PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Democracy has failed
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
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Summary
In this episode, I talk about why a democracy is doomed to failure, and why a feudal system like feudalism is much more likely to succeed than a democracy. I discuss the difference between feudalism and democracy, and the benefits and drawbacks of both systems.
Transcript
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Now, in this episode, I'll tell you what, I've been thinking about democracy and how
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utterly incompatible it is with actually ever getting anything done and perhaps why
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You know, Socrates warned that a democracy is like letting the passengers of a ship choose
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It is only going to work if the passengers are sailors themselves, if the passengers
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are experts in the thing that is being done, the ship of state, then it could work.
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But otherwise, it's pretty much doomed to failure.
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The ancient Athens democracy did fail pretty hard.
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I mean, consider the difference with something like feudalism.
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The aligned incentives in it, not divided ones.
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So, you know, a feudal lord, his wealth is derived from his population, his productive tenants,
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And dead peasants or unproductive peasants are bad for him over the long term.
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And this created a bit of a feedback loop where, you know, exploitation was limited by
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Yes, you could grind the peasants down into nothing.
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Yes, you could get to the point where, you know, young peasants can't afford homes.
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But, you know, ultimately, long term stewardship mattered more than short term, you know, vote
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And therefore, the lord was always incentivized to ensure that his tenants and his serfs and
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whatever and his peasants were actually as wealthy as he could make them.
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Because that meant that over time that he would become more wealthy and he would pass on something
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that's stable and strong and his family line would continue.
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So, feudalism incentivized, you know, competence and continuity, whereas democracies incentivize
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And in feudal systems, there was this clear chain of loyalty from serfs to knights to lords
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And everyone knew their place and their obligation.
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And that is a bit distressing to some modern minds who, you know, want to believe that
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But every successful system on earth operates this way with a clear chain of command.
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And I want to go through some of that because, you know, the more I think about it, the more
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I think, well, of course, we're not going to succeed because we're a democracy.
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You know, democracies require conflict to function.
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In fact, there's almost always two clear factions.
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And these exist in perpetual opposition to each other.
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So, all democracy begins with a split of near 50-50 baked in.
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Division is, I mean, democracy basically demands division.
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Whereas feudalism, you know, it seeks order and consistency and longevity.
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And if you think about the feudalist system, I mean, there was, I mean, the selection pressure
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You know, you can rise to your position through, you know, war or merit.
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But in democracy, those competency filters are being removed.
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And the median voter theory ensures that, you know, leaders, they cater as a function of what
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You know, half the population will be whatever that society considers to be conservative.
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And half will be whatever that society considers to be some form of progressive.
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And so you've got this sort of permanent cold civil war going on in the same polity.
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Democracies function by managing conflict, not avoiding it, which is the complete opposite
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of what they outwardly claim they're trying to do.
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So feudalism, you know, and I'm sure there were some injustices in it, it was stable and
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it was long term and the incentives were aligned throughout.
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Whereas democracy is unstable, short termist, and it is necessarily conflict driven.
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So this is a theory put out by Duncan Black in, I believe, 1948.
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And it basically says in the majority rule democracies, parties and candidates will always
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position their policies towards the preference of the median voter.
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The person who views sit exactly at the center of the political spectrum.
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Indeed, one of the sort of clearinghouses for elites today is the PPE course at Oxford,
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And the first lecture in economics you get on that course, Economics 101, first lecture,
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they sit you down and they give you this premise.
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And the premise is there's a two mile long beach and there are two ice cream sellers that
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So they're two miles apart and they can reposition themselves to take advantage of more customers.
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And the answer in this is the two ice cream sellers end up right next to each other in the dead center.
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And they have to end up there because to do otherwise is forfeiting sales.
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I mean, yes, OK, if they if they both remain at the two end extremities, they get the equal amount of business.
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But as soon as one of them moves in a little bit, they now get more business because they're closer to more people.
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And then once one of them starts moving in, the other one starts moving in.
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And the only stable outcome is either they're both at the end, but then one of them is always going to cheat and move in.
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So the only other stable equilibrium is they're both right next to each other in the middle.
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And this is taught in, like I say, elite finishing school PPE course at Oxford.
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David Cameron did it as, for example, a whole bunch of rulers that we've had have done the PPE course.
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It's telling you from the outset this median voter theory that basically you have to position
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both sides of the political spectrum exactly next to each other and just give the illusion of being something other than
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So you get into this problem of the tyranny of the middle.
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Policy innovation dies because anything too radical alienates the middle ground because that is the voter.
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The exact middle voter is the guy that every political party is going for.
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And as a result, any big problem requiring any sort of bold reform, be it housing, monetary, immigration,
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these things can never be solved under a democracy.
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And politicians, they find they need to speak in this sort of safe, vacuous platitudes
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and talk about things like fairness and security and blah, blah, blah, hardworking families and all that kind of stuff.
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So what you get into is endless incrementalism and nothing ever truly changes.
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Basically, candidates who hold strong convictions will always lose.
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But those who master rhetorical ambiguity, people who manage to say everything and nothing, they win.
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It becomes about tone and empathy and optics, you know, rather than any semblance of truth or, God forbid, logic.
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You know, we're not talking about you or I here.
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And the median voter, they don't want to be challenged.
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And so necessarily under a democracy, political discourse becomes infantilized.
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And, you know, you can see this strongly with a Blairization effect, if that's a word.
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Every successful centrist eventually drags the, you know, the left and the right into his orbit.
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You saw that with, you know, Clinton and Blair and Macron.
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They all kind of stake out their center position and everyone gets sort of dragged towards it.
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And then even opposition parties, you know, they start to feel irrelevant.
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So they start copying the language, hence permanent managerial centralism.
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And the range of acceptable opinion narrows down to what won't frighten the average suburban homeowner,
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Incidentally, this is, I think, you know, the core function of something like the Lotus Eaters,
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because, you know, we kind of, what our job is, is to go and move the median voter
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to get so many people thinking a thing, such as remigration is inevitable or whatever it is,
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And therefore, the political center ground has to shift with it.
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And then the parties are going to move sort of either side of that.
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One of the main reasons why I don't feel bad at all about having been deselected by reform,
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because actually, I think I can achieve more politically at the Lotus Eaters than I ever could as a reform MP.
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And maybe the rise of online, you know, media, the online right, maybe that's a new factor
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and something that can add value going forward.
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But, you know, let's just look at where we have been.
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With the Uniparty, you always get red and blue packaging for basically the same product.
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I mean, going back to the theory, the median voter, the median voter theory, the median voter is typically older
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because they're the median voter and older voters vote more.
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I mean, you could see this in somebody like Peter Hitchens at the last election.
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When the Tories had betrayed everything that Peter Hitchens believed in, he had wrote books explaining why the Tory party must be destroyed.
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And the moment it looked like the Tory party would actually be destroyed, he suddenly flipped and started begging everybody to vote conservative.
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Well, because he's older now and he's risk averse and he's asset rich.
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And he doesn't want to get into the situation where things could change radically because that doesn't appeal to him.
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And so even somebody who writes books about how the Tory party must be destroyed, couldn't bear to actually let it happen because that was too radical for, you know, a median guy like him.
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