The Danger of Republics
If you are a bunch of people who want to band together for common purpose, you need a few things, according to sociologists. You need a legal and economic system, in addition to a political system. I think of these as the big three, but there are certainly other cultural or social systems, but with the big three you’re off to a good start. They must also be woven together in a sensible way so that they work well together. These systems all revolve around who has authority and how they can impose it. In many ways, the strength of the American republic has been the framers incredibly insightful attitude of striking the right balance of those three systems.
Anthropologists separate political systems into those which are centralized and those which are not. This is easy to grasp because those which are not collectively centralized are all clans and tribes. They revolve naturally around families and are, by definition, small and lacking in much absolute power. When you read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, he walks you through the stages of human governance. After bands and tribes, you move on to chiefdoms, sovereign states, alliances, empires and leagues. All these forms of government help to show how increasing size necessarily leads to increasing complexity. In America, divergent geography and the limitations of travel probably led us to form our states as logical self-interested units of governance that initially were non-threatening to the crown and then evolved into units of common interest for the formation of the American republic.
In addition, what Diamond helps contextualize is how these governance styles all have as an unstated outcome (if not an actual goal) of benefiting a specific group or category of their constituents. This means that structural inequality is a constant threat to political systems. This can take many forms that can be passed off as cultural or social systems, but it can also become very blatant and attract the negative label of corruption. No one is ever openly in favor of corruption, even if it benefits themselves. People understand that corruption eventually leads to dissent and dissent leads to instability. The trick is to allow self-interest to exist without becoming excessive and thereby deemed corrupt. A very delicate balance in all circumstances, but certainly helped by a system formed of states as a respected unit of a broader republic.
We all like to think that humankind is always evolving to a more enlightened state, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest the opposite. Human nature has plenty of examples of the adage that the more things change the more they remain the same. We are seeing lots of the same evidence right now in the Congressional impeachment hearings. Republicans have studied the demographic charts, the climatology evidence and the economic statistics and concluded that their day of dominance over the governance of their realm is waning. This is particularly so for the “inner” states of the republic, those that are less outward facing to the rest of the world.
It is also a demographic reality that birthrates of white Anglo Saxon cultures are not only declining societally, but also biologically (meaning biology is reinforcing our cultural preferences). Meanwhile, non-whites are going in the other direction. The charts are irrefutable that brown cultures are rising, and white cultures are receding. The tolerance for this demographic change is simply greater in the outward-facing states since they have had longer to adjust to the outward exposure which has been where demographic change has first occurred. It is not the only variable in this dimension, but human nature suggests that adjusting to cultural/ethnic/religious differences does occur gradually and coexistence can result.
The dominant white cultures have their economic base deeply rooted in post-industrial businesses that are hydrocarbon-based. There is some argument that new information technology importance and some new chemical science is beginning to eclipse that, but the time-compounding realities still leave the monetary strength in the hands of those who grew to dominance with hydrocarbons. Therefore, as simplistic as it may seem, I believe the strategy for rethinking is a combination of generational pressure (get the grandkids involved in changing Grandpa’s mind) and the economic reality of intercepting change by diversifying to new technologies that are green.
The incentive for the existing power elite is to hold onto power by perpetuating current policies and dominating in whatever ways it can. To the extent the governance system can be bent and corrupted to that end, the means are being justified in exceedingly absurd ways. Just watch the Republican Congressmen doing Socratic gymnastics as they try to question considerably better educated and ethically rooted witnesses. This is one of the hardest realities to change. It requires reason to prevail over desperation. History shows us that giving a cornered beast a polite way out is the least injurious path to rapprochement.
There must be important benefits to centralized collective governance for humans to favor (or maybe tolerate) and support bigger and bigger political systems, which by their very nature, are more prone to inequality and corruption. The reason, in a word, is that size matters. When people talk about antitrust initiatives and breaking up organizations like big banks, I am always wondering if the trust-busters realize the loss of competitive advantage and national power embodied in their initiatives. I’m sure there are valid consumer protection (or taxpayer protection) rationales for these initiatives, but the challenge of that is to balance those detriments against the reality that less democratic states will continue to push scale to their advantage (hello, China). So, what is an enlightened person to do? Favor bigger government with bigger tendencies for corruption and bigger business to promote cultural dominance? Or should an evolved person favor smaller governance structures and more controllable business scale and suffer the ultimate humiliation and subordination to the bigger, stronger, mostly-authoritarian regimes of the world? These choices suck.
I’m not enough of a historian to validate this conclusion, but I think it is what leads to alliances, empires and leagues, which are the forms of governance that dominate the far end of the governance spectrum. If we could eliminate the biases of ethnicity and religion, which are difficult but not impossible to do (even if we had to default to a separate but equal time-honored approach, as much as that rings hollow to most of us), perhaps this is the best theoretical answer for a system to pursue common purpose while preserving parity…and avoiding authoritarian rule. I think of the United States as a successful example of this form of alliance of republics. The European Union is another and its survival, while questioned by many including myself at times, seems more and more important to the stability of what we think of as the greater western world.
The problem that always seems to stand in the way of successful republics and certainly successful alliances is the primal nature of mankind, the very equal and opposite side to the enlightened side that makes man strive for perfect collective governance. The baser instinct of man is, unfortunately, what always seems to foil our lofty goals. It is the inherent danger of republics.