Source: https://v-dem.net/documents/44/v-dem_dr2024_highres.pdf page 7
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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What happens when democracy itself becomes a partisan issue? What happens when Democratic Values don't correspond with continuous economic growth (or, at least, the appearance of it as reported by your news outlet of choice)? What happens when democracy becomes unpopular and demagogues are seen as a social good?
It's a paradox of sorts. If a savvy enough media campaign or a cynical set of bureaucrats can turn people against the mechanisms of self-representation, how can a democracy survive?
John Locke would tell you it can't.
People largely don't deserve democracy. They tend to choose kings, so long as they don't remember being ruled by one.
I don't think people have a lot of agency in a liberal democracy. In my experience, the politicians tend to select their voters - via gerrymander and disenfranchisement and strategic GOTV.
Popular views are poorly represented, but the avenues for opposition are walled in by State and private police forces.
This sours people on what feels increasingly like a farce, and poisons popular opinion against the idea of a true functional democratic system.
Sure, a good autocracy will always be more effective and fairer than a good democracy. The greek already knew that.
They also knew that a bad autocracy will always be worse than a bad democracy.
And you have no idea what you will get with an autocrat, they change over time, they make new enemies out of you, what is good for some is bad for others...
So democracy is not just about giving people what they want or representing their views, it is about damage limitation between all the established "mafias" vying for power and a ruleset for peaceful evolution.
To make it worse, some modern societies hide de facto autocracy or oligarchy under democracy, which may sour you towards democracy.
The Greeks thought that. By actual empirical measures democracies do unambiguously better, beyond what can be explained by individual leaders. It comes down to autocracies never actually being one man rule, because the lower downs have their own agendas and palace intrigues, too.
The rest of my comment addresses that. The "good king" father figure does a lot of heavy lifting for autocracy in people's subconscious (even Plato's haha), but it is inevitable for a "benevolent monarch" with the mandate to "fix everything" to turn sour and abuse power, the variance of one single individual's performance and world iew is too high. Aristotle writes about some of this too.
Autocracy is good for the cronies. The theory of Democracy is that you make everyone a potential crony and create political incentive for a broad egalitarian base of support.
But in practice, this doesn't work. Cartels are an effective tool to undermine democracy via Divide and Conquer of the natural social subunits.
Mafias build strong bonds of trust and shared economic advantage at the expense of their neighbors. They form internal patronage networks that promise more than a fair share of reward for compromised ideology and ethics. They also foment superstition and FUD that polarize people against one another.
The perception of hidden selfish cartels operating underneath broad egalitarian institutions is what ultimately undermine them.
That is why mass media has such a major role to play in democracy. And why privatization of media ultimately leads to a failed democracy.
You're on to something, but it's more complex than that. Politicians don't get to choose shit, because they all stab each other in the back by design every election. Nobody is at the wheel. It still works better than autocracies because they have an incentive not to be openly corrupt or explicitly elitist.
There's no one single person who controls everything, but there are lots of local admins that control choke points in economy and bureaucracy.
The backstabbing is about positioning yourself. But once you're in a good spot, can extract enormous amounts of wealth with very little effort.
As the line between autocracy and democracy gets fuzzy, the appeal of democracy declines.
I'm close enough to politicians and other "powerful" people to say that nobody's getting a free lunch like that. If you want to climb the ladder, you hustle for it and probably lose, whether you're gunning for a position in a national cabinet or just food security. The best return you can reliably get on wealth is around 10%, if you don't mind volatility, and if you could buy connections or fame it's my guess that it would work out about the same.
If you're talking about white collar crime, you can make a lot of money that way very easily, but you're also on borrowed time until someone else looks closely at the books. If you try to completely cover your tracks that's pricey and complex itself, and it seems that soon enough you're just working a different kind of 9-5 (blackhat hackers being a great example).
I don't know how close is "close", but I can point you to a litany of local political insiders just in my municipality who benefit enormously thanks to their proximity to power. The HISD Superintendent just got caught sending Houston money to a network of charter schools in Colorado that he has a personal stake in just for instance.
Not when the person looking at the books is Ken Paxton. Then he simply declines to prosecute anyone who is on his team.
I'm not Texan, so unfortunately I can't really comment on that, but it does sound like a messy clusterfuck.
I'm not denying that having positions and influence can be used to make money, and even in legal ways, but you bet the backstabbing continues, at least in every situation I'm privy to.