Liberal Democracy

This is a subject that I have been planning on getting around to for some time.  In the notes I had assembled on the subject I listed "Democracy 101" and "Government 101" as possible titles.  The post was always supposed to feature a discussion of the phrase "liberal democracy".  In the end I decided that this phrase is central to the discussion.  So I went with it for the title.

I also labeled this post as a "culture" post rather than the more obvious label of "politics".  I decided to do that because of the importance of the subject to our culture as a whole.  It is too important to be pigeon holed as merely politics.

And the immediate event that caused me to transform this subject from a potential to an actual blog post was the recent widespread coverage of Sinclair Communications.  Sinclair owns close to 200 local TV stations and would like to own more.  They are working on a plan to acquire the chain of TV stations owned by a company that grew out of the Chicago Tribune newspaper.  Newspapers have long been considered a dying business so lots of owners have been busily diversifying.  That's what the owners of the "Trib" did.  They bought a bunch of TV stations.  Sinclair wants to buy them.  If the acquisition goes through Sinclair would end up owning over 200 TV stations whose combined reach would extend to cover 80% of the population of the US.

That level of ownership concentration sounds bad.  But that's not what Sinclair got in trouble for.  The people who control Sinclair are, like many wealthy people today, very conservative.  They've got it and they want to keep it.  They are adamantly opposed to anything that might possibly threaten their position.  And in the case of Sinclair their ownership of so many TV stations puts them in a position to actively do something about it.

A lot of people get their news from their local TV station.  The news is supposed to be sacrosanct.  There is an unwritten (or, in the modern era, unenforced) rule that says management does not interfere with news content.  Sinclair has instead been influencing what local news on their stations has to say about some issues.  They have long since moved beyond just making hiring and firing decisions, a power that gives them considerable control over news content.  They also have been sending edicts out for years now saying "this must appear on the air".

Some stations have been burying these segments in low viewership parts of their schedule.  Other stations have been happy to air them in prime time.  But all of them have been forced to respond in some way.  A few stations have managed to avoid airing a few segments.  But for the most part the segments got aired.  The segments Sinclair was sending out were always presented as if the local staff decided they should be aired.  This was not the case.  But the segments were obviously not locally produced.  That, at least, gave the local staff a fig leaf of cover.

Having gotten away with everything so far Sinclair decided it was time to up their game.  They sent out a script and instructed one or more of the local news staff to read it on the air as if it represented that person's own opinion.  The local news staff was forced to go along with this charade.  Like all the other material Sinclair provided the latest statement had a decided conservative slant.  In general all of the pieces were designed to support and enhance the ability of Sinclair's owners to maintain and expand their power and wealth.

In the news business it is fine to have an opinion.  But there is supposed to be a separation between news, fact based information, and commentary, opinion which may or may not be solidly grounded in fact.  In a newspaper there is the "news hole" and the "opinion page".  Broadcast news operations are supposed to maintain a similar separation.  There are two problems with the Sinclair material.  First, it has been presented as news when it is actually opinion.  Secondly, they disguised the source of the information.  If Sinclair had said "the following represents the opinion of the management of Sinclair Communications" everything would have been fine.  But they didn't.

This Sinclair behavior was well known within the news business.  In theory competitive pressures should have caused Sinclair's competitors to make a big deal of the story.  They didn't even though claiming "we are the truly independent people you can relay on and they are a bunch of lying corporate toadies" should have been good for business.  It is important to remember that the news business is a business.  And it is owned almost completely by wealthy and powerful individuals and corporations.  Calling out Sinclair's shortcomings might have caused one's own shortcomings to come under scrutiny.  And that scrutiny might have turned up embarrassing information.  For this or other reasons Sinclair's competitors kept mum.  So the public in general and Sinclair viewers in particular stayed blissfully ignorant.

That is until a few days ago.  Sinclair might have gotten away with this latest stunt.  Initially it drew no coverage.  But then a web site called "Mashable" put out a short video featuring video of anchor after anchor on station after station robotically repeating exactly the same words.  They mashed up the video so that we could see many anchors on many stations simultaneously saying exactly the same thing.  The video went viral and the whole sorry business could no longer be ignored.

Or could it?  My local paper, the Seattle Times, at first didn't cover it at all.  Then they did a story not about Sinclair but about Trump's tweet about Sinclair (and a bit about the pending acquisition).  Finally the story blew up to the point that it couldn't be ignored.  So they did a long in depth piece about the whole thing.  That was yesterday.  Today, the follow up consisted entirely of some nice letters to the editor.  I expect the story to be gone by tomorrow and never reappear.  Okay, that was way too long an introduction.  But I feel better.

The form of government in this country is called a "liberal democracy".  Both words are important.  People generally understand "democracy" to be "by the people, of the people, and for the people", in the words of Abraham Lincoln.  But what's this whole "liberal" thing about?

