Hans Rosling-shit does not vindicate the IMF or global neoliberalism!

The following is a quote from this Ann Pettifor piece: http://www.primeeconomics.org/articles/is-globalisation-dead

"Globalisation and poor countries

Ed Balls, citing his personal experience of Indonesia, argued that globalisation had led to a reduction in poverty in that country, and worldwide. My experience of Indonesia was marked by the grave Asian financial and banking crisis of 1997-8, during which the Indonesian economy went into meltdown, banks failed, very high interest rates prevailed, and the rupiah sharply depreciated. Sustained pain was inflicted on Indonesians that were innocent of the crisis. 
Moreover, while it is true that poverty has fallen worldwide, the phenomenon cannot be wholly attributed to financial liberalisation or globalisation, but instead to advances in e.g. medical science and scientific development. Indeed, the numbers of those living on less than $1 a day fell most rapidly, not during the period of financial globalisation, but between 1950 and 1970 according to Bourgignon and Morrison (see Our World in Data, on global extreme poverty). 

(This chart thus shows that the rate of fall in the share of those living on less than $1 a day in 1950-70 is broadly similar to the rate fall in the share of those living on less than $1.90 a day in recent decades, from World Bank data).

To take another example, under communism, life expectancy rose broadly as much as it did under the capitalism of the pre-globalisation era. Despite China’s disastrous Great Famine, life expectancy rose from 44 years in 1950 to 65 by 1970 – well before Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978. In Russia life expectancy increased steadily until after the end of Khrushchev’s administration. It stagnated through the Brezhnev era, and then collapsed in 1991 as a direct result of financial ‘liberalisation’ and ‘shock therapy’. 

Globalisation’s failure to deliver & the rise of authoritarianism

In the BBC’s brief and pressured half-hour I wanted to get across that globalisation had not delivered on its promise – to make ‘the market’ the main driver of a more effective, more productive economy; to transform societies into nations of ‘shareholders’; to ensure a revolution in homeownership, and to avoid what Hayek called the threat of a totalitarian state.  

Instead financial globalisation has been an era largely fuelled by carbon (oil and coal) – as had been the case for over a century. However, unlike the Bretton Woods era, post 1970s de-regulated financial globalisation was built on mountains of private and public debt. The first – private debt -  led to recurring financial crises, and the second - public debt - rose as private sector activity weakened, and tax revenues fell. The consequences of these recurring financial crises in ‘advanced’ economies included ‘austerity’, the removal of employment protection, rising housing and education costs, the return of deflationary pressures, high unemployment, falling real wages, low productivity and rising inequality. 

These crises have led to increased insecurity and over-rapid social and economic change- as
well as the greatest financial and economic crisis since 1929 (itself a product of excessive
laissez-faire ideology). More widely, the insecurities and dislocations generated by financial
globalisation have led whole populations to seek the ‘protection’ of a strong man (e.g.
Presidents Trump, Duterte in the Philippines, Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey,
Putin in Russia). Not that this worries the extreme adherents of laissez-faire – recall how
Hayek supported the murderous dictator Pinochet in Chile for his brutal imposition of
deregulatory ‘reform’.
 

And so, contrary to Hayek’s expectations, financial globalisation has proved that it is market fundamentalism, and not the regulatory state that is leading the world into an era of authoritarianism and totalitarianism – in the US, Eastern Europe, India and China. 

In the UK, average real wages are today lower than in 2008, no higher than they were in 2005, and in general we have to look back to Victorian times for such a stark period of stagnation. In the US, the position has been even more severe for huge numbers of working people.  Median annual earnings in the Bretton Woods period rose steadily until just after 1970. Then throughout the age of ‘globalisation’ or financial deregulation, American male real wages have stagnated. 

This, I contend, explains the rise of Donald Trump. It is an explanation, not a defence of his authoritarianism or of his administration’s irrational protectionism. "

A true curmudgeonly thought

I've long had the curmudgeonly thought that, along with reducing levels of reading, overstimulation by 'modern technology' militates against deep reflection and thought, and is likely to stifle any development of sophisticated philosophical beliefs. This seems to be overwhelmingly likely to be true (though I'm not being emotive about it, because I don't feel that emotional about it (I used to, when I was 15, 16 and 17)).
      My own story is that I had much less stimulation throughout my childhood and adolescence than the vast majority of my peers: I experienced an above-average degree of solitude and social isolation throughout a lot of my childhood (mainly self-imposed because, although I did soccer and cricket, I rarely invited friends over, because the idea of spending time on the weekend with one of my friends was never strongly motivating) and I experienced intense and acute solitude and social isolation throughout basically all of my adolescence (particularly years 7-9, when I was dangerously socially isolated and lonely). In my teenage years, I also never had a smartphone, and I only acquired a laptop in year 10. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I spent thousands of hours sitting on our lounge or my bed, daydreaming or 'talking to myself' internally (I realised only last year that I may have an unusually phenenomologically strong impression of 'hearing myself talk' (I feel like I can 'hear' myself inside my head just the same as outside my head (there's no difference in the way my voice 'sounds')) - some people apparently don't have this at all). I think this helped me develop a philosophical sophistication that most lack. What I mean by that is that I was thinking about epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, self and memory, religion, human evolution, social policy, science, criminology, ecology and nature, the nature of reality, personality, and a bunch of other topics far more than most kids. This was a very good thing for my intellectual development, I think (I'm not saying I was having very sophisticated thoughts on these topics, incidentally).
      When I acquired a smartphone for the first time in January, I spent less time thinking. It allowed me to acquire knowledge more rapidly, but having a smartphone around also makes it harder to read. And they are overwhelmingly addictive. (I think I wouldn't be writing this much this weekend if I hadn't left behind my iPhone after my maths quiz on Wednesday (it hasn't been recovered since, but Find my Phone says it's offline, so I'm hoping that someone responsible and moral has taken possession of it and for some reason hasn't handed it into to the campus assist people, who have found nothing)).
      I do almost all of my reading, outside of uni holidays, on the train. I had to discipline myself to turn off mobile data when riding on the train because I wasn't devoting my full concentration to reading.
      Incidentally, one problem I had with reading-concentration before I acquired a smartphone was that I would fall into this bad habit of reading like one or two pages then drifting off into a ten minute reverie where I would just stare at a wall and talk to myself in my head. I still do that. Bizarrely, I find thinking more entertaining and stimulating than reading.

