Democratic Radicalism vs Liberal Radicalism
A Note on Buterin et al’s “Liberal Radicalism”
Read the postscript to this article.
“Liberal Radicalism: Formal Rules for a Society Neutral among Communities” Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig, and E. Glen Weyl (September 2018)
“How democracy, which is essentially a theory of internal balance, can adapt itself to cover these greater issues, is one of the most challenging political problems ever presented to the mind of man. Needless to say, the immense size of modern states has carried it far beyond the point at which it was meant to be left by Aristotle. Meanwhile, we must guard ourselves against treating the problem as simpler than it really is.”
L P Jacks (1916) “Our Drifting Civilization”
“In many contexts, a sponsor with capital wishes to stimulate and support the creation of public goods, but is ill-informed about the appropriate goods to create.” Thus begins an ambitious and intense introduction to a funding principle, and to a system “that is as flexible and responsive as the market, but avoids free-rider problems.”
The authors concede that their proposal “may, at first blush, seem strange or abstruse,” but in my world as well as theirs, being described as strange or abstruse is a compliment. Strange and abstruse is not the problem with “LR,” however; and though I am strongly tempted to tackle the paper by flagging each dubious assumption and commenting on each irksome line, I will instead respond obliquely. For a smart summary analysis of Buterin et al., see cryptowander’s 5 Septembr 2018 article. The postscript to this piece is an introduction to LP Jacks and his 1916 article.
Thirty or more years ago, I sketched a scheme for what I called the “tax ballot.” This was a hasty bagatelle from my youth, and the gist of it was as follows: citizens would receive a form every three years, allowing them to choose how their contributions to state and federal income tax would be used. Each citizen would control precisely where their tax dollars went. The idea was to take allocation out of the political process and away from our elected officials, leaving them to focus on building productive relationships with their communities, and lawmaking.
The Internet was in its infancy, and though I assumed that computers (such as I understood them) could crunch the numbers, I hit a wall when I began thinking about the logistics of how this could work. I never pursued the line of thought beyond one very rough draft of a very naive essay, about which I remember very little. What I do remember, though, is wrestling with the problem of overfunding and underfunding. What if a majority of people were rabidly hawkish, and wanted 80% of their tax dollars to go to the military? What if too few people wanted their money going towards education? That would be a disaster.
And that’s what I liked best about the project. A tax ballot wouldn’t achieve “near optimal distribution” of tax dollars (whatever that would be), but it would drive home beautifully what I believed (and still do believe) a large part of democracy is really all about: coping with the wild resource-allocation lottery that inevitably arises when individuals within a massive collection of diverse peoples try to get things to go their way, especially when they forget the legitimate interests of their neighbors and neglect the bigger picture.
Democracy is a warts-and-all proposition: we struggle to find it beautiful right up to the moment that we actually do, and when we do it is because of rather than in spite of the imperfections. Democracy — one person, one vote — is the opportunity for one shop clerk to contribute to getting things as wrong or as right as one CEO. Democracy is punitive in nature; but it is also a hopeful venture. It is the opportunity to experiment, make mistakes, and learn from them. It works only when a people enjoys the liberty to talk openly and freely with one another about how we should get it less wrong next time around. To ensure that we do not punish ourselves too harshly, democracy encourages us to get to know our neighbors’ values and understand their claims, and it demands that we explore with one another various and alternative perspectives on “the big picture.” It’s a lot of work, and frankly it is often unpleasant business [1]. If I had to pen a tagline for democracy, it wouldn’t be along the lines of Liberty and Justice for All. It would be more like Good luck, Chuck and Choose your mistakes wisely.
In an open society — one in which most individuals really do value toleration, compassion, and bedrock principles like these — we’re expected to agree (tacitly) to bump along with what we each think are the chronic follies of our fellow citizens. That’s the deal. We take sides, and sometimes we abdicate civic responsibility and vote along party lines rather than on the issues; but at the end of the day we agree to accept the foolhardiness of the electorate, which we all agree never gets things perfectly right.
Optimal? The “optimal” is nothing more than better — as in, better than last time. That’s just how it goes.
It’s possible, I suppose, to describe my tax ballot as “pro-decentralization,” insofar as my plan would take allocation away from a “center;” but I’d reject that characterization. What it is, is robustly and radically democratic. Not in the sense of empowering the masses, or aiming at “consensus” (that great chimera); but in the much narrower sense of being individualistic and communitarian at the same time: my tax contribution, and therefore my decision as to how we spent it; we the people look at how well or how poorly we’ve funded our public goods, we the people live with the consequences of our individual decisions, and we the people try not to destroy ourselves with poor choices next time around.
Wisdom of the crowd? Surely not. Democracy, at least in the case of a large diverse population, is about the unwisdom of the mass. That, I suppose, is one of the things LR has set itself against. The spin on Quadratic Voting seems to support the demi-wisdom of the enlightened minority, though, not We the People. If I understand the subtext and implications of LR, the authors are punting a hard-nosed schematic for a post-Democracy protocol: LR is a sketch for how voluntary congregations (one’s hip peeps) may achieve near optimal goods-realization within the turbulent protoplasm of non-voluntary aggregations (the tragically unhip society we’re placed in). It is a very forward-looking and visionary proposal.
