Most interesting blog post I’ve read in quite a while - Mencius Moldbug relates how he stopped believing in democracy:
If we can define good government, we can take an engineering approach to designing a system that ensures it. Moreover, we can evaluate the expected results of this system by criteria that are, if not quantitative, at least factual and absolute, rather than ethical and subjective. [..] is there any reason to think that democracy - Hill’s kind, or our kind, or Odinga’s kind, or anyone else’s kind - is the output of this sort of engineering process?
Mencius makes many fascinating points in a long post whose conclusion I cannot find myself agreeing with. For my 2 cents I have but a couple observations.
1. It’s worth emphasizing that there are, indeed, many many different kinds of “democracy”. This is too often overlooked by people who view democracy as a sort of stamp you can place on a country, “yes” or “no”. In reality there are sliding scales and infinite variations. The United States in fact really is not very “democratic”: citizens don’t have equal votes for the Presidency; Congress can’t vote democratically to do things forbidden by a 200-year-old text; Supreme Court Justices (who are not elected at all) can “interpret” that text with wide leeway; etc. So I don’t know if I “believe in democracy” but I certainly - all things considered - approve of many aspects of the way the United States has gone about its governance. And that - not a stamp of approval from Jimmy Carter - is really what most laymen have in mind when they use the word “democracy” in a positive light.
2. As for the engineering metaphor, well, if a bridge stands and stands, while others fall, that serves as pretty good real-world evidence that the engineer did something right. It may not be the best of all possible bridges but I’d cross that engineer’s bridges before I’d cross others’. And again, this is really what most people have in mind when they praise democracy.