     This is a very directionless point, but the takeaway is that we are raising children and adolescents to have very different cognitive skills to their parents. This is really kind of obvious and perhaps not that interesting.

NOTE WELL

As I suggested in my classic post, "A Brief Discourse on the Shame that Attends Previous Works" [http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/08/a-brief-discourse-on-shame-that-attends.html], I typically do not strongly agree with anything I wrote three months ago. I do mean only "typically": I fully back the brief discourse, for example.
     Anyway, as a result of this fact, you should not assume that I believe most of the things that have been posted on this blog. In some ways, that may seem like a pretty sorry state of affairs, and would seem to indicate that I should be less rash in committing things to paper and then publishing them. I think that both those things are correct. I will try to improve.
     Incidentally, that cliche that you become less zealous the more you know seems like a pretty solid heuristic to me.

Repudiating Anti-Populism Part I

Fatal Contradictions and Flaws in the Arguments against ‘Strong Democracy’: Part I: the Mistaken Inference from the Argument for Rule by the Epistemic Elite to the Desirability of Rule by Elites (Part II will be Flaws in the Rikerian Argument from Arrow’s Theorem against the so-called ‘Classical Doctrine’ and Rousseau)

Part I: Fatal Problems with making the intuitive jump from the sound ‘Argument from the Irrationality, Moral Stupidity and Ignorance of the Masses for Rule by the Moral and Epistemic Elite’ (Argument for ‘Epistocracy’) to a Rejection of more Participatory Models of Democracy in favour of more Schumpeterian or Neoliberal Models of Democracy

“Democracy: the fools have a right to vote. Dictatorship: the fools have a right to rule.”

Bertrand Russell

A long-standing argument in political philosophy, ultimately dating back to Plato in The Republic, goes like this (I have to present it in an ugly way, because I’m trying to compress Plato’s version and more contemporary variations into one):

1.      The great mass of people in the world are totally incompetent in the political domain (deficient in understanding, rationality, knowledge and moral wisdom (don’t worry, I will later properly discuss how “moral wisdom” fits in and try to resolve the complications it poses)). Most people are (relative to the elite caste that we introduce in premise 3) stupid, irrational, intemperate, brutish, poorly morally attuned, highly tribal, and highly ignorant (without the curiosity and love of truth required to ameliorate this), severely afflicted by biases and not at all capable of perceiving the “common good”, only their own narrow selfish interests, or their group’s.

(Modern versions of this premise mention research in behavioural economics (the “heuristics and biases research program”), psychology, and political-science studies of voting behaviour which powerfully undermine what are called ‘Enlightenment ideas’ about human rationality[1]: the notion that ‘we’ (meaning most members of our species) typically decide our political stances on a given issue by means of careful deliberation and a sober appraisal of the relevant facts, with our general principles formulated according to weighty moral deliberation. This is contrasted with the reality that we are totally controlled by “System 1” – beholden to motivated reasoning, confirmation bias and the availability heuristic in our thinking about difficult issues, by the halo effect in our appraisal of persons (people seem to be disturbingly affected by the looks, tone of voice and charisma of politicians and rhetors), by blind tribal and group loyalties, and by unswerving, often dangerous fealty to sacred values whose very subjection to scrutiny is seen as sacrilege by the pious. A recent popular book on this research was called Democracy for Realists by Larry Bartels and Christopher Achen. I haven’t actually read this and won’t (I’m not going to go near a book with that title – sorry), but I’m well-aware of the research, a lot of which is pretty disturbing.)  

2.      These uncomfortable facts mean that if you give the masses some degree of control over decision-making, they are not going to make anything close to an optimal decision for society as a whole. There is indeed a strong possibility of disastrous outcomes. Empirically, we know that democratic elections can have extremely bad outcomes, and that people tend to form into irrationally polarised groups.

3.      There is a narrow minority of people who are not totally incompetent in the political domain (the “true navigator”[s], in Plato’s famous ship metaphor), and could formulate better, evidence-based policies that would lead to the greater good of all. (In modern versions of this argument, these are understood to be people with PhDs: both those with claimed expertise in fields where public policy is studied – that is, the “policy wonks” in economic ‘science’ or political ‘science’ – and also academics with more narrow, less intrinsically political domains of expertise nevertheless relevant to political decision-making. That means engineers, urban planners, energy experts (physicists), industrial chemists, ecological experts, climate scientists, and so on. In a vastly different era – a world without academic specialists and where the political leaders had only a ‘city state’ to rule over (in a much simpler political system) – Plato saw this narrow minority as those people with moral wisdom (a powerful sense of the common good, a view to the big picture) and probably a high degree of general knowledge relevant domain (trade theory, transport, civil engineering, whatever), and rigorously considered ideas on how to improve things. Plato, famously, called his imaginary elite caste the “Philosopher Kings” (and clearly imagined himself as one of them). Perhaps the best version of the modern argument imagines all the social and physical science PhDs working together with the most-respected political philosophers in academia. Crudely, the political philosophers would set the overall goals – the teloi – and the scientists would try to work out how to reach them.)

Lemma: it is better if policies are formulated by people who have a better-than-average idea of the effects, short-term and long-term, of major policies, and it is better that morally wise people are developing the goals motivating the policies than the vicious.

Conclusion: ideally, it would be better if we had no politicians and all decision-making was carried out by the narrow minority who are not totally incompetent (as we saw above, this narrow minority could be different in different visions, but the argument is valid in any case).

This argument is sound (or at least it’s easy to formulate a precise version of it that is). Although I didn’t actually cite any of the specific research that has been done backing up the first two premises, that can be found anywhere. It certainly suffices to show that most people do not reason according to the standards of the best experts in their fields. Basically, I don’t think you can really push on these empirical claims at all – and most don’t. You can’t deny that some people are more intelligent and knowledgeable than others. I also think it is wrong to deny that some people are more morally wise than others (but, since I know this is a little more controversial, I’ll argue for it in a minute).

