Isegoria

A certain skepticism of democracy has gone (slightly) viral, Mencius Moldbug notes, and left-libertarian Will Wilkinson has coined a predictably indignant pejorative — democraphobia:

From our perspective, he spends most of his gas merely in proving his remarkable, if hardly unusual, inability to distinguish freedom from power. A sort of political colorblindness, as it were. (If colorblindness were transmissible.)

It may be pointless to explain the difference between red and green to any such congenital deuteranope. But 360 years ago, one greater than I tried anyway:

Truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever; but I must tell you their liberty and freedom consists of having of government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government, sir, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and sovereign are clear different things.

That would be Charles Stuart, of course.

Wilkinson says that many people have considered libertarian ideas and have rejected them for all sorts of decent reasons, and that libertarians need to take those reasons (and those people) seriously and adequately address them.

Sounds reasonable. Moldbug calls it teh democrack — alluring, perhaps, but divorced from reality:

Dear Will: you mention IQ. Perhaps you’re aware that the average IQ is 100. Have you ever collaborated with, employed, or otherwise befriended anyone with an IQ of 100? If not, it’s never too late to moonlight in “food prep” at your local Hardee’s. You could also enlist in the Marines; train as a cosmetologist; or work as a telemarketer. Or why not all of the above? Don’t you want to connect with your good friends, the People?

After these learning experiences, you may be inspired to set up a special, simplified version of your blog, to explain the virtues of Rawlsekianism to voters in this bracket — who have, as you say, “considered libertarian ideas and rejected them for all sorts of reasons.” (An accessibility feature, as it were. One small step ahead of the ADA.)

Rawles and Hayek aren’t easy to understand. Neither is Marx, of course, but you don’t have to understand Marx to understand Marxism’s allure:

We now arrive at the fundamental comedy of democratic libertarianism — a proposition no less grimly hilarious for its infinite boneheadedness. At the start of the 20th century, “classical liberalism” was conventional common sense, and Marxism and its relatives were on the fringe. Now, Marxism and its progeny are as ubiquitous as cytomegalovirus, and the lineage of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and Thomas Jefferson infects only a few nerds, stoners and other freaks. (And the world, of course, has gone to hell in a handbasket.) Is this just a coincidence?

Um, no, duh. It’s not just a coincidence. Because if you and your friends can parrot Marxism and get it together to capture the State, Marxism gives you: (a) money; (b) power; and probably (c) women. Whereas if you and your friends can parrot Rawlsekianism and get it together to capture the State, Rawlsekianism gives you — what? Philosophical satisfaction? So: which of these creeds would you expect to be more popular with the masses?

So what we’d expect, just from rational first principles, is that if you start with a libertarian democracy, it will eventually become socialist. Socialism, as a theology of vote-buying and worse, is perfectly preadapted for Darwinian success in a democracy. If democracy is like cancer, socialism is like terminal cancer — the natural, entropic endpoint of the process.

And indeed, not only does the experience of American democracy demonstrate this effect — so does the accumulated wisdom of both Greco-Roman antiquity and classical Europe, both of which regarded democracy and socialism as (a) contemptible and (b) synonymous. You’ll note that the Greeks, in particular, saw upward of five zillion independent city-states over the course of about half a millennium, so their experience is by no means to be taken lightly. (“Aristotle! Plato! Socrates! Morons…”)

Therefore, what the left-libertarian has the courage and forthrightness to propose is not just that a libertarian democracy can remain libertarian —contrary to history, reason, and wisdom alike — but that a socialist democracy can become libertarian! Through the same democratic process that sent it in the other direction! Time reverses, water runs uphill, dogs meow, and old women become young and beautiful. Will, this is why I wonder what your dealer’s selling you.

I’ve been considering reading Luigi Barzini’s The Europeans for some time now, but Mencius Moldbug’s recent mention has finally pushed me to borrow a copy. An excerpt — on Italy, but with wider implications:

Miscalculations, sometimes irreparable, are also constantly made by foreigners in their estimates of the Italian political and economic perspectives. Inevitably, cures for Italian ills based on authoritative diagnoses, cures that might be excellent for other countries, are disastrously wrong.

In the late fifties and early sixties, when the Italian economy was enjoying a boom and political problems were being gradually solved, save one, the Communist threat, foreign specialists decided the only hope for the country was not what common sense would have recommended, the strengthening of the coalition of center parties, which, with American help, had rapidly reconstructed the country after the war (all efficient governments are, whatever they call themselves, center governments). Foreign experts thought that a new Center-Left government would be the right medicine, a coalition of Christian Democrats and Socialists.

