When democracy doesn't work

Stability in government; ignoring Unionists; controlling AI; social media & teenagers; failures of liberalism; conservatives & history; a new economic era?; limitations of meritocracy; Irish Biden

We think conservatives need to talk more and get better at sharing ideas. So here we share the best newspaper columns, policy reports and books that will stimulate thinking and promote new ways of doing things.

The Conservative Reader is published every Friday lunchtime, so please do look out for it. And expect plenty of content about the things we think make conservatism such a compelling body of thought: identity and belonging, community and commitment, market economics, national resilience and good government.

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Best wishes, Nick and Gavin

Towering columns

In the Financial Times, Ivan Krastev argues that democracies do not function when there is too much drama:

Unfortunately, the magic of the post-election return to normality seems to have been lost. Democratic politics today is consumed by a sense of extreme urgency, in which there is no place for compromises. This is politics as the clash of two apocalyptic imaginations. On the left, climate activists believe that if we do not act now then, if not tomorrow the day after tomorrow, there will be no more human life on Earth. The nativist right, for its part, is driven not by the fear of the end of life as such but by the fear that “our way of life” might be about to end.

Both share a sense that we are engaged in the “final struggle”. And while some of the concerns of either side are very real and require urgent societal action, radicalism has become the default way for dealing with complexity and confusion. The problem is that democracy cannot work either when the stakes are too low or they are too high. Democracy loses credibility when the government changes but nothing else does. But it also forfeits self-restraint when the change of government changes everything…

The art of democracy is to leave the future open. The job of the election is to turn madness into reason and to translate passions into interests. The vote gives every citizen a voice but deprives them of the ability to represent the intensity of their beliefs. The vote of the fanatic for whom elections are an issue of life and death, and the vote of a citizen who barely knows for whom she votes or why, have equal weight. The result is that voting has a dual character: it allows us to replace those in power, thus defending us from the excessively repressive state; but it also keeps passions in check, and defends us from the excessively expressive citizen. Ideally, democracy makes the apathetic interested in public life, while cooling the passion of the zealot.

At Unherd, Tom McTague says those calling for the Good Friday Agreement to be reformed are ignoring unionists:

While there is little evidence that any other settlement was possible in 1998 — or any other time — the Agreement itself helps to ensure that the hostile interests remain separate. It both reflects Northern Ireland’s abnormality and entrenches it, for as long as the basic power-sharing structure remains in place, “normal” politics can’t resume. And yet, if the Agreement did not exist, politics in Northern Ireland would be even more abnormal than it is today. This is Northern Ireland’s tragedy…

Should the Alliance continue to hoover up support, some of the basic tenets of the peace settlement would start to lose their legitimacy. Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, the votes of Alliance party MLAs at Stormont simply do not count for as much as their DUP and Sinn Fein colleagues. Power has to be shared between nationalists and unionists — not with those who refuse to define as either. This will no longer be tenable if 20-30% of Northern Ireland is voting for parties outside the divide.

This is one of the major reasons — alongside the DUP’s continuing refusal to serve — why there are now calls for the Good Friday Agreement to be reformed. But those calling for reform are essentially calling for an entirely new agreement — and usually because they want to bypass the DUP. But you can’t ask unionism to share power when it is a majority, and then to give up its veto the moment it becomes a minority. The Good Friday Agreement, as Blair said, can only be changed if both communities agree. And this can’t happen until the current crisis has ended, which can only happen if the DUP’s concerns are met — or enough voters abandon the party in protest.

In the Financial Times, Ian Hogarth says we need to slow down the race towards Artificial General Intelligence:

Recently the contest between a few companies to create God-like AI has rapidly accelerated. They do not yet know how to pursue their aim safely and have no oversight. They are running towards a finish line without an understanding of what lies on the other side…

We are not powerless to slow down this race. If you work in government, hold hearings and ask AI leaders, under oath, about their timelines for developing God-like AGI. Ask for a complete record of the security issues they have discovered when testing current models. Ask for evidence that they understand how these systems work and their confidence in achieving alignment. Invite independent experts to the hearings to cross-examine these labs.

If you work at a major lab trying to build God-like AI, interrogate your leadership about all these issues. This is particularly important if you work at one of the leading labs. It would be very valuable for these companies to co-ordinate more closely or even merge their efforts. OpenAI’s company charter expresses a willingness to “merge and assist”. I believe that now is the time. The leader of a major lab who plays a statesman role and guides us publicly to a safer path will be a much more respected world figure than the one who takes us to the brink.