One (apparent) reason to object to this argument would be moral: considerations of social equality and contractualist-type reasoning would suggest that everyone should be encouraged as much as possible to be engaged in the political process, because political decisions will affect their lives, and people ought to have a role (at least symbolic) in the process that ends up shaping their lives. Nevertheless, if we really do have the most morally wise people, and the most sophisticated social scientists, making the big political decisions (and that’s the point) they will clearly have a better chance at arranging things in a way that turns out morally better than less morally wise people and people with no training in mathematical modelling of complex systems and massive empirical databases.

I’ll further develop my response to this objection in a paragraph’s time, but at this point, I want to stress that, as I just implied above, on my own best version of the argument for epistocracy as applied to the contemporary world, I would stipulate that the social scientists in charge use sophisticated dynamical models and dynamic computer-modelling like Steve Keen or Peter Turchin, i.e. practice ‘cliodynamics’, even though the vast majority of current social scientists, in economics and sociology, do not use complex systems mathematics at all, and therefore do not have even the beginnings of a scientific understanding of the long-term and the big picture. Is this a bit ‘convenient’ for me? Well, maybe, but by stipulation, we’re imagining the elite caste of experts being in charge, not second-rate experts. Nonetheless, is it still a problem for the argument that most social ‘scientists’ today are not doing what they should be doing and literally do not understand anything about the fundamental dynamics of social evolution? That most social ‘scientists’ are no better at predicting even the short-term effects of policies than the best guess of Average Jane?  That most social ‘scientists’ are only ‘experts’ insofar as they are well-versed with the extensive but pre-scientific literature in their field of choice and have a larger inventory of data in their heads than the average person? Well, I mean, it does depend on how, precisely, the argument is phrased (or how we interpret it): if instead we mean by the social science ‘experts’ those people whom a future social scientist with judgment which we can’t question from our own viewpoint would deem to be most qualified to make the decisions (as I implied above, I obviously think it overwhelmingly likely that future social scientists, if social science advances significantly, will be using complex systems mathematics and lots of data, à la cliodynamics), then these considerations don’t pose a problem. Even so, we are at least starting to hint at one of my objections to the way the best version of this argument is used.

Now that that’s been clarified, we should do a little more work dispelling the moral objection to the argument. One way to develop the objection would be by denying the proposition that some people have more moral wisdom than others, which does, on its surface, seem committed to a false Platonic notion that it is contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of your finger (that an individual desire or preference can be designated rational or irrational).[2] But it doesn’t have to be; I see moral wisdom as a vague but real quality corresponding to one’s ability and propensity to try one’s best to make sure one’s ethical positions on specific issues line up with the set of very-hard-to-deny general abstract principles or ‘ethical axioms’ on which one’s ethical system is built (this certainly doesn’t mean you have to be a utilitarian to be morally wise (I count as morally wise and I’m not a utilitarian), but I would suggest that the moral morally wise would have to use consequentialist reasoning most of the time). I think that the best respected political philosophers in analytic philosophy are all very morally wise, and so I would happy for them to play the role of the morally wise group (I also suspect that scientists are, on average, more morally wise than the average person (they do tend to be left-wing (ha!))).

The more fundamental issue with the objection is that it discounts the possibility that if we put the morally wise people in charge, they wouldn’t immediately say ‘We ought to diminish our own power because, whatever the consequences, it is a moral imperative that we have a system where as many people as possible are symbolically involved (i.e. a full-suffrage electoral system).’ If, by stipulation, they are the most morally wise people then, if that conclusion is the morally right one, then they would come to it and follow its consequences to their logical conclusion. More plausibly, one could imagine them keeping their power within the elite caste but telling the social scientists that their central goal should be to work out how to bring about a transformation of society (probably gradual) towards the J.S. Millian or Deweyian or Patemanian or late-Robert-Dahlian vision of widespread institutional democracy, in which schools are made increasingly democratic and the curriculum encourages a great deal more collaboration and unstructured creative activity; workplaces become increasingly democratic, with more corporations beginning to lose their Stalinist hierarchies in favour of an organisation more akin to that of the oft-cited (by libertarian leftists) Mondragon Corporation in Spain; where local councils play an increasing role in all people’s lives, being an important place of communal congregation and polite discussion about the local issues; and where a larger proportion of the population than currently acquires an expertise comparable to that of the elite caste. The point is that such worries are unjustified, based on a misunderstanding of what is being said.

Another objection – from the other ‘side’, as it were – is the Hayekian objection to “central planning” on the basis of the necessary extreme ignorance of central planners in a massive, complex society. This objection doesn’t work because, whilst it is obviously and importantly true that there are strong limits on the extent to which even the most expert of human experts can see the long-term effects of policies in a highly complex world, all large-scale societies require a state engaging in some planning, with long-term planning better than short-term (compare the success of the “East Asian Tigers” over the last thirty years to the US’ decline). Without central planning, there could be no large-scale fightback against climate change, no system enabling massive infrastructure, education and health spending vital for the future of a society. Moreover, when a society, so to speak, ‘relaxes central planning’ in the Mount Pelerin Society-sense, by allowing the corporate and financial sectors to take over politics – an experiment that the US has been working on since Reagan – the society is not actually reducing central planning in a literal sense (just replacing the central planners, installing ‘corporatism’), and is instead setting itself up for disaster and social breakdown (which we’re seeing). I don’t think it is too strong to say that centralised planning is necessary for a large-scale society; the notion that one could have a well-functioning, cohesive large-scale society without any kind of state is an extremely dangerous pathology which ought not to merit any attention whatsoever.

It is also ancient news that hundreds of rapacious corporations doing their own thing will not lead to expense of the common or greater good: this is the Paradox of the Commons. When the already limited propensity of the state to protect the environment and implement other useful corporate regulations (most regulations are terrible, we should openly admit, but it is deranged to want none) is attenuated (by regulatory capture by the corporate and financial sectors in capitalist societies, along with cultural shifts), we are in deep trouble; indeed, we are in deep trouble right now. Just to take an example, climate change may lead to the end of organised human life.

The notion of a large-scale society without a state actually engaging in planning is a nonsense, or rather an aneurysm.

Anyhow, that’s why I think this argument is sound.