It must be honestly pointed out that, as usual, these foreigners were deceived by Italian words, which seldom mean exactly what they seem to say. Italian Socialists of that generation were not what these people imagined. They were also very dissimilar from the Italian Socialists of today. They were then incredibly behind the times. Most of them were verbal extremists. Many clung to the 1870 myths of La Commune and to the excessive impossible hopes of the beginning of this century, some were Anarcho-Syndicalists, others were pure anarchists and a few were terrorists at heart. They believed the economy was the only motor of history but knew almost nothing about economics. They were openly pro-Communist, resigned to accept Soviet leadership in international affairs, resigned also to see the Italian Communists take power, and worked strenuously to help them destroy what was left of the bourgeois liberal state. The secretary of the party, Francesco de Martino, repeatedly threatened: “We’ll nationalize everything in the country except barber shops.” (The odd exception was probably because Professor de Martino, being Neapolitan, presumably did not use a razor, but like most middle-aged southerners, was shaved every afternoon after the siesta by a friendly barber, whose autonomy from the state he was understandably determined to preserve for the safety of his own hirsute jowls.)
[...]
The plan to form a Center-Left coalition was first conceived by Italian politicians for many different reasons of their own, but also custom-designed to seduce the Americans, without whose approval and backing the Italians curiously believed it could not be carried out. The Americans immediately saw in it a wonderful way to fulfill their double vocation: the pragmatic one of leaving no problem unsolved and their missionary obligation to spread democracy and improve everything in sight.

They spared neither effort nor money to implement the plan as quickly as possible. They thought it was the only way to cure all the Italian ills at once, so why wait? It would strengthen the decaying state; check rampant corruption; generally enforce law and order; defeat the Mafia, the Camorra, and the emboldened unattached criminals; discourage the class struggle; decrease the number of ruinous strikes; swell production and imports; slow down inflation; levitate the standard of living; and as a result, encourage domestic and foreign investments.

Above all, they believed it to be a certain way to isolate and weaken the pro-Soviet Communists, by depriving them of their Socialist vassals, and free Italy once and for all from the menace of a totalitarian takeover. A Soviet-dominated peninsula cutting the Mediterranean in half obviously would have thrown all NATO plans and the security of the United States itself into disarray.
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The plan might possibly have produced in some other country all the wonderful effects the Americans expected. In unpredictable Italy, it produced the exact contrary. It was estimated that in the end the plan cost as much as a lost war and retarded social and economic progress for at least one generation. Its failure also came from external circumstances, to be sure, the rise in the price of oil, the revolt of the young and the workers in the late sixties, but was principally due to the wrong diagnosis. The state (what was left of it after twenty years of arbitrary dictatorship and a crushing military defeat) practically collapsed under the burden of a vastly enlarged number of new tasks, some of them admittedly useful and necessary, but with which the bureaucracy, such as it was, was absolutely unprepared to cope. Among them was the enforcement of some of the most ambitious and intricate legislation ever passed outside Byzantium.

Furthermore, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, who had considered with hostility the secular liberal democratic state since its inception in 1861, joyfully kept on dismantling it. Too late they realized it had become an indispensable tool, not only to govern in the ordinary way, but above all to carry out any left-wing policy, which notoriously relies on an ever-increasing state intervention in every sector of the economy. Corruption grew to Levantine proportions. The police were demoralized, paralyzed, and ordered not to use their weapons even when attacked.

Only after Aldo Moro was kidnapped and killed did the more responsible politicians in power begin to realize that the dismantling of law-enforcement agencies did not harm their “class enemies” alone but was detrimental for the whole country and could be mortally dangerous for each of them. Law and order were violated by everybody as a matter of course with impunity; even sedate elderly drivers allowed themselves to cross red lights. Bank robberies and kidnappings of well-to-do gentlemen proliferated. Terrorists dynamited trains, cars, and office buildings and murdered innocent people almost every day. Every request of the trade unions was immediately granted without discussion. The endemic riots, the perennial strikes, the occupation of factories, and the continuous threats of universal nationalizations discouraged new investments. Capital surreptitiously fled the country in vast quantities. Production slowed down and sometimes came unexpectedly, without a reason, to a standstill in many plants. The state deficit, incredibly, grew higher than that of the U.S. federal government, and the inflation rate threatened to reach South American levels. The “economic miracle” of the fifties became but a nostalgic memory, a lost golden age.

