
Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship - cstross
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/political-failure-modes-and-th.html
======
macavity23
Hard to argue with his conclusion. In the UK, the three main political parties
are shockingly similar; I can't think of a single truly-significant policy
difference. As an example, the 'left wing' party wants to restrict university
tuition fees to £3000pa, whereas the 'right wing' party wants them to be
£9kpa. Such things are the limits to our political discourse.

They even _look_ the same, like slightly-morphed versions of Tony Blair. Same
suits, same accents, just different tie colours. Honestly, I find it slightly
spooky.

If you agree with Mr. Stross that this is a structural problem (and I do),
then remedying this _within_ the system seems pointless. So what? Trying to
replace the system seems equally doomed, because as soon as your replacement
structure gets any traction, the System will squash it.

The only way that I can see is to try and work around it - to create new
structures and forms not as competition to the current system, but as
subversive alternatives. Bitcoin is the best example of this at the moment,
and it will be _very_ interesting to see how that plays out. Make no mistake,
the prospect of growing BTC adoption is genuinely threatening to the Beige
Dictatorship, and a crackdown seems inevitable - but its success less so.

~~~
DanBC
> _If you agree with Mr. Stross that this is a structural problem (and I do),
> then remedying this within the system seems pointless. So what? Trying to
> replace the system seems equally doomed, because as soon as your replacement
> structure gets any traction, the System will squash it._

I think it's a shame that guerilla gardening didn't take off more. Or that
graffiti artists don't also clean up bad graffiti.

Or that there are not more voluntary home gardening schemes - there are a
bunch of people who enjoy gardening but don't have gardens, and a bunch of
people who don't enjoy that kind of thing (or who can't do it) but who do have
gardens. There must be some kind of way to get them together.

Unfortunately, doing it within the system means insurance and criminal records
checks (and the misuse of those) and etc etc etc.

------
wybo
Liquid democracy (delegative democracy) might be a potential alternative. It
has its problems, but it would at the very least be an interesting experiment.

[http://wybowiersma.net/pub/essays/Wiersma,Wybo,A_global_advi...](http://wybowiersma.net/pub/essays/Wiersma,Wybo,A_global_advisory_parliament_integrated_with_the_social_web.pdf)

Liquid democracy is a hybrid between direct and representative democracy, that
provides better incentives to vote. It was invented by G. Tullock in 1967, and
it, and very similar ideas, are also named proxy voting, and delegable- or
delegate cascade democracy. Its core idea is delegation. That is, citizens can
either vote directly, or voluntarily assign their vote to a proxy that will
represent them, similar to how this happens in stockholder voting. Also, as in
stockholder voting, people can vote by themselves at all times. The selection
of a proxy can either be pictured as temporarily passing on ones voting right,
or as automatically copying the proxies vote onto ones own ballot paper.
Another important property of TDD, and the one that makes it different, is
that delegation is transitive, in the sense that the representative can, in
turn, transfer his collected votes on to another proxy (...read the paper for
more).

------
speeder
Well, the guy has a obvious leftish slant in some of his opinions.

But excluding his pontual opinions on some issues, he is mostly correct.

And that is very unfortunate.

But what else can we expect?

Democracy, is only good as the people voting. Take a look at what happened in
Egypt, people wanted democracy, removed the dictator, then the sunni majority
of the country obviously elected those they wanted, a sunni guy.

Then he changed the constitution a little, the constitution is almost the
same, and in most areas improved, there are one thing that is very
questionable:

Instead of the laws being "inspired" by Sharia, now they are "inspired" by
Sharia according to sunni islam.

Bang, there you are, the other half of the country, mostly non-sunni muslims
and christians, are very upset, and screw democracy, now we want you to come
out of power because if you don't we will throw molotovs in your palace.

EDIT replying the guy below, because I got seemly slowbanned or something (I
am getting the message "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down.
Thanks."):

Oh, I am from Brazil, to me US center is right...

(I say that US has two parties: right, and even more right).

But I am referring to gay marriage (it is a traditional point of the left,
specially if you are a follower of Frankfurt School or of Gramsci) and drug
decriminalization (Another point that the left likes more than the right).

I am personally against gay marriage (actually my opinions in marriage are
quite complex) and pro decriminalization.

~~~
arethuza
Out of interest what points would you say give it a "leftish slant"?

NB I'm not being snarky, I'm genuinely interested as it seemed fairly neutral
to me. But then again I am the same nationality as Charlie.

~~~
alinajaf
> But then again I am the same nationality as Charlie

I would point out that the _Conservative_ party in the UK just voted 400-175
in favour of gay marriage.