But what really annoys me is when people take the leap from this argument to a Schumpeterian or Popperian or Walter-Lippmanian, ‘neoliberal’ vision of democracy as “elite competition”: that is, when people say that the fact that most people are stupid, tribalist and irrational means that the only function of electoral democracy should be to “remove bad rulers” and that that policy formulation should be left to whoever happens to have the most influence at the top of the pecking order (i.e. corporate and financial elites and the ‘policy wonks’ who don’t massively alienate these elites). The reason this is a very bad inference is that a rational and wise person has more grounds to trust the mass of the people than the elite caste that happen to hold power, because this elite caste are not the smartest and wisest people in our society, and instead further their own interests at the expense of the common good. The Bertrand Russell quote at the beginning basically sums up my view on this.

Now, I just asserted that, but do I have evidence? The answer is yes.

First question: do corporate and financial elites actually affect policy? The answer to this is an unequivocal yes, and in two ways: by influencing politicians and the system of selecting politicians (by gaining greater control over the direction of the political parties themselves), and by influencing public attitudes. Here is what I wrote about it in January 2016, within this massive document which used to be one of my featured posts (http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/02/a-67-page-dismantling-of-economics-of.html):

“Perhaps the most important argument Stiglitz makes in The Price of Inequality is on the impact of inequality on democracy. Influenced by Thomas Ferguson’s Investment Theory of Party Competition, Stiglitz shows how capitalist democracies have an inherent tendency towards plutocracy, and how that tendency is further exacerbated by inequality.   

The influence of wealth on ‘democracy’ works at all levels of the process. For average Janes and Joes, voting in an election provides little benefit and often involves a hefty cost. Researching the candidates and their policies is time-consuming and difficult; registration can be a burden; voting (in the US) takes place on a workday, making it hard for those who need to work to survive; and getting to polling stations may be challenging, especially for people with limited mobility. All this gets easier the wealthier you are – thus reducing the cost.

Wealth insinuates itself into the process in quite subtle ways, too. It is more likely for those with greater education to be politically engaged, and to trust in the democratic process. The highly educated also tend to be wealthier, and their extensive education means they are likely to be thoroughly indoctrinated in state myths. Conversely, it is more likely for the disillusioned, distrustful and radical to abandon voting at all. All these factors guarantee that those who do vote will tend to have views fitting neatly within the conventional doctrinal system; dissidents and radicals will be filtered out.

Then there are the direct influences. For the very wealthy, the democratic process is fundamentally different, because they don’t just vote; they also participate financially. Participating in the system in this way turns the process of engagement from a burden into a potential boon. By putting their money into the political process, wealthy people are essentially making an investment – one that may be paid off handsomely if the outcome is a government passing policies more favourable to them and their fortune. Since our Western political system is very open to money flows and money equals power in our economic system, being wealthy does give one significant power to shape the process in our society. In the US, the corruptibility of their system was increased only recently by the 2010 decision in the case of Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission. As Stiglitz describes it, this ruling “essentially approved unbridled corporate campaign spending” by allowing “corporations and unions to exercise “free speech” in supporting candidates and causes in elections to the same degree as individual human beings” (my emphasis). It is not hard to see why such loosening of regulations is poisonous to democracy: “Since corporations have many millions of times the resources of the vast majority of individual Americans, the decision has the potential to create a class of super-wealth political campaigners with a one-dimensional political interest: enhancing their profits”.

Even without regressive laws like these, the wealthy have a number of channels of influence: personal donations, standard corporate donations, and – if they’re mega-wealthy – through their own personal lobbying organisations. As Stiglitz observes, one of the ironies of this system is that the wealthy have a strong incentive to make common people disillusioned with the political process, and – at the same time – common people are often disillusioned with the political process because of the impression it is rigged. The wealthy have this incentive because they knew that if people are sufficiently disgusted with the process to stop voting, a higher proportion of the votes will favour the corporate and financial puppets instead. As David Foster Wallace informed the readers of Rolling Stone Magazine in his worst essay, “Up, Simba”, “If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”

The height of the absurdity comes in the fact that, because the fatcats know the spectre of the bought-election is one of the things that causes common people to become disillusioned and disenfranchised, some of them may have an incentive to advertise their corrosion of democracy. Of course, is not at all in the best interests of the politicians to display the donations they receive from the wealthy, as they still want average people voting for them, and that will best be achieved under the pretence that they are authentic, sincere and committed to the common good. On the other hand, the fact that the politicians are not really sincere and not really committed to the common good – and are instead perfidious, venal and megalomaniacal crooks – may also increase disgust and disillusionment, thus reinforcing the plutocratic trend.

The most important arm of plutocratic control is, of course, the media – as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky demonstrate in Manufacturing Consent.

Herman and Chomsky’s “Propaganda Model” includes five “filters” of information that function to exclude more radical, dissident or anti-establishment views, or to discourage critical thinking and sophisticated analysis, thus setting the parameters for the doctrinal system. As they themselves put it, “[The filters] fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns”. These filters are as follows:

“(1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism.”

Wikipedia offers an excellent explanation of the action of these five filters:

Ownership[edit]

Main article: Concentration of media ownership

The size and profit-seeking imperative of dominant media corporations create a bias. The authors point to how in the early nineteenth century, a radical British press had emerged which addressed the concerns of workers but excessive stamp duties, designed to restrict newspaper ownership to the 'respectable' wealthy, began to change the face of the press. Nevertheless, there remained a degree of diversity. In postwar Britain, radical or worker-friendly newspapers such as the Daily Herald, News Chronicle, Sunday Citizen (all since failed or absorbed into other publications) and the Daily Mirror (at least until the late 1970s) regularly published articles questioning the capitalist system. The authors posit that these earlier radical papers were not constrained by corporate ownership and were therefore free to criticize the capitalist system.

Herman and Chomsky argue that since mainstream media outlets are currently either large corporations or part of conglomerates (e.g. Westinghouse or General Electric), the information presented to the public will be biased with respect to these interests. Such conglomerates frequently extend beyond traditional media fields and thus have extensive financial interests that may be endangered when certain information is publicized. According to this reasoning, news items that most endanger the corporate financial interests of those who own the media will face the greatest bias and censorship.

It then follows that if to maximize profit means sacrificing news objectivity, then the news sources that ultimately survive must be fundamentally biased, with regard to news in which they have a conflict of interest.