Finally the Communists, who, deprived of their Socialist vassals and isolated in their ghetto, were supposed to wither away, acquired instead an all-pervading tentacular influence they had never previously enjoyed or hoped for. They seduced or terrorized the intelligentsia, more or less controlled schools, universities, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, all means of communications, and through the trade unions, the economic life of the country. They infiltrated the bench and the bureaucracy. Many Italians, who were not convinced Communists, saw the way the wind was turning, and prudently, resignedly behaved as if they were true believers, naturally with the neophyte’s fanatic zeal, somewhat as their fathers had done as Blackshirts. Democratic opponents to the Center-Left, who did not fully trust the government’s programs and still thought the Communists a possible threat to freedom, somehow found themselves without jobs or occupying obscure positions inferior to their capacities. As a result many bright and ambitious young men emigrated to countries where advancement was based on merit and not political affiliation. One Italian writer I know changed language to make a living.

The Communists’ source of power was principally their capacity to stage riots anywhere at any time. The party had money enough to organize noisy and turbulent mass meetings a few blocks from the seat of the government by concentrating hundreds of buses and dozens of special trains on Rome within days. It could also paralyze the whole country overnight by means of general strikes, brutally enforced by strong-arm squads. Sometimes the party did not have to do anything. Threats were enough, veiled threats in Unità leading articles, in a speech in Parliament, or even unspoken threats. The saying went at the time that the Christian Democrats could do nothing that displeased the Socialists, the Socialists could do nothing that displeased the Communists, and, in the end, even if the Communists did not always get all they wanted, nothing could be decided that they did not like. Some of the most controversial laws were in fact passed with their votes or thanks to their abstention.

The idea that the Center-Left coalition could best defend the people’s liberty from the Communists was best criticized by Giovanni Malagodi, parliamentary leader of the handful of democratic opposition deputies, with these words, “You are making the same mistake the Romans made at the end. They entrusted part of the defense of the empire to Germanic tribes, related by blood, customs and religion to the Germanic tribes pressing on the border.”

Specialists in Italian affairs (diplomats, journalists, and professors of international relations in the best universities) were frightened by what they had helped to bring about. They concluded the country was hopelessly, incurably sick, as sick as Imperial China or the Ottoman Empire on their last legs, ready for extreme unction. They saw it correctly as rudderless, irreparably torn by irreconcilable social strife, led by weak, incompetent politicians, and drifting toward final bankruptcy and collapse, or at best, a totalitarian police regime on the Soviet model. They had to conclude that the Center-Left coalition, while inspired by the best intentions and based on sound information, had been a costly mistake that had produced more terrifying problems than it had solved, possibly only because its aims were too high and because it had been set up before the country was ready for it.

Americans have little sense of history and little sense of the brevity of their democracy — which was not designed as a democracy, but as a republic with limited franchise.

G. M. Palmer says that republicanism will always devolve into democracy, which will always devolve into socialism, but one Michael S. notes that while the difficulty of restricting suffrage permanently is true for the United States and modern Europe, it’s not universal:

The Venetian republic effectively restricted suffrage to those families listed in its Golden Book, and lasted for a thousand years. The doges were elected — albeit for life — by a complex and indirect process that makes the U.S. Electoral College seem a model of simplicity, while they were constitutionally more or less severely limited in their authority. That they were not above the law, and could be removed from office, is proved by the case of Marin Falier. The ultimate franchise always lay with the patriciate or senatorial class, as in the ancient Roman republic. Napoleon Bonaparte (a military dictator and self-proclaimed emperor), rather than creeping demotism, finally put an end to it.

The relative stability of La Serenissima seems to me to stand in contradiction of [Mencius Moldbug]‘s neo-Hobbesian alternatives of absolutism or a democracy that ends inevitably in a brahmin nomenklatura riding to power on the shoulders of a lumpenprole mob. As an aristocratic republic, Venice survived longer than many absolute monarchies, and longer than the United States has existed.

Mencius Moldbug offers an unusual explanation of what a conservative is:

A conservative is someone who helps disguise the true nature of a democratic state. The conservative is ineffective by definition, because his goal is to make democracy work properly. The fact that it does not work properly, has never worked properly, and will never work properly, sails straight over his head. He therefore labors cheerfully as a tool for his enemies.

Fascism, according to Moldbug, is the rightmost end of the tradition that in British politics is called Tory Democracy:

The basic method of Tory democracy is to appeal to the masses to support a non-democratic, ie reactionary, form of government. The basic problem of Tory democracy is that the masses suck. Therefore, if you practice Tory democracy, your movement is liable to become contaminated with all sorts of heinous nonsense, such as anti-Semitism.
[...]
Conditions are ripe for fascism when there exists an old tradition which is in the process of being destroyed by democracy, but has not yet quite been destroyed. The half-recreated fascist tradition is half reactionary, half democratic, and all nasty.

Jingoism, Moldbug notes, is an excellent way to appeal to the masses against the elite:

When fascism ascends to power, it creates a coherent central authority (good) which is not responsible in any way (bad), maintains itself in power by indocrinating its subjects (bad), and practices unnecessary and sadistic violence (bad). Thus we have one good and three bads, which makes bad. It is not surprising that fascism is generally considered bad.

