Category Archives: Observance

The bug in democracy’s code – book extract #1

This is an extract from my forthcoming book “Save Democracy?—?Abolish Voting”. It is taken from the Introduction to the book.

The bug in democracy’s code

The variety of liberal democracy used in Europe and North America has created untold growth, prosperity and inter-democracy peace. It has been a fantastically successful experiment and no generation of humanity is as lucky as ours.

Its continuing positive development is not assured, however. One of its fatal flaws is that politicians are stuck in something that looks a lot like the prisoner’s dilemma where, in a climate of distrust, their default setting is to accuse each other, however opaquely, of being liars and thieves. Because of this, politicians fail to defend the idea of democratic governance itself.

Tidying up

Now that my book has definitely been completed, this is probably the last time that these books will be in one place, so I thought I’d get a pic for posterity.

It’s not the definitive pile and others have already been scattered around the house, but it’s a representative cross-section.

Its been a very satisfying, if occasionally lonely and patience-straining process.

Using these titles is not necessarily an endorsement of their contents -particularly the Arriaga book…

Popular Sovereignty v National Sovereignty

Sovereignty is not about what we want to achieve. It is about what is possible. If a king degrees that the waves should retreat, or a parliament decides that the moon should shift it’s orbit, no sovereignty will be exercised.

Sovereignty is about a capacity to do things, and not just a desire.

Neither neoliberalism nor Putin. Democracy has a bigger problem.

This is a short post that is intended to introduce a theme. I won’t develop it too much here (though I’ve filled it with links to posts that I, and others, have written that flesh out specific parts of the argument). I will be publishing something a lot more substantial on this shortly.

We are going through a period of political polarisation at the moment. The organised left may think that this is a good thing, but I have argued previously that this is a game that we are always going to lose at.

Labour and Leninism

In the 1980s, Labour faced an existential threat.

For most of its existence, it had managed to fight off a particularly awkward challenge from Leninists of one kind or another. Initially, in the post-wat years, it came from The Communist Party, and it was awkward because Leninists were always been able to present themselves as the expression of Labour’s soul – socialism of an uncompromising and pure type.

Why brexit may not happen

This has been my ‘pinned tweet’ for a while.

Here is my forecast. #Brexit will not happen. It will not be stopped by ‘opposition’ but by ‘reality’. This is not a certainty but a hunch.

— Paul Evans (@Paul0Evans1) 23 November 2016

Here’s how I think it may work.

Imagine you had been offered a cake. It will be the most fantastic cake that you will ever taste. It’s like nothing you have ever imagined before.

Eating it will be so good it will have a transformative effect on you. It will change your life forever. It’s not so much a cake as a whole new culinary paradigm.

Light at the end of the tunnel?

Some observations following (the first?) 2017 election from a Corb-sceptic Labour Party member.

1) Labour didn’t win the election, but…

The Tories may have been humiliated and hobbled, but Labour has a lot to apologise for today. Not only were we defeated, we created the conditions that allowed the Tories to damage the country quite badly. Oppositions have to take responsibility for their failures, and Labour has played very carelessly over the past two years. The point of democratic politics is to make the country a better place, not to lose surprisingly well.

Some “micro-targeting” bookmarks

A while ago, I posted something here about micro-targeting;

This has been explained in some detail here for anyone who wants a full practical understanding of what it is with a detailed case study of the way that the Tories are using it here from The Guardian. My friend Peter Geoghegan has outlined what we can call “The PAC problem”—of “unincorporated organisations” that filter money into political communications in a targeted way.

Is this the holy grail of politics?

This fascinating paper in Nature makes a case that is, I think, instantly persuasive. That the quest for “equality” is hugely problematic, and that humans are more attached to “fairness” as an aspiration.

I’d go further than that. This is something that everyone who is active in electoral politics has known all along. The public don’t completely buy the version of equality that the different political tribes are selling, and, for a politician, success depends on an ability to steer a battle-cruiser through the holes in the version that is promoted by their rivals.

The solution to this also seems obvious to me, to the point at which I wonder of I’m not missing something.

It can’t be this simple, surely?

Time to deselect Labour MPs

I write here as an avid defender of representative democracy. The most important constitutional checks and balances that we have in the UK exist because of the rights (and duties) MPs have to place their own good judgement ahead of the opinions of their constituents.