Quick and Belated Word on "Punching Nazis"

From the Richard Spencer incident to the present, there has been nothing but nonsense spewed on this subject from the vast majority of the left. Jesus people are stupid. It's fucking annoying. Leftists keep getting distracted by the same Red Herring (we'll see what this is in a second).
Because people are so stupid, we have to split this up into multiple separate questions (something people have clearly failed to do of their own accord).

Is it morally alright to defend yourself if you personally are being attacked by a person? Yes.

Is it true that far-right extremists won't be defeated by civil discourse and open debate? Yes.

Is it true that Hitler wasn't defeated by civil discourse and open debate? Yes.

[[Another stupid quarrel that comes up in relation...

Is it true that MLK was a proud advocate of nonviolence? Yes.

Is it true that MLK was a far more successful advocate for civil rights than Malcolm X? Yes.

Is it true that MLK spoke of rioting as "the voice of the unheard"? Also yes. ]]

Is it a good strategy for "the left" to deliberately choose to confront piddling far-right demonstrations with the purpose of taking the demonstrators on in violence (thereby supporting the far right narrative, giving extra media attention to the far right, making the far right seem larger and more dangerous than they are, and contributing to the impression that the far left is literally a physical danger)? No, it seems fucking dumb. Chomsky is correct in describing Antifa as a "major gift to the right". And it isn't just prima facie fucking dumb, there's also evidence that such strategies are as ineffective as all rational considerations would lead one to expect
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/how-to-make-fun-of-nazis.html

Is it immoral to bash defenceless people period? Should you always stop using violence when you are yourself out of danger? Yes (I think so, regardless of any opinions that may be held by the person in question.)


What's the big Red Herring? I identified it right from the beginning, and sent my thoughts about it in tweet form to Lee Fang, one of the few people on "the left" saying that the punching of Richard Spencer was probably dumb (in part because Spencer could have fallen and cracked his head open on the concrete, and then he would have become a serious martyr (also because it's not right to punch people randomly and you should try to apply ethical principles consistently)). The Red Herring is this: the fact that you can't defeat "Nazis" in civil debate implies that randomly bashing "Nazis" at protests is the way you do defeat them. Now, obviously, to anyone capable of rational thought, this is a fucking bizarre inference. It makes zero sense. But, as we know, most people are not capable of rational thought. In fact, it appears that a huge section of "the left" thinks that this non-sequitur is actually a sound inference, and it appears that most of this section think that the failure to make this fallacious inference on the part of "liberals" (used to refer to almost everyone who isn't part of the tiny fringe who use this word as a slur) is a superb case study in the poverty of the ideology of "liberalism" - a trump card for the left against the liberals, who, so the story goes, are currently flailing about in philosophical despair, all at sea in this moment of tremendous turbulence and upheaval. If I may state the obvious, a non-sequitur shouldn't be regarded as a trump card.

So how do you defeat the "Nazis"? Don't violently confront them at their tiny demonstrations. Just stand far away and mock them. And campaign for Bernie Sanders or whatever. No life isn't a movie.  Bad luck.

A Particularly Devastating Kind of Absurdity

I am particularly tormented by the dilemma of the immorality of confessing great distress and emotional pain... though I also see the comic absurdity.
Consider this scenario: you tell a friend, knowing that you are correct, that you have less reasons to keep existing than them, in both the sense that your death would be an extreme emotional burden to a drastically smaller circle of people, and also in the sense that your life (as you experience it, as a living person) seems to be a lot less actively pleasurable than theirs, since you lack certain things that they have (like companionship). How do we morally evaluate such a confession? Is it a moral or immoral thing to do? I submit that this is clearly a totally selfish act. It is selfish because it's the kind of thing - like confession of suicidal ideation or whatever - which makes the person being told, if they care about you a lot, really unhappy and really distressed. (And if they don't really care about you but care about you enough to not be totally callous, it puts a big burden on them nonetheless.) Such confessions may be admirable if you admire courage, because it seems fair to say that they generally require a high degree of courage: there are evo-psych-type reasons why letting down one's guard in the sense of abandoning the pretence of the falsely high status level is not an easy thing to do, and why the thought of doing so can bring on anxiety (especially for males, for probably evo-psych and social reasons). Yet, courage aside, the effect of such a statement is to place a tremendous weight on the interlocutor, and a drain on their time and emotional reservoirs.
Now suppose that - as sometimes may happen - the interlocutor replies to such a statement by feebly trying to dispute that claim or, even more feebly, simply making some expressive speech act in denial (either because they are being totally irrational and really think that you are stating a falsehood, or because they hope that you will be irrational and take their response seriously). Now, here's the thing: if you choose to treat the response as an actual attempted counterargument and demolish it, then your level of selfishness in this situation has only increased.
And, of course, if you point out to your interlocutor that it would be selfish for you to demolish their feeble response, even though you know you can, that is also selfish.

