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I think it's worth thinking about a long term distribution of outcomes in a democratic system. It's a dynamic process, how does it evolve, what are the summary

I think it's worth thinking about a long term distribution of outcomes in a democratic system. It's a dynamic process, how does it evolve, what are the summary statistics? Well, we know there is some autoregression, some reversion to the mean, some rich time structure. But crucially, it's an online learning system, with a decaying memory. Voters forget populists are bad, and vote for them from time to time. Then one of two things will happen: either we're all wrong and populists are actually ok, or they really are terrible, they do their terrible stuff and eventually get ousted, with voters memory refreshed. It's not that it's a good thing, rather it's baked into how democracy works. Same as winters are baked into the progression of seasons, and there's no point despairing about them every year. So it's a "let it rip", not as a vindictive response, but rather that's a sad but necessary part of democracy.

archagon 2y ago
Well, no, those are not the only two options. Another option that we've already seen play out in a number of democracies worldwide is that a radical populist embeds himself in the government together with some die-hard loyalists, then destroys all checks and balances against him and neuters the opposition by leveraging the executive like a scythe. For democracy to be preserved, political players have to have respect for democracy as a prerequisite. The Heritage Foundation and their oligarch friends have absolutely no interest in that, and the rest of the Republican party mostly just nods along while collecting their paychecks. "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."