~~~
kolektiv
Just to point out that the House of Commons voted that way - that's the
combined vote of all parties eligible. The Conservative party was rather split
on the issue, I think only a (largish) minority of the Conservative party
itself voted in favour (although I can't remember the split offhand). That's
still rather better than you would have got a few years ago, but then the
Conservative party is now basically split down young/urban/secular-ish and
older/rural/religious-ish lines and votes on these issues tend to be somewhat
predictable.

~~~
andyjohnson0
Of 303 Conservative MPs, 139 voted against and 30 abstained. So 44% percent of
Conservative MPs were in favour.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9851322/Cameron-
acc...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9851322/Cameron-accused-of-
dividing-Conservatives-as-MPs-rebel-on-gay-marriage-vote.html)

------
NickPollard
I think the existence of a Political Class (which as Charlie points out, is an
inevitable outcome of our current system) is one of the main problems.

Personally I would like to see a random election system whereby every X years
a random group of Y people are chosen to be MPs for the next parliament. It
would be a civil obligation, similar to jury duty. Each person would only be
allowed to serve once. That way the MPs would not be insulated from the world
outside of the political sphere.

~~~
arethuza
In the UK at least there might be some, for me, rather undesirable
consequences of such a scheme - for instance we'd probably get the death
penalty back.

~~~
cstross
Luckily they couldn't do that -- not without quitting the EU, which would
result in an entirely different clusterfuck. (And I need to blog about the
second-order consequences of that at some other time. For starters: the way
the City of London would respond (mostly by pulling the eject handle and
relocating to Frankfurt and Paris), the way the US multinationals who use the
UK as an Anglophone business centre in the EU would respond (ditto), and how
the Commonwealth would respond ("we only loved you because you were a cheap
way to get our exports into the EU. Bye!") ...

~~~
iuguy
The City of London cannot pull the eject handle and relocate. The City of
London is a separate legal entity[1] with it's own laws and rules, and it's
those rules that meant that the trading that took down Lehman Brothers was
conducted in the City of London, because it couldn't have really legally taken
place elsewhere.

[1] - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc>

~~~
cstross
You're missing the point: the institutions that are headquartered there
conduct a huge volume of Euro-denominated derivatives trading, which becomes
impossible if the City loses its license to do so, and it's hard to see them
retaining it if the UK leaves the EU. So those banks would have to relocate
their investment arms to somewhere in the EU. That's got to be worth several
points off the UK's GDP. Instant recession -- and it's _not_ recoverable.

------
DanBC
One thing which is hinted at, but not explicitly called out, in this article
is that some politicians are just batshit insane.

See for example the recent politician who plead guilty to perverting the
course of justice. He got a camera generated driving penalty. He put his
wife's name on the ticket, forcing her to take the penalty to avoid political
trouble for him.

(<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21320992>)

His ex-wife is alleging some remarkable things about him too.

(<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21372250>)

Some might say that resigning is the honourable thing to do. But he did this
ten years ago, has denied it ever since, and even when it went to trial he
tried very hard to get the case dismissed. (That failed twice.) He only left
when there was absolutely no option for him.

This kind of single-minded idiocy affects many politicians of all parties.

Blair and Bush saying that Iraq was connected to Al-Qaeda; Iraq had weapons of
mass destruction; Iraq was ready to launch WMD within 45 minutes; Bush
declaring "Mission Accomplished" in May 2003; these people are so disconnected
from reality that it must be a pathology.

------
pmorici
This echoes a lot of things that Noam Chomsky talked about in Manufacturing
Consent (both documentary film and book originally published in 1988) esp. the
idea that one of the ways the status quo is sustained in a democratic society
is to encourage vigorous debate but only within a narrow scope of acceptable
opinions.

~~~
sedev
Oh good, I'm glad that I'm not the only one who got about a third of the way
through the article and said "well, yes, this is pretty obviously the way
things work if you've read _Manufacturing Consent_ or similar critiques."

The differences of opinion between different critters inside the Washington DC
alternate-reality bubble are greatly magnified by how hard they pretend to
fight over them.

------
acabal
While I agree with the general sentiment, we should remember that while things
might seem bad now, the general state of things for the average middle-class
Westerner is unquestionably better than at any time in history. Just half a
century ago we a decade of crushing world war, and before that (in America)
crushing civil war, and not that long before that kingdoms and tyranny, and
things go way downhill past that.