Advertising[edit]

The second filter of the propaganda model is funding generated through advertising. Most newspapers have to attract advertising in order to cover the costs of production; without it, they would have to increase the price of their newspaper. There is fierce competition throughout the media to attract advertisers; a newspaper which gets less advertising than its competitors is at a serious disadvantage. Lack of success in raising advertising revenue was another factor in the demise of the 'people's newspapers' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The product is composed of the affluent readers who buy the newspaper — who also comprise the educated decision-making sector of the population — while the actual clientele served by the newspaper includes the businesses that pay to advertise their goods. According to this filter, the news is "filler" to get privileged readers to see the advertisements which makes up the content and will thus take whatever form is most conducive to attracting educated decision-makers. Stories that conflict with their "buying mood", it is argued, will tend to be marginalized or excluded, along with information that presents a picture of the world that collides with advertisers' interests. The theory argues that the people buying the newspaper are the product which is sold to the businesses that buy advertising space; the news has only a marginal role as the product.

Sourcing[edit]

The third of Herman and Chomsky's five filters relates to the sourcing of mass media news: "The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest." Even large media corporations such as the BBC cannot afford to place reporters everywhere. They concentrate their resources where news stories are likely to happen: the White House, the Pentagon, 10 Downing Street and other central news "terminals". Although British newspapers may occasionally complain about the "spin-doctoring" of New Labour, for example, they are dependent upon the pronouncements of "the Prime Minister's personal spokesperson" for government news. Business corporations and trade organizations are also trusted sources of stories considered newsworthy. Editors and journalists who offend these powerful news sources, perhaps by questioning the veracity or bias of the furnished material, can be threatened with the denial of access to their media life-blood - fresh news.^[3] Thus, the media become reluctant to run articles that will harm corporate interests that provide them with the resources that the media depend upon.

This relationship also gives rise to a "moral division of labor", in which "officials have and give the facts" and "reporters merely get them". Journalists are then supposed to adopt an uncritical attitude that makes it possible for them to accept corporate values without experiencing cognitive dissonance.

Flak[edit]

The fourth filter is 'flak', described by Herman and Chomsky as 'negative responses to a media statement or [TV or radio] program. It may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and Bills before Congress and other modes of complaint, threat and punitive action'. Business organizations regularly come together to form flak machines. An example is the US-based Global Climate Coalition (GCC) - comprising fossil fuel and automobile companies such as Exxon, Texaco and Ford. The GCC was started up by Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest public relations companies, to attack the credibility of climate scientists and 'scare stories' about global warming.^{[citation needed]}

For Chomsky and Herman "flak" refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. The term "flak" has been used to describe what Chomsky and Herman see as efforts to discredit organizations or individuals who disagree with or cast doubt on the prevailing assumptions which Chomsky and Herman view as favorable to established power (e.g., "The Establishment"). Unlike the first three "filtering" mechanisms — which are derived from analysis of market mechanisms — flak is characterized by concerted efforts to manage public information.

Anti-Communism and fear[edit]

“	So I think when we talked about the "fifth filter" we should have brought in all this stuff -- the way artificial fears are created with a dual purpose... partly to get rid of people you don't like but partly to frighten the rest. Because if people are frightened, they will accept authority.	”
— Noam Chomsky[4]

The fifth and final news filter that Herman and Chomsky identified was 'anti-communism'. Manufacturing Consent was written during the Cold War. Chomsky updated the model as "fear", often as 'the enemy' or an 'evil dictator' such as Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic. This is exemplified in British tabloid headlines of 'Smash Saddam!' and 'Clobba Slobba!'.^[5] The same is said to extend to mainstream reporting of environmentalistsas 'eco-terrorists'. The Sunday Times ran a series of articles in 1999 accusing activists from the non-violent direct action group Reclaim The Streets of stocking up on CS gas and stun guns.^[5]

Anti-ideologies exploit public fear and hatred of groups that pose a potential threat, either real, exaggerated or imagined. Communism once posed the primary threat according to the model. Communism and socialism were portrayed by their detractors as endangering freedoms of speech, movement, the press and so forth. They argue that such a portrayal was often used as a means to silence voices critical of elite interests. Chomsky argues that since the end of the Cold War (1991), anticommunism was replaced by the "War on Terror", as the major social control mechanism. //

Chomsky also emphasises the importance of the journalists themselves in maintaining the conformity and narrowness of the media. Chomsky has argued that intellectuals, as a class, tend to fit within a narrow doctrinal system, having had certain commitments inculcated into them by their extensive education, including a general servility to power and a belief in the righteousness of the establishment.

 In later editions of Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky have also considered the question of whether the internet has substantially changed the media landscape, and therefore invalidated the model. This is what they conclude:

“Although the Internet has been a valuable addition to the communications arsenal of dissidents and protesters, it has limitations as a critical tool. For one thing, those whose information needs are most acute are not well served by the Internet-many lack access, its databases are not designed to meet their needs, and the use of databases (and effective use of the Internet in general) presupposes knowledge and organization. The Internet is not an instrument of mass communication for those lacking brand names, an already existing large audience, and/or large resources. Only sizable commercial organizations have been able to make large numbers aware of the existence of their Internet offerings. The privatization of the Internet's hardware, the rapid commercialization and concentration of Internet portals and servers and their integration into non-Internet conglomerates – the AOL-Time Warner merger was a giant step in that direction – and the private and concentrated control of the new broadband technology, together threaten to limit any future prospects of the Internet as a democratic media vehicle. The past few years have witnessed a rapid penetration of the Internet by the leading newspapers and media conglomerates, all fearful of being outflanked by small pioneer users of the new technology, and willing (and able) to accept losses for years while testing out these new waters. Anxious to reduce these losses, however, and with advertisers leery of the value of spending in a medium characterized by excessive audience control and rapid surfing, the large media entrants into the Internet have gravitated to making familiar compromises-more attention to selling goods, cutting back on news, and providing features immediately attractive to audiences and advertisers. The Boston Globe (a subsidiary of the New York Times) and the Washington Post are offering e-commerce goods and services; and Ledbetter notes that "it's troubling that none of the newspaper portals feels that quality journalism is at the center of its strategy ... because journalism doesn't help you sell things." Former New York Times editor Max Frankel says that the more newspapers pursue Internet audiences, "the more will sex, sports, violence, and comedy appear on their menus, slighting, if not altogether ignoring, the news of foreign wars or welfare reform." New technologies are mainly introduced to meet corporate needs, and those of recent years have permitted media firms to shrink staff even as they achieve greater outputs, and they have made possible global distribution systems that reduce the number of media entities. The audience "interaction" facilitated by advancing interactive capabilities mainly help audience members to shop, but they also allow media firms to collect detailed information on their audiences, and thus to fine-tune program features and ads to individual characteristics as well as to sell by a click during programs. Along with reducing privacy, this should intensify commercialization.”

