The American two-party system is remarkable in how much the two parties do NOT insist on long-term ideological consistency. Each party shifts its positions and adds and subtracts party platform planks as new third parties introduce net points of view into political discourse. The parties are stable because their positions on issues are very unstable. If you compare the party platforms of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to those of a century ago, you will see on many issues a complete role reversal of the parties. Similarly, which party is more favored by southern voters or which party is more favored by black voters is far less stable than the general tendency that black voters and southern voters only occasionally favor the same party.

One place where it leaves me hungry... what can we do about this very real problem? I understand that no single person can fix this all by themselves, but is there some kind of action that we can take, when the circumstances arise, that will help resolve this problem rather than help perpetuate it?

Edit: Additional note... this is one of the many reasons I like the Swiss system. We vote on issues separately from voting on people. This has its disadvantages, but at least it's direct democracy.

One of the best ideas for reform I've heard is the idea of unpredictable elections, a la Venice. See: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable-elect...

Arnold: Until the budget is sorted out, all state workers get minimum wage.

State workers: You can't do that. Besides, our computer are too old to handle paying minimum wage.

http://www.sacbee.com/capitolandcalifornia/story/1132588.htm...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah

The armies are also very similar to each other, in values and in training, and very different from the civilian population. In fact, they probably trained together in joint exercises or at WHISC before the war.

If you slice the identities one way, the attacks by the armies on the civilians show that the armies are dangerous to the civilians, and therefore civilians should endeavor to eliminate armies, as did the people of the United States in the American Revolution, and as did the people of Costa Rica during the previous century. But of course the more common way to look at it is that the attacks by Nation A show the great necessity for the civilians of Nation B to support the army of Nation B, in order to deter and defend against attacks from Nation A, and vice versa.

So armies, as a class, whip up support for themselves by attacking and killing the civilians whose support they depend on.

And so today in Israel and Palestine, each nation has strong popular support for organized violence against civilians on the other side.

Of course, historically the connection between armies and governments is extremely close.

Is there a way out? Are the Costa Ricans in imminent danger of invasion due to their lack of armed forces? Having armed forces didn't seem to help the Salvadorans, the Guatemalans, or the Nicaraguans when the US funded terrorist campaigns against their people, didn't help the Panamanians or the Granadans when the US decided to invade them, and didn't help Guatemala when the United Fruit Company organized a coup. In fact, in most of those cases, the army acted against its own people.

But would Honduras have avoided the Football War if they had had no army? Or would they now be a province of El Salvador? Would Cuba be a territory of the US, like Puerto Rico? (And would Cubans be better off if they were?)

Also, he rather subtly points out that we haven't actually dispatched of the idea of people being ruled by a separate class, contrary to what we're taught in school.

I'm sure a huge number of politicians are very frustrated by many of the policies of their party and would like to diverge from them to a greater or lesser extent. They are constrained too.

Why can we not see this as an emergent phenomenon of a complex system, with little overall direction?

There doesn't have to be a conscious, collaborative effort by Your Politicians and Their Politicians to keep the Voters screaming at each other, so that they don't notice the increasing gap between the Voters and the Politicians. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It emerges from the interests of the individual politicians in getting you to identify with them instead of judging them.

He calls it a "swindle" because whatever reservations politicians have with their party, they all try to get you to identify with themselves.

I have a much simpler explanation for this phenomenon: no substantial body of voters want smaller government.

The clique of libertarians who actually believe in "smaller government" and not simply "government taking less of my money in taxes and spending less on the things that I personally don't like" is substantial on the Web and among the intelligentsia, but not so much in the voting booth. Look at how poorly Ron Paul did in the Republican primaries.

These are the same people of whom 40% believe Elvis is alive!

Most people don't even know what libertarianism is or that he was one. Then many people who know he was a member of the Libertarian party don't really know the difference between those people and your garden variety Republican.

But you are right in that the majority of Americans aren't libertarians anyway. Most people (Republican, Democrat, "Independent," haha, whatever) actually do want the government to tell us what we can and can't put in our own bodies. Even the "Legalize Marijuana" people are somewhat hypocritical. They say "legalize pot, it's not as bad or heroin."

Oddly enough, most Republicans (the old white guys) actually want social security, which you would think they would view as anathema communist propaganda.

American politics are very strange.

"There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the Administration of the Government, and serve to keep alive the Spirit of Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true--and in Governments of a Monarchical cast, Patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favour, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose--and there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched; it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest instead of warming, it should consume."

GEORGE WASHINGTON, Farewell Address to the people of the United States, Sep. 17, 1796

This made me sad.

Source please. I don't believe you.