It strikes me as a very devastating kind of absurdity that when one is extremely miserable, telling the truth becomes selfish.
And let me just say that I know that this is a trite thought, like all thoughts.

Carceral Routines

Benefits of conscientiousness, adopting a carceral routine and systematising one's life (writing down tasks, starting to use a calendar and spending a lot of time at the library): better marks in mathematical subjects (that's the prediction).
Costs: less thinking, less writing, less reading.

Ever since I moved next to the university, I have become far more conscientious (partly, too, it helps that I am living opposite extremely conscientious friends who have imprinted themselves on me). I am even running every second day now, on top of the studying thing.

But I also feel kind of hollowed out. My thoughts are largely terrestrial now. I have lost touch with the superlunary (partly this is an iPhone thing too).

I am like a worker ant now, or some such metaphor seems appropriate.

Getting started with VPNs

Download NordVPN

Getting started with LaTeX for university assignments

Here is one fairly good way of getting started with LaTeX:
1.) Download the standard LaTeX distribution for your operating system (MacTeX or MiKTeX or TeX Live)
2.) Download TeXstudio
3.) When writing your first .tex file for maths or physics or engineering homework on TeXstudio, use this guy's shit (https://github.com/jdavis/latex-homework-template) as a basis (if you copy and paste all his formatting code, you'll have to install a bunch of packages in order to create your first PDF - but you don't need to do this beforehand. When you try to create the PDF you should get prompted to install all these packages, one at a time).

Until an hour ago, I was using Atom with the Atom LaTeX package.. This was ok, but TeXstudio is a big upgrade in terms of utility (I mean one cool thing about the Atom LaTeX package is that I was able to create PDFs with code that literally wouldn't compile in TeXstudio. Don't ask how.)

Taste, Status, Pretension

https://newrepublic.com/article/134094/tyranny-taste

As this article explains, taste is inextricably bound up with class and social status. Not in a straightforward way, of course. For instance, for teenagers, it tends to be most fashionable to look bohemian, slovenly (the right kind of slovenliness) or thuggish (in short, donning clothes that signify a rejection of the mores and niceties of polite society), and to steep oneself in 'underworld' or 'rebel' culture. As everyone knows, teenagers or young adults who wear clothes associated in the adult world with wealth and prestige (suits, shiny watches), listen to classical music, speak in a very formal register (etc) typically do not have high social status - at best, they acquire social status within very small social circles. (But this still fits the pattern. More on this later.)

