> It’s not even that democracy is bad; it’s just that it’s very weak. And the fact that it’s very weak is easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies [...] persist despite strong majorities being against them.
Is this a sign democracy is weak? Or is it a sign that the political process has to choose between mutually exclusive popular policies?
In my country, the average voter wants their trash hauled away, but don't want any dumps or incinerators built. They want responsive public services, but they don't want tax increases, cuts to other services, or a deficit. They want good care for the elderly, but they don't want to spend more on care workers, or to give the jobs to poorly paid immigrants.
The US political system has a bunch of problems (deadlock and corruption for example) but when voters want to have their cake and eat it too, which is impossible, no political system is going to make it possible.
> In my country, the average voter wants their trash hauled away, but don't want any dumps or incinerators built. They want responsive public services, but they don't want tax increases, cuts to other services, or a deficit. They want good care for the elderly,
Many "undemocratic" nations have functioning public services, clean streets, low to virtually no-crime and good universities.
> but they don't want to spend more on care workers, or to give the jobs to poorly paid immigrants.
In a capitalist economy part of a global marketplace, you are not "owed" jobs.
>They want good care for the elderly, but they don't want to spend more on care workers, or to give the jobs to poorly paid immigrants.
The voters aren't a homogeneous group. Older voters, i.e. the baby boomers, the biggest voting block, want stability and extensive pension spending. Young people want economic opportunity and to avoid worse quality of life than their parents' generation, as evidenced by recent election results in the US and Europe, where under 30s, especially young men, voted for radical right-wing parties more than any other demographic. Due to the number of working people shrinking relative to the number of retirees, there's a fundamental conflict of interest between the older generation, and the young generation facing greater and greater financial burden to support them. The relatively greater number of voters in the older block is causing society to prioritise their needs over those of the youth, inverting the traditional structure where the old make sacrifices to support the young.
> Due to the number of working people shrinking relative to the number of retirees, there's a fundamental conflict of interest between the older generation, and the young generation facing greater and greater financial burden to support them.
The older generation's burden on the younger generation has always existed. It was paid by labor, usually uncompensated by women of earlier generations. Now, the burden is paid by money from tax revenue and/or personal savings.
We need to expand the financial base for many social services, including elder care. It is long past time that we tax wealth, as the wealthy extract their money from our pockets through various rent-seeking schemes.
> Is this a sign democracy is weak? Or is it a sign that the political process has to choose between mutually exclusive popular policies?
It is a sign democracy is fake. Democracy only exists at the grace of someone/something else that decides these very large (in terms of cost) and unpopular policies. And the only thing that really matters is whether people advance economically. This works in democracies because, in a democracy, it's very, very easy to prevent change, so the institutions and policies that existed before democracy was introduced (or before it was real democracy) persist almost everywhere.
Authoritarian changes, and eventually war, is what happens when you have a sustained economic deterioration in a country. The form of governance matters on an individual level, but not on a country level. We're in the first stages of that now, and it's hard to see anything happen but it getting worse from this point forward.
One application of this: if you want to defeat MAGA, you need to pay middle America. MAGA voters vote MAGA because their economic situation has been deteriorating since, well, really since 2008 (with local areas, like Detroit, further back), and accelerated since COVID. A very, very visible part of this deterioration on a household level, sorry, is the increase in household medical spending that is the result of ACA. Yes, it's a very good deal in terms of "how much medical care do I get for $x" (esp. if you're poor), but a pretty bad deal in terms of "if I don't care about medical anything, how much $ can I spend right now?" (especially if you work for those $, and what especially matters if it's more or less than last month/last year/last ... it's less)
More generally, medical and pension costs for the aging population are reducing everyone's standards of living ... and this will keep getting worse for at least 2 decades. We need a solution for this. Republicans' solution is to throw everyone to the curb (less medical care, less pensions, less public transport, even less education, less universities, ...). Can we do better? How?
> only thing that really matters is whether people advance
economically.
This is such an incomplete understanding of governance and state it
could only appear under already degenerate conditions of poor
political education and non-participation.
I would argue it has a very great deal of historical support. And yes, it's a simplification, it's not like it's the only factor (e.g. Ukraine was rapidly improving since the fall of the Soviet union and now they're at war. We all know what happened, and I don't consider that a counterexample)
It's not only a simplification, it's a bias, your bias views all governance solely on the matters of economic improvements, how do you even define what's economic improvement? If it's in terms of a singular macroeconomic metric like GDP then it will grow if you strip out all public services, privatise those and make people pay for it, it will also grow if shoddy products are made so when they inevitably break people will buy more of it: shoddy houses needing constant repairs, cars breaking down and generating economic activity when they get sorted out by mechanics, etc.
