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The Democratic Destruction of Democracy

Hitler speaking in the Reichstag

We’re all familiar with the phrase. Democracies allow so much freedom that anti-democratic forces can develop inside of them and ultimately destroy them from within, using the very tools that make democracy what it is (freedom of speech and association, elections etc.). The archetypal case is, of course, the Weimar Republic of pre-WWII Germany (although one can claim that Weimar wasn’t really a democracy and Hitler’s rise to power didn’t occur through purely democratic means). The democratic destruction of democracy is also, misleadingly, called the self-destruction of democracy, as if it is the democracy as a whole rather than an abusive part of it that causes the destruction.

However, I also have a problem with the phrase ”democratic destruction of democracy”. There is, after all, nothing democratic about the abuse of democracy by anti-democratic forces trying to get elected with the sole purpose of ending all future elections. Their actions may be democratic in the strictly legal sense, but not in the moral or philosophical sense.

I believe the “democratic destruction of democracy” means something else. Most people, and even those who care about democracy and are willing to die in its defense, view one of its basic characteristics – the plurality of opinion – as a suboptimal state of affairs, and something to be overcome. We all believe strongly in certain opinions, and we may even consider those opinions to be more than mere opinions. In other words, we make truth claims about our opinions. That means that we believe that other people, who have adopted other opinions, are wrong, mistaken. We want to convince them, but that means that we want to eliminate the plurality of opposing opinions. It also means that we want to abolish democracy, because it’s impossible to imagine a democracy in a world of unanimity.

Paradoxically, the most typical democratic activity – persuasion – has the objective of ending democracy. I wouldn’t call it a “destruction”, because the end of democracy is a byproduct, not a conscious goal. Of course, this democratic (let’s call it) termination of democracy is possible only through persuasion, and by the looks of it, that’s not a very sharp tool. Hence the termination is still a rather abstract and long-term possibility. The undemocratic termination of democracy does not suffer from tool-limitation, and is therefore a much less theoretical possibility.

This undemocratic termination can occur inside or outside of democracy, with the tools offered by democracy or with other tools. Anti-democrats can decide to try to get elected, or they can stage a coup. Or whatever. Common to many anti-democrats is impatience with persuasion. Some are motivated simply by power or money, but many believe that the “democratic masses” just can’t see the light and are immune to even the best arguments. Instead of persuasion, the impatient anti-democrats are led to believe that imposition of a worldview is the only remedy for error and mistake. Re-education camps are quick to follow, and extermination camps for those for whom even persuasion in the form of re-education is impossible.

Statistical Jokes (3): Meta-Statistics

(forgot where I got this from; sorry)

More statistics jokes are here.

Human Rights Maps (70): Gender Equality in Government

(source, click on the image to enlarge)

(source)

Read more about the reasons why this is a human rights issue.

Human Rights Ads (30): Health Care

(source, a Make Poverty History ad)

More on the Millennium Development Goals. More on health care as a human right here. More human rights ads here.

Human Rights Quote (146): Some of the Causes of Wealth Inequality, Ctd.

(source; more Herblock, more on “split-level living“)

Regular readers know that we often post about income inequality (which is a proxy of wealth inquality). Here’s an overview. Although income inequality, contrary to some other kinds of inequality, isn’t a human rights violation as such (there’s no human right to equal income, nor should there be), it does have some negative consequences for certain human rights. Read more about this here.

So if we agree that income inequality is a problem (if you’re not convinced you may want to read this) it’s important to look at some of the causes. One of those is called “positive feedback“: wealth begets wealth. There’s an interesting quote about this here, and below is another one:

I think that perhaps the most important trend of the past thirty years is the increased importance of cognitive skills relative to physical labor. Obviously, this has been going on for more than just the past thirty years, but during the past thirty years we saw an acceleration. This has had a number of consequences:

1. It changed the role of women. Their comparative advantage went from housework to market work.

2. This in turn, as Wolfers and Stevenson have pointed out, changed the nature of marriage. Men and women look for complementarity in consumption rather than in production.

3. This in turn leads to more assortive mating, with achievement-oriented men looking for interesting mates rather than for good maids.

4. This in turn leads to greater inequality across households. It also fosters greater inequality among children. The children of two affluent parents are likely to have much better genetic and environmental endowments than the children of two (likely unmarried) low-income parents.

5. Inequality is exacerbated by globalization and technological change. If your comparative advantage is basic physical labor, you have to compete with machines as well is with workers from the Third World.

The net result is an economy that has improved considerably for people with high cognitive skills, but which has improved only somewhat for people with relatively low cognitive skills. Arnold Kling (source, source)

Some data on income inequality are here.

Political Graffiti (71): Communism

On the 20th anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism:

The story behind the person waving the flag is here. More on communism. More political graffiti.

Moral Dilemma (4): Unequal Human Beings

(updated following comments; the initial version of the poll was confusing)

Another post in our blog series on moral dilemmas. Although on some level, we cherish the equality of human beings and their equal worth, in practice we value people and their lives on the basis of their merit and desert.

Standard note: Use the comment section in order to elaborate on your answer. As usual in this series, we don’t pronounce ourselves on our favorite answer. This series is about what the readers think. However, nothing in the statistics on the answers you give makes it possible to conclude anything about “public opinion”. The usual disclaimer about the quality of internet polls where participants can self-select is applicable. Read more. Also, the polls in this blog series will remain open indefinitely in order to allow accidental readers of this blog, or readers finding their way here through a search engine, to participate.

More on desert. You can still vote on our other dilemmas here.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (30): The Bombing of Dresden

(source, click on the image to enlarge)

Read the story behind this atrocity here. More iconic images of human rights violations are here.

Human Rights Facts (162): The Truth About the Deterrent Effect of the Death Penalty, Ctd.

Some more data to support the claims expressed in this post, and this one. There’s a paper here presenting the results of a survey among leading criminologists regarding their opinion on the deterrent effect of capital punishment in the U.S.

The findings demonstrate an overwhelming consensus among these criminologists that the empirical research conducted on the deterrence question strongly supports the conclusion that the death penalty does not add deterrent effects to those already achieved by long imprisonment.

Here’s one result of the study:

death penalty deterrent, expert opinion

Of course, it’s not because experts believe something that this corresponds to the truth, but at least it’s ammunition that can be used against those proponents of the death penalty who like to claim that there is a ”scientific consensus” in favor of the deterrent effect. There is no such thing. On the contrary, if there’s a consensus, it’s for the opposing view.

Another point: this kind of statistic on expert opinion, together with the data offered in the posts I linked to above, is much more convincing than the data comparing murder rates in capital punishment states and abolitionist states:

(source)

At first sight, this graph also undermines the deterrent argument, but it’s not as solid as it appears. It’s always important to control your data for other variables which can explain a difference. Maybe there are other reasons why states without the death penalty have lower murder rates, e.g. less poverty, more gun control etc. And maybe the murder rate in states with capital punishment would be even higher without capital punishment. No way to tell on the sole basis of this graph.