Easy Come, Easy Go

Coming soon to a theatre of war near you

 “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair

“a new birth of freedom and… government of the people, by the people, for the people” Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address

What’s Easy

• Nothing’s easier than appealing to self-interest. So that will be pervasive in social life and in politics.
• Nothing’s easier than accepting as truth opinions that support one’s interests and biases, one’s passions and sense of self — even when these become unhealthy obsessions. So that will be pervasive in social life and in politics.

What Comes of It

• Historically, the first governments we hear of — the first , that is, to keep written records of their victories, reigns and actions — are top-down governments, generally run by elites composed of warriors, landowners or priests.
• Of the elite, by the elite, for the elite.
• At certain rare historical moments, this top-down model of government — which mostly goes unquestioned and unchallenged — gives way to a more bottom-up approach.
• Democracies are commoner in the West than in the East, although the young democracies of the East — Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and the Hong Kong that was — are center stage in the Pacific theatre.
• Xi’s China even claims that such ideas as democracy, fairly contested elections and human rights are cultural peculiarities of the West, imposed by ex-colonialists and not valid in China’s sphere of influence or the Global South.
• No wonder he must stamp it out in Hong Kong and Taiwan, for they give the lie to his claim.
• The greater prevalence of more bottom-up forms of government in the West may be a matter of historical accidents, with Hellenic political culture exported by Alexander’s conquests and Roman political culture by its conquests, begun by the republic but extended by its emperors.

The Travails of Democracy

• This more bottom-up approach is never all-inclusive.
• It typically extends as far as those whose active support, military or political, is necessary to overturn the old order.
• It’s usually aristocratic, when driven by warlords or military men, oligarchic when driven by landowners or merchants. Athens was unusual in being a naval power dependent on the willing service of rowers, and thus a broader swathe of society, America in being a nation of independent farmers living in self-governing colonies.
• Discontent with the way things are (the search for justice, trouble-making, court conspiracies or rabble-rousing , depending on who’s doing it, and who’s viewing it) usually arises in the next circle of insiders just beyond the inmost circle where real power lies.

Power lives in concentric circles

• So sedition by persuasion has been the weapon of disrupters since human history began.
• In the most top-down governments, the ruling circle is narrow, so seditious persuasion works as a conspiracy among the powerful few within the second circle of power.
• In the more bottom-up governments, the ruling circle is broader and more dependent on the favor (mostly as expressed via elections) of the broadest class of true citizens, those with the minimal unit of sovereign power, the vote.
• Seditious persuasion works in democracies as an appeal to voters, those within that outermost circle of power, the voters.
• Seditious persuasion is impatient with facts and evidence, with legal procedures and thoughtful arguments.
• It appeals to interests and biases, to grievances and prejudices.
• It works by slogans and insults, by baseless assertions and slander, by rumors and conspiracies theories.
• The modern medium of rumor and gossip, social media, are the floodtide river carrying all before it.
• The more polarized the community becomes, the more sidelined become the procedural processes for determining truth.
• This includes trial verdicts, judicial verdicts, technical expertise, the scientific method, and standards of credibility in both journalism and academic research.
• This partisan disregard for the slow and accountable procedural practices agreed to by all parties give way to
• This includes verdicts of the higher courts, the routine compromises between parties and interests that signal normal politics, and even elections results themselves, procedural processes for determining the common good, that is, the best achievable compromise between the many interests that make up the political community.
• Such procedural processes are what make a constitution, and what make it different from rule with impunity, different from rule without law or limit.Their weakness is that they take time to sift through charge and countercharge, claim and counterclaim.
• Cheapshots and slogans work faster — faster than thought — as do visceral appeals, appeals to bias, prejudice and self-regard, as do playing upon grievances real or imagined, and conspiracy theories which dance above all evidence, because evidence is part of the conspiracy, too.
• The seditious claim more and more reverts to the claim that no one is to be believed but the maximal leader, the one man who can lead the people out of their misery, or so he and his partisans proclaim, with ever less need for procedural processes, evidence or competent argument.
• This man is the demagogue, and he has been with us for as long as democracy has.
• Athens and Rome were plagued by demagogues, and at times succumbed to them, leading to such disasters as the ill-fated Athenian invasion of Syracuse or the destruction of an entire Roman army by Hannibal at Cannae.
• The same factors are in play now as were in play then.
• Some things never change.
• Because their causes don’t.
• It can always happen here, it can always happen now.

Holland’s Geert Wilders, Hungary’s Viktor Orba, France’s Marine Le Pen, waiting in the wings or already inside gumming up the center