For a long time, my friend HR and I were obsessed with calling people "pretentious". It was our go-to insult for more than a year, and a massive number of people were caught on the receiving end (though never in person). We were teenage boys getting seriously into poetry and literary fiction, both very obsessive fans of Radiohead (and HR, with an artist father, has always been an aficionado of fine art, with very particular tastes), but one of our main conversational tropes was the vituperation of "hipsters". Obviously, the syntax in that sentence you just read has the effect of making us look ridiculous, but, to be clear, I'm not trying to undercut our belief that we weren't hipsters, because we really genuinely weren't hipsters (no, please believe me! I'm not at all concerned with saving my 15/16-year-old face (so to speak)). Evidence: we had no particular interest in coffee or cafes, we didn't dress or groom ourselves in any particular way (we sneered at people who cared about fashion), we didn't go to concerts by indie bands, we didn't practise photography (when we were together, we took no photos), we did not own smartphones or have Instagram accounts, we did not get obsessed with Tarantino films or Seinfeld (or whatever) (in fact, I despise Tarantino films and Seinfeld), we did not fetishise food (in fact, we spoke of our distaste for people who fetishise food), we reviled 'excess' sociality and exhibitionism (we were both great admirers of the Robert Lowell poem "For the Union Dead" thanks to our year 10 English teacher, Dr Windon, the man who unwittingly brought us together and thereby changed our lives), and our private dialect bore no correspondence to any dialect attributable to any known subculture; instead, it was a very strange jumble of formal syntax, *highly* archaic verbiage and very vulgar slang (we both had a thirst for memorising very old English words, such that we both now test in the 99.99...th percentile for vocabulary size (HR's vocabulary is larger but I wouldn't be surprised if we both turned out to be in literally the top ten of Australian 20-year-olds in terms of English vocabulary size)). We sneered at people who believed fashion was an art form, rather than simply a means of displaying social status, we sneered at people concerned with having good profile pictures and getting lots of 'likes', we sneered at people who sought popularity, we sneered at people who liked photography and took photos of themselves with serious, 'deep' looks in dilapidated urban environments (or whatever),  and we sneered at people who pretended to have intellectual depth but in actuality spent all their time socialising and on their phone (habits which precluded intellectual depth, so far as we saw things at the time (there was, to be fair, a logic to this - for example, we are now the two best undergraduate philosophers at USyd lmao)).
Were we, though not hipsters, nevertheless "pretentious" ourselves? Well, I mean, we were unambiguously supercilious and haughty and aloof (we would probably even concede this at the time - certainly aloofness). But were we pretentious? Most likely, you will think "Heck yeah". My own take, however, is that that would be simply an expressive speech act - and expressive speech acts are dead-ends. I think instead that this question can't be given a serious answer until we have an 'account' of pretension that is satisfactory in the sense that it clearly 'captures' the 'core' cases and its exclusion of certain edge cases is 'well-motivated'...
Now, on the surface, one fact that imperils the attempt to construct such an account is that, for those people in the habit of assigning the property of pretension to people or actions by people, the extension of this predicate varies so significantly (the set of objects (people, actions) designated pretentious varies greatly from designating person to designating person). What I will suggest, though, is that this variability of application does not show that 'pretension' is an extremely nebulous concept unfit for philosophical analysis, but tells us instead something about the way this word 'works' - in particular, the connections between the invocation of pretension, taste and social status. I'll attempt to illustrate this point with an anecdote.
After our exams finished, my friends (S and M) who live opposite me at my new abode in Forest Lodge (they live in a small flat, but it has a better kitchen than my terrace), kept inviting me over to watch an 'X-Men' movie with them, until we had finished virtually all of them (they didn't show me Deadpool or Logan). We started with X-Men: First Class, then we went forward in time through the X-Men trilogy to which that belongs (with McAvoy, Lawrence and Fassbender), then we watched The Wolverine (my favourite), then the early 2000s X-Men movies. I had not seen any of these movies before, but watching them was not a revelation: I did not feel the least pang of sorrow or regret that I had 'missed out'. Au contraire, I feel entirely vindicated in my prejudice that these comic book movies are for children and that they contain very little of interest to someone with a mature mind. Unfortunately, M and S - especially M - seemed to be disappointed with and critical of the fact that I saw these as childish movies, and lamented the fact that I couldn't enjoy them the way they did. (Not to give the impression that I was a real dick about it, though perhaps if I was a better, more altruistic (LESS PRETENTIOUS) person I could have literally just pretended that I was enjoying it at the same level of intensity as they.)
Why do I mention this? Because M recently used the word "pretentious" to describe me. Whilst I think this is understandable, I don't think this is 100% fair. From his perspective, I seem pretentious, because he thinks that I am more similar to him than I in fact am. He thinks that, if I 'let my guard down', then I could really enjoy these movies for their visceral thrill. He is mistaken. I am the guard. I don't mean to say, of course, that it is a great burden to watch the X-Men movies (and I did more or less enjoy The Wolverine) - they're compelling enough. But I never lose the impression when watching them that I'm witnessing something fundamentally silly and childish. The characters are unreal, nothing makes sense, and the dialogue is extremely dull and predictable. (Saying this, of course, makes me look even more pretentious from this kind of perspective.)
This brings us to my big thoughts about "pretension" and status:
To those who can't fathom certain 'higher' realms of aesthetic appreciation (to those who can't fathom liking Mahler, or being profoundly moved by a painting, or possessing an infatuation with long hikes through wild landscapes), people who claim to experience things in those realms will look fraudulent and will therefore seem "pretentious". At the same time, people never reach these realms of aesthetic appreciation without an awareness that it distinguishes them from the unwashed masses, or without an awareness that it gives them a certain higher status in the world of culture. Because learning to appreciate 'higher' art forms is difficult, and requires a lot of background knowledge, it is also the case that when one is first starting out, one necessarily has to be motivated by little else than a desire to be part of the elite caste.
Does that mean everyone who enjoys high culture is pretentious? No, I wouldn't produce such a pointless speech act. I also don't mean to get all 'relativistic' about pretension here. I personally think what makes someone derisibly pretentious is an obsession with exhibiting and displaying their idiosyncrasies, rather than trying to fit in with the people around them (assuming the people around them aren't horrible people). Some people clearly do this in a very egregious way. But I am more forgiving now. In fact, this brings me to the denouement.
Something that has happened to me over the last couple of years is that I've become significantly less liable to use this word "pretentious" than I used to be. Why? Because I've realised how easy it is to abuse. I know from personal experience how throwing it out willy-nilly can so easily seem justified and non-nasty. But I now recognise that it is usually nasty, and the person called "pretentious" usually doesn't deserve it. I've also become a much more understanding and slightly less judgmental person. Also, self-interest: why would I use a word that I know people are so willing to turn against me?
You can't really judge people for seeking status; it's like the fundamental social drive.

