General Election: The Looming Choice Between Oligarchy and Kakistocracy [View all]
As much as I'd like to revive the fading embers of the democratic republic, that does not appear to be among our choices. On November 8th, we may be forced to decide between oligarchy and kakistocracy. The pros and cons of each are unappetizing, but it's best to have at least a fall-back strategy for unpleasant realities.
Oligarchs tend to maintain a minimal awareness of the necessity to keep up the appearance of a functional, if grotesquely corrupt, governing capacity. This occasionally creates cracks, where the desirability of appearing to appease popular sentiment becomes necessary. An oligarchy, if the oligarchs support a moderately competent executive, can preserve some level of civil order, maintain some level of infrastructure, and enable sufficient economic activity to engage their helots and support the services and appearance of normality from which the oligarchs themselves benefit.
They keep the wheels on, in other words. If they delegate competent executives and maintain some awareness of the need to balance repressive authoritarian responses to challenges to their authority against 'keeping up appearances,' they generally avoid wholesale slaughter, bloodshed, displacement, and genocide.
The downside to this side of the choice is that in maintaining a minimal comfort level for their helots and sustaining the appearance of "normalcy," it can take longer and be more difficult to ultimately destabilize, overthrow, and replace oligarchs with more democratic government.
This should be balanced against the awareness that our oligarchy is large and very complex, and there are some opportunities to create divisions among them, play off factions within the oligarchy against one another, and accelerate destabilization that way.
A kakistocracy's one "pro" is usually the speed of devolution, and the shattering chain reactions of upheaval as incompetence produces unrest which is met with authoritarian repression, undermined by further incompetence to produce further unrest and the wheels come off fairly quickly.
The cons to that side of the equation are the human costs of bloodshed, civil disorder, pogrom, repression, disease, massive environmental catastrophe, and chaos, in the process of the kakistocracy's failure and ultimate replacement. In such environments it can be difficult for democratic revolutions to maintain equilibrium. Catastrophic failure of a kakistocracy usually results in a series of further devolutionary regimes such as competent authoritarian dictatorships, repressive totalitarianism, and other forms of backlash, before democratic government can be re-established.
So, if the General Election choice comes down to Oligarchy versus Kakistocracy, I shall reluctantly choose the former.
Your mileage, of course, may vary.
pragmatically,
Bright
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