OK, I’ve been promising myself that I would produce a less blovial (like jovial, but bloviating) statement of my notions on how to preserve our democracies, under the dubious supposition that democracy is a habit we want to continue.
Thaaaat’s off to a bad start.
I’d rather think about anything in the universe besides human politics. But since politics sneak into every feed and cranny that’s supposed to be dedicated to the arts these days, the less I try to think about it, the more this idea about politics keeps wallowing around in the back forty of my mind. I’ve already posted several pieces trying to lay some groundwork for it, but they’re so full of caveats you can’t understand what I’m saying.
Time to be direct. Maybe pander a bit more to the LCD writing techniques of my age, even if they sound like farts to me. I know, easy-reading versions of politics are usually how the disaster starts. But usually, these cheat-code manuals are written by someone who has a dog in the fight. I’m only here clean up the dogshit. The last place on earth I would want to be is in government. I’m greasy enough from my natural secretions.
I like to do things in the most entertaining way possible—entertaining to me, alas. Now that everyone has contracted situational ADHD and refuses to do anything hard, you have to get to your point in the first paragraph, or someone who’s more eager to condescend to the lowest common denominator and will produce a color-graphic version of your idea and pretend they had it first.
Shit, that’s three four five paragraphs already, and all of them are too long.
Double shit; I almost forgot to put the important part in bold text:
People are doing crazy shit over their political identity. The right and the left are mad at the way each other think, because we think our enemies are evil or dipshits on purpose.
True, I could cite an event or two that would make a few people in politics seem stupid and/or malevolent.
But science keeps reluctantly converging upon the philosophical truth that we don’t reason our way to our political positions. One can be reasonable in defending one’s feelings, and a lot of interesting political writing has been generated this way (there’s a lot of boring bathwater in with that baby, but I promised myself this was going to be simple and straightforward). But rare is the bird who uses his reason to get to his viewpoint in the first place.
One’s choice of political orientation is no more logical than sexual orientation, and no less heritable.
We use reason to pretend that we reasoned our way to our positions.
I’m pretty sure I dislike politics because of my overly alarmist sense of smell.
We feel first, then rationalize the loaf on its way out the colon.
Why else would people get so mad when they’re arguing about it?
OK, often there is reason to get angry, when you’re arguing against something you consider to be an existential threat to your self, town, or country.
But when Americans argue passionately FOR mass immigration, for instance, they don’t get mad because they feel they’re desperately protecting themselves. They’re desperately defending what they feel is their ideological identity.
They claim it takes all genders and all ethnicities to make your neighborhood spin round, and yet most players proudly refuse to recognize the humanity of the political yang to their yin.
So the yang got pissed off and now we’re going to have a civil war. Maybe. Unless we can corral get these two powerful forces to tack the boat together instead of tearing civilization apart.
Sorry, these bolds and itals are giving me a headache.
Look, I’m not saying that being a leftist or a rightist in itself is bad merely because the choice isn’t rational.
It’s how we are. It’s how your brain sees the world. Ask me how I know; my brain seems to see the world differently from either of the halves. I can’t change it any more than you can. But even if it’s not as sacred as one feels it to be, plenty of useful and entertaining rational thought can spring from political orientation.
As I always say, never trust a misanthrope with healthy self-esteem. The danger of money, nukes, and justice being in the hands of politicians heightens the humor of our situation like a pinch of fresh mint. (I get to be glib because I have already been a casualty.)
We’re an animal in a body in a world where the very nature of matter is random and absurd. There’s more than one type of quantum particle, and we need more than one sail to steer the ship of state.
OH MY GOD GET TO THE POINT, ANN.
Democracy was a cool idea. Cool experiment. But now it’s produced some data.
Data, I say
If you start running a long-term experiment with dangerous chemicals and the first 250 years of results tell you that your setup is going to explode if you don’t adjust it, wouldn’t you adjust it?
When the US Constitution was written, we had no way of knowing* that people in politics seem to pretty dependably cleave into a left and a right, in oddly equal measure. We hadn’t gone through five elections in a row that are so close to 50-50 that people’s behavior tacitly admits they believe the edge will go to whomever can do the best cheating. We weren’t even sure what heritability was at the time. Most people still seem to think it means you’re exactly like your parents. So we let the political parties develop as they may.
Maybe nobody thought they would be that important.
The result has been a winner-takes-all political system where the Constitution doesn’t dictate that the president has to be a Republican or a Democrat, but that’s the way it always is. (Yeth, European countrieth hath multiple parties, Ralph, but they fall along the same continuum of scoundrels.) And despite the checks and balances, each party seems to the other to get a runaway amount of power when the pendulum swings their way. Thus their increasing desperation to get their paws on the reins.
For example: the Democrats currently think they live under a fascist dictatorship because Donald Trump’s attempts to reverse his Democrat predecessor’s incredibly extreme immigration policies seem to be, to them, incredibly extreme.
Yeah yeah, I know, I’m sure the Democrat leadership was doing all that shit mostly for corporate cash and prizes, not sincere adherence to an ideology—to quote Vince Dao, they’re more of a mafia than a political party, if there was ever a break after Tammany Hall—but it could be both. And those of their followers who don’t hope for direct compensation went along with it purely because of their ideological sing-along (well, unless they have enough social media followers to have a reasonable hope of one day getting on the gravy train). Just as it feels incredibly satisfying for the other team to swing the other way.