Addendum, added 8th of August:
It occurred to me today that there is one common kind of derisible music-related pretension which I really ought to have discussed, and for more than one reason. It is the phenomenon of a person who listens to 'indie' music which is fairly melodically and rhythmically simple and formulaic (whether highly popular or not) holding a blanket distaste for 'pop music' (I don't think it's pretentious to hold a blanket distaste if you literally only listen to classical music). I reckon you see this often. The reason it's such a great example of pretension is because it seems like such a great example of fraudulence: a person fitting this description is deceiving themselves in order to distinguish themselves from others (this is actually overly simplistic, as that article suggests). Basically, if you like simple indie music, you no doubt find certain pop songs pleasurable and could, if you changed your mindset (perhaps not as easy as it sounds), enjoy listening to certain pop songs on repeat, in a playlist. A related musical phenomenon is the phenomenon of rejecting a band like Coldplay because everyone you regard as cool thinks it's uncool, even though you secretly can still take pleasure from the music.
One reason why I think I ought to have discussed these kinds of pretension is that they are personally relevant to some extent. In particular, I think I have become less subject to both of them over time. For example, I now make sure to add to my massive 3000-track Spotify playlist current pop songs which I enjoy and which give me a sensation of pleasure which is not merely akin to eating fairy floss or a chocolate bar (this usually equates to 'replay value'). Lana Del Rey's new song "Lust for Life" with The Weeknd and Katy Perry's "Chained to the Rhythm" are two recent examples (I also just added The Weeknd's "I Feel it Coming" and "Starboy" to this playlist).
As for Coldplay, I actually still keep the first three Coldplay albums on my Spotify playlist (along with early Muse albums which I added in 2013). I think I may remove Parachutes at some point, because that album is particularly insipid and watery - but early Coldplay is really not unpleasant, and I feel no pressing need to remove it from my playlist...
Anyway the reality is I'm saying all this because I think whoever reads this will think I'm super cool and high-status for being so different from everyone else that I've like totally transcended pretension while still having super diverse and interesting taste and whatever... I"m barely joking. I'm a huge asshole. We all are. As I said before, status is like the fundamental social drive. Especially for males. And males like me are desperate for validation in these kinds of areas...

Yeah this is all very bleak.

Update, 17th November 2017:
https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/931477133821607937

Sub-part ii of Repudiating Anti-Populism: Summary of Democracy Defended Chapter 2

Summary of Chapter 2 of Democracy Defended

·       The first section of this chapter seeks to “establish further the influence of Riker and his Rochester School”, giving a detailed historical narrative. [23]

·       Mackie makes concrete Riker’s importance in the field: “At one point, Riker had published more refereed articles in the American Political Science Review, the premier journal of the political science profession, than any other figure (Miller, Tien, and Peebler 1996) […] A New Handbook of Political Science (Goodin and Klingemann 1996) cites Riker, his student Shepsle, and co-author Weingast as three of the eleven most frequently referenced authors discipline-wide (31) […]” [23-24]

·       Mackie explains the origins of Riker’s movement: The Rochester school movement “was born when in the 1960s the Xerox Corporation, headquartered in Rochester, New York, richly endowed the University of Rochester to upgrade its social science departments; Riker was hired to do that job in political science, and over time brought the department from nowhere to one of the most successful in the country (279). Among its other contributions, Riker and the Rochester school “used Arrow’s result to question the efficacy of democratic government in producing outcomes that are somehow publicly beneficial,” they say (286).” [24]

·       “Although the Rochester school is not he majority force in the political science discipline, it is the modal force in it.” [25]

·       Mackie starts explicating some of the criticisms that have been made of this sweeping intellectual movement and rational choice theory in general. Mackie thinks rational choice theory has been abused, but he does not seek to condemn it in general terms; he is not on the side of those absolutely hostile to mathematical and economics-influenced political science. “A cover story in The New Republic, “Revenge of the Nerds,” was devoted to Riker and his followers (Cohn 1999). I relate, but do not endorse, some of its contents. The article is an attack on rational choice theory in general, which Cohn identifies with Riker and his Rochester school; but that is not quite correct, there is also the Virginia school, the Bloomington school, the left-liberals formerly centred at the University of Chicago, and individuals not otherwise classified […] The insiders are said to maintain a unified front, to cite and to referee one another’s papers, to preach that their approach is the only legitimate method in political science, and to establish litmus tests for faculty hiring, according to Cohn’s disgruntled and anonymous informants. “‘Because they are not as broad-minded, they had the advantage,’ says one senior scholar at Harvard. ‘They’d support any candidate who did rational choice, oppose any non-rational-choice scholars,’” Cohn relates.” [25]

·       Mackie describes the origin of the ‘post-autistic’ economic movement. “In June 2000, economic students in Paris rebelled against their rigidly formalist curriculum. Among the reasons they gave were:

1.)    We wish to escape from imaginary worlds!

2.)    We oppose the uncontrolled use of mathematics!

3.)    We are for a pluralism of approaches in economics!

