Equality by lot

I thought readers of this blog might be interested in a post I’ve just put on my own blog on Walter Lippmann’s The Public Philosophy. It does not directly reference sortition, but I think it’s an excellent illustration of the value that sortition can bring — and it provides a corroborative context for the ideas I sketched out here.

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One way to get beneath the surface of what’s going on is to read people who were writing about issues as they emerged rather than in more modern times when they’d become the norm and become infused in our commonsense.

I was browsing in one of the few remaining second-hand bookshops around (as is my wont) when I came upon Walter Lippmann’s 1955 book, The public philosophy. Walter Lippmann was one of the great journalists and thinkers of the 20th century. He wrote a series of books that were landmarks in their day, despite uniformly bland titles. Public opinion. The good life. And this one — The public philosophy. 

Reading part 1. I was shocked to discover a critique of democracy that I had not really crystallised for myself. It comprehends two tendencies both of which are at their most disastrous in the avoidance of war on the one hand and the fighting of wars on the other.

In the first place there’s what I’ll call temporal mismatch. It can take an electorate years to catch up with emerging developments and so public opinion can be a disastrous guide to the exigencies of a particular situation. A further aspect of public opinion is its capacity for wild swings in sentiment which I’ll call temperamental amplification.

Lippmann explains how democracies wildly overshoot. They’re not good at avoiding war by preparing properly for it. It is easy to understand why that is. Wars are very expensive. So preparing for them is expensive too. That means that politicians get the choice between warning the electorate and preparing for war and winning elections. If they call for more military spending their democratic opponent will say that it can be handled without serious financial pain — either because the threat is overblown or because it can be managed via borrowing or some other evasively defined expedient.

Then as war looms larger, far greater sacrifice than would otherwise have been necessary is called for, alongside industrial scale demonisation of the enemy. We’re somewhat familiar with this narrative from WWII, but Lippmann extends it back to the insouciance of war before WWI, the imposition of the Carthaginian Peace of 1919 which in humiliating Germany made Round Two of the Great War all the more likely. (Lippmann became fast friends with Keynes when they were both in Versailles. Coming to terms with the cataclysm of that war and its peace burned itself deeply into both men’s thought.)

Of course, this is directly relevant to today’s circumstances where the economic hangover from both COVID and Europe’s first major war in eighty years is intensifying the scarcity of energy and food, and in so doing undermining living standards. A further demand is to get Ukraine the arms it needs to fight off the Russians — but that’s expensive too.

But how much are our political leaders leveling with their populations? They’re not of course. Because to do so they’d have to say something like “Here’s the plan. We need to reduce living standards compared to what they would otherwise be by 2-3%. Then their opponents will denounce this as the counsel of despair and incompetence and come out and say they can do all they need to do without such hardship.

An extract from Lippmann is over the fold.

Filed under: Books, Elections, History, Sortition | 2 Comments »