The first thing to understand is that an authoritarian form of government is the natural state of things.  To cite just one example, classical China was of the opinion that the best form of government was one headed by a "philosopher king".  A king is an authoritarian figure.  That was taken as a given.  What one hoped for was that he was also a philosopher.  The Chinese saw that term quite differently than we do today.  They did not think of an academic pontificating from an ivory tower in a completely impractical way about things that seemed completely disconnected from the real world.  To the Chinese a philosopher was a well educated and intelligent person who was thoughtful and careful and was very familiar with the way the real world worked and how actual people behaved.

If you ignore the formal title a philosopher king is what most people in most places and at most times have hoped for in a leader.  They expect a king, an authoritarian head of government who has absolute or near absolute power.  But they hope he also has the same attributes the Chinese looked for:  intelligent, well educated, thoughtful, practical, and careful.  Such a person would be well versed in the issues of the day.  He would come to a decision about what the right way to proceed was and then he would have the power and authority to "make it so".  The whole point of a liberal democracy was to not have a king, philosopher or otherwise.  But why?

The problem with kings is that while a good king can do a lot of good a bad king can do even more bad.  The big problem with kings in particular and authoritarian systems in general is the succession problem.  Who takes over from the old guy?  Ideally you want to replace a good guy with another good guy.  But all too often the guy you were replacing was a bad guy and he ended up getting replaced by another bad guy.

And there was another problem.  Succession fights could get really messy.  A lot of people could get killed.  A lot of raping and pillaging could happen and that would be bad for everybody.  Say you had a good guy.  In the standard authoritarian scheme he sticks around until he dies.  But late in life he could have all kind of medical problems that turned him from a good guy to a bad guy.  Or he could get dementia or some other mental condition that again turned him from a good guy to a bad guy but left him physically healthy and, therefore, long lived.  And say you eventually replaced him with another good guy but there was a nasty fight over the succession.  A country could go a long time between stretches of "good guy" rule.

The long term effect of this experience was succession rules.  Lots of countries in lots of places and in lots of historical eras went with some kind of blood line thing.  The eldest son of the old king would succeed him to become new king.  The idea was to make the succession as smooth as possible.  The odds that the son of a good guy will also be a good guy were better than average.  So there is that to be said for that particular system.  But what if there is no son?.  Or what if the son is an infant?

Nobody ever came up with a really good succession rule.  Modern corporations are authoritarian.  The usual succession rule for them is "promote the pest qualified person from the ranks of senior management".  But authoritarians are jealous of their power.  So they often surround themselves with yes-men.  Yes-men are by their nature second rate.  And in public companies the ultimate arbiter is the board of directors operating on behalf of shareholders.  Oh no!  Liberal democracy.  So while some kind of "best man for the job" rule is possible in principle it often doesn't work that well in actuality.

The idea behind the liberal democratic form of government came out of a European movement called The Enlightenment.  Steven Pinker just published an excellent book called "Enlightenment Now" that goes into a lot of detail about what The Enlightenment was about and what the key ideas that drove the movement were.

The Enlightenment is associated with the liberal movement.  But it is important to understand that the liberal movement was a reaction to the status quo, the way things are, have always ben, and naturally should be.  The thing that drove the liberal movement and produced The Enlightenment was the simple idea that "there has to be a better way".  Liberalism and The Enlightenment started out as an "anti" movement.  It was only after they convinced themselves that certain ideas were superior to the old way of doing thins that they became "for" anything in particular.

Liberalism and The Enlightenment marched in lock step with science.  The old ways of  finding truth were revelation and authority.  God would reveal to us what was right and true.  And the down-to-earth version of God was an authority of one kind or another.  It might be someone with a lot of military or political power.  It might be an oracle speaking for God.  Or it might be a revered ancient.  Again, these sources of truth work better than some completely random process.  But people started asking themselves a key question:  "is there some method that works better for finding truth?"  Listening to some random dude was not the answer but was that the only alternative?

Eventually they found their answer not in a religious belief or a person but in a process.  We now call that process "scientific investigation".  Don't listen to some random dude.  But do listen to the dude who has scientifically investigated the question or issue.  Galileo looked through a telescope and saw amazing things.  And the cool thing about Galileo's approach was that anyone could look through a telescope and see the same thing.  You didn't have to depend on Galileo.  You could confirm it for yourself.  And this whole idea of confirmable observations leading to new ideas and theories that, in turn, could be buttressed by additional observations revolutionized everything.  And this approach quickly ran up an amazing track record.  New ideas that were produced by this process actually worked.

The Enlightenment took this approach to culture and government.  It was apparent that a good king was amazing.  But even good kings screwed up a lot and bad kings and messy successions made for a lot of bad, and often really bad.  So the first thing members of the enlightenment did was try to figure out how to fix the succession problem.  They failed. They also figured out that nobody gets it right all the time.  So maybe vesting all power in one person was a bad idea.  Experience with various forms of councils and ministries, shared authority and responsibility, often led to a better outcome.