However, since we have one good, it is not surprising that it can accomplish good as well. For example, it is just the bee’s knees for crime, and may even be the least of two evils. Mussolini did a fine job with the Mafia. Imagine him in Mexico now.

The 20th century was the golden age of lies, according the Mencius Moldbug:

The liars of the 20th century, like the painters of the 16th, will be remembered forever as the Old Masters of their art. I know [Unqualified Reservations] has many readers who are Christians or Jews, and sometimes I even regret my own inability to believe in God. But no one who knows anything about the 20th century can fail to believe in the Devil.

Lies are like snowflakes. Every lie is its own unique, perfect self. It is no more possible to list all possible kinds of lie, than all possible kinds of magic trick, or all possible patterns of camouflage. Each is defined only by its goal: misdirecting the mind of the audience. Producing the illusion of a reality that is not real, and obscuring the reality that is.

Every nation in the 20th century produced masterpieces of mendacity. Here is one, from Last Train from Berlin (1942), by the New Deal journalist Howard K. Smith. Bear in mind: Smith is observing the Nazi and Soviet regimes at a point in time at which the former has not committed millions of political murders, and the latter has.

On first glance, Germany [in 1936] was overwhelmingly attractive, and first impressions disarmed many a hardy anti-Nazi before he could lift his lance for attack. Its big cities were cleaner than big cities ought, by custom, to be. You could search far and wide through Berlin’s sea of houses or Hamburg’s huge harbour district, but you could never find a slum or anything approaching one. On the countryside, broad, flourishing acres were cut into neat checkerboards. People looked good. Nobody was in rags, not a single citizen. They were well dressed, if not stylishly dressed. And they were well fed. The impression was one of order, cleanliness and prosperity – and this has been of immense propaganda value to the Nazis.

There is a great fallacy here, and it is a mistake which an unfortunately large number of young American students I met in Heidelberg made and retained for a long time. The fallacy is in connecting this admirable order, cleanliness and apparent prosperity with the Nazi government. Actually, and this was pointed out to me by a German dock-worker on my first magic day in Bremen, Germans and Germany were neat, clean and able to do an amazing lot with amazingly little long before Hitler came to power. Such slums as existed were removed by the Socialist government and replaced with neat workers’ apartments while the Nazis were still a noisy minority chalking swastikas on back-alley fences.
[...]
Once, however, I broke my routine and took a trip to Russia. That land impressed me disgustingly favorably for a individual who was still more Liberal than Socialist. Contrary to the development of my reactions in Germany, Russia looked better the longer I stayed and the more I saw. Russia was not neat, clean, and orderly. Russia was dirty and disorderly.

But the spirit of the thing got me. The Bolsheviks did not inherit cleanliness and order; they inherited a wrecked feudal society, and in a relatively short period wonders had been done. The edges were rough and the effort was amateur. But that was just it; it was amateur, everybody was doing it. You got the impression that each and every little individual was feeling pretty important doing the pretty important job of building up a State, eager and interested as a bunch of little boys turned loose in a locomotive and told to do as they please. It showed promise like a gifted child’s first scratchings of “a house” on paper. Klein aber mein; a little but mine own, as the proverb goes.

What is more, the standard of living was definitely rising, not falling. The whole picture was not as pretty as the German one, but the atmosphere, utterly devoid of any trace of militarism or racial prejudice, was clean and healthy as the streets were dirty. I knew all along the atmosphere reminded me of a word, but I couldn’t think what it was until I got back to Germany. The word was “democracy.” That, I know, is a strange reaction to a country which is well known to be a dictatorship, but the atmosphere simply did not coincide with the newspapers’ verdict.

The quality of this propaganda is beyond comparison. Goebbels had talent — there is no denying it. But as a patriotic American, I believe our product is a step beyond.

If there are two words that summarize the above, perhaps they are sincere mendacity. Perhaps not all the journalists of the New Deal, or their heirs of today, were (while not of good character) perfectly sincere. But at worst, even when they consciously lied, they thought of themselves as conveying a higher truth. And when they lied they did so as individuals, not cogs in a machine. Goebbels, who was more or less the pope of Nazi Germany, is not in the building.

The result is a wonderfully chummy tone. You are grateful to your friend, Howard K. Smith, for seeing beyond the simplistic, superficial appearance of Nazi prosperity and Soviet barbarism, and helping you feel the deep and subtle reality of Nazi incompetence and Soviet democracy.