It is also radically anti-democratic. The authors hope that LR will help liberal leaders “articulate an alternative to the avowedly illiberal world-views espoused by increasingly authoritarian governments in China and Russia” (p.37). But I suspect implementation of LR in the public space would result in nasty, narrow-minded micro hegemonies, albeit decentralized ones. Were these to scale, I doubt they would be preferable to the Rightism about which the authors’ frett, or the mindshare/groupthink cyberauthoritarianism into which LRDAOs would likely slide.
Here’s the thing. Democracy is not a protocol for optimization, and “one person/one vote” it is not a protocol for consensus. Democracy isn’t a protocol. It is a commitment to deal with one another and to eschew force as a means of dealing with those with whom we disagree. “1P1V” is a great method for allowing a group to measure the lack of consensus in the body-politic, and democracy is the agreement not to trample to death those who lost the vote.
And in any case, the consensus that really matters most isn’t procedural; it is the established and enduring consensus (1) that we do and will agree to do the best we can with the least-bad compromise position we reach, and (2) that our judiciary and other institutions are sufficiently trustworthy, and are capable of providing remedies to our very worst legislative mishaps. But any piece of legislation is always a mishap to someone, and that’s the point. Wherever there is less than full, hot-blooded unanimity, “consensus” is always a degree of resignation. We can code “consensus protocols” for public chains. But there’s no algorithm for coping, and democracy is about coping — and living peaceably with one another as we cope.
Long before the crypto craze and excitement about blockchain tech, there was talk about “consensus” and “decentralization.” Back in 2011, these were among the buzzwords associated with OWS. Blockchain technology, computational “decentralization,” and cryptocurrencies have always been informed by (or: tainted by) sociopolitical theory; and this much can be said for Mr Buterin, co-creator of the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem and thought-leader among the cypheratti: he’s not shy about nailing his colors to the mast. Bless him.
Buterin et al’s proposed “design for philanthropic or publically-funded seeding to allow (near) optimal provision of a decentralized, self-organizing ecosystem of public goods” seems to be cut from the same cloth as my “tax ballot” scheme, which is why I have discussed it. I lack the ability to grasp or appreciate their math, and I am therefore in no position to comment at all on whether they have succeeded in offering a solution, or succeeded even in advancing efforts to arrive at one. The authors are scary-smart people, so I suspect they have — at least on paper. To be frank, I wonder whether my inability to understand the math disqualifies me from commenting at all on their work. But I do understand enough to be troubled by almost everything about LR.
The problems with LR begin with the first sentence of the paper: “In many contexts, a sponsor with capital wishes to stimulate and support the creation of public goods, but is ill-informed about the appropriate goods to create.” Surely this cannot be the case. And if I struggled to understand everything subsequent to these words — the authors’ mishmash of math, economics, and sociopolitical theory — perhaps it is because I can’t get my head around the idea of a “sponsor” with capital being “ill-informed” about which projects or causes to support. Nor can I accept the authors’ failure to distinguish between selfishness and self-interest, or their seeming obsession with “free-riders” and “collusion.” With respect to the latter in particular, they have mistaken puzzles for problems, and seem to believe that in solving the former they have resolved the latter — an error to which powerful intellects are prone, and to which economists/game-theory people are particularly susceptible.
The main thing rubbing me raw however is the suspicion that the authors are not in fact motivated by the desire to achieve more “optimal” funding of public goods, but are driven chiefly by the desire to enable the values and interests of the “creative class” to triumph over the values and interests of the less sophisticated, less high-minded members of society [2].
“Visual artists, game designers, journalists, filmmakers, science fiction authors and more have already started to play a critical role in this communication for other Radical Market ideas (Posner and Weyl, 2018) and we expect that the ambition and novelty of the LR mechanism will inspire more activity in this direction than any of the other, narrower ideas. // Building awareness and understanding of the ideas will, in turn, be a critical basis for and component of activism and organizing aimed at policy change in the LR direction.” (p.37)
It is interesting that this list (visual artists, game designers, etc.) overlaps nicely with those individuals soonest to benefit from distribution and use of blockchain technology. Nonfungible tokens which establish and secure copyright and IP ownership are likely to be the best immediate use-case for public chains, such as the one Mr Buterin helped to create. Coincidence?
And if LR strikes one as strong-arm authoritarianism posturing as emancipation-democracy, that’s not to be wondered at: much of “decentralization” seems to be techno-oligarchism posing in the itchy mantle of liberalism, and privilege masquerading as populism [3]. The hardcore who “occupied” Wall Street for the duration of that circus of best-intentions cum 60s nostalgia clearly didn’t need to punch a clock to keep food on the table, and I for one have a difficult time believing that these sorts know enough about real work to speak for the proletariat. Carhartum non facit artifex — The Carhart does not make the worker [4].