The hyper-infantilised, utterly nugatory nature of the most popular new-media site, Buzzfeed, would seem to confirm this analysis, as would the generally trivial and superficial news articles produced by slightly more ‘serious’ websites like HuffPost, Salon and Junkee. This analysis is also consonant with the precipitous decline in quality of traditional news outlets like the Sydney Morning Herald as they’ve started following an internet-advertising revenue model that is wholly reliant on ‘traffic’ and ‘clicks’. Clickbait of all kinds – generic celebrity stories, inane discussions of celebrity behaviour, reposting of viral videos with superfluous synopses, commentary on episodes of TV shows or important moments within them, lewd pictures of celebrities, sensationalised grotesquery (you-won’t-believe-what-she-did-next or a-grandma-has-been-butchered-and-eaten-by-her-grandson), and highly personal, utterly vacuous op-eds – is now de rigeur for almost all formerly ‘serious’ news outlets, not just the Murdoch tabloids. The advertising model is also strongly encouraging the use of ‘integrated advertising’ – ads disguised as serious, impartial news articles – which represents a fairly Orwellian trend towards the total commercialisation of information.

It is true that one can find all sorts of very radical, very incisive and very cogent news sources on the internet, and that one can – for example – easily access the collected essays of Noam Chomsky, as well as literally hundreds of his speeches on Youtube. The internet has also enabled dissident communities to spring up, and it allows activists from all over the world to network and organise much more efficiently than they could in the past. Nevertheless, the propaganda model still survives, since the inherent corporatism of all popular news outlets has not changed. To be a popular website one must rely on advertising and a massive volume of clicks. It is very difficult for rigorous, righteous and honest journalism to meet these requirements.

To return to the general argument about money’s influence on democracy, it’s worth pointing out that there is considerable empirical evidence for all this abstract speculation about the nature of Western ‘democracy’ (but particularly US democracy). Stiglitz mentions in the preface to the second edition that $2 billion was spent in the 2011-2012 US election campaign by people in the 1%. As he then points out, inequality didn’t come up as a topic of debate in that campaign once – not even from Obama’s mouth. Another fact that would seem to explain the bank-welfare policies that have dominated Washington since Reagan (including the bail-outs after the crisis and the total lack of criminal action on reckless bankers) is that there are an estimated “2.5 banking lobbyists for every US representative”.

One study that Chomsky often likes to refer to when discussing the plutocratic nature of American society is a paper called Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America by the Princeton scholar Martin Gilens. Gilens found that the majority of the US population is effectively disenfranchised. Based on surveys of their opinions, he found that about 70 percent of the population, at the lower end of the wealth/income scale, has no influence on policy. Moving up the scale, by contrast, influence slowly increases. Finally, at the very top are those who – in Chomsky’s words – “pretty much determine policy”. Stiglitz highlights a similar kind of study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science. This found that, in most people’s ideal distribution, the top 40% had less wealth than the top 20% currently holds. Moreover, as he notes, “when asked to choose between two distributions (shown on a pie chart), participants overwhelmingly chose one that reflected the distribution in Sweden over that in the United States (92% to 8%)”.

The evidence from these studies proves that the Republicans should not be getting any votes from the downtrodden and unemployed. The fact that they do is therefore a testament to the power of the propaganda system in America. By the same token, even the fact that the Democrats get so many votes from the downtrodden and poor is a testament to the power of the propaganda system in America.

Some more evidence for the propaganda model can be found in the almost complete failure of the mainstream media to ever mention the plutocracy in America and the preference of the Democratic-establishment media (such as The New Yorker and New York Times) for Clinton over Sanders, typically facilitated by their refusal to mention the money-problem.”

A very well-cited and rigorous 2006 paper on corporate media influence can be found here: http://www.nber.org/papers/w12169.pdf. Thomas Ferguson’s most recent (and very strong) article (with collaborators) on the political influence of wealth can be found here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2817705.

We can perhaps also see some evidence of the influence of Exxon’s lobbying and influence campaigns [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_controversy#Funding_of_climate_change_denial] in the US’ higher levels of climate change denial than most other developed countries [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/18/what-the-world-thinks-about-climate-change-in-7-charts/] (though the propertarian, right-libertarian ideology of the South also encourages the conspiracy that climate change is a ruse for the imposition of global communism by left elites).

Second question: would the world be a better place if our political-economic system was more populist? I think this question is hard to answer because it’s so vague. Nevertheless, one generalisation that one can seemingly extract from studies of polling attitudes is that the public is generally more ‘left’ than the elites, even if they don’t realise it. There seems to be good evidence that people are extremely easily manipulated just by framing and language. In his review of Democracy for Realists [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/04/democracy-people-power-governments-policy], George Monbiot summarises these findings as follows: “When surveys asked Americans whether the federal government was spending too little on “assistance to the poor”, 65% agreed. But only 25% agreed that it was spending too little on “welfare”. In the approach to the 1991 Gulf war, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they were willing to “use military force”; less than 30% were willing to “go to war”.”

This does show an incredible irrationality on the part of most of the public, but it also shows that Chomsky is not completely wrong when he talks of the media’s role in “driving” benevolent feelings and natural sympathy out of people’s heads. One generalisation that one can seemingly make about studies of public policy attitudes is that the public is significantly more ‘left’ than the political leaders (who, as well as being generally far wealthier than the public, and as well as being influenced by major concentrations of corporate and financial power, also tend to be old and male). We can also see massive indirect evidence that a decline in the effect of public attitudes on public policy leads to worse outcomes in the terrible outcomes in the developed world that have resulted from the Neoliberal assault (see my other writings for more).

     To sum up my argument in this essay: Plato was right that rule by philosopher kings is ideally better than democracy, but that this argument has zero implications for the real world.