The students opposed the use of mathematics as an end in itself, deplored the domination of economics by highly ideological neoclassical theory, and they rejected what they called its repressive dogmatism. They favoured intellectual engagement with concrete empirical realities, a pluralism of approaches, and science rather than an obscurantist scientism. The rebellion, which came to be known as the Post-Autistic Economics Movement (www.paecon.net), spread through France, the Continent, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Parallel declarations emerged at Cambridge University and at a Kansas City conference. The French minister of culture appointed a commission to investigate student concerns, which eventually recommended reforms endorsed by the students.” [26]

·       Mackie moves onto explicating the “doctrine of democratic irrationalism” promoted by Riker and his followers. He makes clear once more that he is not opposed to rational choice theory as a research programme: “The theory of democratic irrationalism is a species of the genus rational choice theory, but I criticize the species and not the genus. The theory is one justification for laissez-faire, or perhaps for total anarchism; if successful, my criticism eliminates that irrationalist justification for laissez-faire or anarchism, but not other justifications.” [27]

·       He further expands on his pluralist philosophy of political inquiry and gives further endorsement of formal methods in political science: “I see the study of politics as an interpretive enterprise. A plurality of methods contributes to that enterprise, and the methods of rational choice theory are especially but not exclusively useful for describing and explaining some collective actions, strategically interdependent actions, and the character and consequences of voting rules. Although the terms are used informally and interchangeably, social choice theory is simply the formal description of economic and political aggregation, and is indispensable even if some of it is sterile and scholastic. I cannot imagine doing without noncooperative game theory which in the right hands yields rich insights into social life, along with testable, and supported, predictions (for example, see Mackie 1996); although some formal work is irrelevant and some applied work is unimaginative.” [27]

·        Mackie makes an important point about assumptions of egoism necessary for the models not necessarily implying that one believes that humans are egoistic: “Although many rational choice practitioners believe that their method requires the assumption of egoism, it need not, and I wholeheartedly reject the assumption that humans are exclusively motivated by egoistic concerns. I agree with Elster’s Davidsonian account of rational choice theory in the narrow sense, as an initial assumption, in interpreting individual human action, of the consistency of beliefs and of desires; and I agree with his claim that there is no alternative to it as a set of normative prescriptions (Elster 1986a).” [27-28]

·       “The scientistic aspirations of the Rochester school are dashed by Green and Shapiro’s demonstration of methodological pathologies such as post hoc theory development, vague or slippery predictions, and selective use of evidence. These pathologies are not necessary implications of the use of formal models in political science, however.” [28]

·       Mackie clearly has concerns with the power of rational choice theory in political science, in comparison with other methodologies: “If the effect of rational choice on the study of politics is to keep too many scholars and students away from historical knowledge, contextual understandings, exposure to multiple cultures, broadminded appreciation of human motivations, the formulation and testing of competing hypotheses, or the facts and feelings of politics, then its costs would exceed its benefits.” [28]

·       Mackie finally speaks explicitly about ideology and the inherent fraudulence and philosophical wrongheadedness of the ‘positivist’ methodology in the social sciences: “Although there are socialists and left-liberals who do not contest Riker’s irrationalist [democratic irrationalist] theory, its primary appeal is to the economic right. Public choice theory, in the narrow sense of the term, is the assertion by the Virginia school that government should be limited in order to avoid damaging policies enacted by self-seeking interest groups, politicians, and bureaucrats, and the assertion by the Rochester school that government should be limited because democratic outcomes are arbitrary and meaningless. Shapiro (1996, 43) remarks that “the implicit counterfactual in this tradition is that private action is essentially benign,” rather than anarchic chaos. For the public choice tradition, says Shapiro, collective action is only necessary in instances of market failure, but there is no rational way of organizing collective action. Remarkably though, as I shall later show in detail, the Arrow theorem applies to the market, there are strong analogues to the political chaos theorems in economic theory, and the market, too, is subject to strategic misrepresentation of preferences.” [30]

·       “It might seem curious that irrationalist theory cavils at hypothetical and unproven deviations from the democratic ideal of equal influence in politics, but neglects actual and proven distortions such as the campaign finance problem in the United States (Drew 2000). Kutner (1996, 347) claims that “Public Choice theory is almost entirely silent on the disproportionate purchase of influence by big money.” The irrationalists do not criticize democracy in practice, I surmise, because practical defects are remediable. The remedy may be difficult to accomplish or involve an unacceptable tradeoff with other values, but remedies are conceivable. Riker’s point is not that democracy is imperfectly approximated in practice. Riker wants to establish that democracy has defects that are irremediable in principle (also see Weale 1999, 140).” [30]

·       “My defense does not pertain to the whole of democracy and liberalism. Rather my attention is confined to a single question of major importance: the possibility of accurate and fair amalgamation of opinions and wants.” [31]

·       Mackie begins to explore Riker’s writings in more detail:

“Riker’s (1982) volume opens with a discussion of the normative features of democracy (adapted, with radical changes, from his 1953 book on democracy in the US). Riker tells us that the democratic ideal is one of individual self-realization and individual self-respect. The democratic method is the free and equal participation of each citizen in the political life of the community. Hitherto democratic theory has assumed that democratic ends (ideals) can be attained by democratic means (or methods), but Riker says that this assumption may or may not be true. Social choice theory will help us decide whether or not the assumption is true, whether or not democracy is unattainable. The Platonic and Marxist conceptions of justice were not attainable, he says, because in each case the means could not reach the end. The same question should be asked of democracy as of those conceptions of justice: do its means attain its ends? […]