The "old" (VHF and UHF) broadcast frequencies were given to the various stations without any fees whatsoever, I believe. Each broadcast station has to pay a $170 (sic) license renewal fee every couple of years. Those frequency allocations are going away, being reclaimed by the government in the digital TV transition. Some of the old TV frequencies have already been auctioned:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/700_MHz_wireless_spectrum_aucti...

Many of the digital TV frequencies (which are in the same area as the old VHF and lower UHF frequencies) have been given to the existing TV stations free of charge. These would have been worth a great deal of money if sold or leased, as you can see from the 700MHz auction above.

So it's actually somewhat worse than the original poster says, in that there's no $100,000 collected.

Look, I'm really sorry for being such a boring no-fun dude, but... please source this statement.

http://www.fcc.gov/fees/am_fm_2008.pdf

This page suggests TV broadcast license fees up to ~$70,000, but it's not at all clear to me whether it applies to the major networks:

http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-284863...

Yeah, for each Nielsen Designated Market Area. The US is divided into 210 of those.

Are we confused, or are "lionhearted" and "jellicle" liars?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_stations_in_...

I thought this at first was a politics article, but for me, at least, it's a much more practical one. Let me explain.

Working with large corporations, I've found that this is not restricted to sports or politics. It happens between divisions, between business groups -- even between cliques of programmers on the same team. Politics is the ultimate generalization of the problem, but it's a much more practical and immediate matter.

I guess that's why I've never understood the fear of talking about politics on HN. Heck -- you guys do it all the time. Every time there's an Apple vs. Microsoft thread, or a Twitter vs. Blogging thread, or a functional programming vs. imperative programming thread -- this is the same thing. It's amazing people can't see it. You identify with a product, a brand, a group of people, and then suddenly it's us versus them. We have our experts, our slogans, our information sources. They have theirs. We can argue for years and never do more than talking past each other, because we've never generalized the type of discussion we are having and worked at the meta level.

Where I think politics is more interesting is that positions change month by month. That means that political party X may support something this month and be against it the next month. In effect, it's a critical thinking test -- can you identify your own bias? Because if you were arguing for something last month and are arguing against the same thing this month, you might be identifying more with a group that ideas. It's much easier to spot this when the positions keep changing, which makes a discussion of politics useful for detecting personal bias.

BTW, it's also a quick test for thinking about other things too. If you're meeting with a new person and they seem stuck on some political party thing, you can bet they're going to be group-identifying with a lot of other things as well. Different people have different levels of the need-to-identify. We all know the worst ones: the people with bumper stickers all over their car, various flag pins or whatever on their clothes, a rabid sports fan and a sticking-to-a-political-party-no-matter-what attitude.

Solutions to the two-party swindle? Term limits (to prevent camping out in office) Expiration limits for laws (to prevent get-what-you-can-now-attitude). Some sort of push for a multi-party system.

Oddly enough, in the US at least the thought was that it would end up being a dynamic system with small groups taking various positions and coalitions changing over time. Instead that's not how it worked out.

Solutions to the group-identification problem? Simple. Learn to talk about tough topics with each other.

> Solutions to the group-identification problem? Simple. Learn to talk about tough topics with each other.

A fine idea. It gets tricky, however, because there is a difference between an individual learning and a group learning.

Say you and I learn to have a reasonable discussion. That's great, as long as we are alone in a room together. But put us in a crowd with an open mic, and even if 99% of the crowd are mostly reasonable people, the remaining 1% can still wreck the discussion. Especially because there is maybe another 5% that can easily get their emotions aroused by the loony 1%. That, I think, is why there is a fear of political discussion on HN.

Then, of course, there is the question of what to do about it. HN has made a start; it's clearly one of the calmer places to have a public discussion on the net. However, I rather doubt that opening up HN to political discussion would work well. Sad ....

I also think it's the most important social problem facing technologists today: how to dynamically and vigorously mix ideas on the internet without chaos.

In Hollywood there's a concept called "creative tension". You can look at it as meaning "he's a jerk to work with" but there's a deeper meaning: from wildly divergent creative styles comes the best product. As long as you can set up the framework for productivity.

Part of the problem is the most people aren't very smart, certainly not smart enough to run a government or think about issues in sane or at least non-simplistic terms.

As far as teams that have divergent personalities but still manage to perform, it depends on what you mean. There's a lot of factors there.

My point was that there is probaby not some technology (at least non-invase/non-mind-altering) that can solve problems of "group-think" or "us vs them" or whatever kinds of problems. Even if you just look at how religion affects politics, with the fairly reasonable assumption that you aren't going to get rid of it, it seems hard to see how you would construct a technology to solve such problems. I don't know what that would mean, really.

Part of the problem is the most people aren't very smart, certainly not smart enough to run a government or think about issues in sane or at least non-simplistic terms.

