This is an underappreciated point about why democracy works so well. People wonder: How is it that a system in which political disagreement is aired publicly, people are fighting all the time, leadership changes all the time historically produced better outcomes than systems where one person can be in charge, set long-term plans, try to do everything in this consistent rational way over time? Why does that produce better outcome, better economic growth, higher levels of innovation, stronger militaries? Democracy has been consistently shown to be better. And a really important part of that story is that because democracy prizes loyalty to the political system as an abstract ideal rather than to particular cadres of leadership, it allows you to select for the people who are the best at any particular job.
It doesn’t succeed always in those—no political system always elevates the best people at all time—but it has a better track record in ensuring that people from all different political persuasions, all walks of life can access and participate in collective decision-making. And that has led to historically high qualities of governments in democratic systems. When authoritarian movements inside of democracies take power, they try to make them more autocratic. And that brings these features of authoritarian politics into a democratic system so it ends up resembling in its functioning something that has generally, even setting aside the morality and the desirability of democracy as a normative goal, a much worse track record at things like national security over time.
Sargent: In addition to what you’re saying there, though, I want to try to bear down on this point. As you mentioned earlier, in a sane polity, what we’d be seeing is them saying, You know, we really screwed this up. They’d be admitting error. They would be saying, We are going to try to fix this now. Instead, they just wall out any and all opposition because they think that what Trump wants above all—and rightly so, as he does want this—is a no-surrender posture that places his infallibility at the center of everything. That, I think, is a hallmark of the type of governments you’re talking about, and it gets at why we’re getting terrible outcomes. We’re in the middle of this crazy crisis where we’re fighting over the meaning of “war plans” versus “attack plans” instead of fixing the problem. Isn’t this all an outgrowth of the type of authoritarian populism you’re talking about?