There are two interpretations of voting, the liberal and the populist, which Riker implicitly treats as exhaustive and exclusive. Warning: Riker’s usage of the two terms is idiosyncratic, polysemic, and inconsistent at crucial points in his argument. The liberal view is Madisonian, Riker maintains at this point in his narrative, and the populist view is Rousseauvian. Riker eventually concedes that his liberalism would not be endorsed by Madison, and I will shortly show that his populism would not be endorsed by Rousseau. The liberal view, says Riker, is that the purpose of voting is to control officials, and nothing more. Madison, he writes, held it necessary that republican government derive all of its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and sufficient that it be administered by officials who hold office for limited periods (Federalist No. 39, in Hamilton, Jay, and Madison n.d. (1937)/1787). […] All democrats accept the necessary condition, but only Riker’s “liberal” democrats accept the sufficient condition, he claims. […] Populism assumes popular competence, that the electorate is right. Liberalism assumes that the electorate can change officials only if many people are dissatisfied or hope for a better performance. All liberalism requires is that officials can be rejected by election; however, in order to avoid rejection, officials do act so as to avoid giving offense to future majorities; the union of those many possible future majorities is often most of the electorate, hence liberal officials are approximately agents of the people, and thus liberalism satisfies the democratic ideal of self-control, Riker concludes.

For the populist, according to Riker, liberty and hence self-control are obtained by embodying the will of the people in the action of officials. Rousseau is the exemplar, or perhaps the demon, of populism. Rousseau posited a general will that is the objectively correct common interest of the incorporated citizens, which is computed by consulting the citizens, Riker claims. “What the sovereign people, when speaking for the public interest, want is justified because the sovereign people want it and because it is their liberty” (12). […] The hurried reader might reject populism as portrayed by Riker because it is so painfully obvious that democratic decisions can be factually and morally mistaken. Who could be so silly as to believe that actual democratic decisions by definition precisely carry out some “general will” and thus that they are always true or right? The hurried reader would be attracted to Riker’s liberalism which, at this point, requires only that the decisions of democratic officials approximately satisfy the opinions and desires of the people. The hurried reader would be mistaken.” [31-33]

·       Mackie corrects Riker’s misrepresentation of Rousseau:

“As is well known, Rousseau distinguished the general will from the will of all […] The general will, true or right, is independent from the will of all, which can err in attaining the general will. The will of all, actual democratic decision, might err because it is mistaken about some fact of the matter, or might err because it aggregates partial interests rather than judgments about the general interest […] Thus, for Rousseau, and for the younger Riker, actual democratic decisions variably approximate rather than define the general will or public good. The democratic public good is defined independently from the output of actual democratic procedures, these days perhaps as the output of an ideal procedure, or by subjective utilitarianism, or by objective measures of welfare such as of health, nutrition, longevity, or by appeal to ethical intuitions, or by secular extension of religious revelation […] Riker’s populism is an absurd doctrine, one not even endorsed by its supposed champion Rousseau. Why is Riker tempted into this error about Rousseau? In his first chapter he maintains that his liberalism approximates the public good, and if it were sufficient for populism only to approximate the public good, then his distinction between liberalism and populism would collapse. If there were no distinction between the two, then Riker’s argument against the populism he wants to attack would apply as well to the liberalism he wants to defend; and then the final conclusion, according to Riker himself, would be that democracy is wholly indefensible (241).” [33-34]

·       Then there is “the third source of error in identifying the general will: the basic problems of aggregating opinions and desires introduced in the previous chapter. Because different voting systems may yield different outcomes from the same profile of individual voters’ preferences, he argues democracy is inaccurate. Different methods of aggregating individuals’ fixed choices may yield different group choices. Furthermore, although one or more voting rules may be better than other voting rules in a particular setting, there is no one uniquely justified voting rule across settings. Finally, from the outcome of any vote it is not possible to infer enough about citizens’ preferences to determine whether that outcome is a true and fair aggregation of those preferences. Next, Riker continues, given a fixed voting system, then democracy is meaningless: the outcome of voting is manipulable, and it is not possible to distinguish manipulated from unmanipulated outcomes because of the unknowability of private intentions underlying public actions. […] the Arrow’s theorem shows more generally that, assuming all logically possible individual orderings over alternative social states, no method of aggregating individuals’ transitive preference orderings guarantees a collective preference ordering that is transitive. Therefore, even the same method of aggregating individuals’ fixed choices may yield different group choices, as the choice arbitrarily or manipulatively cycles from one alternative to the next. Associated with the possibility of cycling are the possibilities of unfairly manipulating the outcome by means of strategic voting, agenda control, and introduction of new alternatives or dimensions to the issue space.