Then why do people have the ability to vote? That's my point: from simple people complex systems form and operate. To say that people are not smart enough to run their own affairs is quite interesting. I'm not sure how to reply to that.

But switching to the technology side, with the internet we already have some examples of voting and filtering in action. For instance, there are probably a thousand bad, emotional blog entries for each one that gets upvoted on HN. It's just a matter of appropriate filtering and selection criteria.

Let's suppose instead of voting items up or down we categorize them by how they emotionally affect the reader. Over time, the system could provide an appropriate mix of interesting, insightful, and sometimes maddening material for me to consume. My "tolerance level" would be determined by how emotionally I responded to certain stimulus. The system would keep things emotional, but not so much as to not have a cohesive discussion.

That's a broad outline of one solution. There are others.

Say we converted social news sites into voting platforms. Would you rather be ruled be Hacker News or Digg?

Votes are power, not freedom. I believe the average person is smart enough to run his own affairs. I do not believe the average person is smart enough to run my affairs.

Neither do I. And I don't believe it is a matter of smarts. I don't believe anybody should run my affairs, smart or not.

But that's a structural question: the limits of voting power. Can the majority force the minority into slavery? Can the majority overtax the minority? Etc. All great structural questions.

Or to put it in a non-political venue: should database designers have final say over persistence mechanisms on a team? Should teams vote to decide what they can accomplish by a milestone or should a few decide?

I don't think you can go from "many people aren't smart but can vote therefore the complexity of government arises from simple constituents (pun intended)." Those people can vote other people into a well established government with machinery of bureacracy dating back hundreds of years.

I think that is overstating and reading too much into what is happening. It does sound nice, I agree. However, giving people choices in terms of people who are collectively able to join and continue the machinery, say, the bureacracy of the U.S. government and maintain a semblance of the status quo is not really akin to some phenomena in which simple components combine to form complex systems.

In the case of the U.S. government, there is such a long standing set of machinery that is never really seen by the voter in the capacity of voting that the government is really sort of a machine that runs regardless of the officials in office and so forth. Note, this is not the same thing as saying "there is no difference between the two parties." It's just that, for the most part, over the course of time certain things have been established thus the wheels of government continue to run without regard to voters. If the entire state of Maine decided not to go out and vote on Presidential Election day, the mail would still run.

Anyway, to you're other point. It seems like you're trying to argue that humans are so malleable that you can change courses of history or foundationally change the way humans deal with eachother by changing how they consume news or other information, presentationally (i.e. not thought-control devices in their brains).

I don't think people are necessarily that malleable or that one-side they would, on the whole, choose to be mindless consumers getting information only from your Suggest-a-tron machine. What happens if they decide to actually talk to each other directly without intervention? Wouldn't that interfere with the mind training program? Also, I'm not sure about all this emotional stuff you're talking about.

The best answer so far is so let everybody vote once in a while and to use representatives to make the day-to-day decisions. Perhpas there is another optimum, but I haven't seen anything so far that's better. So even though people have this tendency to view us versus them, somehow we still manage to make tough decisions. Heck, some legislators have been know to get into fist fights, and fights at early elections in the states were common. But it still worked.

My wife and my oldest son are completely opposite politically. When he lost his car, she gave him a ride to the polling booth -- human nature holds, but a good system of rules (both personal and structural) allows conflict to be productive and not destructive.

Yes -- the system is set up for indirection, and on purpose. Direct democracy has the knack of being "rule of the mob".

Over time, a simple 3-branch, 3-level government turned into a complex machine, but that has nothing to do with the two-group thing, at least not directly. That's simply the (recent) institution of the idea that government should be everywhere. Democracies run just fine and make tough emotional decisions without all of that complexity.

Note that I'm just using democracy as an example here. You run into the same problem whenever two groups meet, like for instance when you have a programming team half composed of web developers and half die-hard COBOL programmers. Democracy shows us that such divisions can be surmounted.

you're trying to argue that humans are so malleable that you can change courses of history or foundationally change the way humans deal with each other by changing how they consume news or other information This already happens. It's called mass media: TV, internet, radio, newspapers, etc. It's been going on forever.

The new thing in the mix is the ability to self-discriminate sources of information. It used to be with only one town newspaper and no radio or TV that there was a forced conversation at the town level about important events This type of forced conversation is critical, whether in government or startup teams. We have to learn to have critical conversations.

Anymore, however, we've been able to completely filter out anybody who might challenge our worldview. This prevents us from realizing how close the two groups actually are, and it additionally prevents us from developing skills at crossing the barrier to accomplish meaningful things. One group isn't right and the other wrong, rather both groups need each other. Our way of interacting has failed us by allowing us to clan to a degree that is not natural (or productive)

And I'm not talking about a Suggest-A-Tron. I'm talking about a discussion board, just like this, only with a more advanced filtering mechanism in place of up-down voting.

