The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - November 04, 2025


PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Democracy has failed

Topics
median voter theory
Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Peter Hitchens David Cameron Duncan Black Socrates Clinton Macron Blair
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1287 The Age of Liberals Is Over

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

144.43

Word count

1,820

Sentence count

120

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Brokonomics.
00:00:29.640 Now, in this episode, I'll tell you what, I've been thinking about democracy and how
00:00:34.480 utterly incompatible it is with actually ever getting anything done and perhaps why
00:00:40.460 it's a root cause of many of our problems.
00:00:43.340 You know, Socrates warned that a democracy is like letting the passengers of a ship choose
00:00:49.880 the captain.
00:00:51.060 It is only going to work if the passengers are sailors themselves, if the passengers 0.81
00:00:55.500 are experts in the thing that is being done, the ship of state, then it could work.
00:01:01.140 But otherwise, it's pretty much doomed to failure.
00:01:04.000 Now, of course, it did fail.
00:01:07.860 The ancient Athens democracy did fail pretty hard.
00:01:11.440 It ended up being absorbed into another power.
00:01:16.120 And indeed, Socrates himself was suicided.
00:01:19.820 So I think he may have been on to something.
00:01:23.900 I mean, consider the difference with something like feudalism.
00:01:28.300 The aligned incentives in it, not divided ones.
00:01:33.260 So, you know, a feudal lord, his wealth is derived from his population, his productive tenants,
00:01:39.640 you know, his farms, his craft and his trade.
00:01:41.600 And dead peasants or unproductive peasants are bad for him over the long term.
00:01:48.640 And this created a bit of a feedback loop where, you know, exploitation was limited by
00:01:53.740 self-interest.
00:01:54.480 Yes, you could grind the peasants down into nothing.
00:01:58.040 Yes, you could get to the point where, you know, young peasants can't afford homes. 0.89
00:02:02.700 But, you know, ultimately, long term stewardship mattered more than short term, you know, vote
00:02:08.920 chasing.
00:02:10.240 And therefore, the lord was always incentivized to ensure that his tenants and his serfs and
00:02:14.920 whatever and his peasants were actually as wealthy as he could make them.
00:02:21.560 Because that meant that over time that he would become more wealthy and he would pass on something
00:02:25.900 that's stable and strong and his family line would continue.
00:02:29.160 So, feudalism incentivized, you know, competence and continuity, whereas democracies incentivize
00:02:36.520 virtue signaling and redistribution.
00:02:41.320 And in feudal systems, there was this clear chain of loyalty from serfs to knights to lords
00:02:49.400 to kings.
00:02:50.280 And everyone knew their place and their obligation.
00:02:52.260 And that is a bit distressing to some modern minds who, you know, want to believe that
00:02:57.820 anybody can do anything.
00:02:59.760 Not really true.
00:03:00.640 They can't.
00:03:01.860 But every successful system on earth operates this way with a clear chain of command.
00:03:10.060 And I want to go through some of that because, you know, the more I think about it, the more
00:03:14.160 I think, well, of course, we're not going to succeed because we're a democracy.
00:03:18.660 You know, democracies require conflict to function.
00:03:23.300 There must always be at least two factions.
00:03:25.760 In fact, there's almost always two clear factions.
00:03:29.320 And these exist in perpetual opposition to each other.
00:03:33.140 And it thrives on division.
00:03:35.420 So, all democracy begins with a split of near 50-50 baked in.
00:03:43.620 Division is, I mean, democracy basically demands division.
00:03:47.080 And democracy builds in that division.
00:03:50.380 Whereas feudalism, you know, it seeks order and consistency and longevity.
00:03:56.900 And if you think about the feudalist system, I mean, there was, I mean, the selection pressure
00:04:00.920 was very real.
00:04:02.380 You know, you can rise to your position through, you know, war or merit.
00:04:07.020 But the cost of failure was very real.
00:04:12.920 But in democracy, those competency filters are being removed.
00:04:18.280 Popularity replaces ability.
00:04:20.480 And the median voter theory ensures that, you know, leaders, they cater as a function of what
00:04:28.640 democracy is to mediocrity.
00:04:31.420 So, in a democracy, you start off pre-split.
00:04:38.000 You start off with the division baked in.
00:04:41.080 You know, half the population will be whatever that society considers to be conservative.
00:04:45.080 And half will be whatever that society considers to be some form of progressive.
00:04:49.700 And so you've got this sort of permanent cold civil war going on in the same polity.
00:04:54.760 And it doesn't resolve itself.
00:04:57.080 In fact, it institutionalizes it.
00:05:00.340 Democracies function by managing conflict, not avoiding it, which is the complete opposite
00:05:06.580 of what they outwardly claim they're trying to do.
00:05:11.520 So feudalism, you know, and I'm sure there were some injustices in it, it was stable and
00:05:15.540 it was long term and the incentives were aligned throughout.
00:05:19.280 Whereas democracy is unstable, short termist, and it is necessarily conflict driven.
00:05:27.360 I mentioned the median voter theories.
00:05:29.360 It's worth touching on that.
00:05:30.580 So this is a theory put out by Duncan Black in, I believe, 1948.
00:05:36.120 And it basically says in the majority rule democracies, parties and candidates will always
00:05:43.560 position their policies towards the preference of the median voter.
00:05:47.640 The person who views sit exactly at the center of the political spectrum.
00:05:54.600 Indeed, one of the sort of clearinghouses for elites today is the PPE course at Oxford,
00:06:01.940 Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
00:06:04.920 And the first lecture in economics you get on that course, Economics 101, first lecture,