In the New Statesman Jonathan Haidt says the evidence is clear - social media is causing a disaster for the mental health of teenage girls:

We are now 11 years into the largest epidemic of teen mental illness on record. As the CDC’s report showed, most girls are suffering, and nearly a third have seriously considered suicide. Why is this happening, and why did it start so suddenly around 2012?

… There is one giant, obvious, international and gendered cause: social media. Instagram was founded in 2010. The iPhone 4 was released then too – the first smartphone with a front-facing camera. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram, and that’s the year that its user base exploded. By 2015, it was becoming normal for 12-year-old girls to spend hours each day taking selfies, editing selfies and posting them for friends, enemies and strangers to comment on, while also spending hours each day scrolling through photos of other girls and wealthy female celebrities with (seemingly) superior bodies and lives. The hours girls spent each day on Instagram were taken from sleep, exercise, and time with friends and family. The arrival of smartphones rewired social life for an entire generation. What did we think would happen to them?

… The collaborative review document that Jean Twenge, Zach Rausch and I have put together collects more than 100 correlational, longitudinal and experimental studies, on both sides of the question. Taken as a whole, it shows strong and clear evidence of causation, not just correlation. There are surely other contributing causes, but the collaborative review document points strongly to this conclusion: social media is a major cause of the mental illness epidemic in teen girls. It is now time for parents, heads of schools and governments to act.

In Chronicles magazine, Paul Gottfried says woke culture comes from the failure of liberalism, not the ideology of Marx:

The liberalism that the woke left cancelled was a greatly weakened form of the liberal persuasion, the exponents of which had already ceased to argue very convincingly for open discussion. For decades, that attenuated liberalism excluded the right, except for a moderate centrist version of it that would not upset leftist gatekeepers. The parameters of allowable discussion on many issues had become more and more restricted before a late modern form of liberalism gave up the ghost entirely. By then, universities were already being ideologically controlled while both government and the media had prepared the way for this postliberal age.

Liberalism in its last stages did not suffer from an indiscriminate tolerance, a condition that thinkers as diverse as Joseph Schumpeter and Carl Schmitt viewed as liberalism’s great weakness. Quite to the contrary! Late modern liberalism moved in the direction of what became the woke left even while clinging to the illusion of openness. And those who complain about leftist intolerance practiced the same vice in relation to the right, until they were overtaken by greater powers on the left. They then became the fashionable mourners of a lost tolerance, the loss of which they themselves helped bring about.

… At some point in the last 20 years, the very ideal of open discussion and debate fell into disrepute both in institutions of higher learning and in the media. What had become a shrunken, denatured liberalism was abandoned for a successor ideology: wokeism. Further, there may be no way back to what has been resoundingly repudiated and what took generations to collapse. Only an equally determined collectivism can effectively resist those who have ended the liberal era, or what became the pale imitation of one.

In The Critic, James Vitali explores how an understanding of history - very different to our ideological opponents - informs conservatives:

Conservatism’s preoccupation with history makes it starkly different from other political perspectives. Liberalism and socialism have end points towards which history is inevitably progressing — to a society of maximal freedom, or to a society of maximal equality — and to which political action in the present must therefore be orientated. This is why Marx could speak of a “deadweight” of history, or Paine could speak of the tyranny of the dead over the living. Allowing the past to shape what we do in the present can only work to slow down our progress towards the telos of history in this view. For those impatient of progress towards a predetermined historical destination, history cannot hold value in and of itself, save perhaps for lessons about how to get to that destination more quickly in the future. Yet history is innately and inherently valuable in conservative thought. 

For conservatives, history is something from which we can derive meaningful knowledge. It provides us with a sense of what makes for content, happy societies which ought to guide our decisions for the future. Conservatives do not take a dialectical view of history, and there is no necessity about the direction of history’s progress. We can make contingent assessments about it through our engagement with the past, but Conservatives do not then presume to make the logical leap from these contingent assessments to presuming a determined historical trajectory.

It is in the peculiar defence of institutions that conservatism’s distinctive approach to history — and the knowledge that it contains — is most evident. As Samuel Huntington put it, conservatism is in essence the “intellectual rationale of the permanent institutional prerequisites of human existence … the conservative ideology reminds men of the necessity of some institutions and the desirability of the existing ones”. Why do conservatives defend institutions? It is not because institutions conform to some timeless, “transcendent moral order” (though a conservative may believe this to be the case, this is not the conservative argument for their preservation). As the historical record shows, conservatives have defended a variety of institutions, even those that they have previously scorned. It is because institutions are vestibules of a powerful form of sedimented wisdom that is not susceptible to easy codification or rational analysis. 