Have you ever considered whether or not this is actually true? Sure we have a government run school system that tells us that our government is the best ever. But you know, that's what government run school systems do.

When you look at specific transitions from monarchy or aristocracies to democracy, do you see an improvement in the quality of government?

Did the transition from Louis the XVI to Robersspierre improve government?

The transition from the Bourbon Kings of Naples to a unified democratic government?

From Czar Nicholas the II to the Russian Provincial Government?

Did the reform act of 1887 improve governance in Britain? Did it usher in a golden age - or destroy one?

Did the transition from aristocracy to Jacksonian democracy in 1820's America improve the level of governance?

Did the universal suffrage Act of 1870 improve goverance in Germany? How about eliminating the emperor and creating the Weimar Republic?

How about going from Ian Smith to Mugabe in Zimbabwe?

To me the lessons from history are pretty clear. Aristocracy and monarchy are historically superior to universal suffrage representative democracy.

"Aristocracy and monarchy are historically superior to universal suffrage representative democracy."

If this were true, then where are all of the great monarchies?

We're veering off into historicism versus reductionism here. I don't think there has to be as much of a conflict as some do, but it's best to leave that for another day.

They were superior in terms of quality of governance. They were inferior at war. The monarchies were defeated militarily by democracies.

I'd love to go down point by point with all of your earlier examples. Sounds like fun. But we're already 47 levels deep in this thread, and we're probably the only two who care about it.

Suffice it to say that you have basically two choices. You can argue some line of Hegelism, that truth is relative and over time the dialetic of history advances certain societies that are more fit. If this is the case, then the proof is in the pudding: looking back over the last couple of hundred years should give you the survivor/evolved societies, which are, badda boom badda bing, the democracies.

Or you can argue some line of reductionism: there are true things that don't change. Societies that are based on these truer things do better than those which aren't. I believe this is more of both of our lines of argument. But even in this case, we're still back to survivorship: no matter what their great qualities, aristocratic societies have consistently underperformed in national defense. Indeed, if anything European history is a prime example of the various wars and conflicts all caused because somebody's cousin claimed a title and somebody's uncle didn't want them to get it. Thomas Paine did a wonderful job of demolishing the idea of kingship.

There is no doubt that some people would naturally be able to do certain things better than others. This is self-evident. Where we cross paths is the idea of a stratified society in which a ruling class assumes those roles for life due to blood relations or other unearned criteria. In my opinion, a rotating system based on popular support carries all the benefits of both aristocracy and democracy at the same time. That old representative republic idea still makes the most sense. If you want to add a layer of quasi-permanent public service bureaucracy, on it fine, but we're just splitting hairs at that point.

In my opinion, a rotating system based on popular support carries all the benefits of both aristocracy and democracy at the same time.

This would make so much more sense if you put quotation marks around "benefits" or changed the word to "drawbacks".

Secondly, the problem with talking about capability to lead is that it is highly subjective. Your idea of a great leader and mine will probably diverge. Multiply that times a million and there is no standard for great leaders. You're trying apply some scale of competence where in reality none exists, at least as far as the governed care.

The best answer for that is to have a pick at the best leader/administrator and then repeat and rinse. This time I think the guy is doing great and you think he sucks. Next time our roles reverse. Over time, this keeps the most people satisfied and convinced that we, in general, have good leaders. This is because the consent of the governed has been proven to be more important that objective competence. Lots of really smart people were highly unpopular and almost sparked revolts while lots of popular idiots advanced their cultures just fine for their time in office.

BTW, World War I is a great example of how the old aristocratic systems a) got the world into a war, and b) completely started breaking down once the people began finding their own voice.

Take a look at this from the point of view of a software team. Let's say there are five of us getting equal pay to perform a complex project over the next six months. We might decide that we need to have a project manager. How to select one? Do we give a test? Rank ourselves by intelligence? Ask for references?

Whatever our criteria, as the project changes, we're likely to have second thoughts. Gee, the guy who scored highly on intelligence really has no social skills! Or the great social guy can't manage complex dependencies. Or the project looked like this when we started but really ended up somewhere else.

This is natural and to be expected. If we preface our PM decision with "and we're going to vote once a month to keep or rotate the job" then we have a way to respond to new eventualities.

During the month, of course, our PM can make management decisions and do everything we would expect of an autocrat/manager. But as smart or as good as he might be, he still has to think about our feedback loop. When you rotate, you have the ability to be wrong, to adapt. Systems with feedback loops that adapt are much better than systems with a single selection criteria and no feedback loop.

What are the two forms on either side of the local maximum? If I understand you correctly, you're saying both of them are worse than representative democracy.

