Social Matter

Yesterday, the Umlaut published another article (this time by Eli Dourado, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University) [1] about neoreaction’s supposed inability to understand the positive aspects of democracy. Let’s start with praise: unlike the majority of articles written about neoreaction, he links to a few relevant articles and spends a minority of the piece discussing them.

Dourado spends most of the piece explaining why a journal article [2] refutes Mencius Moldbug, the authors at More Right, and Nick Land. Dourado should not have wasted his time attacking neoreactionaries, who are mostly presenting cases developed by other authors. Moldbug himself builds his case against democracy on a pile of pre-20th century sources and a few more recent ones that are uncomfortable to name.

For whatever reason, the Umlaut was happy to mention Hans-Hermann Hoppe in two of the previous articles about neoreaction, but did not see fit to mention him in this one, instead namedropping Bryan Caplan, who is affiliated with the author.

This professorial split is critical, and will become more relevant later on in this article. The intellectual approach of Caplan, which makes room for empiricism as it relates to society, and that of Hoppe, which states that empiricism is not applicable to society, is the breach that can’t be repaired. I don’t share the Caplan/Dourado worldview, and I’m comfortable asserting that almost no one who considers themselves even neoreactionary-sympathetic really shares that view, either.

Within neoreaction, you will find near universal sympathy for Hoppe’s views outside his deontological views on ethics in neoreaction, and near-universal contempt for Caplan’s views on many topics.

As should become clear, this split is not a distinguishing characteristic of neoreaction, but is independent of that fresh phenomena.

This is the central point that Dourado attempts to establish:

 [Mulligan, Gil, and Sala-i-Martin] find, controlling for economic and demographic variables, that democracies have similar government consumption, education spending, social spending, corporate tax rates, and payroll tax policies as nondemocracies. 

The authors conclude this based on a slice of time, 1960-2000, during which all of the world powers were assembled in favor of democracy, and engaged in a program of worldwide democracy promotion, punishing states that did not hold elections and rewarding those that did. This should not be a controversial observation.

The 20th century world democracy promotion project is a central theme of Unqualified Reservations. It does not make sense to draw a universal conclusion of this nature from a limited sample size.

These results eviscerate much armchair political economic theorizing, of both the academic and Internet varieties. Models that rely on formal allocations of power through voting (i.e., most of the academic literature) are contradicted, because they all assume that the distribution of votes alters the distribution of power. So are the implicit models used by the neoreaction—if democracy creates a giant political commons, then why do nondemocracies have basically the same economic and social policies that democracies do?

‘Eviscerate’ is a lovely verb, but in this case, it’s misused. Given the 2004 publication date of the study, current events blunt the intended rhetorical impact that Dourado attempts to make with it: when the American president himself confesses that the leading democratic government “tortured some folks,” when the world’s leading democratic states are busy enforcing pervasive censorship laws, dealing with problems related to maintaining an enormous standing army, police misconduct, and prosecuting various people for failing to observe ‘marriages’ that their religion finds to be abhorrent, it is just mistimed in a way that Thomas Friedman writing about his ‘Golden Arches theory’ of international conflict in the early 2000s and 1990s was not poorly timed.

Given that academics live in a sort of time warp, insulated as they are, it’s easy to understand his misstep in this case, when few, even the most fervent advocates of democracy, believe that democracy and liberalism are compatible. The advocates of both democracy and liberalism find themselves engaging in a rearguard action to ‘restore constitutional freedom’ from both the left and the right, exemplified by the writing of journalists like Glenn Greenwald and of pop-up nonpartisan activist groups like ‘Restore the Fourth.’

‘Democracy promotion’ has come to be synonymous with violent political destabilization. This was not the case in 2004, at least in the minds of democracy advocates. It is the case, now.

The conflict of ‘Euromaidan’ was portrayed as democracy in action, even though it resulted in enormous destruction and bloodshed. The result of that democratic revolution has been bloody and illiberal, much as the other contemporary (and historical) democratic revolutions have been. The short postwar period in which it was rhetorically feasible to conflate democracy with liberalism has expired.

It is not a good time to purport that (nominally) democratic governments are better on liberal grounds after your government is exposed to be operating a global wiretapping operation that makes the Stasi look like the local peeping Tom. That does not itself undermine Dourado’s presented argument, but the juxtaposition is hilarious.

Dourado is unwilling to defend democracy with as much fervor as the typical State Department employee, instead selecting a weak defense that he himself does not appear to be fully comfortable with, as he’s intimate with the existing literature on topics like public choice theory.

To be progressive-libertarian defender of democracy today, you must be both conservative and out of step with the latest political developments.

The basic problem that neoreactionaries are going to tend to have with this sort of rhetoric is not actually unique to neoreaction or even to the right wing. It is not original to me, either.

The problem is that there are no controlled experiments in social science. It’s wrong to state that a given political point about democracy is proven by this uncontrolled observation based on an array of subjective definitions and selective measures assembled in what amounts to a black box put together by a trio of authors and their assistants.

In this case, they’re misusing empiricism, at least from our perspective, so this rhetorical tack is unlikely to be effective. It may persuade people who believe that one can ignore the need for controls in experiments. The reason why the material sciences use controls is because, even with controlled experimentation, it’s easy to assign the wrong causes to certain effects, because the data collected is necessarily polluted. No matter how many times that social scientists argue around this point, it does not lose its impact, especially as the obvious, widely-acknowledged errors of social science mount.

This is not a unique case from me, nor is it a unique perspective to neoreaction. It is more common on the right than on the left, and not universally observed. I would not be surprised if other contributors to Social Matter disagree with me about the possibility of practicing empirical science on society.

