On the rationality of being politically “brain-dead"

Swimming to Cambodia and Back with David Mamet

May 2002.  My friend would do the unthinkable: Vote for Jacques Chirac.

Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen had clocked in as the top-two vote-getters in the French presidential election of April 21.  With no candidate nabbing more than 50% of the vote, these two candidates would proceed to a run-off.  The run-off would proceed in early May.

Everyone had expected a run-off, but not one featuring Le Pen.  Chirac had secured 19.88% of the vote.  The Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin had secured 16.18% of the vote.  The big surprise was that Le Pen had edged out Jospin, having clocked in at 16.86%.  All the correct-thinking people were shocked.

Many of these same people demonstrated in the streets over the course of those two weeks.  The protestors were not people of Algerian or (otherwise) North African heritage.  They weren’t people who maintained heritage from other parts of Franco-phone Africa.  They were affluent white people.  They were disproportionately young, affluent, white people.  In a 2017 retrospective, France 24 would observe that,

Within days of the vote, popular French rocker Damien Saez released “Fils de France,” or “Sons of France”, a zeitgeist-capturing anthem blasting “suicidal amnesia in the land of the Enlightenment”. In the song, a chorus of young people chant “shame on our country, shame on our homeland, shame on us, the youth, shame on tyranny” -- incredulous that the National Front could advance in France, home of “human rights, tolerance, the Enlightenment, the Resistance."

May Day rallies five days before the run-off vote would muster 1.3 million people in cities across the country – considered at the time a record turnout, going back to France’s Liberation from Nazi occupation. Demonstrators wielded anti-FN banners and placards; never again, they exclaimed. Some held up the little yellow hand inscribed with “Touche pas à mon pote”, or don’t touch my buddy, the iconic symbol of tolerance created by French anti-racism group SOS Racisme in the 1980s; many less subtle placards likened Le Pen to Hitler.

In the end, on May 5, Chirac won a second term by a landslide, 82.2 percent to Le Pen’s 17.7.

The self-anointed agents of enlightenment protested peacefully.  They carried precisely crafted banners.  They were out to protect democracy—their concept of democracy.  It amounted to a Continental version of Our Democracy™.

Their concept of democracy was (is, remains) Rousseauian or (the same thing), Wilsonian. It’s about consensus.  It’s about getting everyone to agree on doing the right thing, and that makes sense, because the “right thing” is obvious.  Anyone who doesn’t agree to go along with orthodoxy (the “right way”) is either disingenuous, corrupt, or stupid.  More than that, Rousseau had explicitly instructed that the authorities should censor the speech of such people, for they might otherwise lead others away from the rightful path.

And so, the righteous people protested.  They had likely voted for one or another candidate of the nominal Left in the first round of the election, but this time they all voted for Chirac.  Chirac secured 82.2% of the vote.  Le Pen’s vote share hardly changed.

One might wonder if the business of comparing Le Pen to Hitler amounted to meaningless commentary, but Le Pen had (I am told) said things that would have explicitly invited the comparison.  Le Pen’s big draw, recall, involved immigration, but he went further than merely calling for the attenuation of immigration.  He explicitly called for deporting illegal immigrants.  He went so far as to call for deporting immigrants “by train.”

The bit “by train” was intended, of course, to bring to mind images of another age (Vichy France) and of other undesirables (Jews) being rounded up and shipped by train to death camps further east…  The language of “trains” did thusly make for a puzzling bit of rhetoric.  Why align one’s political movement with such imagery?

That said, Le Pen’s performance did derive from democratic process.  He secured under 20% of the vote in the first round.  And he secured under 20% in the run-off, and that was that.  Thus, had there really been much of a threat to Our Democracy™?  No.  Not with the requirement that the winning candidate must secure an absolute majority of the vote.[1] 

July 2023.  Protests in France unfolded over the course of the first week of the month.  Immigration remains an issue, but this time the great body of protesters nationwide were comprised of peoples with connections to the Maghreb (North Africa west of Egypt) and, one may guess, to parts of the Levant. 