As a libertarian, I'd love to see more forms of government tried.

As a libertarian, wouldn't you have to require the unanimous consent of the governed to find a representative democracy acceptable?

There are other axes, of course. I don't have an exhaustive list in front of me.

As a libertarian, I would. But as a utilitarian, I'm resigned to the fact that at some point we're going to have to start talking about what's best for the most. Unanimous consent doesn't work in groups of more than just a few.

Fortunately, this is not true. Markets work because they require unanimous consent. Note that this doesn't mean everyone participating in a market has to make the same decision -- you and I can buy different models of cars and consent would still be unanimous.

Implied consent can be unanimous, of course.

I was referring to consent on matters of policy.

I care about these issues for two reasons. 1) simply for the pleasure of understanding how the world works. To me, understanding whether democracy seceded monarchy because a) democracy provided better quality of governance or b) because it was a lab experiment that went out of control, is an interesting question.

The second reason is that it can inform decision making. I do not work in government now. But I have in the past, and perhaps will again some day. I have friends who work in the CIA and the State Department. Knowing whether democracy works or not is an important question.

Attempts at establishing democracy in Germany, Zimbabwe and Iraq happened because of the specific decisions of people in working in the American government. Had their brains been filled less with the textbook myths about democracy, and had they studied actual transitions to democracy much more closely, they may have made different decisions and averted much human suffering.

That old representative republic idea still makes the most sense. If you want to add a layer of quasi-permanent public service bureaucracy, on it fine, but we're just splitting hairs at that point.

Actually, adding a quasi-permanent public service bureaucracy dramatically changes the nature of the government. Despite operating under the same Constitution, the government of the United States in 2009 bears very little resemblance to the government of 1850. Read the Power Broker and compare the government of New York pre-civil service to post-civil service.

Where we cross paths is the idea of a stratified society in which a ruling class assumes those roles for life due to blood relations or other unearned criteria.

By aristocracy I meant "rule by the best". Basically, any system that cares about the quality of the voters and not just one person one vote counts as an aristocracy. For example, the original U.S. political system, with property qualifications to vote and President elected by a college of electors was basically Aristocratic in design and intent. Before the 1887 Reform Act, Britain was basically an Aristocracy. Another good example is Venice: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable-elect...

Another interesting idea is Formalism: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpredictable-elect...

As for monarchy, you jest with me, but Gibbon already anticipated your jesting 200 years ago and wrote a response:

--------------------------

OF the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule. Is it possible to relate, without an indignant smile, that, on the father's decease, the property of a nation, like that of a drove of oxen, descends to his infant son, as yet unknown to mankind and to himself; and that the bravest warriors and the wisest statesmen, relinquishing their natural right to empire, approach the royal cradle with bended knees and protestations of inviolable fidelity? Satire and declamation may paint these obvious topics in the most dazzling colors, but our more serious thoughts will respect a useful prejudice, that establishes a rule of succession, independent of the passions of mankind; and we shall cheerfully acquiesce in any expedient which deprives the multitude of the dangerous, and indeed the ideal, power of giving themselves a master. In the cool shade of retirement, we may easily devise imaginary forms of government, in which the sceptre shall be constantly bestowed on the most worthy, by the free and incorrupt suffrage of the whole community. Experience overturns these airy fabrics, and teaches us that, in a large society, the election of a monarch can never devolve to the wisest, or to the most numerous, part of the people.

----------------------------------------

In other words, the principle of hereditary rule may be ridiculous, but it's the best way to keep the monsters out of power. And note, after Gibbon wrote this quote, many European countries proceeded to cast away their monarchs and elect monsters ( Robespierre, Napoleon, the Bolsheviks, Hitler, etc).

You're trying apply some scale of competence where in reality none exists, at least as far as the governed care.

There are many widely acceptable components of good government: provides safety and order, allows relative freedom of action, grows the economy, is not an oppressive police state, stays out of foolish wars, etc.

Sure, some aspects of good governance are debatable ( should drugs be legalized or not, should we have public schools, etc.). But you don't need a perfect definition of good government to have a generally useful definition. If I asked you whether you'd rather be ruled by Stalin and the Bolsheviks, or by Teddy Roosevelt, I don't think you'd have much trouble answering.

BTW, World War I is a great example of how the old aristocratic systems a) got the world into a war, and b) completely started breaking down once the people began finding their own voice.

You need a new provider of history. Britain, Germany and France all had Parliaments elected by universal manhood suffrage that voted for the war ( The Russian Duma also voted for the war, although it had more limited suffrage).

The problem with democracy is that jingoism is an extremely effective way to win votes. I mean, are you aware of the existence of Fox News? Of the Iraq War? Metternich spent his career as a minister in the 1840's trying to prevent German democracy, because he believed it would lead to German nationalism and jingoism. Was he right or was he right?

