Green Energy

Democracy Failure

Sarcastically, I believe, my friend Sonic Charmer writes that, as we have to listen to Lefties go on and on about "market failure" - wherein free markets, supposedly, work to produce outcomes which limit freedom (i.e.Monopolies) , we had better examine the notion that there may be, what he terms "Democracy Failures".

RWCG:

I think nowadays we need a twin concept: democracy failure. Presumably, democracy, like markets, is supposed to optimize outcomes for people in some way or another. (Otherwise, why do we have it?) So then, just as with market failure, democracy failure could be defined along the lines of, a (self-sustaining or sustained) pattern that can emerge in democratic governance in which the outcome is undesirable in some appropriately-measured way.

This would all have to be firmed up, and there would be the usual disputes over definitions and all, but for starters it seems worth pointing out that today we observe in our ‘democracy’ some patterns that seem both self-sustaining and sub-optimal: the rise of the ‘Smart’ crowd or mandarin class controlling bureaucracy and perpetuating their own power; wealth massively accruing to the capital city chasing privilege, rent-seeking and corruption in a time of recession and deprivation for the middle class; on the voter/’buy’ side, large swathes of the electorate electing a man they knew virtually nothing about to be the chief executive primarily because of his skin color, fantasies they had made up about him, and/or this fluffy-opiate Youtube video; rising inequality concentrated in a super-rich class characterized by massive self-indulgence and waste combined with a state of utter denial about their self-centeredness that usually goes hand in hand with a belief in their own benevolent progressivity. (Arnold Kling has more charges in his docket against the state of our democracy here. )
The point is that these patterns and tendencies all tend to feed on each other and sustain – increasingly so, it seems – a certain malign social arrangement. In this arrangement we see
an elite ‘progressive’ class of super-rich, condescendingly supersnobbish elites on top with ever-increasing power (smoothly bouncing between corporations and government, blurring the lines between the two, living and passing on to their children lives of unprecedented comfort, prestige, and privilege), with
credentials to ‘certify’, and ‘correct’ ideologies that flatter them, that they deserve that power and ratify the highly delusional views they all have about their benevolence and ‘progressive’ superiority, which
insulates them with an ironclad sense of entitlement to their high status and wealth (they deserve it because they care, or are Smart, or aren’t racist, or…), even as
their privilege and comfort is fed by extracting – more and more in violation of the rule of law and the social compact, but rather due to cozy arrangements and privileges – ever more wealth, power and status from an electorate, an electorate made up mostly of people who are either
simply unable to remove this elite from power and claw back some of their rights/property, or
actively and willing ceding power to this elite due to various romantic or fantasy views they have about governance and society, views that can be very seductive (because they flatter those who hold them into thinking they are Smart), views which are
nurtured – at times consciously – by the elite for obvious self-serving reasons: the more the democratic electorate holds these romantic views, the more power/wealth will accrue to the progressive elite, to the ‘Smart People’.
Read down this list and then start back at the top. Repeat a couple of times. Each seems to feed on the previous. There seems no way out of this loop, either. So imagine what sort of society these tendencies will perpetuate. Is it the sort of society of equally-protected rights, rule of law governed by a blind justice, opportunity for all, and widespread prosperity usually connoted (rightly or wrongly) by the term ‘democracy’?

Go read the whole thing.

Note, Sonic Charmer corrects me, saying he is not being sarcastic, in the least.

:)

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