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It's a proxy for "how many divisions can you field" and the further it is removed from that the less useful it is as a consensus mechanism. Because then, you "win" an "election" and the people with more divisions topple your illegitimate regime.
You can't escape violence, you can only add abstractions on top of it. Liberals used to understand this before they fell for their own propaganda.
I understand one-man-one-gun-one-vote fine, I don't see why it should undermine debate or democracy.
If you want; then I am pro-abstraction. One man goes around shooting people - another talks to them, then counts their vote, and then, only if he has won, uses limited force. Do you think they are the same?
It's not the same. We've long known of the distinction between abstraction heavy and light regimes, i.e. Machiavelli's Foxes and Lions. But I'm not sure you are fully aware of the tradeoffs.
For instance, a common criticism of fox regimes is that they, by nature, have to be totalitarian. The legitimacy they rest on relies on the illusion of public support, which means they have to control and shape public opinion as much as possible. This is how it is paradoxically democracies that have brought forth general conscription, total war and the most sophisticated forms of psychological warfare.
This isn't all to say that debate is useless or pointless. Nor even that Fox regimes are strictly worse that Lion ones. Merely that it is foolish to think oneself secure from the forces of power, however many pieces of paper one hides behind.
Debate only really is possible in the areas of life that do not concern power, and this isn't something that can be changed. To the dismay of any and all anarchists.
I think a reality check is enough to disabuse people of that theory, if ‘totalitarian’ is to keep any meaning.
I take it you categorize the ur-totalitarian communist, and nazi regimes, as ‘light’, ‘fox regimes’? Even though they were opposed to debate, to voting, and made direct unrestrained force the order of the day?
There’s a contradiction here. If the people are truly powerless, their support a mere ‘illusion’, why do the rulers need it, shape it? Your answer ‘Legitimacy’ is tautological. Why do the people in power need this ‘legitimacy’, what is legitimacy but the people’s acceptance of a ruler’s authority?
That would be silly. Of course Hitlerism and Stalinism are lion regimes, and the late Soviet Union a fox regime. Your mistake is assuming that just because I'm providing a criticism of foxes, there aren't any of lions. However, it turns out that, much to the dismay of mediocre political analysts everywhere, politics is more complicated than good vs evil dualism.
Indeed, my point (or rather De Jouvenel's and Aristostle's) is that democracies are structurally more inclined towards mass politics. This isn't even disputed by democrats most of the time, as they tend to regard participation in politics as not a right, but a duty as well. This involvement of literally every sphere of life in the political process being, ultimately, totalitarian. Democracies are most often fox regimes (though not always), so this is also a very common feature of foxes.
You'll be able to get a good feeling for this by discussing with people who live in despotic nations. They live lives that are mostly free of political thoughts compared to people who live in democracies since that area is so obviously off bounds dangerous territory. Politics then is the exclusive domain of despots and dissidents.
Whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion. But it is the case.
Aristostle argues this is bad because it is this tendency that allows democracies to decay into mob rule (or rather, politeia into democracy).
This question is the object of a century old academic debate within scholars of Elite Theory, between partisans of Mosca and partisans of De Jouvenel. Answers to the question vary, so I can only really give you my own.
I hold that legitimacy is a phenomenon that doesn't happen in the masses, but in the mind of the elite. Legitimacy is what we call the Ruling Class's ability to retain will to power and organization by telling itself a convincing enough story about how its power is legitimate. I believe this because the only examples of circulation of elites available in all of history involve the ruling elite willingly letting go of their power, or rather not having the will to cling onto it at the price of incredible bloodshed. In any example I can think of where they did so at any price, the establishment remained.
No, it just seemed even sillier to me to recategorize the founding examples of totalitarianism as not totalitarian. Plus I seem to remember some neoreactionary stuff about "demotism", which put those regimes in the same category as liberal democracy.
But okay, your choice. So in nazi germany, where every civil association was forcibly absorbed into a nazi church, a nazi youth group, a nazi union; where every film and radio was spewing pure nazi propaganda, that regime did not care about public opinion, and wasn't totalitarian?
That's lame. Politics is more complicated than "Politics is more complicated than good vs evil dualism".
What despotic nations are you talking about? Africans? I think even the dictators don't care about politics in africa. China? The rulers care what the people think.
Sounds like a made-up pseudo-freudian theory.
But if they thought they were going to lose to a superior enemy, wouldn't they "let go of their power willingly"?
Approximately 99% of defeated nations do not fight to the last man in war. Does that mean that they are in fact the stronger party, and only a weak will can make them lose?
If it's so silly it's because you imagined it. Nowhere have I ever claimed that War Communism or National Socialism aren't totalitarian ideologies.
Hence the rest of my analysis. Your insistence on reductionist dualism in this conversation is striking though. And totally irrelevant to a pragmatic school of political analysis.
Morocco, Belarus, Oman, Cuba, I've traveled quite a bit, how many examples do you want?
I'm not quite making up one of the most influential sociology works of all time but so what if it is?
If there is a superior enemy then you are not the ruling class because you have already been circulated.
What we're talking about here is a continued laxist or incoherent policy which then ends up at a crossroads where you either have to repress opposition in a bloodbath or be deposed. People who commit to the bloodbath are very seldom deposed. People who hesitate past the Rubicon always are.
Consider Louis XVI or Nicholas II, striking examples of this behavior.
So both lion regimes and fox regimes result in totalitarianism? Which is more totalitarian? Those two, or liberal democracy, or late soviet union?
I see, the apathetic kind of shit government. What I’ve noticed is the people want to get out of there.
It’s likely nonsense, that’s all. Freud wrote influential books around that time, too.
No true scotsman. Elites can never really lose, because if they’re beaten, you just mint new elites and call it circulation, say the old elites weren’t really elites, or imagine they could have fought harder. The circular logic of circulated elites theory.
Nicholas killed 15,000 in 1905, that was a bloodbath. Charles I fought two civil wars. I don’t think you can say he gave up a winning position because he was demotivated.
Of course. This is the destination of all power. Both concentration and the inevitable collapse that comes with it.
Democracies do tend to get there faster, however, because of the aforementioned effect. This has been observed on independently by enough people (Aristostle, Machiavelli, Jefferson, Lenin, etc) throughout enough eras that I think it's a relatively uncontroversial statement historically speaking. Of course modern liberal democracies tend to believe otherwise, but all regimes think themselves immortal and stabilizing. Let us grant ourselves some perspective.
I'm glad we can agree that despotism indeed doesn't necessarily involve mass politics.
And that's because...?
This would be circular logic if it was an argument to prove that only elites rule, this is just analysis that follows on from that proposition, mere implication.
If you want to discuss the axiomatic claim of elitism, we can certainly do that: I shall ask you to provide one (1) example of a government without an identifiable elite class.
Michels' core argument and the famous "iron law oligarchy" is that all human organization naturally create these out of structural necessity. So you shouldn't be able to find a single one given non trivial scales.
Given the scale of the October revolution as a whole (around 10M dead), and this being the upper bound of death toll estimates from Tsarist repression, this is ridiculously low. This is Russia we're talking about. There are battles that killed more people than this upper bound of all repression since Bloody Sunday. I don't see how that could honestly qualify.
Compare this to Stalin's purges (around 6M), an honest attempt to keep one's seat at any cost, and then let's talk of blood baths.
You'll notice that despite a troublesome interregnum, this did not mark the end of the British absolutism which would eek out three more decades. The end is typically set to the Glorious Revolution and James II's acceptation of the Bill of Rights and escape to France, which I believe fit the motif of renonciation pretty well.
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