The proximate cause of the protests was the police killing of a young man, well known to the police, who, at the time, was operating a vehicle without a license.  This young man’s heritage derives from the Maghreb (Algeria).  The real cause of the rioting, according to the usual suspects, is racism, racism, with a little more racism mixed in.  The real cause, according the other usual suspects, is the failure of what, in Germany, Angela Merkel would recognize as the “multi-kulti” project.  Yet other observers question what has motivated the multi-culturalism project.  One rationalization has been the aging of the populations in the most developed countries: We need to bring in younger people to do the work that younger native people are less likely to do, and there are proportionally fewer such younger people to contemplate doing (or not doing) such jobs in the first place.  But, how, the skeptics reasonably wonder, does bringing in unskilled people remedy labor shortages?  And, if labor shortages are the motivating problem, then why not set up “guest worker” programs to deal with such problems?  Indeed, why go through this charade of admitting economic migrants under provisions that admit scope for “political asylum” if, in fact, the motivation is economic migration?  The authorities have proven unwilling to advance an internally consistent rationale for their immigration policies.

It hasn’t always been this way.  Post-war Germany implemented a guest-worker program through which skilled and unskilled workers from (mostly) Southern Europe and then Turkey showed up.  Were these migrant workers much like the characters who populated the film Pane e Ciccolata (Bread and Chocolate, 1974)?  Nino Garofoli endeavors to establish himself in Swiss (not German) society, first as a waiter at a very high-end restaurant.  While his own restaurant career falters, he does get to observe, with some bitterness, the success of a Turkish colleague, who does well enough as the paterfamilias to support his entire family which remains ensconced back home in Turkey.  This fellow ends up doing so well that he becomes situated to invite the entire family to join him permanently in Switzerland.

That is not to say that the migrant experience in Germany (or Switzerland) had been seamless.  The long-term status of migrants, especially Turkish migrants, had been a long-running issue, but after Angela Merkel’s Germany threw the doors open to uncontrolled migration from Syria and elsewhere in 2015, we haven’t been hearing much about Turks who have been long resident in Germany.  Incomplete the guest worker program might have been, why did Germany, and the whole of Europe, not adopt a version of it post-2015?

I have no sharp ideas about the incomplete career of guest worker programs in Europe, but let me pose an idea about the larger politics of multi-culturalism in France.  It relates to the David Mamet’s idea about being politically “brain-dead.”

In an essay titled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-dead Liberal’” (March 11, 2008 in The Village Voice), Mamet recounts how he had composed “a play about politics…”

.. which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.

The play, while being a laugh a minute, is … a disputation between … the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

The “liberal view” ostensibly being what?:

As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

And, yet:

[T]he synthesis of [the liberal] worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted [is]: that everything is always wrong.

Hence, a question: How could everyone be good at heart and yet everything persisted in being wrong?  Mamet asks himself just that.

[I]n my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, ...  And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? …

Are people “basically good,” … except all those people in politics and business?  So, not all people are good but rather society is composed of both “the exploiters” (in Lenin’s parlance) and the good-but-hapless victims of the exploiters? 

I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are … a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.

I recommend David Mamet’s entertaining, short essay, and perhaps Mamet has subsequently produced other essays that further elaborate his points.  But, what exactly are those points, for one could suggest that his essay makes fleeting contact with a range of big issues?  For example, is “brain-dead” intended to suggest a kind of thoughtless, autonomism with which, say, a randomly-selected voter responds to policy prescriptions?  Does that voter even respond to policy prescriptions, or, rather is that autonomism only responsive to grand narratives?  More pointedly: Why does the brain-dead “Left” or brain-dead “Right” appear to vote, again and again, for the same policies and the same stagnant coalitions with the expectation that, somehow, things will be different this time?

