Response to Andrew Sullivan

Some comments on Andrew Sullivan's NY Mag article entitled Democracies End When They Are To Democratic. There's actually a lot to comment on. I want to start by reviewing some of the problems with the article. Afterwords I'll comment on some of his valid points.

Problems

Sullivan starts by quoting Plato but then undermines his first eight paragraphs with this quote:

Plato, of course, was not clairvoyant. His analysis of how democracy can
turn into tyranny is a complex one more keyed toward ancient societies than
our own (and contains more wrinkles and eddies than I can summarize here).

Now I loves me some Plato and he has written many things worth
reading, but he was not a practitioner of science and his
political ramblings are not based on any evidence.
In other words, he's an interesting thinker but I
wouldn't trust him to build a bridge or design a stable
working social structure.

Another quote in the article shows Sullivan's ignorance of American
politics.

Many contend, of course, that American democracy is actually in retreat,
close to being destroyed by the vastly more unequal economy of the last
quarter-century and the ability of the very rich to purchase political
influence. This is Bernie Sanders’s core critique. But the past few
presidential elections have demonstrated that, in fact,
money from the ultra-rich has been mostly a dud.

It has always been true that the effectiveness of money in an election
decreases with the popularity of the election. The truth is that in
congressional or state elections, the candidate with the most money wins
95% of the time. Money spent on presidential elections is least effective
because the media (especially news outlets) give all the candidates free
coverage. These let the less funded candidates get their messages out. In
other words, just because presidential elections are expensive to
"purchase" does not mean that the U.S. is not a plutocracy.

Throughout the article Sullivan seems to conflate "elite" with "educated"
and/or "qualified". This is a dangerous assumption. Perhaps in the 1700s
it was reasonable to assume only the "elites" were educated. Now, with
public education, many of the people most "qualified" for running a
government are middle or lower class. My personal hypothesis
(unsubstantiated with any evidence thus far) is that, in a society
that provides education to all of its citizens, the average
knowledge of the economic "elite" decreases as income inequality
increases. It may well be the case now that the average knowledge
of a middle class college graduate exceeds the average
knowledge of the top one percent of the economic "elite".
I chalk this up to the fact that the economic "elite" do not
need to take education seriously; their life path is secure regardless of whether or not they learn anything.

Then there's Sullivan's description of Obama.

Obama would never have been nominated for the presidency, let alone
elected, if he hadn’t harnessed the power of the web and the charisma of
his media celebrity. But he was also, paradoxically, a very elite figure,
a former state and U.S. senator, a product of Harvard Law School, and, as
it turned out, blessed with a preternaturally rational and calm
disposition. So he has masked, temporarily, the real risks in the system
that his pioneering campaign revealed. Hence many Democrats’ frustration
with him. Those who saw in his campaign the seeds of revolutionary
change, who were drawn to him by their own messianic delusions, came to
be bitterly disappointed by his governing moderation and pragmatism.

Liberals and progressives are not disappointed with Obama because
of their "messianic delusions". They are disappointed with Obama
because he turned out to be neither liberal or progressive.
From the very beginning he spent a great deal of effort
"reaching out" to conservatives who were not willing
to "reach" back. He surrounded himself with people who gave him bad
counsel. Liberals and progressives could see early on that
he was just going to continue many of the same establishment
policies of his Republican predecessor. He didn't fight the
battles that needed to be fought. He didn't restore fourth amendment protections. He didn't promote peace in the world. (Though I
think the Obama administration was less hawkish than Bush
was and less hawkish than a Hillary Clinton administration would be.)
He did some good things and he did some bad things. He was,
after all is said and done, a reasonable centrist.
But he was not a progressive or a liberal.

Our country has swung so far to the right these past three decades we
desperately need more progressive policies just to get back to being a
"centrist" country.

A little further down Sullivan makes another mistake.

What, one wonders, could be more impossible than suddenly vetting every
single visitor to the U.S. for traces of Islamic belief? What could be more
make-believe than a big, beautiful wall stretching across the entire
Mexican border, paid for by the Mexican government? What could be more
credulous than arguing that we could pay off our national debt through a
global trade war? In a conventional political party, and in a rational
political discourse, such ideas would be laughed out of contention, their
self-evident impossibility disqualifying them from serious consideration.

All of the policies he mentions were created by a
"conventional political party". All of these ideas came from
the mainstream Republican party. This is one reason why
the other Republican candidates had problems differentiating
themselves from him. Yes, Trump often takes these policies
to the extreme. But none of them were his idea.
Sullivan implies that the problem with this election is Trump,
the outsider, the unqualified. The truth is that even the "qualified"
candidates were crazy this time out.

Likewise with Trump's racial rhetoric. That rhetoric was already
a part of the Republican party. (Remember the "Southern Strategy"?
Nixon's war on drugs?) Trump again dials the rhetoric up to
eleven but the core message came from "conventional
political parties".

Then there's this.

Those still backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want
to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise —
and their facile conflation of that with corruption — is only playing
into Trump’s hands.