00:06:12.880 they sit you down and they give you this premise.
00:06:16.880 And the premise is there's a two mile long beach and there are two ice cream sellers that
00:06:23.060 start at the opposite end of each bit.
00:06:26.460 So they're two miles apart and they can reposition themselves to take advantage of more customers.
00:06:35.840 Where do they end up?
00:06:37.000 And the answer in this is the two ice cream sellers end up right next to each other in the dead center.
00:06:46.120 And they have to end up there because to do otherwise is forfeiting sales.
00:06:51.700 I mean, yes, OK, if they if they both remain at the two end extremities, they get the equal amount of business.
00:06:57.840 But as soon as one of them moves in a little bit, they now get more business because they're closer to more people.
00:07:04.360 And so the incentive is always to move in.
00:07:06.060 And then once one of them starts moving in, the other one starts moving in.
00:07:09.200 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.
00:07:14.120 So the only other stable equilibrium is they're both right next to each other in the middle.
00:07:19.460 And this is taught in, like I say, elite finishing school PPE course at Oxford.
00:07:24.780 David Cameron did it as, for example, a whole bunch of rulers that we've had have done the PPE course.
00:07:31.780 It's telling you from the outset this median voter theory that basically you have to position
00:07:37.000 both sides of the political spectrum exactly next to each other and just give the illusion of being something other than 0.99
00:07:46.240 basically two cheeks of the same arse. 1.00
00:07:50.580 So you get into this problem of the tyranny of the middle. 0.98
00:07:54.980 Policy innovation dies because anything too radical alienates the middle ground because that is the voter.
00:08:01.820 The exact middle voter is the guy that every political party is going for.
00:08:06.200 And as a result, any big problem requiring any sort of bold reform, be it housing, monetary, immigration,
00:08:17.020 these things can never be solved under a democracy.
00:08:20.380 They can only ever be managed cosmetically.
00:08:23.940 And politicians, they find they need to speak in this sort of safe, vacuous platitudes
00:08:28.320 and talk about things like fairness and security and blah, blah, blah, hardworking families and all that kind of stuff.
00:08:34.720 So what you get into is endless incrementalism and nothing ever truly changes.
00:08:41.080 Basically, candidates who hold strong convictions will always lose.
00:08:45.540 But those who master rhetorical ambiguity, people who manage to say everything and nothing, they win.
00:08:54.940 And so politics ends up becoming feminized. 0.92
00:08:58.200 It becomes about tone and empathy and optics, you know, rather than any semblance of truth or, God forbid, logic.
00:09:07.680 You know, we're not talking about you or I here.
00:09:09.820 We're talking about the median voter.
00:09:11.500 And the median voter, they don't want to be challenged.
00:09:13.740 They want to be flattered.
00:09:14.780 And so necessarily under a democracy, political discourse becomes infantilized.
00:09:23.640 And, you know, you can see this strongly with a Blairization effect, if that's a word.
00:09:30.100 Every successful centrist eventually drags the, you know, the left and the right into his orbit.
00:09:37.720 You saw that with, you know, Clinton and Blair and Macron.
00:09:41.140 They all kind of stake out their center position and everyone gets sort of dragged towards it.
00:09:46.920 And then even opposition parties, you know, they start to feel irrelevant.
00:09:50.700 So they start copying the language, hence permanent managerial centralism.
00:09:56.000 And the range of acceptable opinion narrows down to what won't frighten the average suburban homeowner,
00:10:01.940 because that's where you've got to be.
00:10:03.320 Incidentally, this is, I think, you know, the core function of something like the Lotus Eaters,
00:10:08.960 because, you know, we kind of, what our job is, is to go and move the median voter
00:10:16.520 to get so many people thinking a thing, such as remigration is inevitable or whatever it is,
00:10:23.300 that the median voter starts to shift a bit.
00:10:26.080 And therefore, the political center ground has to shift with it.
00:10:28.500 And then the parties are going to move sort of either side of that.
00:10:31.840 But you can't do that from within politics.
00:10:36.260 One of the main reasons why I don't feel bad at all about having been deselected by reform,
00:10:40.520 because actually, I think I can achieve more politically at the Lotus Eaters than I ever could as a reform MP.
00:10:49.220 And so I'm entirely happy with it.
00:10:51.780 You know, and that's an interesting dynamic.
00:10:53.840 And maybe the rise of online, you know, media, the online right, maybe that's a new factor
00:11:02.520 and something that can add value going forward.
00:11:05.720 But, you know, let's just look at where we have been.
00:11:08.840 With the Uniparty, you always get red and blue packaging for basically the same product.
00:11:15.040 I mean, going back to the theory, the median voter, the median voter theory, the median voter is typically older
00:11:22.580 because they're the median voter and older voters vote more.
00:11:26.900 So they're older.
00:11:28.400 They're risk averse and they're asset rich.
00:11:32.240 I mean, you could see this in somebody like Peter Hitchens at the last election.
00:11:35.400 When the Tories had betrayed everything that Peter Hitchens believed in, he had wrote books explaining why the Tory party must be destroyed.
00:11:45.260 And the moment it looked like the Tory party would actually be destroyed, he suddenly flipped and started begging everybody to vote conservative.
00:11:53.760 You know, why did he do that?
00:11:54.780 Well, because he's older now and he's risk averse and he's asset rich.
00:11:59.460 And he doesn't want to get into the situation where things could change radically because that doesn't appeal to him.
00:12:04.060 He has become the median voter.
00:12:06.700 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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00:12:34.060 Thank you.