulgence as oversight, appeasement as diplomacy. As it goes from one disaster to the next, progressivism never considers the possibility that the obvious, rather than its opposite, could be the case. Occam’s Butterknife is the only tool in its kitchen.

So everywhere that socialism or communism triumphs, we see the same phenomena: hypertrophy of the bureaucracy, destruction and/or assimilation of organizations outside the State, expansion and widespread delinquency of the underclass, decimation of the working class, decay and disappearance of manufacturing industries, persecution of upper classes and successful minorities, destruction of old cities and production of hideous totalitarian architecture, ubiquitous depression both economic and psychiatric. These effects are not pleasant to anyone, progressive or otherwise. But their production does not slacken.