To claim, after all the evidence, that Hillary has not been
systematically corrupted by the donor class is absurd.
And to classify Sanders as a "demogogue" ignores all the valid
rational arguments he has pot forth that support his policy
positions. The debates that include Bernie Sanders have
been the most substantive debates of this election. Not all
popular leaders are demagogues. Sometimes popular leaders are popular
because they are more rational than their opponents.

Finally I was disappointed in the way Sullivan seems to cast Trump
supporters as incapable of understanding the world around them.
He paints a picture of them being instinct driven animals,
immune to rational arguments. This perspective not only gives
a false view of the situation but it is divisive and destructive.
If you really want to understand the reasons why Trump is
resonating with so many people, I recommend
I Know Why Poor Whites Chant Trump, Trump,Trump
by Jonna Ivin.
Trump supporters are a consequence of employers
systematically abusing labor. A country's workforce is a public
commons. It needs to be overseen by regulations so that
companies don't "use it up" but instead use it "sustainably".
A country that can't sustain its labor pool with livable
wages ends up as a country with peasants. And a country
with peasants is a country that will break down.

Insights

Overall Sullivan is right about the danger Trump poses.
Anyone who thinks Trump can't get elected truly has not
been paying attention. There have already been polls showing
a Trump v. Hillary race in a statistical tie.
And Trump has mastered the art of saying dozens of stupid things
just to see which ones resonate. He then doubles down on the
attacks that worked and starts spewing another round of
ridiculous statements to find his next attack.

Sullivan is also correct that Hillary's failure to take Trump
seriously could easily be her undoing. Trump is an idiot, yes.
But he is also a master showman. If Hillary thinks that her
political experiences have prepared her to debate Trump,
I fear she may be unpleasantly surprised.

Can you imagine what a Trump-Hillary debate would be like?
Neither can I. There has not been a similar event in
living memory. Who knows what might happen or
what the consequences might be?

Something Sullivan doesn't talk about and that I find even more
frightening is what Trump would do if he were elected.
I've heard some progressives say that it might be good to have
four years of Trump because he would "unite the opposition".
These progressives are assuming that a Democratic Senate (which
looks likely with Trump hurting the Republican down-ticket votes)
would effectively prevent Trump from doing anything substantive.
I think these progressives are suffering from a
"failure of imagination".

We've already seen how "conventional" politicians like the Bushes
and the Clintons can exert a surprising degree of control over
the media when they are in office. And let us not forget
Nixon's use of the FBI, CIA and IRS to attack his political
opponents. Trump would have no compunctions in reviving all of these
practices and going much further. And with recent laws like
the Patriot Act already giving federal officials
unprecedented powers, there is no telling just how much damage
Trump could inflict. Free press? Net neutrality?
Independent news sources? Does anyone really believe that
Trump would not or could not destroy any of these things
if he set his mind to it? When the person who enforces the law
doesn't respect the law, they don't need Congress or the judiciary
to exercise their policy. They just do what they want,
all the while not believing that there will be any consequences
to their actions.

Final Thought

I can't say that I agree with Sullivan's titular assumption. I'm not sure there is such a thing as "too democratic" in the sense that Sullivan puts forth. A democracy is an idea that in its simplest, naivest form is dysfunctional. But that's true of all ideas, including socialism, communism, meritocracy, free market, etc. For an idea to work in the "real world" it must be implemented as a system. The complexities of these systems can surprise us when the underlying idea seems so simple. But we don't say that a failed system was too similar to its idea. We say the system failed and we look for ways to improve it.

Sullivan proposes that for a democracy to work only the "elite" should be allowed to run for office. Perhaps I do him an injustice phrasing it that way. I think what he really means is that a person running for Congress, for example, should know about law, about legislation and about how the government works. In other words the offices of government are jobs and the people doing those jobs need to fulfill some set of minimal requirements so that they will have the capability to perform the duties required by the job.

Sounds like a another simple idea. It shouldn't be too hard to create a system that implements that. Right?

Tom Stoppard's play Night and Day says it best. In the play there is a young reporter named Jacob Milne. Milne gives a speech near the end of Act I about "junk journalism". He is in the middle of a conversation about how the newspapers are always reporting the silliest things. How they get into people's personal lives and ruin reputations. How reporters will spend hours waiting outside a celebrity's house just to get a photo of his or her new lover. The other person in the conversation, Ruth, puts forth the idea that wouldn't it be better to have a free press that avoided all the silly junk? Milne's reply is brilliant.

People think that rubbish journalism is produced by men of discrimination
who are vaguely ashamed of truckling to the lowest taste. But it's not.
It's produced by people doing their best work. ...
I know what I'm talking about because I started off like that,
admiring it, trying to be that good, ...
Some of the best times of my life have been spent in a clapped-out
Ford Consul outside a suburban house ... waiting to grab a bereaved husband
or a footballer's runaway wife who might be good for one front page
between oblivion and oblivion. I felt part of a privileged group,
inside society and yet outside it, with a license to scourge it
and a duty to defend it, night and day, the street of adventure,
the fourth estate. And the thing is - I was dead right.
That's what it was and I was part of it because it's indivisible.
Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least
one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate
where responsible journalism begins.

Perhaps the occasional "unqualified" candidate is the analogy for politics.
Perhaps Trump is the evidence that our society has got at least
one thing right. That there should be no one with the power
to dictate where responsible leadership begins.