Wanting Less of the Least Bad

Although his post is worth reading for points made within the range of its argument, Paul Craddick's thoughts on the inevitability of atrocities in wars extrapolates in an interesting way:

What I mean to say is this: it's a basic principle of explanation that what is common to two things cannot explain what is different about one of them. If both an in-the-main just(ified) war, such as World War II, and a more controversial one such as the one at present in Iraq can exhibit shameful behavior by its participants, then - to the extent that there's an isomorphism between the misdeeds in both cases - that behavior cannot render one unjust yet not shake our esteem of the other. ...

The truth might be closer to Augustine's view in Civitas Dei, in which the gulf between the earthly city and its divine counterpart can never really be closed. Or, as a secular writer once put it, "war usually doesn't involve a clash of right with wrong, but of wrong with greater wrong."

This has a broader parallel in an aphorism my father must have recited to me a thousand times: "representative democracy is the least bad form of government." The point, at least as I take it, is that the ideal would be for people to have no need of being ruled by other people. Since matters ranging from practical to idealistic preclude such an outcome in this world, the emphasis is to be placed on "small government." Here, a definitional complication arises: a government can be "small" in multiple ways.

For most people, "small" in this context is a measure of expense or reach. A small government is restricted in the amount that it takes from us and/or in the amount that it imposes on us. In a way of looking at it, more of those tasks that might be considered matters of governance are left to individual sovereignty; each of us is our own siloed participant in the collective government.

Another way of looking at government smallness is to measure it by the number of people wielding its official power — its concentration. Using the yardsticks of cost and reach, if the central government is too restricted (too small) in its power to impose its will on the sovereign individuals, the "government" actually consists of everybody (too big), and the threat becomes tyranny of the majority. Using the yardstick of concentration, if the range of people wielding official power is too small, they will seek to expand that power in order to siphon off resources and impose more of their will on everybody else.

This is simplistic, of course. However, I think it offers a passable summary — albeit within deliberately narrow terms — of the premise of representative democracy. Remaining simplistic, one could say that, in their capacity as active participants in government, the self-sovereign citizens wield their power only periodically, and only in circumscribed ways. Meanwhile, those directing the centralized power can only do so for a limited time, and with accountability to everybody else. In other words, representative democracy is least bad because mankind must be governed, and this system attempts to balance all of the ways of adjusting the relationship of rulers and ruled.

(Obviously, the American system seeks to divide power in many other ways — by branches of government, by levels of government, by facets of the broader society. I'm just attempting to get at the basic idea to which those specifics are added.)

Getting back to Paul's above quotation, what seemed interesting enough to justify all of this rambling (at least before I began) was that many of the people intent on lashing the nation that represents the "lesser wrong" in terms of war atrocities are also the people who wish to move away from the "least bad" form of government. Those flattening the range of government torture — from naked pyramids to paper shredders, from being intimidated by a dog to watching your child's body be eaten by one — are also those intent on expanding the breadth of government.

I've only been thinking about this today (and it's been very hot in my office), but I wonder if there might be something to this line of thinking that runs across the differences that Paul cites between reactions to WWII and to Iraq. The government of the United States has expanded dramatically since the '40s, both in size and in the areas of life into which it reaches, and the political party that is currently in the hotseat is the one at least ostensibly interested in reversing that trend.

Why would socialists (expensive, long reach) find common cause with fascists (few rulers, expensive, long reach) when trying to stifle a domestic push back toward a more limited representative democracy (many rulers, less expensive, short reach)? Well, I'd say it has something to do with the government yardstick that I left out of the socialist parenthetical.