The reality of the decentralism punted at OWS was nicely observed by The Economist in October of 2011:
“Even given a climate of ideological similarity, this mode of communal egalitarian living doesn’t tend to scale up well beyond a few hundred people, and requires intense and often invasive surveillance and monitoring to minimise free-riding, as well as heavy communal pressure to maintain the kind of conformity of belief necessary to maintain ongoing consensus. This is not, to my mind, a beautiful dream. Anyway, insofar as people are serious about it, egalitarian participatory democracy points in the direction of radical decentralisation and hyper-local control. The immense scope and diversity of the American territory and population, as well as the vast scale of the American state and the number and complexity of its activities, are fundamentally incompatible with the kind of society now being performed by the romantics in Zuccotti Park.”
Democratic systems — at least the 1P1V kind — do not, and probably cannot, deliver “optimum results.” None should expect them to. They deliver the bad results a polity deserves, and the kinds of inefficiencies a people must learn to endure, and work together to rectify. That is community — though I suspect that when the authors of LR use the word ‘community,’ they mean “community of like-minded people wherever they live on the planet,” and not the sorts of real communities the non-elites of Earth are forced to call home. Again, OWS:
“Not only is it hard to see how this worthwhile little experiment in leaderless, consensus-based decision-making is a realistic means to the end of a whole society governed by leaderless, consensus-based decision-making, it’s hard see why this is a desirable end.
Because the participatory democracy of OWS is an ideological endeavour, it can avoid the hard problem of liberal society: the ineradicable diversity of moral belief and the impossibility of consensus. Consensus-based communes composed of individuals who opt in specifically because they already agree with the commune’s founding values can work precisely because the people who would make consensus impossible — people with very different opinions and values — stay away. But not only does the OWS experiment skirt the problem of pluralism through self-selection, the ideological homogeneity of self-selection may make deliberation tend toward extremism…”
The principle upon which democracy rests is the freedom to make bad decisions, one vote at a time. Quadratic Voting is too clever by half, and I do not believe we need better math and DAOs (etc.) to solve the “problems” of civic management and national governance. LR may be a brilliant means of allocating private contributions to good-works, to ends identified by private individuals (and enjoyed most immediately by a small slice of the public). I hope someone tries it. We do however need to remember that democratic public institutions “work” only in the sense that they allow people the freedom to hang themself by their own petard.
If however we wish to have people with better values, and would rather have them voting more wisely than swinging from yardarms of their own manufacture, then we need to educate them better. Alas, that requires normative judgments and enthusiastic promulgation of visions of both the right and the good, and few have the stomach for that these days. It may also require the “creative class” to engage rather than wall themselves off from the work-a-day slobs who don’t have Ethereum wallets, don’t frequent boutique art galleries, and who still think that “blockchain” is the way you keep your dog tied-up in front of your double-wide. This, too, is messy (keep your MAGA cap out of my cafe), and perhaps that’s one reason some folks are keen to farm it all out to consensus mechanisms. In code we trust. As for the “problem” of “collective organization,” it is (like “consensus”) chimerical — for all but closet authoritarians, that is [5].
“Liberal Radicalism” is a work of great intelligence, aye. It may yet become of classic in one or more domains of scholarship. It may in time be cited as evidence that democracy’s ultimate demise was hastened by youthful savants trying to hack “the dismal science” with tools and terms unsuited to the messy business of decision-making and governance.
Either way, understanding LR takes work, a lot of work — and maybe that’s the inside joke: in the future, governance by consensus will be left solely to those who can demonstrate both proof of work, and who can afford to purchase their proof of stake.
I do hope LR is studied — as an oddity rather than an oracle, and as a symptom of the ills of the age, not as a draft of the cure.
Read the postscript to this article.
Written by the Executive Director of the AEIOU Dr J Ellis Cameron-Perry
Footnotes
[1] While in high school I was the assistant editor of my town’s weekly newspaper — The Country Chronicle, proudly serving the 7000 souls of Muskrat Falls with 3000 copies of gossip each Tuesday. Covering town meetings was part of my brief. One never fully recovers from high doses of open-forum New England “town hall” democracy, but one often develops immunity to psalms about its virtues — and to schemes to save democracy from them.
[2] Alternatively, this is all a Glasperlenspiel to them — part display of wit, part promotional work for Ethereum.
[3] I believe this will be clear enough to readers who attend carefully to the discussion section (S7) of the paper.The authors seems to have taken their most important philosophical cues from Arendt, Rawls, and Nussbaum.
[4] Cucullus non facit monachum.
[5] See Saul (1992) Voltaire’s Bastards , or at least this review of it by Camille Paglia (1992) in The Washington Post.
The AEIOU is the Think Tank of Adrealm, a digital advertising ecosystem powered by blockchain. The observations published on the AEIOU publication do not necessarily reflect the point of view of the Adrealm foundation.