The Smiths of today omit the first-glance impression of Nazi Germany, but in 1942 this was not possible. Let’s be clear on the facts: while German meticulousness is not a myth, the transition from Weimar to Third Reich was indeed responsible for much of the “admirable order, cleanliness and apparent prosperity.” This probably does not change your mind about Nazis, Nazism, or Hitler. And nor is it intended to. It is not a point much stressed these days, that’s all.

He recommends primary sources:

For a fair anti-Nazi source, try Stephen Roberts‘ House that Hitler Built (1937). For a fair pro-Nazi source, try Francis Yeats-Brown‘s European Jungle (1939).

Both these books will leave you seeing the Third Reich in color. But if you are satisfied with black and white, a modern history (I like Michael Burleigh‘s) of the Third Reich is perfectly acceptable.

His point:

My perception is that the portrait of Nazi Germany we get from Howard K. Smith, his uniformly synoptic colleagues, and of course their present-day successors, is basically accurate — in analysis as in facts. They portray National Socialism as fundamentally demonic, and indeed it was. In this, they are right and their opponents are wrong. In other things…

The easy error is the assumption that because National Socialism was demonic, its enemies were not. Smith’s portrait of Russia is a brief masterpiece of sincere mendacity. Since truth plus fiction equals fiction, the whole — even with its fresh, clean Germany — becomes an even more staggering masterpiece, enhanced rather than disqualified by its factual fraction.

The New Deal’s picture of the Soviet system has since been corrected, of course. Its picture of the American system has not.

Almost all Lincoln biographies are completely worthless, Mencius Moldbug says:

They explain Lincoln as a saint, rather than the extraordinarily talented politician he was. Their method is as follows: tell us what Lincoln said, assume that he was saying what he was thinking, then praise this noble thought. When Lincoln emits “darky” jokes or other crass noises, this can be put down to necessary political opportunism, in which he had to engage if he was to fulfill his Father’s mission. (Note that the same method, with the same results, can be used for Barack Obama.)

Masters [Lincoln the Man (1931)] and Beveridge [Abraham Lincoln (1928)] put Lincoln in his political context, and they explain his speeches as what they were: not thoughts but actions, with intended results. Masters was America’s leading poet and Beveridge a major senator, and neither of them have any patience with the “great man” act. Their books are hard to find, unfortunately, but there’s always interlibrary loan.

The general mistake that brought down the Confederacy, Mencius Moldbug claims, was that it was conservative, rather than reactionary:

Had the South seceded in 1850, even had Virginia voted to secede (as she almost did) in 1861 before Lincoln’s inauguration, we would probably have a Southern Confederacy to this day.

For fans of the Confederacy, we must describe the general mistake that brought it down. The Confederates made many errors, of course, as any government of any longevity must; but perhaps the general pattern of their error was that the Confederate nation was conservative, rather than reactionary. Perhaps, in the 19th century, this was avoidable; but it was still fatal.

A conservative is one who, rather than simply rejecting the revolutionary tradition of democracy, finds some effective way to contaminate it with reality, thus producing a weak but somewhat effective simulation of archism out of basically anarchist materials. Conservatism always appears, because it is easy. And it always fails, because it is weak and fraudulent. It is a case of tiling over the linoleum.

The American populist conservatism of the late 20th century, so reminiscent of Disraeli’s “Tory democracy,” is a fine example. It uses the tools of democracy to appeal to the inchoate urge of the petty-bourgeois or kulak class for law, order, and national power. In the long run, this is a great way to persuade your aristocracy that it needs to smash the bourgeoisie. Not a fortunate result, and not the only way that real power has of resisting this feeble attack, either. But in the short run it can improve things, sort of, for a little while.

The Confederates failed because they failed to realize that they were Cavaliers. Lord only knows what they would have done if they had, but it would have been quite a bit more drastic. This was not quite a realization available to the 19th-century Southern intellectual — not even to the most extreme, such as the fascinating George Fitzhugh, star of what Louis Hartz called the “Reactionary Enlightenment” and author of the amazing and mischievous proslavery tract Cannibals All. Even Fitzhugh was not quite ready to restore the Stuarts, and he was probably more talked about in the North than read in the South. It was just the wrong century for that sort of a thing.

The Confederacy, in particular, failed first and foremost because it seceded way too late. It should have done the deed in 1850 at the latest, and probably earlier. It was not necessary to wait for Abraham Lincoln, John Brown and the Secret Six for the South to know that the North was after its blood. It should have been clear by the 1830s that the marriage with Puritan revolutionary democracy was not a winner.

After that, it failed because it failed to secure British support. Sheldon Vanauken, in his excellent Glittering Illusion, tells the story of this fiasco. The demise of the Confederacy was the demise of the aristocratic tradition in Great Britain, and yet these natural allies could both have survived had Palmerston lifted a finger in the appropriate direction.