What even means to improve economically? Buy more stuff? Buy bigger stuff? It's a great mirage to look at, it's absurdly simplistic to equate that being able to purchase more things will translate into a better society... It doesn't really follow, of course people want to buy stuff they think will improve their lives but there's a breaking point to that. If that was the case the USA should be the most fulfilled and happiest population to ever exist, and we know it isn't the case.
> I would argue it has a very great deal of historical support.
Yup, while a society is in the stages of scarcity it does have historical support, after the point of scarcity into abundance... We need new models, it's clear this model doesn't hold after this transition.
> GDP then it will grow if you strip out all public services, privatise those and make people pay for it
No it won't, because people won't pay for it. They can't, so to get ahead of your next argument: it doesn't matter how necessary those services are, they can't pay. If doing without means a city dies economically or even if it means people start actually dying then that's what it will mean, not more GDP.
Read about the century before and after Irish potato famine to see an example of just how bad it can get, while still not resulting in GDP growth.
> What even means to improve economically?
Having the ability to do more, on a bigger scale. Think of it this way: there isn't a city on the planet that wouldn't benefit from rebuilding itself (in practice increasing the rate at which it rebuilds itself). Lots of houses, businesses, ... are old and have huge problems that need fixing. Most places could use a lot more houses. And then, there's no shortage of ideas for improvements. Wouldn't you agree it would be great if the London metro had the same density all the way to Birmingham as it has in the center of London? If the New York metro extended into the state? If medical care really was universal, cheap, fast and thorough? If there was a vaguely usable train network in Europe (by which I mean that it would be realistic, and cheap, to use European trains to go from, say, London to Rome)? To say nothing of the fact that in 90% of the world, if you brought people's living standards to Eastern European levels, that would be increasing them. That certainly seems worth doing and requires more economy.
These are extreme and perhaps unrealistic examples, but, yes, that would be economic improvement. And yes, these things would improve nearly everyone's lives.
>> Having the ability to do more, on a bigger scale.
Even waste , inefficiencies ? That is setting yourself up for a big collapse too. One needs to look at it from a more resilient, sustainable perspective, like a biological system.
In which manner, in this theories, do you measure the performance of the « dictator »/CEO/president? Is it based on objective KPIs decided ahead of time? or are the KPIs supposed to be evaluated by the consumers/electors/ people?
And what consequences can those KPIs have, if considered to be poor?
Can we fire the dictator?
If no KPIs allow to maintain the system stable, as a feedback loop, then welcome to USSR where everything is fake, and the « government » governs itself until complete failure.
>In which manner, in this theories, do you measure the performance of the « dictator »/CEO/president? Is it based on objective KPIs decided ahead of time? or are the KPIs supposed to be evaluated by the consumers/electors/ people?
The Magna Carta had a solution for this:
> Under what historians later labelled "clause 61", or the "security clause", a council of 25 barons would be created to monitor and ensure John's future adherence to the charter.[46] If John did not conform to the charter within 40 days of being notified of a transgression by the council, the 25 barons were empowered by clause 61 to seize John's castles and lands until, in their judgement, amends had been made.[47] Men were to be compelled to swear an oath to assist the council in controlling the King, but once redress had been made for any breaches, the King would continue to rule as before.
Such an arrangement can only work when at least some part of the populace is well armed enough to overthrow the government if things get too bad.
> least some part of the populace is well armed enough to overthrow t
What a naive fantasy.
Organization of people is much more important than guns. You don't even need guns when you organize. You can stop the state just by collective action. See color revolutions.
When it is guns, you need RGP's, detonators and TNT (and drones), a good underground insurgent logistic chains. You also need commit to life in poverty and eventual death.
United States, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, Serbia have plenty of independent weapons, yet there is no fear of effective armed resistance. Everybody is a rebel in the Internet. When things go tough it's "I have to go to work and eat. My family needs me."
Magna Carta predates not just guns but even just gunpowder being known in Europe.
The barons it talks about would have been somewhat analogous to US state governors, though even then it's a very loose analogy as the logistics of England in the 1200s was so different to the modern world.
There's lots of things it could be analogised to, including a board of directors empowered to remove an unwanted CEO; or how the English civil war was a fight between Charles I and his parliament (some of the discourse at the time explicitly mentioned Magna Carta*).
Which is to say that while one does indeed need to be able to respond "this one" when asked "you and what army?", that requirement is not itself a show-stopper, people can (and have) been able to give the correct answer.