Wonky thinking

In an essay prepared for a symposium at the LSE next month, Harvard professor Dani Rodrik articulates an alternative both to the post-war Keynesian welfare state and the neo-liberal model that followed it:

I describe in this essay an approach that I call “productivism.” This is an approach that prioritizes the dissemination of productive economic opportunities throughout all regions of the economy and segments of the labor force. It differs from what immediately preceded it (“neoliberalism”) in that it gives governments (and civil society) a significant role in achieving that goal. It puts less faith in markets and is suspicious of large corporations. It emphasizes production and investment over finance, and revitalizing local communities over globalization. It also departs from the Keynesian welfare state – the paradigm that “neoliberalism” replaced - in that it focuses less on redistribution, social transfers, and macroeconomic management and more on creating economic opportunity by working on the supply side of the economy to create good, productive jobs for everyone. And productivism diverges from both of its antecedents by exhibiting greater skepticism towards technocrats and being less instinctively hostile to populism in the economic sphere.

Our core economic problems – poverty, inequality, exclusion, and insecurity – have many roots. But they are reproduced and reinforced on a daily basis in the course of production, as an immediate by-product of firms’ employment, investment, and innovation decisions. In the language of economists, these decisions are rife with externalities for society, i.e., they have consequences that spill over to many people, firms, and other parts of the economy. Some of these externalities are well recognized in economics. Learning and innovation spillovers from R&D form the rationale for tax credits and other public subsidies. Environmental externalities and the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on climate change form the basis for environmental regulation.

But in our contemporary world, these externalities are broader and also include what may be called “good jobs” externalities. “Good jobs” are a pathway to the middle class. They pay sufficiently well to allow for a reasonable living standard with some security and savings, are relatively stable and with safe working conditions, and offer some career progression. Firms that generate “good jobs” contribute to the vitality of their communities. Conversely, a shortage of good jobs comes at social, political, and economic costs. Social consequences can take the form of exclusion, broken families, drug abuse, addiction, and crime. Political ills such as polarization, the rise of populism, backlashes against globalization and immigration, decline in trust in government, experts, and institutions can follow. The prevalence of “bad jobs” is also symptomatic of economic dualism, which creates its own inefficiency: productive technologies remain bottled up in a few firms and do not disseminate throughout the rest of the economy and the labor force.

Firms’ decisions on how many workers to employ, how much to pay, what kind of technologies to deploy, and how to organize work affect not just the bottom line, but the life chances of prospective employees and their communities. When a company decides to automate its production line or outsource part of its production to another country, society may suffer long-term damage that is not “internalized” by its managers or shareholders. Framing the problem in terms of an “externality” - or as a “coordination failure” which prevents the undertaking of complementary actions (in training, technology adoption, investment decisions) for broad-based prosperity – clarifies that productivism is about productivity first and foremost, and not about redistribution or social/labor standards. But it does not presume productivity trickles down. It aims to enhance well-being across all sectors of society by directly broadening access to productive employment opportunities.

Book of the week

We recommend Michael J. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? In a bold challenge to “meritocratic” thinking, Sandel argues that liberal capitalism and the ethics of global competition have failed to deliver a political economy conducive to the flourishing of all:

The political divide, the winners explained, was no longer left versus right but open versus closed. In an open world, success depends on education, on equipping yourself to compete and win in a global economy. This means that national governments must ensure that everyone has an equal chance to get the education on which success depends. But is also means that those who land on top come to believe that they deserve their success. And, if opportunities are truly equal, it means that those who are left behind deserve their fate as well.

This way of thinking about success makes it hard to believe that “we are all in this together”. In invites the winners to consider their success their own doing and the losers to feel that those on top look down with disdain. It helps explain why those left behind by globalisation would become angry and resentful, and why they would be drawn to authoritarian populists who rail against elites and promise to reassert national borders with a vengeance.

…The toxic mix of hubris and resentment that propelled Trump to power is not a likely source of the solidarity we need now. Any hope of renewing our moral and civic life depends on understanding how, over the past four decades, our social bonds and respect for one another came unravelled. This book seeks to explain how this happened, and to consider how we might find our way to a politics of the common good.

Quick links

The economy did not grow in February.

President Joe Biden “announced” he would run again on Sky News.

One in four are unaware they need photo ID to vote in the upcoming local elections.

Two-thirds of voters believe the Government is handling Brexit badly.

One in four Americans now see China as an enemy.

China’s financial elite are increasingly moving assets out of the country.

Public sector wage hikes contribute “significantly” to inflation, according to the IMF.

Global growth forecasts have been cut to 3 per cent for 2024.

56 per cent of journalists identify with the political Left.

The Government’s failure to get close to its heat pump installation target has been branded an “embarrassment.”

The American war on terror must truly be over (or maybe, with some terrorists, it never began).