If you look at European history, you see that after the various universal suffrage acts (1870 in Germany, 1887 in Britain) there is a cycle of increasing jingoism as politicians try and out do each other winning votes. And not just jingoism, also anti-semitism. The anti-semitism of 1930's Germany was nothing like the anti-semitism of 1850's. It was the result of decades of competing demagoguing politicians. It took complete military defeat, a decade of military rule, and the notorious JCS 1067 to eliminate the poison.

In 1870 the monarchs of Germany and France got in a stupid war. They fought a few battles, some territory was exchanged, and life went on.

But in 1914 entire nations were out for blood. Mobs filled the streets jeering on the war, thirsting for the blood of others. And once the war started the politicians and people of Britain refused to negotiate terms with the Germans. For them, it was the equivalent of "letting the terrorists win." Unlike the war of 1870, it dragged on for four bloody years.

For an example of the mood of the time, try this quote by Stefan Zweig. He lived in Austria during these years of tumult, and I highly recommend his book "The World of Yesterday" Shortly before the war he was vactioning in provincial France. He reports:

-----------------------------------------

It was a small suburban cinema, utterly different from the modern palaces of chromium and glass; a sparsely fitted hall, filled with humble folk, workers, soldiers, market women -- the plain people -- who chatted comfortably. The third picture was "Kaiser Wilhelm visitis the Emperor Francis Joseph in Vienna." The train came on the screen, the first coach, the second, and the third. The door of the compartment was thrown open, and out stepped William II in the uniform of an Austrian General, his moustache curled stiffly upwards. The moment he appeared in the picture, a spontaneous wild whistling and stamping of feet began in the dark hall. Everybody yelled and whistled, men, women, and children, as if they had been personally instuled. The good natured people of Tours, who knew no more about the world and politics than what they had read in their newspapers, had gone mad for an instant. I was frightened. I was frightened to the depths of my heart. For I sensed how deeply the poison of the propaganda of hate must have advanced through the years, when even here in a small provincial city the simple citizens and soldiers had been so greatly incited agaisnte the Kaiser and against Germany that a passing picture on the screen could produce such a demonstration.

-----------------------------------------------

If we preface our PM decision with "and we're going to vote once a month to keep or rotate the job" then we have a way to respond to new eventualities.

I'm quite sure this system could work quite well for some teams. But what happens when the team grows? What happens when you have 80 people? Does the newest hire in QA have the same vote over the direction of the company as the Founder-CEO? The problem with democracy is that it does not scale.

No software company of any size uses one person-one vote democracy to manage the company. There is a reason for this. I would like to see experiments where governments adopted joint-stock corporation form of management.

If I asked you whether you'd rather be ruled by Stalin and the Bolsheviks, or by Teddy Roosevelt

I'd rather be ruled by a system, not a person. We are a nation of laws, remember? I would rather not be ruled by any one person no matter how great they were. Remember "Give me Liberty, or Give Me Death!" "Live Free or Die!" Come now, these issues were prevalent and were widely discussed during the United States' founding. It's not like any of them are new.

As for your Gibbon quote, let's not start playing who's got the best authority. Plato said that philosophers should rule, and that art should mostly be eliminated. Lots of people working with the best information they had at the time made lots of statements. I think Gibbon was completely smoking crack, and I'm not going to take 7 paragraphs to prove it. After all, I don't think it will convince you anyway.

You're making a case based on incomplete stories. Sure, early democracies without proper checks and balances did all sorts of heinous things. But Germany became productive, Iraq will become productive. These things are simply a matter of time. Aristocracies stagnate. Democracies evolve. Since we've started with mostly autocratic systems and moved towards democracies, any change to the negative has to be viewed in a much longer focus.

As to WWI, you're surly not telling me that Tsarist Russia was democratic, are you? Or that the rise of populist feelings and movements didn't drastically affect the outcome and aftermath? Or that the Germany-France war in 1870 didn't set the stage for the larger conflict to follow, right?

It just seems amazingly blind to assert that the evolution of what works and what doesn't be predicated on some Utopian view of inherited rule. In fact, it's circular logic at its best. If a nation doesn't do well, then it's the leader's fault. If it does well, then it must have had a good leader. You're stuck never being able to figure out that some systems work with bad leaders. That's a major advance in thought that The Enlightenment brought, and it's one that you seemed to have missed.

Laws must be enacted, interpreted, and enforced by people. All governments are governments by people.

* Come now, these issues were prevalent and were widely discussed during the United States' founding. It's not like any of them are new.*

Indeed. Of course, the so called "patriots" who agitated for the revolution ended up infrining on rights far more than the British ever did. If you ever want to read a real history of the American Revolution instead of the school book mythologies, check Sydney Fishers history. Chapter 8 is a great read if you are short on time: http://books.google.com/books?id=SZccAAAAMAAJ&printsec=t...