Now that's not to say that everything is peachy, that things can't be
improved, or that we shouldn't strive to do so. I guess Stross's question is,
_can_ things be improved given the current system? I don't know. Some days I
suspect that human pettiness, fallibility, tribalness, and forgetfulness will
doom us to forever repeating a cycle of violence and revolution.

On a side note, sometimes I feel that America, despite our relatively
prosperous position in history, is on the knife's edge of falling over into a
blatant Minority-report-ish surveillance/police state. Look how fast it
happened to other countries in history that _didn't_ have the overwhelming
military power and surveillance infrastructure that America has in place
today. What would it take for the country to tip over the edge? Could we stop
it if it happened? _Would we want to?_ (Apropos: today on NPR they had a quote
from Brennan at his hearing where he said, without a hint of irony, something
along the lines of, "drone strike killings of Americans will never be used for
people who have committed crimes in the past; only for people who pose a
threat to America in the future.")

~~~
PavlovsCat
I'd love to have source and context for that last quote.. not because I don't
believe you, but because it seems rather scary and vaguely important, and the
more details the better.

~~~
arethuza
Possibly this recent DOJ White Paper? [PDF]

[http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_W...](http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf)

------
7952
The "beige policies that nobody wants" reminds me of the reliance on
"fairness" within debate at the moment. Raise taxes on the rich and cut
services to the poor because you can persuade people that it is "fair".
Everyone gets poorer but its okay because our society is so unequal who would
even notice? They get away with policies that know one really wants because
they are usually directed at someone else (richer or poorer than me). We have
replaced empathy with simplistic politics.

------
zby
Beige politics is surely intellectually frustrating, but what if it is quite
optimal from the utilitarian point of view?

Maybe we should not measure politics by how interesting it is?

~~~
humanrebar
Sometimes the middle-of-the-road option is worse than either the left or right
options. Also, don't underestimate how important it can be to have definitive
winners in debates. Compromises in heated debates can lead to prolonged foot-
dragging and resentment that can be worse than both the disease and the cure.

------
tokenadult
I like Charlie Stross essays, and I'm glad this one was submitted here, but
when Stross writes,

"The range of choices available at the democratic buffet table have therefore
narrowed until they're indistinguishable. ("You can have Chicken Kiev, Chicken
Chasseur, or Chicken Korma." "But I'm vegan!") Indeed, we have about as much
choice as citizens in any one-party state used to have,"

then I have to say no. Evidently Stross has no lengthy experience in living in
a one-party state. I do. The range of choice for voters in the United Kingdom,
and especially the range of channels for dissent there or here in the United
States, far exceed the range of choice available to citizens in a one-party
state. Been there, done that. (The one-party state I lived in during the early
1980s, Taiwan, still had rigid mass media censorship and political
assassinations both at home and abroad, but even at that was rather benign
compared to many current one-party states. Taiwan has transitioned to
democracy. Throughout Stross's lifetime and mine, the U.K. and the U.S.A. have
offered far more political choice to citizens than has any one-party state
anywhere in the world.)

Stross is a science-fiction author by occupation, and maybe the next stage of
his self-education for spicing up his science fiction stories is to learn more
about political science, especially public choice theory.

<http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html>

[http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet....](http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet.pdf)

<http://perspicuity.net/sd/pub-choice.html>

[http://pileusblog.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/the-left-and-
publ...](http://pileusblog.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/the-left-and-public-
choice-theory/)

Stross's point is quite correct that people developing their careers in
politics look for channels to increase their influence on the system, whatever
their ideological proclivities. That is human nature--why work hard in
political activism to NOT end up with influence? But the counsel of despair in
the interesting article kindly submitted here is an exaggeration. There is
still diversity of point of view in the system, and plenty of opportunity for
activists to make meaningful changes, including the example he gives:
"Marriage equality is a fundamentally socially conservative issue, but
reflects the long-term reduction in prejudice against non-heteronormative
groups." Choices still abound. Advocate for those that you desire.

~~~
zby
When there is an important new policy change needed (think environment
conservation) - then in beige politics it gets coopted by all or most of the
parties. In this way they stay beige (and the green party never becomes
important) - that looks boring and is intellectually frustrating - but it is
so much better what happens in dictatorships (even when they are overthrown by
revolutions and the politics become so interesting and exciting).

