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  1. Jan 2022
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    Michael Ignatieff on How To Stay True to Liberal Values in Politics
    3
    1. shywholood 19 Jan 2022
      One final thought, and this is based on my own experiences as a politician. One thing that I think is a problem is the erosion of legislatures, the erosion of parliaments, the ways in which the site of our democratic debates is simply emptied out. One of the most shocking things to me as a democratic politician elected twice is that nothing happens in the Canadian Parliament. It's an empty shell. Same thing in the Assemblée Nationale in Paris. That, it seems to me, is a systemic problem. And I'm not quite sure what the solution is. So, we've got a lot of democratic institutional reinvention that we need to try. I would start with trying to fix what's wrong with our legislatures.

      This seems to be a common refrain - "legislatures are broken", but I haven't really head proposed solutions other than things like the Reform Act (Canada) that are either unlikely to do anything substantial or, as in Australia, just lead to continual and often ridiculous bouts of instability. Mostly it's just a complaint about peoples' behaviour, which is not useful - behaviour in legislatures is responding to changes in society and technology. Nobody watches QP, people care less for decorum and don't revere institutions, if it's not Tweetable its not really going to gain traction, etc.

      Is this a problem that requires "fixing legislatures", which ostensibly do still pass laws, or is it that we need some kind of memetic approach to discourse and compromise that works in a digital world. Is that even possible?

      I'm not sure I believe the work done in committees in the 1960s was necessarily of a higher average quality, even if it was less boisterous.

    2. shywholood 19 Jan 2022
      I think what that teaches us is that institutions are not enough. There has to be comity. 

      Agree with that but again I don't think you get likes through "comity" (or at least you're disadvantaged versus thought that take a kind of rage-farming approach). Can you put a process in place that somehow advantages agreeable, good-natured people in a democratic system?

      Maybe that's the general problem - if technology allows political actors to disintermediate historic sense-making institutions like MSM and directly access people, you'll trend towards an equilibrium where the people that hold the power are those that are most effective at driving engagement, which means driving the greatest emotional response.

      That means that the solutions are what? Tech regulation that would necessarily trend towards either infringing free speech and/or destroying limited liability established through Section 230 which would certainly have a very chilling effect on a lot of things. Even finding a way to great rid of fake news isn't going to do anything to generate "comity" - you can still be a shithead without lying to do it.

      So you've got:

      • Somehow make being nice more popular with people (unlikely)
      • Enforce strict restrictions on online free speech (dystopian)
      • Make democratic institutions less reflexive, and as a result less driven by emotions of the day (complicated, but...maybe?) -- what does that look like?
    3. shywholood 19 Jan 2022
      Where the crisis is obviously focused is in the leading democracy of them all, which is the United States. I was just talking last night to a friend who said, “You know, the United States is actually in a state of civil war.” That is, it's not declared; it doesn't require fighting. But it is a state in which people do not accept the legitimacy of basic decisions. Republicans don't accept the 2020 election. Imminently, if the Supreme Court rolls back Roe v. Wade, millions of Americans simply won't accept that decision. This is when you have a democratic crisis: when closure can't occur, when people don't accept the results of deliberation.

      Another noteworthy point here is the powers accorded to, and increasingly exercised by states (and munis, as extensions of states) - very strong and used in widely divergent ways. Think law enforcement, minimum wage, voting / recall / referendum. California would seem to be very much a different country than NY or Dakota.

      I've often thought that potentially the political structure and separation of powers in the US is part of the problem - maybe a variant on Popper's issues with proportional representation - in that at some point you need to concentrate enough power in structures that force groups to build broad tents through compromise and experimentation, and which allow the public to enforce accountability. It's a two-party system, sure - but "party" is a weak proposition - a double-majority in Congress + the White House, as we've seen != smooth passage of substantial legislation. Even if it did federally, you have a situation where states can substantially diverge from federal direction.

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