A Cautionary Note on Democracy

As I've been saying, I think that The Contrarian has been doing an excellent job reporting on the abuses of the Trump administration, and I appreciate their initiation of legal actions against it. However, because my primary view of anything that has to do with human behavior has been affected by my knowledge of evolutionary biology, I occasionally have to question their faith in democracy, while I recognize that they are lawyers and that this is their particular area of expertise. The question that comes up for me is: how important is democracy in the greater scheme of things?

In my understanding of world history, democracy has not been all that important. Some of my ideas were affected when I read Collapse, by Jared Diamond. While Diamond is certainly not omniscient, I think that he made a strong case that the general success of the U.S. was largely the result of geography. The advantages included more high-quality soil than anywhere else due to glaciation, physical isolation from other world powers, a highly navigable river system, and a huge influx of people who wanted to make money. In fact, the American Revolution was primarily about financial independence, and George Washington was sworn in as president at the intersection of Broad Street and Wall Street in New York City in 1789: Wall Street was literally the capital of the country then. I think that, to some extent, the success of the country has more to do with free enterprise than anything else. Broadly speaking, the country became extremely wealthy by removing economic constraints for most of its history; additionally, no monarchs or religious leaders had influence over the political system. These factors alone probably had more significance than democracy per se. It seems to me that the primary structure of American society has always been capitalistic, and equality and democracy were almost afterthoughts that arose when wealth imbalances and racism became conspicuous during the nineteenth century. As late as 1857, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court stated that slaves were not citizens and therefore had no federal or legal protections.

Comparatively, there has been far less unity of purpose and stability in Europe than the U.S. since the seventeenth century. Wars between the U.K., Germany and France have been common, and now Russia is acting up. Furthermore, unlike today, the Roman Catholic Church was often politically engaged and interfered with governments. These were rarely American problems. Additionally, it is more difficult to control immigration in Europe than it is in the U.S., and, whereas the U.S. often benefits from immigrants who take unwanted jobs, in Europe, the waves of immigrants may actually contribute to political instability. 

The obvious problem with democracy for me, which I've brought up repeatedly, is that people don't necessarily vote rationally. No matter how many articles you write, rallies you hold, petitions you sign, etc., there are still going to be lots of irrational voters out there. I think that in many cases, to convince irrational voters to vote rationally in their own best interest, you may have to rely on different arguments that are also irrational. 

To put this in the context of how I make voting decisions, let me describe my actual process of thinking about Donald Trump as a politician. By 2015, I already knew that he was pretty stupid and had an enormous ego. I didn't like Hillary Clinton much in 2016, but, with Trump running, voting for her was a no-brainer. I tried to give Trump the benefit of the doubt when he won, but it immediately became apparent that he was completely incompetent, and, rather than learning from his mistakes, he tended to double down on them. Over the years it has become increasingly apparent that he only has one model – the same one that he has been using for decades. This is not a complete list, but covers what I think are the basic ideas:

1. Recruit only people who have a major handicap and are willing to declare full allegiance to you.

2. Groom your hires for corrupt activities.

3. If hires don't deliver, fire them.

4. When negotiating, always exaggerate whatever assets you have.

5. Favor negotiation with those who are unable to match your legal resources in the event of a conflict.

6. If you enter a political position, keep opponents under constant attack.

7. Leverage your political position to extract the maximum possible financial benefits for yourself.

8. Never waste time thinking about benefiting your constituency and delegate those tasks to subordinates.

9. Arrange situations in a manner such that your subordinates will be blamed for failures rather than you.

I think that Trump has always been highly predictable, but that the evidence wasn't quite as clear during his first term. That was largely because he resorted to experienced people in that term and found that they were not only an encumbrance but a threat to him. That is why he has assembled an outlaw gang for his second term. The sheer volume of lies being generated by his administration now is astounding in historical terms.

From the above, you can see that I don't think legalistically. I prefer to analyze the personalities of politicians in order to predict their behavior. Since Trump's behavior indicates that he usually only attempts to benefit himself, that is sufficient to reject him as a candidate or an incumbent. For this reason I have suggested several times that a solution to the current plague of corrupt and incompetent politicians might be something as simple as vote-assisting software. That would be easier than engaging in years of lawsuits, impeaching Supreme Court justices, amending the Constitution, etc. In this vein, since Trump is such an incompetent president – he may be costing taxpayers trillions of dollars – why not just replace him with an app? A few Nvidia chips could probably do the job!