------
hugh4life
He's not saying anything much different than what people like Vilfredo
Pareto(of Pareto principle fame) and Oswald Spengler and others of German
Conservative Revolutionary movement... they were right of course but they also
provided an ideological basis for fascism.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto#Fascism_and_pow...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto#Fascism_and_power_distribution)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West#Democra...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West#Democracy.2C_media.2C_and_money)

------
narag
I hate cars analogies. But now I'm going to make one.

Sixty or seventy years ago, cars were unsafe, contaminant, ugly, heavy... add
to this that they were driven mostly by (often drunk) males.

What has changed? How? Did some of the changes annoy big corporations?

That's it. What are the problems with democracy now? I'd say:

\- Defective control of party functioning: represenatives hiding behind party
line, opaque lobbying, etc.

\- Bad representation systems. Winner takes it all that prevents new minority
parties to enter the system.

\- Opinion created and spread top-down through media and representatives.

These are general non-partisan problems, couldn't they be solved on their own?

~~~
humanrebar
> Opinion created and spread top-down through media and representatives

I would argue the emerging long-tail media is reinforcing special interests
and gotcha politics. Some of it is top-down but much of it isn't.

------
igravious
Hmm. Michel's "Iron law of oligarchy".

Summarized as: "Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises.
Power corrupts."

See also Niklas Luhmann's[1] idea of autopoiesis[2] in modern social systems,
the political system being an example of a modern social system. Luhmann
contends that modern social systems are functionally differentiated from each
other: legal, political, mass media, and so on. Autopoiesis is the idea that
these social systems contain within them the means for their own continuation
and effectively do not exist for anything other than to continue their own
existence. In order for these systems to come into being one needs self-
reflexivity, this is provided by language. No language, no autopoietic systems
(this is my contention). "An autopoietic system is to be contrasted with an
allopoietic system, such as a car factory, which uses raw materials
(components) to generate a car (an organized structure) which is something
other than itself (the factory)." The common natural example (of an
autopoietic system) given is the biological cell. The primary function of a
cell is to keep the cell being a cell. Sure, different cells do different
things but they all use the raw materials of their environment primarily for
their own upkeep.

Ok. So given the Iron Law and Autopoiesis how do we stop social systems from
becoming self-serving? This is the challenge of our times. Luhmann is a
pessimist. He contends that you _can't_. Should we be pessimistic? It is the
nature of these systems. We have never been able to have a full participatory
democracy because of the coordination problem. Does the internet change this?
Can we show that the internet allows everyone's hand to be on the tiller so to
speak? Another idea might be to go with the inevitable flow of the way systems
"evolve" and "mutate" over time and come up with a virtue theory for social
systems much like we have a virtue theory for human behavior. So we should 1)
reject monopolies (in politics, single party systems; in commerce, single
telecoms carriers, single os vendors, and so on), we should 2) prefer
transparency over opacity (think wikileaks), following on from this we should
3) prefer freedom of expression over censorship (an example often given is the
advantage protestant countries had over catholic countries because of the
papacy banning certain titles thus handing economic advantage to protestant
publishers).

Anybody else got any ideas? Sorry for the vagueness and haphazardness of my
thoughts.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann> [2]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis>

edit: clarification, elucidation, and grammar

~~~
humanrebar
I would add that long-tail media consumption reinforces the tendency toward
special-interest groups.

------
PavlovsCat
_we haven't been on the receiving end of a bunch of jack-booted fascists or
their communist equivalents organizing putsches_

This brings to mind a quote [1] from George Carlin:

"When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts, it
will not be in jackboots, it will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts. Smiley
smiley."

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKQs-jDI7j8> (around 4:00.. though the
whole thing, especially the end, is relevant here)

------
dageshi
The "beigeness" in europe was specifically engineered to avoid another world
war. Everyone chooses a slightly different shade of beige in their own country
and then sticks to it. Every couple of years they all go to an EU summit and
sign a treaty that enshrines more "beige" as the way things are done.

Is moderate prosperous apathetic "beige" better than the alternative? The
founders of the EU seem to think so, it's not like there are any great
ideological alternatives is there?

------
martinced
_"They concede that the opposition may disagree with the party in power on
precisely how the state must operate, but agree that it should operate..."_

I don't get that sentence from TFA. Is the author really against _any_ kind of
statism?

Even most libertarian don't argue that there should be no state operating at
all. Only crazy anarchists advocate for no state at all, like in Somalia ; )

~~~
cstross
I am not anti-statist. I was trying to set out the difference between systems
that acknowledge a Loyal Opposition, and totalitarian/one-party/monarchical
systems, where the centre of power explicitly rejects the legitimacy of other
groups' aspirations and desires for how the state should be run.

