constitutional autocracy: the alternative to democracy, polarization, factionalism, bias and dysfunction

If liberal democracy has failed in the West, it would be no surprise if it failed largely because political participation drives factionalism -- as James Madison notably observed right at the start of the US project. But in the debate over whether liberalism has failed and should therefore be replaced with autocracy -- which seems to me a false dichotomy straw man intended to bias the solution in favor of techlords and emperors -- I haven't seen any advocacy for constitutional autocracy, the autocrat constrained by the rule of law. I mean, we don't have a direct democracy, we have a constitutional democracy with a bill of rights that protects the individual from mob rule. Why shouldn't the autocracy promoters devote their attention to a system of likewise constrained autocracy? 

When I mentioned something of the sort to a friend, he objected that he'd rather not be ruled by a Trump or Musk. He's a smart guy, but this objection seems contradictory to me. We live in a so-called liberal democracy and here we are ruled by Trump and Musk...and soon to be ruled by a bunch of techlords who show no concern for humans at all except maybe as consumers. 

And how did we come to ruled by Trump? Because of the polarization facilitated by liberal democracy, a zero-sum two party system that divides voters by identity, not policy. Go to Cairo, Egypt, and you will find no political polarization. Everyone knows their government is a military dictatorship that serves the military alone and the military owns everything. The ordinary Egyptian well knows their government doesn't care much about them. The consequence of this broadly understood knowledge: ordinary Egyptians take care of each other, as if they were one big family. When times are good, they tolerate Sisi and look for the silver lining; we're stable, construction is up. When inflation rises, everyone agrees Sisi is an idiot, resents the stability and criticizes the construction. I see something of this among Russians. They're not happy, but they're not hating each other the way the secular middle-class Istanbula hate the religious conservatives. The pretense of participatory democracy is not an unalloyed good. And if it's a mere pretense, then it's surely a net bad. 

One wonders whether a constitutional autocracy -- one that grants freedom of speech, for example, and a right to health care, a job, a home -- would get us a lot closer to solidarity, well-being, and greater accuracy in our debates than our fractious and dysfunctional democracy.  

I pointed out to my skeptical friend that Singapore and China seem more functional and less abusive than US democracy. China hasn't conducted a war since 1979 while the US Democratic Party regime, which he reservedly supports, rejected the 2023 Chinese peace plan for Ukraine even though its first principle, "respect sovereign borders", was a clear slap in the face of Putin and seemed to be a clear friendly gesture towards the EU, a big market for China. The US remains as much a military "empire" as Russia, while China's regime seems to be "make money, not war". 

He feels that if only our media were improved, the quality or our democracy would rise.

But in a class-distinct society, we all live in an information-confirmation bubble based on social location; the professional class in its bubble assumes improving media will benefit civil discourse by reforming media in the professional class' own image. Now, it could be the professional class and its economists and political scientists have better information than the Right. However, in our zero-sum polarized society, members have already chosen what they want to believe based on their social location, not based on truth. (Just look at what the Fox watcher thinks of mainstream media, and the NYT's reader thinks of Fox.) So "improving" media information will merely drive an audience to other sources, as we've already seen in social media with Joe Rogan, Carlson, Fuentes, Yarvin ... too long to list, which says something important about the market for it.

Teaching the sociology of false beliefs over the past few years has taught me that the dilemma of free speech — the Scylla of allowing lies or the Charybdis of censorship — can only be solved from the bottom-up, not from media sources that are captured by their audience. Unfortunately, accurate information is tied to that market so information, even when true, is tagged with socio-economic status. NYTimes readers are never persuaded by Fox News perspectives even when they are accurate, and Fox News watchers are never persuaded by NYTimes perspectives. On the contrary, NYTimes reader finds Fox information or spin as evidence of its depravity and the Fox watcher finds the Times’ spin equally depraved and misguided. It’s all a game of socio-economic confirmation myside bias. The media’s problem is not its relation to accuracy, it’s a market failure of its audience capture — the consumer drives the market, even when information itself is the commodity.

Untampered regression to the mean and crowd-sourcing are the only means out of that market failure of a polarized zero-sum politics. Here's what I see: The media sources of influence on the public can only be understood by looking at the motivated reasoning differences between the chosen media audiences, on the one hand the educated elite respected class — the professional class members that reap the most from their society, economy and governance and are most invested in its society’s success — and on the other, the non elite class, the class disrespected by the elite and disparaged by the prestige values established in the mainstream of culture. That non elite class seeks peer approval by rejecting elite spin and embracing complete distrust of elite information sources. Conspiracy theories give them street cred as being smarter and more insightful than the elites who believe mainstream “propaganda”. The audience of conspiracy theories often view voters as chumps. 

Regulating media implies top-down censorship, but who fact-checks the fact checker? And when mainstream media is duly chastised, its audience will turn to social media.

I want to say, the free speech dilemma will never be solved through improving media. News media is a market failure. A solution can only begin with understanding the zero-sum game of class difference: the sociology of false beliefs, whether those beliefs be leftist nostrums or rightwing conspiracies, the self-interest of the virtue-signaling class at the economic top or the solidarity among the respect-signaling class at the cultural bottom. I tell my friend that above all, understanding and solving the dysfunction begins not through concourse with one’s ideological peers at the top but socializing extensively with the cultural, non professional, alternatively educated bottom.

A solution to both solidarity and good information must come from the distributed bottom, not censorship from the top or from the professional class. I don't know whether Galton's original observation of the wisdom of the crowd plays a role in the solution, if there is a solution, but surely we should be looking for such bottom-up solutions. Observers smarter than me should be able to come up with possible solutions to try, if they would just focus on it. One possible solution is scrapping the zero-sum politics and constructing a constitutional autocracy that protects the entire people without engaging them in the politics. 

Full disclosure of hypocrisy: I'm a monthly donor to The Intercept because if we lose investigative journalism, then nothing remains but propaganda and clickbait. I read Right-wing magazines more than Left-wing ones, mostly because the Left is so familiar and predictable that I don't need to read them, while I feel it's important for me to keep up with what's bothering the Right so I can understand it better. But I support investigative journalism only on the Left-liberal side -- I just couldn't possibly bring myself to give money to the Right. I recognize that's my bias but have to accept my bias: it's me.