If the leader does too much of a poor job it tends to be voted out. Democracy doesn't work by ensuring great people get power. It just avoids perpetuating leadership that gets too misaligned with a large share of the population.
It seems very clear to me that the feedback loop is utterly broken in all democracies.
Two big reasons:
1: It's incredibly difficult to judge the effects of an elected leader's actions. Even assuming an educated/informed/engaged populace, there's nearly always an extremely long delay between an elected leader's actions and the results of those actions.
2: Even when the results of the actions are very tangible, it's still extremely difficult to assign credit or blame for the outcome.
A prime example would be the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Americans can tangibly experience the outcome of the ACA and form their own opinions. However, the final product is objectively quite different from what Obama and the Democrats initially wanted.
So if you think the ACA turned out pretty well (or poorly), to whom do you ascribe the credit (or blame)? To the Democrats for pushing the idea, or Republicans and the healthcare industry for scaling back its initial ambitions? To make an informed decision here you need to know "how the sausage was made" and you're also comparing the actual outcome versus a number of hypothetical roads not taken.
It just avoids perpetuating leadership that gets too
misaligned with a large share of the population.
I think, at best, in America we've basically just achieved a kind of schizophrenic perpetual see-saw between parties that has almost nothing to do with how effectively either one governs. Which is I guess slightly better than having one party perpetually in power forever, but is not great.
It precludes any kind of long-term thinking, or stable relationships with other nations.
> So if you think the ACA turned out pretty well (or poorly), to whom do you ascribe the credit (or blame)? To the Democrats for pushing the idea, or Republicans and the healthcare industry for scaling back its initial ambitions?
Classic class warfare at work.
Here you stand, trying to blame 1 of the political parties, when the people responsible for ACA were company boards of health insurance companies and any other front-men of large business interests (doctor cartels, medical supply companies etc.)
In the US, both parties are captive to large business interests, with mostly non-overlapping areas of interest.
In almost all cases, you should be looking very closely at large business interests and elect leaders who have shown strong anti-trust tendencies and understand how the social contract works.
Well, when a party has lost an election, what's supposed to happen is they spend the next several years figuring out what the people actually want. (Or, more cynically, at least what the people want to hear.) That's where the feedback gets listened to - when they're out of power.
It’s been longer than a few months. Biden actively snubbed multiple high ranking dignitaries and even world leaders during his presidency, avoiding them due to his advanced mental decline. Multiple countries, such as Hungary, France, and even Germany, saw the waning relevance of US power and allied themselves with Russia, or in France’s case wishes to disassociate from NATO and have Europe handle its own military separate from the US.
Isn’t the feedback loop supposed to be Elon/Robert trying to convince the deputees and senators of the validity of the law they propose? And the deputees and senators being accountable to their people for their decisions in Washington ?
Biden wasn't voted out; he was old as shit and opted not to run
Trump got just over 1/3 of eligible US votes. the Republicans could have run the dead corpse of Nixon and probably gotten at least 1/4 of eligible votes just because he was running on a GOP ticket.
almost 1/3 of the US eligible voters didn't vote at all. the Elector College means that red states have a disproportional sway in elections.
Sorry, that's kind of bullshit. Stating things that way is just spin to mischaracterize the actual result.
> almost 1/3 of the US eligible voters didn't vote at all.
Things are weird now. The indications I've been seeing is the less engaged the voter, the more they tended to support Trump. So if those people voted, Trump would have probably have had a bigger win. In prior years, those voters would have tended to support Democrats, but not anymore.
The Democrats got rejected badly. They lost to a dangerous buffoon. Instead of sticking their heads in the sand, they need to own that loss and internalize what that means about them.
> Instead of sticking their heads in the sand, they need to own that loss and internalize what that means about them.
Is that actually true? I've been around ~45 years, and the Republicans have been in and out of power repeatedly during that span. But I don't think they've ever owned a loss, and I don't think they've ever internalizing what it means about them. And it hasn't stopped them from coming back into power, once the mess from their last misadventure has been cleaned up.
> And it hasn't stopped them from coming back into power, once the mess from their last misadventure has been cleaned up.
I'm sure the Democrats at some point will come back into power in a 50%+1 squeaker, but that will be bad for the country and another step in its decline.
If they want to be the people to actually answer this crisis, instead of ratifying it, they damn well better own thier loss and internalize what that means about them. They lost to Trump, twice, FFS. The only Democrat who could beat him was a fossil from another time (and he only won by a hair). The Democrats suck. They need reform into something else for the sake of the God-damned country.