I imagine that this sort of response is both predictable and irritating to Dourado and to others, because it represents a break that is not bridgeable, a mismatch in intellectual frameworks that cannot be reconciled. It would be one thing to quibble about the data in the study (which I cannot verify independently), and another thing entirely to have a basic disagreement about the limitations of the scientific method in analyzing human behavior that side-steps the possible debate on the details.

We can poke more holes in the cited case by pointing out that, in that the authors’ argument against taxation completely ignores monetary depreciation, which is a historically common method of increasing effective taxation that isn’t unique to democracy. Even ardent democrats are pleased to admit that depreciation of currency is a form of indirect taxation. Yet, the authors gloss over this, perhaps because even with official inflation measures, it does not fit into an easily comparable dataset like fractions of GDP do.

Another issue is that we cannot access the data or see the work that has been purported to have been done. We must rely upon blind faith in the statements of these academics. This might be easy for an academic to do, but it’s certainly not easy for neoreactionaries to do, given the widespread distrust within this community towards academics.

We’re not willing to just take their words for it, no matter how good their reputation reportedly is. We also must take for granted that all the various data sets were responsibly collected and are accurate. Because we have neither the time nor resources nor access to verify their work and the work of their diverse source institutions, it must have limited persuasive impact in our minds (unless we are feeling particularly trusting).

We must also ask how the various categories of spending were selected, because unless we take the words of the authors for gospel, we cannot use them reliably. Further, one wonders how one can separate categories of ‘spending’ so clearly from categories of ‘investment’ with such specificity in areas like health and education.

I spend most of my education budget on books and most of my health ‘spending’ is not measurable accurately in monetary terms. It does not likely show up in the data as such, and when I buy a book in cash, the purchase must be fudged, especially if the business’ records are not perfect, which they rarely are, because small business accounting standards are not flawless.

I go into this detail to illustrate why empiricism is not a workable approach towards society, because of the necessary reliance on fuzzy models that nonetheless purport to precision. In the Real World (TM) of Serious Business outside the academy, corporations of all types have enormous difficulty measuring activity within controlled environments of all sorts. It is not even possible to get 100% reliant models of server traffic or of grocery store inventory, yet econometricians and their apologists would have us believe that they can be trusted to achieve greater precision than is possible at smaller scale with greater environmental control and more objectively definable variables.

The joke is that the scientific method is not a scientific approach outside the scientific laboratory. All that you get applying these methods to statistical models is an exquisite analysis of an immensely complicated textual-statistical diorama of the real world. Even if the math used is flawless, the plugged-in variables are distinct from what they’re intended to represent, in the same way that a drawing of a horse is not the horse itself.

The cited article itself is far less confident in its conclusions than Dourado seems to be. The conclusions speak of tendencies. It is also less willing to speak of strong equivalency. It is especially difficult because it relies upon subjective definitions of categories.

Pol Pot ran a democratic party: is he suddenly not a democrat? How racist that is, othering our Cambodian friends! Is it fair at all to draw a conceptual dividing line between Communist governments and democratic ones? Surely this was not as conceptually clear before 1945, especially.

The conceptual distinction only became critical during the Cold War, and the distinction would not have made any sense in the 19th century or earlier. Discussing these historical shifts in language and conceptual categories is part of what makes neoreaction appealing to so many readers.

Social categories are arbitrary in a way that carbon atoms are not.

The cited article also picks a fight with the statement that I’ll paraphrase as ‘nondemocratic governments should remain small, but they don’t.’ This is not an accurate characterization of the Hoppean position that has been adapted and altered by various neoreactionaries (again not unique to Hoppe, as the paper authors characterize it as the Tocqueville position on democracy also — the latter author only echoing common European wisdom at the time).

The difference is not between authoritarian and demotic  or authoritarian and liberal, but more towards owned and un-owned forms of government. It is closer to an application of the tragedy of the commons argument to general politics, as Dourado himself notices in his article. The dichotomies are not necessarily that clear, either.

Authoritarian governments can be quite liberal for certain classes of people, while quite repressive towards others, and vice versa in different mixes. Even North Korea is liberal in regards to its restrictions on the behavior of the Kims. Samurai enjoyed many freedoms under the Shogunate that peasants did not. Human societies throughout history tend to defy simplistic chart-models.

Demotic governments cannot effectively ‘own’ property permanently at scale, whereas more authoritarian structures can. Where there is agreement in neoreaction, it is that tenant governments have an incentive to exploit their temporary property in a way that more permanent owners don’t.

To clean up and score some cheap points, Dourado states that democracy is ‘hundreds of years old.’ It is not. It is thousands of years old, as he is probably well-aware. Modern democracy is less than a hundred years old, particularly the varietal that Moldbug criticizes. Enlightened liberal government with limited democracy is a couple hundred years old, ignoring the short-lived and bloody experiments in France and elsewhere throughout that period. [3]

It’s unclear to me what Dourado was hoping to achieve, and why he thought that his case was as persuasive as he seemed to think that it was.

It is an ‘evisceration’ if the reader shares his views on empiricism as it relates to human behavior and if he finds the cited article as credible as Eli seems to think that it is, if he has as much respect for the moral authority of the people that he cites as he does. It seems to me that he has a hard time fully accepting that his outlook on these points is not shared, that there is no universal agreement on the assumed framework of his arguments.

Because none of those things are accurate for most of neoreaction, the article has no persuasive weight for us.

[1] What the Neoreaction Doesn’t Understand about Democracy

[2] Do Democracies Have Different Public Policies Than Nondemocracies?

[3] Struck through due to a regrettable misreading.