As for your Gibbon quote, let's not start playing who's got the best authority. Plato said that philosophers should rule, and that art should mostly be eliminated. Lots of people working with the best information they had at the time made lots of statements.

I didn't mean to make an argument from authority. But Gibbon was a smart man who read a lot of history. He came up with conclusions about monarchy that were counter-intuitive to a lot of people, including you. Rather than arguing against monarchy with glib remarks you should ground your arguments in historical evidence.

Sure, early democracies without proper checks and balances did all sorts of heinous things.

You mean, democracies that had not been diluted by something other than democracy ( Civil service, independent judicary). You are agreeing with my point.

But Germany became productive, Iraq will become productive. These things are simply a matter of time.

That's the largest understatement I've heard in a while. It did not take time. It took military force. The allies bombed the crap out of Germany, occupied it, purged all Nazis from public life, and set up an education system that reeducated the public along pacifist lines. Germany is still military occupied. It is still illegal to publicly speak in favor of Nazism or jingoism. It's modern elections resemble student council elections, not actual democracy ( and for very good reason).

As for Iraq, if the U.S. ever wakes up and starts acting more like Lord Cromer ( http://books.google.com/books?id=SZccAAAAMAAJ&printsec=t... ) then maybe Iraq will turn out alright. But 50 proof democracy will continue to be a disaster. Democracy puts the entire resources of the country up for grabs every four years. While elections are supposed to be peaceful, the stakes are so high, that voting easily turns into violence. This rarely happens in the U.S. anymore because the committee system and the civil service results in a very stable allocation of resources. But again, this is tantamount to diluting democracy with not democracy.

Aristocracies stagnate. Democracies evolve.

Also totally not true. Read Mancur Olson or Jonathan Rauchs. Rauch was a writer for the National Journal, which is the in house magazine of the Hill staff in DC. His writings match my experiences on the Hill exactly. The title of his book was "Government's End". The end result of democracy is either a) tyranny or b) Brezhnevianism (stagnant socialism or quasi socialism)

As to WWI, you're surly not telling me that Tsarist Russia was democratic, are you?

Tsarist Russia was probably about as democratic as the modern U.S. It was less democratic than the U.S. of 1914.

Or that the rise of populist feelings and movements didn't drastically affect the outcome and aftermath?

Populist feelings in Britain almost certainly prolonged the war. In Russia, the mob was more fickle. At first they were for the war: "It was war. 'A popular war this time' said the people in the cathedral of Yalta ... I found the Czar hard at work and doing his utmost to justify the popular acclaim given to him the day of the declaration of the war. Never in all Nicky's twenty years of luckless reign had he heard so many spontaneous hurrahs. National solidarity, coming at this late day, pleased him enormously." (from Once a Grand Duke by Alexander Grand Duke of Russia )

Later, of course, the newspapers and the mob turned against the Czar and the war. I certainly do not defend the actions of the Czar. I just note that what followed ended up even worse. Within a year they were back at war ( the 1919 war against Poland). And later the Bolsheviks got in a war far worse than even World War I.

And as for the effect of democracy on the aftermath, see Churchill: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:OOaesHZ14PAJ:themonarchi...

Or that the Germany-France war in 1870 didn't set the stage for the larger conflict to follow, right?

Old disputes over territory are never the cause of war, only excuses for war. Lots of territorial exchanges occur without causing future wars.

It just seems amazingly blind to assert that the evolution of what works and what doesn't be predicated on some Utopian view of inherited rule.

I'm not going by some utopian view. I'm simply arguing that monarchy as it was actually practiced tended to produce superior results to democracy as it is actually practiced (and by superior, see my definition in a previous comment). I'm arguing that actual transitions that went from aristocracy or monarchy to democracy tended to make the quality of government worse. Again, I recommend Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday.

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Thanks to the constant accumulation of profits, in an era of increasing prosperity in which the State never thought of nibbling off more thant a few per cent of the income of even the richest, in which, on the other hand, State and industrial bonds bore high rates of interest, to grow richer was nothing more than a passive activity for the wealthy. Not yet, as later at the time of the inflation, were the thrifty robbed, and the solid business men swindled; and the patient and the non-speculating made the best profit.

...