I am still working out my thinking about these things, but let me suggest a formative outline:

1.  Vision versus Implementation

Behaving like a brain-dead automaton programmed to respond only to certain stimuli—and thus voting for the same, exhausted, grand vision for how society should be made to work—may be almost rational in that the political market-place only offers grand visions.  And the market-place only offers grand visions, because grand visions sell.  And grand visions sell, because the question of implementing grand visions remains ever and always underappreciated. 

Implementation matters.  Understatement.  If implementing the orthodox policy prescriptions were easy, then we could just march into Ukraine and impose an enduring peace under the right terms.  More generally, why not just ban war?  War imposes so many costs on everyone; why not just get rid of it?

One reason we can’t, of course, is that it could be difficult to secure agreement between erstwhile warring parties about what would constitute the right terms.  People might be willing to fight over the terms.  They might, oddly enough, be willing to wage war.  They might be willing to wage a protracted war, costly to both themselves and others, as a way of bargaining over the terms of the peace…  Perhaps von Clausewitz—“War is politics by other means”—was on to something.

Thus enter the Bad People, in David Mamet’s telling, who must be the ones “always” making “everything wrong.”  The Bad People don’t go along with the “right terms,” and perhaps these are the same people who, in Rousseau’s telling, fail to go along with orthodoxy, because they are either corrupt, stupid, or misinformed.  Bad People frustrate the implementation of the Right Policies, because they’re bad.  Are they not the ones who should be exiled “by train”?

Dare I appropriate this metaphor, but the Mamet of 2008 seems to have “broken the binary”: people are not so much entirely good or entirely bad but rather have this way of factoring their parochial self-interests into their behaviors.  Those behaviors might be bad, by some measure, but the pursuit of self-interest could also generate good things.  (Just ask Adam Smith.)  Mamet then seems to suggest that what we need is not a centralized authority that tells us what is good or bad and then endeavors to impose its concept of the good but rather a system of decentralized exchange that allows everyone to just “work things out” as they go along.  Hence the appeal to the Constitution and constitutional governance.  Which leads us to:

2.  Democratic Process versus Democratic Outcomes

Progressives identify democracy, as in Our Democracy™, with specific outcomes.  Outcomes that deviate from the Right Outcomes are bad, Fascist, worse than anything Hitler would do.  Classical liberals, meanwhile, identify democracy with democratic process.  The Classical Liberals understand democratic process as something that will go some way toward implementing “equality of opportunity.”  Progressives, however, don’t perceive any use for democratic process, because they’re interested in implementing “equality of outcomes”.  (These days they call it Equity™.)  If you’ve got the Right Policy Objectives, then who needs “democratic process.”  Indeed, if equality of outcome is the orthodox policy objective, then we shouldn’t frustrate its implementation by having to deal with messy, democratic processes.  Democratic process merely affords the Bad People more opportunities to frustrate the implementation of the Right Policies.  Democratic process is the stuff of crypto-fascism.

The Khmer Rouge understood this, and they were enthusiastic proponents of Equity™.  They were going to dictate the Right Policies, and, if some number of (mostly Bad) people would end up being swept away through the course of implementing those policies, then that would amount to a small cost.  At worst, some number of eggs might get cracked in making the Equity Omelet.  At best: Eliminating Bad People might, on net, be a good thing.  So, to recount: The Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975.  They set the clock back to Year Zero, and within days of first marching in to Phnom Pen, they then marched everyone out of the cities and into collectivized agricultural communities.  Everyone would enjoy Equity™ by virtue of working side-by-side in the fields and living in government-assigned hovels.  “Angka [The Party] will provide!”

The productivity of the agricultural sector subsequently collapsed, and that precipitated the starvation and deaths of millions, but, again, that was just part of the cost of implementing the Nirvana of Equity on Earth.  Totally worth it in the view of the Right-Thinking People.  Oddly, even the neighboring Communist Vietnamese thought that the Khmer Rouge program was a little much.  They invaded in 1979—Year Four of the Khmer Heaven on Earth—and kicked the Khmer Rouge out.  All the hapless souls who had survived the great culling could then get down to the business of cleaning up the mess and properly mourning their dead.