> I'm sure the Democrats at some point will come back into power in a 50%+1 squeaker
> If they want to be the people to actually answer this crisis, instead of ratifying it
Honestly? I'm not convinced they do—they seem to be content swapping back and forth, saying "well at least we're not evil". Which like sure, they're not trying to burn the country down, and that's a good thing, but they don't seem to be putting any effort in stopping the country from being burned down by the Republicans. And that's not a good thing.
> while president trump is aligned with a large share of the population of the US
Judgement is passed by the end of the term. So that's a open question for now.
> how the 'feedback loop' works for elon musk and robert kennedy jr, as they are not in the feedback loop of voting
They were appointed by someone that was elected. So their fuck-ups count against whoever appointed them.
But this is not to say democracy as implemented is always perfect. For it to work properly I think a diverse pool of viable would-be leaders must be present, to maximize the odds of at least one well aligned being present for people to choose. Indirect voting and the bipartisan system screw this, creating moral hazards and poor fit candidates that just take turns between them.
It's like we know evolution works, but if everybody starts marrying their cousin, the gene pool will lose the raw diversity necessary for evolution to work.
Democracy, even Athenian democracy, is not a feasible large-scale system and there’s a reason we have never been a democracy. Not even the inventors of democracy were democratic in the modern sense. There were heavy restrictions on who could vote and how, namely: only males, you had to be a proper citizen of Athens by birth, you had to publicly serve military, and you had to actively participate in the politics in order for your vote to count. Mob rule is what modern “democracy” is, and that’s dangerous.
I have been told this guy is an irascible reactionary genius for like 15 years - he says so himself: "No. I’m an outsider, man. I’m an intellectual." Yet once again I see somebody with the sophistication of a teenager:
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.
[...]
Understanding why Hitler was so bad, why Stalin was so bad, is essential to the riddle of the 20th century. But I think it’s important to note that we don’t see for the rest of European and world history a Holocaust. You can pull the camera way back and basically say, Wow, since the establishment of European civilization, we didn’t have this kind of chaos and violence.
This sounds like something that Ricken from Severance wrote in his self-help book:
It’s basically just a greater openness of mind and a greater ability to look around and say: We just assume that our political science is superior to Aristotle’s political science because our physics is superior to Aristotle’s physics. What if that isn’t so?
And I laughed out loud at this, he's just a ridiculous idiot:
When I look at the status of women in, say, a Jane Austen novel, which is well before Enfranchisement, it actually seems kind of OK.
I belong to the same X-gen group as Marc Andreessen, Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk,Peter Thiel, and others. I have a background in computers and am financially independent.
While I strongly disagree with them, I feel an affinity and familiarity with their thinking. I have read the same books, seen the same news, and lived in the same era. I understand how they arrived where they are now.
The Neo-reactionary movement seems exactly like what my generation comes up from the right. Dark Psychology of Dark Enlightenment is a cyberpunk sci-fi world as a fantasy. To live with societal collapse, dystopia and decay with low-life and high-tech. Always framing oneself as an independent outsider and a rebel. Sarcasm as a reflex. These guys see themself living in William Gibson's Neuromancer world.
>> While I strongly disagree with them, I feel an affinity and familiarity with their thinking. I have read the same books, seen the same news, and lived in the same era. I understand how they arrived where they are now.
Similar , however I see them more as extreme greed (for power/control) and technological hubris.
Interesting how people interpret things differently based on their life experiences. I feel this is what strong advocates of objective facts and EMH tend to miss. People have the same input data, however the interpretations are different based on the (hidden) internal state.
I keep wondering, what does the richest man in the world want more ? Why this ? I find it a very revolting way to live.
I can see how you would draw this conclusion, and somewhat agree. However, viewed through occam's lens, I'm more inclined to go with simple greed (tale as old as time) over an adult male fantasy.
> I belong to the same X-gen group as Marc Andreessen, Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk,Peter Thiel, and others.
Me too.
> I have a background in computers and am financially independent.
Me too.
I think having read the same books, seen the same movies and news, played similar games, having lived in the same era is only part of it.
Maybe where you came from, where and under what circumstances you grew up, which opportunities and/or (bad)luck you had, where the winds of chaos have blown you, how you were 'driven' to be 'driven' where you landed makes you more detached, or immune to such overgeneralizations, or maybe call it 'cultural' brainwashing?
IOW: There is too much trash in the minds of too many people. Memory leaks. Buffers overflow. Garbage collection is overdue. Or a reboot.
Edit: That's not to be read as an endorsement of the people you mentioned, and their likes. Or that I'd be a fan. Maybe my 'reboot' is useless, too. Because the filesystem is irrecoverably damaged, the hardware underneath has been replaced, and is working different, so a new install of another 'OS' is needed anyways.
