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LV's avatar

How does one date British “democracy”? It is my understanding they were a parliamentary republic (monarchy in name only) much longer than the length of time shown on this graph.

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Ebenezer's avatar

Regarding the US Senate, Mitt Romney stated:

>[Romney] joked to friends that the Senate was best understood as a “club for old men.” There were free meals, on-site barbers, and doctors within a hundred feet at all times. But there was an edge to the observation: The average age in the Senate was 63 years old. Several members, Romney included, were in their 70s or even 80s. And he sensed that many of his colleagues attached an enormous psychic currency to their position—that they would do almost anything to keep it. “Most of us have gone out and tried playing golf for a week, and it was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna kill myself,’ ” he told me. Job preservation, in this context, became almost existential. Retirement was death. The men and women of the Senate might not need their government salary to survive, but they needed the stimulation, the sense of relevance, the power. One of his new colleagues told him that the first consideration when voting on any bill should be “Will this help me win reelection?” (The second and third considerations, the colleague continued, should be what effect it would have on his constituents and on his state.)

Source: https://archive.is/TBngI

This obsession with re-election makes the value of Rome's Senate more intuitive. Give ex-politicians an emeritus position which still allows them to influence policy without being subject to re-election incentives. They have the characteristics that the populace wants in their leaders, and deep knowledge of the challenges faced by the polity, without being slaves to public opinion.

This has the effect of smoothing policy across time. Computationally, you can think of a republic as exploring some sort of state space, characterized by various dimensions such as political polarization, economic inequality, literacy rates, population age structure, external threats, and the like. Certain parts of the state space represent a high likelihood of transition to autocracy. Assume autocracy is a steady state which can't be exited.

Now consider a highly "dynamic" republic which moves around the state space very rapidly and erratically.

For example, in the post-9/11 era the US launched a couple major wars, elected a two-term Black president, saw a communications revolution thanks to social media, experienced a steep rise in political polarization, etc. Contrast with the relative stability of the cold-war era, where the US had a consistent primary adversary. The Republicans were consistently interventionist and the Democrats consistently isolationist. Just in the past few years we've seen a notable flip on that particular axis.

Right now the US is moving around the state space in a wild and rapid manner, and will likely do so until the factors driving this rapid movement disappear, *or* the US hits a steady state, plausibly in the form of authoritarianism.

A smoothing mechanism, such as Rome's senate consisting of "emeritus politicians", could slow state-space movement and reduce the amount of state-space that gets explored, reducing the risk of hitting a bad attractor state.

Note that the US Supreme Court has a similar "emeritus" structure to the Roman senate (lifetime appointments) and has also been a moderating influence in the contemporary US political environment, as predicted by the account above.

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