The liberal interpretation of voting, says Riker, accepts that democratic voting and discussion are inaccurate and meaningless. The only democracy that withstands the scrutiny of “modern political science” (Riker and Weingast 1988, 396) [LOOOOOOL] is the liberal institution of regular elections that permits both the rejection of tyrannical rulers and the “circulation of leadership” (Riker 1982, 253), preferably supplemented by the liberal constraints of divided government […]

One problem with Riker’s “liberal” justification of voting is that his proposed constraint is no constraint at all and thus officials would do as they please (see Cohen 1986, 30). True, if there is a random chance of getting a ticket for driving faster than the speed limit, then my speeding is constrained. But if there is a random chance of getting a ticket whether or not I am driving faster than the speed limit, then I will do as I please.

In the first chapter of the volume, Riker’s liberalism approximates the public good (11); but in frank contradiction by the last chapter of the volume there is no such thing as a knowable public good, the connection between the democratic electorate and its officials is random, and Riker has to admit that Madison would not endorse his conception (242-243). […] The instrumental and negative purpose of participation, to restrain oppressive rule, is thwarted under the liberal interpretation fo voting, because the removal of officials is not only imperfect, but wholly random, and officials are thus unrestrained. The intrinsic and positive purpose of participation, to further the individual’s self-control, is thwarted, because there is no knowable relationship between the individual’s vote and the collective outcome. Liberty is unguarded, because there is no effective restraint on officials. Equality is mocked, because any one decision can be unfairly manipulated, and hence all decisions could be unfairly manipulated, if the older Riker’s argument is correct.

[…] We need not be cornered by Riker’s definition of “populism,” however. We are free to adopt a more standard view, that it is sufficient for the outcomes of actual democratic procedure to approximate a democratic ideal of the public good. In this volume I will endeavor to show that, in principle, democratic procedures adequately approximate the public good.

If the reader is a bit vague about the distinction between populism and liberalism, some concrete examples may help. A present-day manifestation of populism, according to Riker in 1982, is Marcus Raskin of the American New Left, and a present-day manifestation of liberalism is William Rusher of the American New Right. Populism is typified by American progressivism and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal (Riker 1982, 63), and Riker’s liberalism would roll back progressive-era and New Deal reforms and re-establish the minimal state of the Gilded Age (Riker and Weingast 1988).” [SO MUCH FOR VALUE-FREE, EH?] [34-36]

·       Mackie reviews and criticises Riker’s “basic argument pattern”:

“Riker’s several lines of attack against the populist interpretation of voting all ultimately depend on the following pattern of argument:

(1)   Because of cycling, strategic voting, agenda control, and multidimensional issue spaces, it is possible that the outcome of any one vote can be manipulated.

(a)    If underlying preferences must be indirectly inferred, then it is possible in any one instance of voting for there to be undetected manipulation;

(b)   Revealed tastes, actual choices such as votes, are directly observed, but true tastes, the underlying preferences, must be indirectly inferred;

(c)    Undetected manipulation is possible in any one instance of voting.

(2)      

(a)    If undetected manipulation is possible in any one instance of voting then it is possible in all instances taken together;

(b)   Undetected manipulation is possible in any one instance of voting (1c);

(c)    Therefore, in all instances taken together, underlying preferences cannot be inferred from votes.

(3)    

(a)    If underlying preferences of individuals cannot be known, then it is impossible to aggregate such preferences;

(b)   Underlying preferences cannot be known (2c);

(c)    Therefore, it is impossible to aggregate underlying preferences; any such claim is meaningless.

Notice that by substituting “communication” for references to voting in (2), the amended argument would prove the “meaninglessness” of all communication, including political discussion.

Riker claims not only that undetected manipulation is possible (1c) but also that it is frequent, but the frequency claim is not essential to his argument. Moreover, the frequency claim verges on self-contradiction: if true preferences cannot be known (2c), then it would not be possible for any observer to estimate the frequency of manipulation. Also, the claim that actual choices are directly observed but that underlying preferences must be inferred (1b) is heuristic in some investigations but it is not fundamental […]

Nevertheless, we may for the sake of argument grant Riker his claim that preferences are inferred from choice (1b). His fatal error is the move from the claim that undetected manipulation is possible in any one instance to the claim that in all instances taken together it is therefore impossible to infer preferences from choices (2a). I will argue that (2a) is defective and thus that (2c) does not follow; it is false that in all instances taken together, underlying preferences cannot be inferred from votes. What does my conclusion do to the claim that it is impossible to aggregate preferences? Riker’s third argument is that if underlying preferences are unknowable, then it is impossible to aggregate such preferences (3a), or if p then q. I say that underlying preferences are knowable, not-p. In the present context, then, I do not show generally that it is possible to aggregate preferences. I only show here that if it were impossible to aggregate preferences then the unknowability of preferences would not be the reason for such an impossibility.” [37-39]

·       “Riker’s claim is that if communication is limited to voting choice, then it is impossible to know underlying preferences. This may be so for each of our votes taken alone, but from that it does not follow that it is so for all of our votes considered together. A series of votes on similar issues would begin to generate enough data to allow inference of underlying preferences, presuming that the individual level logically consistent beliefs, their correspondence to objects, and transitively consistent desires, that are sufficiently similar.

