We are living in a moment wherein any number of people are questioning the efficacy of democratic governance. On the one hand, I get it. There are all kinds of problems that seem never to be solved, often in the face of clear public opinion on a given topic. It is difficult to hold politicians and political parties accountable. Indeed, the entire electoral feedback loop could be said to be broken. Some, such as myself, think that the solution to this problem in the United States is pro-democracy reforms that would improve representativeness and democratic accountability.
Others, however, think that democracy itself is the problem and instead want to take power out of the hands of voters and centralize in a more authoritarian type of governance. Some just want a temporary strongman to fix these problems (as characterized by populism) others want to go full-on dictator.
I would note that this is not a new debate. The issue of who should govern and whether power should be concentrated or not is an ancient one (I wrote about this in some detail here years ago). Of late there have been a number of folks emerging from the tech sector who are arguing for dictatorship over democracy (I cited an example here). A prominent example is Curtis Yarvin, who was interviewed by the NYT: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.
The interview is worth attention for a couple of reasons. First, as the linked headline notes, some prominent conservatives are listening. Yarvin has been cited by J.D. Vance, for example, and he has become a darling of the reactionary right’s mediasphere.
Not surprisingly, I find Yarvin’s lessons from history and his prescriptions for the future to be lacking.
He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted, and perhaps most provocative, he argues that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a “monarchy” run by what he has called a “C.E.O.” — basically his friendlier term for a dictator.
I would note that even monarchs need bureaucrats. Also, it is just so very shocking that people such as Yarvin whose basic experience is business thinks that a modified CEO model is the way to go. And it leada to things like this:
It’s an excerpt from the diary of Harold Ickes, who is F.D.R.’s secretary of the interior, describing a cabinet meeting in 1933. What happens in this cabinet meeting is that Frances Perkins, who’s the secretary of labor, is like, Here, I have a list of the projects that we’re going to do. F.D.R. personally takes this list, looks at the projects in New York and is like, This is crap. Then at the end of the thing, everybody agrees that the bill would be fixed and then passed through Congress. This is F.D.R. acting like a C.E.O. So, was F.D.R. a dictator? I don’t know. What I know is that Americans of all stripes basically revere F.D.R., and F.D.R. ran the New Deal like a start-up.
He thinks that FDR is a good example of the kind of CEO/dictator that he wants. However, I must confess that I do not understand how a president working with his cabinet to then pass legislation through Congress is a good argument for why democracy ought to be scuttled.
Also, two other things.
- “This is F.D.R. acting like a C.E.O. So, was F.D.R. a dictator? I don’t know.” Then why in the world does he use this as an example?
- “F.D.R. ran the New Deal like a start-up.” What does this actually mean? It just sounds like a person with a limited understanding of politics and history applying his own experience. And, moreover, it is the kind of thing that certain people will think sounds edgy and cool because of the mythology that surrounds Silicon Valley start-ups (most of which fail, I would note).
I would counter, by the way, that a parliamentary system wherein a Prime Minister would have to have a majority in the legislature could function in a similar CEO way (because, and hear me out as this might blow your mind, the Prime Minister is a chief executive!) while still having to be accountable to voters. Such an arrangement allows for a coherent policy plan that requires public debate and scrutiny without all the rather obvious pitfalls of power concentrated in a dictator (or monarch, as Yarvin likes to say).
But, Yarvin does like the “start-up” analogy.
If you look at the administration of Washington, what is established looks a lot like a start-up. It looks so much like a start-up that this guy Alexander Hamilton, who was recognizably a start-up bro, is running the whole government — he is basically the Larry Page of this republic.
First, sure, the Washinton administration was a kind of start-up, but only in a general sense of the term. But the analogy to a company/firm is just wrong. Companies produce a specific product or set of products. Governments do far, far more than that. People who think that government is a relatively simple entity that can be analogized to a household or business always demonstrate to me that they shouldn’t be listened to.
Second, this sounds like a person whose understanding of the Washington administration comes from watching Hamilton.
As a general matter, Yarvin’s historical and philosophical understanding is not especially impressive (to put it mildly).
For example:
So when you want to say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is not a good system of government, and then you’ll be like, Yes, of course, actually policy and laws should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors. Then you’ll realize that what you’re actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy.
No. Having a government guided by the results of elections to provide a direction and then using experts to implement policy is not “aristocracy” (which tends to mean government by a hereditary upper class, at least colloquially*).
There is also this, which is the kind of thing that authoritarians love to raise.
What I do know is that if democracy is against the common good, it’s bad, and if it’s for the common good, it’s good.
So, on the one hand, I agree that the goal is to try and work towards the common good. I will even agree that in abstract that the common good is more important than democracy, per se. I will go yet a step further and note that democratic mechanism can produce outcomes that are counter to the common good.
However, the question is not whether or not democracy is imperfect and can lead to problematic outcomes. The question is whether democracy is less prone to such outcomes than autocracies. And, additionally, which kind of governance, democratic or autocratic, has a higher chance of self-correction.
History teaches rather clearly that it is a dangerous brew when a leader with centralized power tries to provide their version of the “common good” for a mass of people.
An interesting question is this: what actual autocratic example would you prefer to live in over all the democratic systems we have seen? Beyond that, if we look at the democratic era (which really only dawns in the 20th century with the advent of true universal suffrage and mass participation, and even then at different times in different places) we see that in the aggregate, democracies outperform autocracies in terms of various metrics of the common good.
These are key questions.
I thoroughly understand the abstract notion that a wise and wonderful king is more efficient than a democracy. This idea dates back to Plato and Aristotle at a minimum. It is at the hear of Christians who long for King Jesus to reign. But finding an actual monarch who is wise and wonderful has been maddeningly hard to come by when we look at human history.
This is why democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.
*It really means, literally, “government by the best.”