3.  Natural Rights versus Manufactured Rights

How do the proponents of Our Democracy™ get off on declaring that failure to implement Equity™ is undemocratic, the stuff of “Fascism”?  I am going to suggest that documents like The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) provide some view into the mindset.  I am also going to suggest that the document itself reflects a kind of schizophrenia of the sort with which Mamet explained that he had been afflicted.

The first twenty or so articles of the Declaration pertain to “natural rights”: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship and so on.  These things map largely into the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments) to the US Constitution.  Recall the process in 1787: the delegates to the Constitutional Convention came up with processes that would govern how the new central government would operate.  Basically, the question was how do you govern the government? A traditional solution would be to assign governing to a class of experts—they might call themselves “Philosopher Kings”—who, on paper, just happen to be endowed with all of the best qualities and temperaments for governing. That is the kernel of the Platonic, Rousseauian or Wilsonian concepts of government. And, if anyone doubts the qualifications of the ruling class, then conjure up a pantheon of gods (or the One God), and claim that the ruling class has been anointed by the gods.

Right after sending the text of the new Constitution to press, the delegates realized that they had left out any content about actual rights.  They were interested in setting up a central government while at the same time setting up processes that would mitigate abuses of natural rights by that same central government.  These rights were understood to be “natural” in that everyone was endowed with them.  Government might yet infringe those rights, but government couldn’t take those rights away.  But, what to do about the prospect of government failing to respect those rights?  (Again, how do you govern the government? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) Setting up the processes of governing was one thing, but the Bill of Rights would go some way toward proscribing what government could do.  To wit:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

And that was just the first of the ten amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights.  Meanwhile, The Universal Declaration identifies much the same portfolio of natural rights as those catalogued in the Bill of Rights, but, by Article 22, it deviates from enumerating what government should be proscribed from doing to a listing of policy outcomes government should be affirmatively obligated to pursue.  Take, for example, part 1 of Article 25:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Everyone wants everyone to enjoy a good standard of living and to (thus) be able to take care of himself and make the most of life.  But such declarations invite government to do things.  Such declarations invite any volume or scope of mischief. They invite government to define “adequate” standards and then to go attempting to impose them.  And, yet, defining standards is one thing.  Endeavoring to satisfy such standards is another, because satisfying them may prove to be infeasible and, no better, will involve taking resources from some people and shuffling them in the direction of others.  But, there may never be enough of other people’s money and resources to satisfy (possibly) ever increasing but infeasible demands to satisfy increasingly generous “standards.” 

Consider, for example, the state of healthcare in 1955.  The American President, Dwight Eisenhower, suffered a heart attack.  His healthcare involved six weeks of bed rest.  Six weeks of rest may not be a trivial thing to someone who might be facing the prospect of six weeks of lost income, but, in 2023, would we understand bedrest alone as adequate “healthcare,” or would the authorities have updated the standard of care to something much more elaborate?  But, how much more elaborate?  Who decides?  Who decides what constitutes the “adequate” standard of care?

It gets worse in 2023.  The Biden administration has demanded that insurance companies cover the costs of “gender-affirming care,” Because Rights.  Gender-affirming care, recall, includes the chemical or physical castration of boys, and the sterilization of girls.  Why anyone would demand to be mutilated is a puzzle, but proponents have asserted rights to it and have demanded that other people pay to satisfy these manufactured rights.

Suffice to say that “standards” may amount to moving goalposts, and the demands to move goal goalposts may be especially strong, because politics.  There is always political demand (and receptive political supply) for more, more, and more.  So, for example, access to “healthcare” (whatever that moving target is) is a manufactured “right.”  Housing is a right.  Insulation from the vicissitudes of life is a right.  Free access to opiates and opioids (synthetic opiates) is a right.  Unfettered migration is a right.  The demands to manufacture rights are ceaseless, and anyone who objects is a Fascist.