For example, suppose that we observe that a legislator votes for alternative C over alternative B in the first stage of a plurality runoff among alternatives A, B, and C, and that alternative C wins the most votes in the first stage. Then in the runoff between C and A we observe that the legislator votes for A, and that A is victorious in the runoff. So far, we have observed that the legislator chooses A > C > B. The next day a binary vote arises between alternatives B’ and C’ and the legislator votes for B’ over C’, contradicting yesterday’s vote for C over B. At this point an observer can generate a number of hypotheses. Perhaps the legislator blundered or is irrational. If we assume that the legislator’s actions are rational, then one plausible hypothesis is that his true preference is B over C and that yesterday he was engaged in strategic (also termed “sophisticated”) voting: the legislator and his allies knew that the chamber’s distribution of preference orders was such that if they voted sincerely for B in the first stage B would go into the runoff and defeat A their more favored alternative, so they strategically voted for C in the first stage. Contrary to Riker, the possibility of manipulation has not obscured our inference of the legislator’s underlying preferences, rather, just the opposite, our knowledge of the possibility has enabled the inference of preference ranking. Now suppose that that we are able to make a third observation and a fourth observation: the legislator votes for B’’ over C’’ and B’’’ over C’’’. That strengthens the hypothesis that the legislator’s true preference is B over C.

The foregoing is merely from assuming internal consistency of desires and understanding the logical properties of voting rules. Considerations of external consistency may improve the inference of an individual’s preference rankings. Suppose that alternative A is for high social-security payments, B is for medium social-security payments, and C is for low social-security payments. Then on the first day’s vote we would be able to hypothesize that voting for C over B was strategic: although there may actually be occasional contexts where it makes sense to prefer high payments to low payments to medium payments, generally someone will prefer high over medium over low. Or suppose that alternative A is aid to the third world, B is labor organizing rights, and C is costly imperialist war memorials. From what we know about the coherence of ideologies we are again able to hypothesize immediately that the legislator’s true preferences are A > B > C and that his vote for C (imperialist war memorials) over B (labor organizing rights) was strategic in nature.

[…] Finally, public discussion of surrounding the votes provides even more data with which to “triangulate” on a reading of others’ underlying preferences. Suppose that when the legislator voted for C over B he said out loud in a speech that his true preference is for B over C and that his vote was strategic in order to thwart the unfair attempt by the opposition to manipulate the outcome via agenda control. His announcement itself could have been a strategic lie, but it is a piece of evidence that gains strength from other considerations, for example if he later votes for B’ over C’, or if he is known never to lie about such things. […]

The sceptical political theorist infers preferences behind choices in every human situation, evne, as it turns out, in making his case against the possibility of doing so. Riker uses the very methods of inference I have recited in his case studies that purport to demonstrate pervasive political disequilibrium and obscurity of preferences. I will argue that Riker’s inference of preferences in each of these cases was clearly mistaken, but that does not change my point against him on the knowability of preferences. My point is the transcendent one that he must assume that preferences are knowable in order to attempt his demonstration that they are not. Further, the fact that I am able to present reasoning and evidence that supports one hypothesized set of underlying preference rankings and undermines another hypothesized set of preference rankings shows again that inference of underlying preference from surface manifestations is not only possible but also normal and uncontroversial everyday occurrence. […]

Riker’s […] analysis of the Powell amendment makes an implicit auxiliary assumption that elected representatives represent the interests of their districts. He goes on to confidently identify five “natural political groups” (!), almost the exact number of representatives in each group, and the preferences of each group over three alternatives (Riker 1986, 118-122). He seems to have forgotten, among other things, that on his account there is no such thing as a district interest that could be discovered by electing a representative. It is a delicious irony that his analysis is forced to assume that Congressional districts have identifiable interests […] In his attempts to show the empirical relevance of Arrow’s logically possible result, Riker is forced to assume the empirical irrelevance of Arrow’s result. In another analysis, of the Wilmot Proviso, Riker confidently identifies eight factions and proposes an inference of the preferences of each over three alternatives: “There were not enough votes to ascertain preference orders, but it is easy to guess what they were” (Riker 1982, 227). Finally, from minuscule data in an obscure letter written 1,900 years ago by Pliny the Younger, Riker is able to identify and estimate the strength of three factions in the Roman Senate on an issue, involved in a process of voting that resulted in the socially better outcome, despite rampant manipulation […] There is one unfortunate difference between the sceptical philosopher and the sceptical political theorist. The philosopher would be ignored if he recommended that human institutions be designed as if his conclusions were true, but the political theorist might wrongly be heeded.” [41-43]