Because of their liberal belief in the unfailing progresss of the world through tolerance and reason, these middle-class democrats honestly thought that with small concessions and gradual improvements they were furthering the welfare of all subjects in the best way possible. But they had completely forgotten that they represented only fifty or a hundred thousand well-situated opeople in the large cities, and not the hundreds of thousands and millions of the entire country. In the meantime the machine had done its work and had gathered the fomerly scattered workers around industry. Under the leadership of an eminent man, Dr. Viktor Alder, a Socialist Pary was created in Austria to further the demands of the proletariat, which sought a truly universal suffrage. hardly had this been granted, or rather obtained by force, before it became apparent how thin though highly valuable a layer of liberalism had been. With it concilliation disappeared from public political life, interests hit hard against interests, and the struggle began.

...

An able and popular leader was Dr. Karl Lueger, who mastered this unrest and worry and, with the slogan, "the little man must be helped" carried with him the entire small bourgeoiseie and the disgrunteled middle class, whose envy of the wealthy was markedly less than the fear of sinking from its bourgeois status into the proletariat. It was exactly the same worried group wwhich Adolf Hitler later coallected around him as his first substantial following. Karl Leuger was alo his prototype in another sense, in that he taught himself the usefulness of the anti-semititc catchword, which put an opponent before the eyes of the broad classes of the bourgeoisei, and the same time pimperceptibly diverted their harded from the great landed gentry and the feudal wealth y class.

...

But soon a third flower appeared, the blue cornflower, Bismarck's favorite flower, and the emblem of the German National Party, which -- although not then recognized as such -- was counsciously a revolutionary party, and worked with burtal forcefulness for the destruction of the Austrian monarchy in favour of a Greater Germany under Prussian and Protestant leadership, such as Hitlers dreams of. Weak in numbers, it made up for its unimportance by wild aggression and unbridled brutality. Its few representatives became the terror and ( in the old sense ) the shame of the Austrian parliament. Hiter also took over from them the anti-semitic racial theory - "In that race lies swinishness" his illustrious prototype had said. But above all else, he took from the German Nationals the beginning of a ruthless storm troop that blindly hit out in all directions, and with it the principle of terroristic intimidation by a small group over a numerically superior but humanely more passive majority.

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Stefan Zweig lived through the transition from monarchy/aristocracy to democracy. Have you ever actually read first hand accounts like his? Or is your entire knowledge based on second hand caricatures from AP history text books and PBS specials?

I used to think the same way you did. I could have written your response a few years ago. I'm not some snooty William Snodgrass Brunswick the 7th who's bitter over the fall of the aristocracy. I came across a bunch of history that never gets taught, and I changed my mind about a lot of things I used to think were true.

As shown in "The Myth of the Rational Voter", the amount that it costs a person to understand the issues exceeds the amount of benefit that his vote is likely to make. So people just aren't motivated to learn what's going on, and vote based on their feelings.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter for more information.

Even when you see it, you still have to pay close attention not to fall into the trap. If you are arguing against a certain position, people tend to regard you as holding the opposite position and brandish you as 'on of them'. When you identify somewhat more with 'them', it is easy to forget you were holding middle ground and let yourself be pushed into that corner, causing you to actually take up a more extremist position than you were defending in the first place. Even after discovering the power this effect, it took me years to be constantly aware of it and resist it.

There are those in denial, sure. But based on my observations of myself and hundreds of others and dozens of groups (and a bit of reading about sales and social dynamics) it's just part of human nature. This is why good teams are so much stronger than the sum of their parts: since each person has a different cognitive blind spot, team members can look out for each other.

This seems to be embedded in English, at least. If I say "I don't like chocolate", that's universally interpreted as "I dislike chocolate". But I only meant what I said: I do not possess an active enjoyment of chocolate. The listener just assumes "if yer not with us, yer agin us".

It seems that taking sides is baked pretty deeply into our thought process.

I'm not convinced this is an English problem, or even a human problem, though. The problem is the low resolution being used; no matter how fine your stated opinion, if it is being viewed through a low resolution sensing device, it'll get aliased to one of the things the sensing device can actually perceive. (This is also the correct definition of "bias", though that would take a bit longer to describe.) It takes cognitive energy to increase resolution, so a lot of times we'll use "love/hate" as the only two options pretty casually, because it's easy and we don't have an infinite supply of cognitive energy.

(A number of terms in that paragraph are sort of ill-defined but it would take a lot of time to really nail them down.)

For counter examples: if I were to say "I don't drive fast", you would likely not interpret that as "I drive slowly"; if I say "I'm not rich", you wouldn't hear "I'm poor".

Yet in all these classes, we must be using some resolution. So your explanation only begs the question of "why, then, do some kinds of statements get treated to higher resolution than others?".

Using group dynamics to achieve power is just a reality of human nature, as Elezier points out.

But Elezier jumps from this fat to assume that we should then be concerned about the unequal distribution of power between most people and the few political entrepreneurs (aka "power seekers").

It's hard to argue that all power seekers are bad, even if all do use group dynamics to gain and keep power.

So how to we determine which power seekers we consider legitimate?