Things change faster than tribalistic peoples grasp. Dunbar's Number etc.
Yarvin is only another horribly damaged person, squealing in pain in a pseudointellectual vocabulary. He has neither knowledge nor insight, but a gift for miming these things. The questions are, first, how might we stop so many children from being psychically tortured so that their minds become piles of bloody shred like this, and then second, why does anybody take it at face value when, rarely, one of them learns to scream in sounds that mimic high discourse?
Well, many of us take an LLM's outputs at face value, don't we?
Also, I don't claim to have any answers, but I found some insights about literacy (vs pre-literate orality) in Walter Ong's work "The Written Word". Maybe it'll spark some ideas in your mind as well.
The main tl;dr from Ong's work IMHO is that Literacy is a Technology, and every technology entices us to give up certain strengths and conveniences for other strengths and conveniences. Humanity bought into the power of the written word wholesale, but words can be hijacked to manipulate people (by LLMs, by Yarvin, etc.) at scale.
People voted the Republicans in right? Perhaps them winning the vote indicates that the Democrats were not doing things right, in most people's opinion?
If that is indeed the case, then it was not a vote for what Republicans are doing now. It still points to a systemic problem: the system gave certain individuals the power to do things that they don't actually have a mandate for.
I'd say one of the major problems is that the voting system is built to de facto ensure a two-party system because it's a system in which individuals are voted for, with each race being a winner-takes-all for a single individual; as opposed to a system of representative voting. And a two-party system simply isn't able to represent the complexities of the world.
(This is of course in addition to other problems of the system which are also real.)
But one's vote is never for whatever the vote winning party actually does.
Eg one might like one party's position on the environment, but disagree with regards to their military position - it is not possible to find a party that represents how one feels on a multitude of issues. And even if you did agree with all a party's positions, parties change their positions - saying one thing and doing another.
And it has always been thus. One votes for a representative, who then votes on the specifics.
Trump won, not just because of his policy program, but also because he wasn't Biden. But then, Biden won because he wasn't Trump.
If you think about that, if that's the best our democracy can do, then it sounds like evidence for Yarvin's position... until you think about it. Then you wonder, what happens if the non-democratic ruler was Biden or Trump or equivalent, and you can't get rid of them?
What we actually need is to fix the primary process.
Years before he was the Republican vice presidential nominee, however, Vance openly touted that influence.
“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin who has written about these things,” Vance said on a right-wing podcast in 2021. Vance didn’t stop at a simple name-drop.
He went on to explain how former President Donald Trump should remake the federal bureaucracy if reelected.
“I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
This “piece of advice” is more or less identical to a proposal Yarvin floated around 2012: “Retire All Government Employees,” or RAGE.
JD Vance thinks monarchists have some good ideas (Oct, 2025)
A bunch of people who got ahead by breaking things—often the law—to prosper are just looking for new things to break so they can drink more milkshakes. And we just sit there crying, 'Don't bully us.'. What they think of us and civil society:
Yarvin comes across as not very articulate in this conversation. One
has to doubt his bona fides. Karl Marx was no statesman, but his ideas
were the banner to slaughter millions. Yarvin is no remarkable thinker
whose ideas surfaced on their merits. This stuff is 6th form debating
society take on politics. He's been dug up as justification for people
who want to seize power and need acceptable words to flatter their
plans. Ambitious thugs in any epoch can find "genius" writer from the
unhinged fringe and hold them aloft. So Yarvin suddenly feels bathed
in light, but he's just being used and is too giddy with attention to
see that.
Confronted with the deaths of millions under Hitler and Stalin, his response is: "you can’t separate Hitler and Stalin from the global democratic revolution that they’re a part of". So the rise of democracy is to blame for the 100s of millions of deaths under Stalin and Hitler, not the autocracies of Stalin and Hitler.
Now I get how people can argue that Ukraine got invaded by the USSR because they wanted to join NATO. You just go back in the causal tree until you hit the thing you don't like and blame it.
Is this a sign democracy is weak? Or is it a sign that the political process has to choose between mutually exclusive popular policies?
In my country, the average voter wants their trash hauled away, but don't want any dumps or incinerators built. They want responsive public services, but they don't want tax increases, cuts to other services, or a deficit. They want good care for the elderly, but they don't want to spend more on care workers, or to give the jobs to poorly paid immigrants.
The US political system has a bunch of problems (deadlock and corruption for example) but when voters want to have their cake and eat it too, which is impossible, no political system is going to make it possible.