The reason he did not, as Vanauken explains, is that the general feeling in Britain was that the Confederacy could not possibly lose — being far more studly than the successful nationalist revolutionaries in Greece and Italy. (Of course, the liberals of Greece and Italy (a) were actually liberal, and (b) actually had the British Navy on their side.)

Thus, the fighting should be kept going as long as possible, to bleed the loathsome Jonathan. Many British aristocrats were quite surprised, and quite disappointed, when the surrender of Richmond did not lead to a protracted guerrilla campaign. Of course, this was not to be expected from a movement which was conservative, rather than revolutionary — not to mention one faced with the utterly (and appropriately, in my judgment) ruthless North. Again, the error is one of building reaction on the ideological foundations of revolution.

He adds an important caveat:

But before we get too carried away with the Lost Cause, note: we are still working on the temperance theory. We are describing the Confederacy as if it were a normal country, not one built on the evil of slavery. Surely, different rules apply.

Mencius Moldbug explains how the War of Secession came about:

At the time of American independence, there was little or no proslavery ideology. American slavery was an accident, an outlier. It was an African institution which had spread to the English colonies via Portugal and Spain. It survived because English property and contract law of the time was so strong that it frowned not at all on contractual servitude. This was easily extended to Negro slaves purchased from the existing Spanish asiento trade, though they had signed no contract of indenture. Slavery existed at first because no one had the power to ban it or to confiscate slaves. Before the American Rebellion it was gradually regularized — in all states, not just the South — by legal recognition of actual fact. It was, in short, an unprincipled exception to the democratic enthusiasms of the 18th century.

So, for example, a Virginian slaveholder like Jefferson could write a prohibition of slavery into the law that established the Northwest Territory, because the issue at the time was not a bone of contention. Statesmen of the early Republic, North and South, generally saw slavery as an artifact of history which was undesirable and fated, somehow, to disappear.

All this changed in the ’20s, and still more in the ’30s, with the rise of abolitionism. Imported from England and associated, as we would expect, with Quakers, Unitarians, Methodists, etc, etc, abolitionism was the first great cause of the democratic era. Its original exponents, as we would expect, were highly moral and principled intellectuals, such as John Quincy Adams.

There were two basic problems with abolitionism.

One: it could not be seen as anything but an attack on the South, the weaker party, by the North, the stronger party. Once the lines of sectional politics were clear, as Jefferson saw clearly in 1820, the question of whether a new state would allow slavery was the question of which bloc would get its two new Senators.

Two: the North had no legal basis whatsoever for this attack. The idea that the Federal government had the power to end slavery and free the slaves was roughly as foreign to antebellum constitutional law as the proposition that Barack Obama could order Rush Limbaugh hanged at dawn, “just because he’s an asshole,” is to ours.
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Southern politicians, writers and ministers found the moral defense of slavery in the context of democracy and Christianity a difficult problem, but not at all impossible for the sinuous. But they found the legal defense of slavery no problem at all, because the law was on their side from day one.

Northern politicians, writers and ministers had exactly the opposite problem. While the American mores of 1850 were not quite the same as ours, moral condemnation of slavery came almost as naturally then as it does now. However, said moral condemnation created the urge to actually do something about the problem. For which the North had no legal standing at all.

During the 1840s and 1850s, the antislavery movement spread far beyond the handful of Massachusetts intellectuals who were the original abolitionists. And its features became extremely unattractive. Because it had no legal means to proceed, it resorted to illegal ones. Because the truth was that the North was attacking the South and trying to abolish slavery, its politicians had to assert that the South was attacking the North and trying to propagate slavery. Conspiracy theories abounded — such as Lincoln’s completely false charge that the Dred Scott decision was a conspiracy between Douglas, Buchanan, Taney and Pierce to bring about national slavery, as wild a lie as anything in American political history.

As the ideology of antislavery spread West, it passed from those who hated slavery because they loved Negroes as fellow men, to those who hated slavery because they didn’t want Negroes around. (Lincoln, with typical dexterity, managed to convince his audiences that he was in both categories.) Thus the free-state Kansas constitution prohibited Negroes free or slave, as did that of Oregon. By 1860, little that is human or humane can be found in the antislavery movement. Its engine runs on pure chimp rage. As Pierce’s speech shows, it took no hindsight to detect the growing smell of blood.

Responsible Northern statesmen, typically Democrats or “old line” Whigs, saw where things were going, and with their old Southern Unionist friends did their best to shut the antislavery agitation off. This was generally taken by antislavery men, and by your less scrupulous historians, as complicity with the infamous Slave Power.