Those who are about to insist on democracy
If we want to avoid a Caesar, or any of the other non-democratic things that democracies have warped into over the course of history—let’s face it, one of the main reasons democracy sucks is that it can turn into just about anything, depending on what the loudest assholes want; but to help me in the lost cause of simplifying my argument, just pretend nobody here wants a Caesar, OK?—then we need to have ideological checks and balances in the system the same way we have checks and balances between the three branches of government.
If we continue to let total control of the rudder live a single rigged election away from the greediest and most extreme sets of paws out there grasping at the hoeseshoe, eventually the Populares and the Optimates are going to be replaced by Caligula (here, read the Oxford Classical Dictionary; the Wikipedia article is too silly). The ship of state can only lurch so violently before party politics collapse.
Triumvirates for everyone
So my immodest proposal is that each political office should be held by two or three people:
1. Someone who wants to do radical new things—roughly, those who sat on the left of the original Parisian hemicycle;
2. Someone who doesn’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater—those who would have plopped down on the right;
and maybe a moderate to referee.
If you want power, you should have to learn to work with the other half of humanity. More important, this will force candidates for office to become the best possible version of their own ideology—not the version most likely to piss off the other team.
The differences between you are at least as as arbitrary as differences of culture, gender, or race; and unlike Somali scammers, it’s not possible to deport the other side of the body politic. Political orientation might be biological, but it’s only roughly 40 percent heritable—if the researchers who think it’s about the amygdala are correct, for instance, you may be genetically coded for a big strong’un, but incidents can happen in the womb, it’s a delicate place—so if your population keeps on having kids they’re going to keep getting a variety pack.
Will it be expensive to have three times as many politicians?
Not if we stop allowing “politician” to be a job.
It’s supposed to be a service. So serve. And perhaps more random chance should be involved than party politics. We could learn a lot from the politics of the Doge of Venice (before a Caesar like Napoleon came in and wrecked it, but that is a complication for another day… holy shit, it just dawned on me how shockingly fast the original French Revolution produced a Caesar).
Will it make the government spend more time arguing with each other and less time doing stuff?
YES! This is why the subtitle says it’s the “Ron Swanson theory of cohabitation.”
We already have more laws than an army of lawyers could pretend to give a shit about in four lifetimes. This republic is two and a half centuries old, we don’t need to pump out another thousand laws a week as though we were still working our way through the Ten Commandments and preparing to read the Napoleonic Code. We don’t need these people to be doing shit all the time. All the unnecessary shit they get to do and decide on and hold funds for now is what draws such nasty people to the profession in the first place.
There we go. Clear as mud. Yeah, I realize this will probably never happen, but you can’t say I didn’t tell you. Have a diagram.
Granted, we could cancel democracy
In practice, that’s what happens anyway. The left-right divide is dictated by our filthy little brainhams, not the mind of God—and it can be exploited quite easily by little would-be Caesars.
Typically, they use it to steal money or other valuables. Go look at a Medici tomb once. You think we aren’t the same animal? We just found out that powerful Democrats in state and local government have been using the left half of ‘oi polloi to cover for their fiscal sins, and once they step up and collect a decade or so of power the Republicans are not unlikely to follow them.
Power corrupts, and every idiot who has the vote is corrupted by that little idiot slice of power.
At the height of the Athenian empire, you know why Athens kept going to war with Sparta till they were so weak the Macedonians ploughed in and swept the board? Because the guys who got paid a lot to sit in the relatively safe bottom of the warships and row voted for more war. Over and over and over. Till everything they were proud of was gone. The Romans had a senate before they had a writing system, but that didn’t stop them from winding up with an emperor they worshipped as a god. A culture of reason, once achieved, can be lost with dizzying speed, and it’s unreasonable to deny that; in the end the world’s great democracies have eventually led to disaster.
Granted, so does everything else we do.
So far we’ve come back every time.
Now we have the Internet, where, on top of a vote, every idiot gets to have an opinion. This is another thing the Founding Fathers didn’t know: Yeah, it’s cool to drink ale and ramble about the rights of man, and it all sounds heady and sublime till you find out how most people “think.” I don’t think there’s a political orientation out there that doesn’t have a sub-wing that spends their days dreaming of stripping me of my rights, either for being white or for being a woman (SHOULD women be voting? Look, you should know by now that you can’t send people like me down that kind of line of thinking and expect us NOT to arrive at “None of you motherfuckers should be voting”). What do I care about the government? What reason do I have to trust in a pretend democracy?
But if you’re going to continue making that pretense, at least repaint the façade; millennial greige is out now. Don’t let politicians paint the world with one sloppy grey brush, filled with their own unexamined team loyalty and whatever is trapped in their colon. Maybe if it were a less complete and valuable prize, taking control of the government would drive people less nuts.
The colon jokes tickle me somehow. Which reminds me of a line in a movie I can't at all remember the title of or even what it was about but..."Tickle your ass with a feather?" Anyone? Bueller?
We've heard the yin out and let it hold the reins for too long. That's how we got to this point. The yin needs to shut up and fall in line. I see no benefit of offering the reins back until the enemy is annihilated. Furthermore, there should be safeties put in place, to ensure it never gets this bad again. Democracy is a terrible idea. Just ask Plato. He's long dead, but the clarity of his position against democracies are laid out in The Republic.