Some observations about democracy and the state

This is clipped from the middle of a longish post by E. Glen Wyle, The Political Philosophy of RadicalxChange. It may be a bit obscure without more context (e.g. AP = Actual Polity, NP = Natural Polity – but what do those mean?).

The experience of the twentieth century with nation-states, and the hope that democratic but exclusionary forms within them will lead through a process of bureaucratization and democratic dialog towards justice, is an unhappy one. Zionists who escaped (originally democratically-elected) Nazi terror hoped to establish a Jewish democratic state. That state excluded from political influence most of the Arab people whose ancestral lands it occupies. Every year of the boisterous democratic debate in Israel, more vital than anywhere in the world, seems to be leading Hatikvah bat shnot ‘alpayim (the hope of two thousand years) ever more in the direction of oppressive and exclusionary ethno-nationalism. This is clearly not a result of insufficiently active democracy or an incompetent civil service; quite the reverse. It seems quite clearly a result of an exclusionary construction of the polity. And with increasing returns phenomena that cross the borders of APs, we have new levels of exclusion to contemplate. Given the tremendous effects each nation has on others—e.g. through global warming and the War on Drugs—any policy focused on empowering current nation-states simply deepens the problem of APs dominating NPs whose members they exclude.

Still, we needn’t abandon the concept of democracy, just its tight connection to the existing nation-state framework. In contrast, to majoritarian democratic nation-states that have perfected the politics of exclusion, a specific set of nations and regions have made progress in developing democratic and civil service cultures of the “progressive” sort that proactively seek inclusion and alignment of actual polities with natural polities. Despite their differing individual political histories, Singapore, Scandinavia, and Taiwan were all deeply influenced by the Liberal Radical tradition and by ideas about decentralization of power. Henry George and other Radical political economists were central to the cannon shaping thought in these locations in a way they were not to the same extent anywhere else in the world.

These countries and regions have exceptionally efficient bureaucracies, use market mechanisms of an enlightened community-oriented variety extensively, have (except for Singapore) among the best democratic cultures and most vital civil societies in the world, etc. This suggests that the same types of institutions that effectively decentralize power may also be conducive to, in other less clear and formal ways, improving democracy and governance. Importantly, we will see below in the final section on imagining alternatives, mechanisms for governance by decentralization need not be limited in their function to geographies that align with nation-state boundaries. Instead, these mechanisms can be deployed for use across the public sphere created by NPs.

Successful exercises of state power have co-evolved tightly with detailed governance structures that help align actual polities and natural polities through checks and balances. While such systems are described by extreme capitalists as “statist” or “central planning” they are not statist in the sense here: they involve simple, transparent, widely understood legal or quasi-legal regimes that decentralize power, in a way that is quite different from and much more effective than simple capitalism. They constrain the discretionary power of the democratic state, as well as that of private wealth. There are also international equivalents, such as restraints on nuclear weapons, rules of war and trade barriers, that try to deal with NP>AP and NPAP cases; while these have been relatively ineffective, there are increasing experiments with creative new means of international cooperation, such as blockchains and open source software collaborations. Such systems are precisely what we need to build.

The important point, coming out of the Georgist tradition, is that social institutions need to be worthy of the trust we place in them to deliver good governance while protecting freedom roughly in parallel to our entrusting them with powers based on that trust. We should not entrust power to social institutions that have proven themselves unworthy of our trust, or where no work has been done to assess their trustworthiness from the point of view of governance and results. Trust can be earned based on clear arguments about why power is appropriately distributed, by good empirical performance on average, by clearly visible experiments, and so forth.

Who they are and what these folks are up to:

The RadicalxChange (RxC) movement is a community of artists, researchers, entrepreneurs and activists working to imagine, design, experiment with, and execute political changes based on radically innovative political economies and social technologies that are truer to the richness of our diversely shared lives. The diversity that the movement aspires to, and has begun to instantiate, requires it to frequently code switch, expressing ideas in the idioms and values of a range of social groups and holding itself accountable to those value systems. For all its attitudinal differences from analytical political philosophy at a broad level, this is one of the many languages it must speak to be effective.

And why: Increasing returns:

The possibility that many people, working together, can achieve more than the total of what each could achieve separately is what economists call the phenomenon of “increasing returns”. The greatest chance of enabling broad human flourishing lies in understanding increasing returns and structuring markets and governance to unleash their shared value to humanity while avoiding the ills they can provoke—monopoly, opportunity hoarding, majoritarian exclusions, tragedies of the commons. A central goal of any effort to build a new political philosophy or fresh paradigm for political economy should be to lay out approaches to markets, governance, and community that capture the benefits of increasing returns without falling into the traps that increasing returns phenomena can generate.

A historical name for this philosophy is Liberal Radicalism, though the RxC neologism may be more appropriate given the misunderstandings that crop up around the word “Liberal” in the US. Liberal Radicalism was a philosophical tradition that took “radical” critiques of liberalism’s limits seriously and sought to design a liberalism that can work in a fundamentally diverse, but social, world. It attempted, wherever possible, to combine the flexibility and dynamism of capitalism with democracy’s public spirit and inclination towards the common good. Classical liberalism was instantiated by capitalism and the one-person-one-vote concept, but no equally simple, formal institutional ideas have as of yet instantiated Liberal Radicalism. A core goal of the RxC movement is to develop such institutions.

This manifesto begins by laying out why increasing returns are so important and explains how classical liberalism, or reigning paradigms of capitalism, statism, nationalism, and technocracy, fail to deliver on the value for human well-being of increasing returns, while also generating a range of problems – from failures of freedom to poor economic outcomes—from their mode of handling the increasing returns problem. Finally, it ends with an attempt to articulate a set of principles to guide the alternative to institutional design that we advocate.