Part I is done now. I’ll get onto part II when I read Gerry Mackie’s book on why certain anti-democratic interpretations of Arrow’s Theorem are fucking stupid; I currently know all about his arguments because I learnt about them in my really excellent “Democratic Theory” unit in my second semester last year. I don’t know how long part II will take to finish.

Addendum on 28th July 2017:
I forgot to include Dewey's responses to Lippmann, which go something as follows.
1.) The cynicism about 'human nature' of the anti-populist liberal ought to lead to a profound cynicism about the ability of our  political institutions to select for the best qualified epistemic elites, or our ability to 'design' (or rather collectively engineer) systems that select for these people (I covered this one in the above, but not explicitly).
2.) If people are so stupid, irrational and bad at thinking about politics, the most direct remedy that suggests itself is improving the educational system (making the educational system more Deweyian!) (along with eliminating heavy metals from places where people live and such like) and encouraging greater civic participation (one thing that Neoliberals ignore in Mill is that he strongly advocated this kind of 'remedy', as Carole Pateman took great pains to illustrate). Political scientists researching 'deliberative democracy' have done experiments on the effects of communal deliberation on political ignorance, and the results are arguably quite 'hopeful' [no Wikipedia or blog summary of this research available; I encountered some of it in the one political-philosophy unit I've done at university. It's easy to find academic reviews]. But the anti-populist liberal vision seems not only opposed to this ambition, but corrosive to it, since they want to exclude the masses from practising the skills that might help them get better at thinking better about politics.
[Thanks to John Dewey and American Democracy by Robert B. Westbrook.]

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[1] I tend to think this description is misleading. It’s not like great Enlightenment figures were unaware that there existed stupid, brutish, superstitious, ignorant, highly tribal and fickle people; indeed, there clearly was a far higher degree of popular irrationality, superstition, ignorance and tribalism in the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th Centuries, because there was not mass public education, and literacy itself was a rare and rarefied skill. Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (though right-wing people like to call Rousseau ‘counter-Enlightenment’), Adam Smith, David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Paine, Wilhelm von Humboldt, John Stuart Mill [insert ‘Enlightenment figure’ here] all would been acutely aware that the vast majority of people within their own societies wouldn’t even have had the slightest clue what the ‘scientific method’ was, let alone have the capacity to “proportion their beliefs to the evidence” or to reason about morality based on abstract, generalised principles. Now, clearly, “rationality” was rather a buzzword when it came to the theory of human nature for many of these figures (though it certainly wasn’t for Hume or Rousseau, for example), but one has to realise two things about this: a) that the word rationality was used in a far broader sense than the conventional modern sense of Bayesian rationality (rationality as ability to avoid systematic bias and follow the evidence as best one can), and b) that most Enlightenment figures thought of human nature in an Aristotelian teleological way (remember, they came before Darwin, and even for the agnostics/atheists/Deists like Hume, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Paine, J.S. Mill, Spinoza and Voltaire, believing that there might be some kind of purpose in the universe was completely reasonable). As it was for Aristotle, the word “rationality” for many Enlightenment theorists encompassed all kinds of higher cognitive traits that were (and are, to some extent) thought to be more or less unique to human beings as a species.   If you think about human nature in teleological terms, you may well conclude that “Man is the rational animal” even if most humans were fickle and stupid, incapable of responding to reasons, guided by base instincts and animalistic drives (and so on), because you simply observe that language and abstract thought are unique features of humans as a species and you reason that cultivating these abilities must be our divine purpose.

[2] Most philosophers think that, though a preference taken on its own can’t be ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’, there is at least one type of preference-set that is objectively irrational: an intransitive preference set (you prefer A to B and B to C, but C to A). Hume doesn’t explore such things in his account (it may be that he was unfamiliar with the notion of transitivity). A nontrivial number further think that you’re objectively irrational if you have preferences that are arbitrary and self-defeating (i.e. preferring a minute of pain now and an hour of pain tomorrow to half an hour of pain now and a minute tomorrow (inconsistent with your own broader self-interest)), and many of this nontrivial number – most famously, Derek Parfit – thinks this opens the way for ethical objectivism. 

A Short Essay I wrote last year for a unit called "Models of Democracy" on Federalist 10 and Robert Dahl and Social Capital and Scale (before I read Peter Turchin, but whose ideas I pre-empted in my own abstract thinking)

In The Federalist 10, James Madison seeks to justify a particular kind of representative democracy (‘republican government’) on the basis that it offers the best chance of controlling the mischief of factions. Explain and evaluate Madison’s argument.

In The Federalist 10, James Madison argues that, as long as certain basic features of the human species obtain, there will be a division of society into “factions” with interests inimical to other factions and to the “public good”. His claim is that a republican government is the best palliative to this problem because it is the ultimate compromise: like a “pure democracy”, it can defeat minority factions “by regular vote”, and like a more oligarchical system, it has means to prevent a majority faction from gaining too much power.

In this essay, I express strong opposition to Madison’s arguments. My overall thesis is that, whether or not Madison’s arguments were justified pragmatically, they are badly flawed theoretical arguments. Firstly, I argue that he was almost entirely wrong about the faction-negating effects of size, because he ignored the role of cultural and economic unity in degrading the “mischief of factions”. This also undermines his absolute hostility to “pure democracy”, which is not fundamentally unstable in small communities or societies. Secondly, I argue that, while Madison is correct that inequality generates factions, he was seriously misguided about the inevitability of the kind of inequality that existed in his time, and wrong to overlook the simple ‘removing-the-cause’ strategy of increasing equality. Finally, since I disagree with Madison’s Platonic view that representatives chosen only from the aristocratic class can know the “public good”, I argue that factional uprisings to broaden representation are not always “improper or wicked”.

In The Federalist 10, James Madison identifies two possible types of solution to “the mischiefs of faction, “removing its causes” or “controlling its effects”, and argues that only the latter is viable. [Madison, 1787: 1]. He explains that there are two methods of carrying out the first type of solution – destroying liberty or making all citizens identical – and that both are completely untenable. Destroying liberty would be an unthinkable overstep, and the “second expedient” would be impossible, since “as long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed” [1]. This leads him to the final inference that “the causes of faction cannot be removed and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects” [2].