So, for example, the authors of the Dred Scott decision had no thought of instituting slavery in Vermont. Their goal was to drive a legal nail into the coffin of the antislavery movement, allowing a country in which the map of slavery had been finally and completely outlined (after Kansas, there were no remaining territorial quarrels) to return to politics as usual. But every attempt of this type was no more than political fuel to the antislavery machine.

Southerners developed the increasingly beleaguered sense of nationalism that terminated in secession. They had two choices, neither good. If they compromised and accepted Northern demands, despite the essential asymmetry of the situation, they gave in to force and fed a crocodile. The next round of agitation would demand more. If Southerners resisted, being the hot-blooded people they were, or even raised the ante, they were conjuring the specter of the Slave Power and contributing to Northern paranoia.

Moldbug heartily recommends George Lunt’s Origin of the Late War:

I cannot even fathom the quantity of testicular fortitude required to publish this sort of material in Boston in 1865. Origin of the Late War is simply a wonderful book; it has both judgment and immediacy, detail and passion. I recommend it highly. If you only read one primary source on the War of Secession, this should probably be the one.

Mencius Moldbug argues that, in order to understand the Civil War, we need a conceptual tool that can separate our moral judgment of slavery from our critical assessment of the political acts and actions of the 1850s:

The name of our tool is temperance. Ie, prohibition of alcohol. For reasons that will be obvious to any [Unqualified Reservations] reader, the temperance and abolition movements were close bedfellows. The match is not perfect, of course, but if we replace slavery with liquor, we have a hot-button issue in the 1850s whose emotional connotations in 2009 are comical at best.

So, for example: when politicians are fighting about whether “slavery shall go into Kansas,” just think of them as fighting about whether liquor shall go into Kansas. Is Kansas to be a wet state, or a dry state? Shall Congress decide? Or the settlers in Kansas? Are prohibitionists in Massachusetts organizing to dispatch teetotalers to the territories? Are all the worst sots of Missouri up in arms against them?

With this device at our disposal, we are equipped to ask: disregarding the moral connotations of slavery (which we will consider later), which side in the War of Secession was in the right?

I can’t help but think, Other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

The politics of the Gilded Age were undeniably corrupt — Mark Twain dubbed the whole thing the Great Barbecue — and the progressives of the era — intellectuals like historian Charles Francis Adams, Jr. and the Mugwumps — hoped for a better system:

What Adams and the Mugwumps are asking for is no less than the creation of a new power structure, a “lofty rostrum,” which is above democracy — which supersedes mere politics, which makes decisions and policies much as Adams and his friends would have — in the light of reason and science, the “calm lessons of history,” not the mad psychological battlefield of the torchlight election parade.

The result is our Modern Structure [of power], of course. The dream made real. The Mugwumps won. Yet somehow, all the diseases Adams diagnoses seem worse then ever. What happened?

What happened is that Adams and his friends, as members of an aristocratic intellectual caste, true Platonic guardians, Harvard-bred heirs to the American dream, had been disempowered. Sidelined, in fact, by grubby street politics of a distinctly Hibernian flavor. This could not have been expected to make them happy. It did, however, render them pure — because even if the Carl Schurzes of the world had been inclined to corruption, which they were not, competing with the James G. Blaines of the world in that department was simply out of the question.

So the Mugwumps believed that, by running a pipe from the limpid spring of academia to the dank sewer of American democracy, they could make the latter run clear again. What they might have considered, however, was that there was no valve in their pipe. Aiming to purify the American state, they succeeded only in corrupting the American mind.

When an intellectual community is separated from political power, as the Mugwumps were for a while in the Gilded Age, it finds itself in a strange state of grace. Bad ideas and bad people exist, but good people can recognize good ideas and good people, and a nexus of sense forms. The only way for the bad to get ahead is to copy the good, and vice pays its traditional tribute to virtue. It is at least reasonable to expect sensible ideas to outcompete insane ones in this “marketplace,” because good sense is the only significant adaptive quality.

Restore the connection, and the self-serving idea, the meme with its own built-in will to power, develops a strange ability to thrive and spread. Thoughts which, if correct, provide some pretext for empowering the thinker, become remarkably adaptive. Even if they are utterly insane. As the Latin goes: vult decipi, decipiatur. Self-deception does not in any way preclude sincerity.

Ideas are not individuals. They do not organize, have meetings in beer halls, wear identically colored shirts, practise the goose step or chant in the streets. However, to ambitious people the combination of good and altruistic intended effects, with evil and self-serving actual effects, is eternally attractive. We can describe policies exhibiting this stereotype as Machiavellian.