Blessed we are in America that the Constitution restricted itself to negative rights—to telling us what the central government should not be able to do—as well as to a set of (mostly) natural rights.  Note the mischief, however, that manufacturing rights for access to some set of poorly defined stuff (“healthcare”, “housing”, “good compensation”, …) enables.  Telling the central authorities that they have to affirmatively provide stuff encourages the central authorities to provide more and more stuff.  The central authorities end up with license to crowd out more and more private initiative and we end up with what?  The socialization of everything?  Throw in demands for Equity™, and the central authorities may update their standards around it.  Maybe we don’t end up with the Khmer Rouge dream of a Year Zero, but we might end up being like South Africa, Venezuela or Zimbabwe. 

*     *     *

The second round of the 2007 Presidential election in France pitted the nominally “Gaullist,” “center-right” Nicolas Sarkozy against the nominally socialist Ségolène Royal.  The winner would succeed Jacques Chirac.

A friend explained to me that she might perceive more affinity for the policy platform advanced by Sarkozy’s party, but she would be voting for Royal.  It was no contest, because the vote for Royal accorded with a vote “from the heart.”  And, why not, for a vote for the Socialists would amount to an affirmative vote for the enlightened concept of government as provider of an adequate standard of living for all.  (Might one not hear echoes of “Angka will provide”?)  Voting against Royal would amount to voting against “human rights, tolerance, the Enlightenment, la Résistance!”  That would make for an emotionally fraught proposition. It would like betting against one’s team in the World Cup, the Superbowl or the NCAA tournament—hard to do.

Admittedly, it’s not obvious that everyone goes into the voting booth having re-read The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but, among French elites, France has its brand, a kind of technocratic Sweden-between-the-Channel-and-the-Mediterranean but with better weather and better food.  At the same time, it is not obvious that rioters in the streets have read anything about “cultural Marxism” or “the Frankfurt School” … nor even Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961 by Algerian Franz Fanon) about the colonial experience.  The elites vote for a Chiliastic vision of a gentle and comfortable Year Zero where everyone’s needs are “adequately” provided for, notwithstanding the apparent fact that the Chiliasm (Year Zero) always remains just beyond the next election cycle.  There is always more work to do. The struggle against “the Fascists” continues.  And government loves that, justification to do ever more work.  Vive la Résistance!

My sequence of formative propositions is that (1) David Mamet’s concept of being “brain-dead” involves voting for the enlightened vision of Year Zero, year after year after year, but (2) being brain-dead can make a lot of sense if one doesn’t perceive difficulties in implementing the vision; and, yet, (3) appreciating that implementation is a real problem might reveal that certain aspects of the vision may be infeasible or, worse, may involve the opposite of “Pareto-improving” moves—to wit, the destruction of the livelihoods and well-being of a lot of people not favored by the enlightened regime; further, (4) failure to appreciate the problems of implementation can motivate a lot of demands for government—and, more often than not, government has proven willing to satisfy demands for more government with supply of more government; (5) Demand and supply for more and more government get dressed up in the language of manufactured rights, not in the language of natural rights; (6) Demands to respect natural rights, as David Mamet figured out, amounts to demands for government to “stay out of the way” and to thus admit scope for people to “work things out” on their own.

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[1] We can see that the design of voting procedures matters.  A requirement of absolute majority screens out fringe, fluke, freak winners in a given election.  But, can not requiring absolute majorities yield fringe governments?  Specifically, on paper “first-past-the-post” processes—that is, processes that assign offices to the candidates who secure the largest share of votes in a given election—can yield winning coalitions that might be comprised of fringe candidates.  There is some question, then, whether parliamentary elections in both Canada and Inger-land have sometimes yielded just such governments.  It turns out, for example, that Canada is ruled by a coalition that has maintained not more than 3/8ths support in the broader electorate.  And, yet, that government rules as if it maintained a robust mandate.