For Madison, the best way of controlling the effects of faction is, of course, a republican system – a system involving delegation of government “to a small number of citizens elected by the rest” over a very wide territory [2]. Madison’s central thesis seems to be that the republican system is the best compromise between a “pure democracy” (like Athens), which can defeat minority factions straightforwardly, and an oligarchy (more like Republican Rome), which opens up the possibility of weakening the power of majority factions. He illustrates this point by outlining the ways in which a republican system differs from a pure democracy. Whilst both are “popular governments” in some sense, a republic delegates government “to a small number of citizens”, and Madison believes this process will “refine and enlarge the public views” since the chosen citizens “will be least likely to sacrifice [the public interest] to temporary or partial considerations” [2-3].

The other difference between a pure democracy and the republic is that the republic is far larger. Madison believes this is a significant advantage for negating the mischiefs of factions, for two reasons: the greater number of citizens should “make it more difficult for vicious candidates to practise the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried”, and an extended sphere makes it “less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens” [3].

As I explained in the introduction, I have several problems with Madison’s arguments, and one of the biggest concerns exactly this reasoning about the ideal size of the republic. As Robert Dahl writes in his excellent 2005 paper, “James Madison: Republican or Democrat?”, “if we consider the [argument about size] as an empirical proposition in political science […] two centuries of experience since then flatly contradicts his proposition” [Dahl, 2005: 445]. Madison went so wrong, I believe, because he ignored one key consideration from his calculation: the necessity of socio-cultural and economic unity– what Robert Putnam calls “social capital” [Putnam, 1993] – for any society which hopes to avoid factional dissension. The American Civil War broke out less than 80 years after Federalist 10 was published because there was a massive division of economic interests between the agricultural South, and the more mercantile North. Today, as Dahl himself points out, some of the most successful democratic societies – arguably the least faction-prone democratic societies – are ones with relatively small populations: “the three Scandinavian countries, together with Finland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and New Zealand” [Dahl, 2005: 445].[1] As Dahl also notes, this correlation between smallness of polity and cohesion even extends to very small democratic communities. His own evidence for this comes from a 2004 analysis of town meetings in Vermont,[2] yet far more significant is the evidence from the massive anarchist literature on small-scale direct democracy: for example, the accounts of the communes in Revolutionary Catalonia, or contemporary examples of workplace democracy, such as that of the Mondragon Corporation in Spain.[3]

Madison’s failure to realise the complexities of the ‘size question’ is also what leads to his simplistic dismissal of “pure democracy”. The easier promotion of “social capital” in smaller democratic societies clearly gives part of the explanation as to why the direct democracy in 5^th and early 4^th Century Athens was able to function at all: Athens was a polity just small enough for its citizens to have a robust sense of civic purpose and unity of interest.

Of course, Madison was right that a larger jurisdiction increases diversity, and thereby probably vitiates the development of an impassioned majority faction,[4] but this only brings us to a bigger problem: that the whole argument is premised on a self-serving fatalism about inequality. After proclaiming that factions “are thus sown into the nature of man”, Madison suddenly brings up a very important truth about the role of inequality: “The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property”, which divides people “into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views” [Madison, 1787: 1-2]. The reason he doesn’t see this as self-contradiction is perhaps that he took it for granted that increasing equality (somehow) means destroying liberty. But, whatever the case, it seems to me that this tells us something significant about the subtext of The Federalist 10: at its heart, the paper is an expression of Madison’s base fear that if the American democracy was too strong, it would undermine the interests of his faction, the landed aristocracy. Indeed, Madison’s remarks in the “Secret Debates of the Federal Constitution”, which also took place in 1787, reveal thoughts along exactly these lines: “In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. [To prevent this] our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation […] to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” [as transcribed by Robert Yates, 1927 print].

As Noam Chomsky points out, Madison differs in this way from one of his main influences, Aristotle. Aristotle also worried about the poor in a democracy infringing upon the property rights of the rich, but he thought the solution was increasing equality [Chomsky, 2012: 237]. In fact, in book VI, Aristotle writes the following: “The true friend of the people should see that they not be too poor, for extreme poverty lowers the character of democracy; measures therefore should be taken which will give them lasting prosperity” [Aristotle, 1999: 147].

The extent of equality is, of course, the other major reason that the Scandinavian countries have such high social capital. It also gives us another part of the explanation as to why Athenian direct democracy could succeed at all: the Gini coefficient for the Athenian citizen population in late 4^th Century Athens has been calculated at 0.708, “more equal than Florence in 1427 (0.788) or the USA in 1998 (0.794)” [Ober, 2010: 13].

This brings me to my final point of disagreement with Madison. I don’t, in fact, believe that all factional uprisings are “wicked or improper” [Madison, 1787: 5]. Indeed, I think that factional uprisings of a certain kind have, since 1787, made our society more just. The first two waves of the feminist movement were “factional”, as was the powerful labour activism of the early 20^th Century, as well as the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Although there is always the danger of “an interested and overbearing majority”, in practice, I feel that an equally significant problem throughout history has been loosening the grip of the elites on the system, who, in reality, never possess the higher Platonic wisdom they claim.

Reference List

Aristotle (1999). The Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Batoche Books, Kitchener.

Chomsky, Noam (2012). Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Global Threats to U.S. Empire, Metropolitan Books, New York.

Clayton, Edward (2002). “Aristotle: The Politics”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed from:

<http://www.iep.utm.edu/aris-pol/>

Dahl, Robert (2005). “James Madison: Republican or Democrat?”, Perspectives on Politics, 3(3): 439-448. Accessed from:

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/3689017>

Madison, James (1787). The Federalist 10, transcript from the National Archives Online Portal: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=10&page=transcript.

Putnam, Robert (1993). Making Democracy Work, Princeton University Press.

Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787, transcribed by Robert Yates. Accessed from:

<http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/yates.asp>

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[1] It should, of course, be noted that when talking about factions in today’s context, anachronism is inevitable. I think Dahl here is using “faction” to refer to extreme parties and separatist groups – perhaps Tea Partyers, Neo-nazis, communists, etc.

[2] In particular, Frank Bryan’s 2004 book Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How it Works

[3] The best known of these accounts of 1936 Spain is, of course, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

[4] Mainstream political parties in big Western countries do their best to unite people, but even if they do, it is very often passionless, merely symbolic unity.