The Modern Structure [of power] exhibits a fascinating quality which might be described as distributed Machiavellianism. [The US Government] under the Modern Structure enacts large numbers of policies (such as “affirmative action”) which are best explained in Machiavellian terms. However, there is no central cabal dictating Machiavellian strategies, and actors in the Structure do not feel they are pursuing evil or experience any pangs of conscience.

Under this pattern, the intended effect of the policy is to inflict some good or other on America, the rest of the world, or both. The actual effect of the policy is to make the problem which requires the policy worse, the apparatus which formulates and applies the policy larger and more important, etc, etc. In other words, the adaptive purpose of the actors is to maximize their own share of sovereignty. The side effects are at least parasitic, and at worst far worse.

Most people’s share of sovereignty is zero. However, many aspire to make policy who will never get there, just as many aspire to play in the NBA. Since Machiavellian thinking tends to become the corporate culture of all powerful institutions, and since the ambitious naturally tend to emulate the thinking of the powerful, the natural perspective of the ambitious becomes Machiavellian. In a meritocratic oligarchy, where power is open only to those who succeed in contests of intellectual strength, the natural perspective of the intelligent is Machiavellian.

In other words: Machiavellian ideas are adaptive in a competitive oligarchy, because they allow members of that oligarchy to feel good about themselves while in fact looking out for number one. However, if the same exact people are completely disconnected from power and have no chance of regaining it, these same ideas will dwindle and die out, their intrinsic stupidity soon revealing itself.

Just in time for Watchmen, Mencius re-raises the old question:

Once again, we see the failure to solve the quis custodiet problem. The classic mistake is to pass power to some new institution, already extant but hitherto uncorrupted. It appears worthy of power because it is worthy of power, being uncorrupted. However, it is uncorrupted only because it has not yet held power. Handed power, it becomes corrupt, and the problem repeats.

So it was not the intelligence or education of the Mugwumps that shielded them from the corruption of power, but solely their (temporary) irrelevance. When that irrelevance was reversed, the consequence was a new system of government by deception — the Modern Structure — which is not, unlike the coarse populist mendacity of the Gilded Age, transparent to anyone of any intelligence or education.

The Modern Structure is just as sophisticated as Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and no less slippery, mendacious or corrupt than James G. Blaine. It is subject to all the woes of the system it replaced, but its new system of deception is impenetrable enough to convince even most of the most intelligent that up is actually down. It is, in short, a perfect disaster.

Charles Mackay, who is best known for his Extraordinary Popular Delusions, also wrote about his visit the States — he was from London — in Life and Liberty in America (vol. 1, vol. 2), which Mencius Moldbug considers mandatory reading:

His ideas are typical of a moderate English liberal at the time, which of course makes him wonderfully reactionary for now. I can’t imagine a better host.

My first response to Mackay’s travelogue is that the America he is writing about is, um, actually, alive. There is no sign of any tetrodotoxin. There are no zombie banks, zombie theaters, or even zombie politicians. If you absolutely have no time for anything beyond a sample, read Mackay’s chapter 3 — Broadway By Night.

What would you pay for a ticket to Broadway, 1859? Just to spend a night there? Imagine Mackay traveling to the New York of 2009. How is our Broadway by night? Not bad at all — by the standards of 2009. (And pretty damned good by the standards of 1979.)

I suspect he’d think Manhattan had been subjected to some kind of awful experiment in mass psychiatric medication. Everything has become grim, gray and slovenly. Not to mention that “life and property” are no longer anywhere near what Mackay would consider “very safe.” (Being a Londoner of the Victorian era, by “very safe” he means “completely safe” — the presence of a human predator on the streets being slightly more likely than that of an escaped leopard.)

And this is Broadway, then and now. Now, consider his description of St. Louis. What would Charles Mackay make of St. Louis today? What do you make of St. Louis today? (Or Detroit? Consider what this news crew found… in what was once America’s fourth largest city.) And then there’s Mackay’s New Orleans…

But there is another difference between 1859 and 2009: modern technology. We have it. They didn’t. So: imagine Mackay’s America, plus iPhones and satellites and nuclear power. Now you see the true measure of the gap. It’s a little like comparing America, 2009, to Belarus, 2009.

Every democracy must be a psychological-warfare state, Mencius Moldbug argues:

Most people get their opinions from others. If public opinion commands the power of the State, the power to inform is the power to command the State. Just as you will seldom find a stack of twenties on the sidewalk, this power will not just be waving around in the breeze. Someone will capture it, and hold it until it is torn from their hands.

Even if you have not been reading UR long and remain a good democrat, it disturbs you to see the resemblance between political communication and commercial advertising. This is because you know the latter consists largely of psychological-warfare tropes (as per Bernays, Lippmann, and the like). Their goal is not to inform you, but to control your behavior. You know this. And yet…