So the idea of replacing monarchies with democracies came out of The Enlightenment and liberal thinking.  And it is important to understand that in this context "liberal" means no more than "not bound by past ways".  "Liberal" now means something else.  But that is because The Enlightenment is now a historical movement.  As such liberalism is now tied to a set of ideas that were developed then and are still around.  Similarly the concept of conservatism has also evolved.  It is no longer just "they way things are and have been".  It is now associated with ideas that may or may not represent how things are now.  Instead, they can be more clearly seen as "in opposition to the standard list of 'liberal' ideas".

This can be quickly be demonstrated by the way we talk about economic systems.  Economic systems are now often lumped into just one of two systems: "capitalist" or "socialist".  But historically speaking, at the dawn of The Enlightenment "the way things are and have always been" would be closer to socialism.  Then government had a close connection to markets and the economy.  And capitalism, the dependence on markets rather than government action, arose out of Enlightenment (i.e. liberal) thinking.  But capitalism is now associated with conservatives and socialism with liberals.  A complete role reversal has taken place.

There are a lot of problems with democracy.  One hopes for "the wisdom of the crowds" and one is often disappointed.  It often seems like an "enlightened despot", the modern equivalent of the Chinese "philosophe king" would be a definite improvement.  And at first blush that's right.  Liberal democracies are hamstrung by process and can't react quickly and effectively to problems.  In theory a benevolent despot could.

The succession problem usually takes a while to become apparent.  And we always assume our benevolent despot of choice will be in the "good king" mold.  Certainly the Italians in the '20s thought that's what they were getting when they put Mussolini in power.  And in fact he worked out well for the Italians for a while.  The same is true for Hitler in Germany in the '30s.  He got the economy out of the ditch and made most Germans feel better about themselves.  It was only after a while that the bad outweighed the good.

So there is always a strong undercurrent pulling us toward an authoritarian system here in the US and elsewhere.  The only time and place you find liberal democracy having true popular support is in places where they have been subject to terrible authoritarian governance for a prolonged period of time and then have, one way or another, found a path to democracy.  This usually doesn't last long as the democrats start screwing up to a greater or lesser extent and people start forgetting how bad the past really was.

It turns out that continuing to have a liberal democratic political system requires buy in from powerful people.  Our founding fathers strongly believed in liberal democracy.  This was especially true of George Washington.  He was very popular when he was elected President.  He saw clearly that he could easily have become King George the First of America.  But he carefully chose another course.  The congress squabbled incessantly, as democratic bodies do.  But he patiently waited them out and established a reputation for restraint and deference.

None other than Richard Nixon, one of my least favorite Presidents, continued that tradition.  When he was convinced he was shortly going to find his Impeachment by the House ratified by the Senate he resigned instead of trying to fight it.  At some level he believed in liberal democratic values.  Many powerful people, some famous and some not, have relinquished power in an orderly manner as required to maintain our form of government.  Our system critically depends on this kind of behavior.

Hitler was democratically elected in Germany but he chose to take a different route.  He had wide public support when he did.  The public had become fed up with democracy.  In that case the problem was not with democracy but with the draconian economic provisions imposed on Germany by Democratic Britain and Democratic France.  We have seen the same scenario play out in Russia.  The problems there were entirely home grown but they were also real.  Putin leveraged them to a position where Russia is no longer a democracy.  And there are dozens of examples of the Hitler/Putin model playing out.

Generally speaking, the response in the US is "it can't happen here".  But it can if people in power abandon liberal democratic values for those that advance their own personal interests.  In short, they behave like the Sinclair Communications people.

The bulwark against this is supposed to be the general public.  What's good for Sinclair Communications is bad for the general public.  But for this to work the general public must recognize what's going on and respond accordingly.  At this pint I am pessimistic about the chances of that happening.  People are supposed to have learned about liberal democracy in civics classes in school.  But civics classes are mostly a thing of the past.  And I am skeptical that even when they were a part of the curriculum  most students ever bought into the idea that this sort of things was important.  Instead I see most people as being pretty apathetic on the subject.  They are not much interesting in voting rights and access to the ballot, for instance.

Contrast that with how deeply they are invested in the fate of local sports teams.  There they pour money, interest, and enthusiasm in in almost limitless quantities.  ESPN is a much bigger cash cow than CNN because it has much higher ratings than CNN.

I am not optimistic that our current form of government will endure much longer.  But we have been through a period like this before.  We had the "Gilded Age".  This was the era of the millionaire robber-baron, people like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, etc.  That age spawned Teddy Roosevelt and the "progressive era" complete with trust busting and other efforts to reign in the power and wealth of the super-rich.  But history only gives us a template.  It does not force us to follow it.