A review copy of Erwin Dekker’s The Viennese Students of Civilization. He places Mises and Hayek in the intellectual circles of Vienna between the two world wars, as they watch a once-great civilization collapse. Capitalism and democracy simply could not take root in that part of Europe. I will have more to say about the book once I have finished.
Meanwhile, support for capitalism and democracy among young people in the U.S. is not exactly robust. Timothy Taylor reports,
In both the US and in Europe, young adults have become less likely to say that it is “essential” to live in a democracy.
It is, as Winston Churchill said, the second worst form of government.
The charts in Taylor’s post are must-sees.
What a freefall: ‘Democracy Essential’ percentage by decade of birth (eyeballing):
1930: 75%
1940: 62%
1950: 57%
1960: 53%
1970: 50%
1980: 31%
Whoa. That’s really close to what support for gay-marriage by generation looks like. If you think opposition to gay-marriage is eroding, then it makes sense to conclude, from similar data, that support for Democracy is eroding just as quickly.
Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of 16-24 year olds now think Democracy is a bad or very bad way to run a country, and support for ‘strong leader without encumbrances’ up to nearly a third for upper income respondents.
Time to worry less about supreme court nominees and more about joint chiefs of staff appointments.
Actually, the modem judiciary and especially the Supreme Court is a prime example of what non-democratic government looks like.
The media and the Academy have long been secretly and dishonestly discriminating against Pro-Life Christians and Republicans. It’s also arguably illegal, based on equal opportunity laws that require no discrimination based on race, sex, religion, creed, etc.
Any talk of “discrimination” which fails to point this out is woefully weak.
So, a pleasant nightmare – Trump wins, enacts an anti-discrimination enforcement law that is against results-discrimination — so that organizations whose results are discriminatory, will be denied federal funds or tax exempt status, with a specific religious carve out for overt religious organizations.
Then, this law is applied to end gov’t student aid to Universities who have been discriminating against pro-life Republicans (almost all of them). The FCC would look at TV media and their discrimination; and at movies getting tax breaks, with their “star” discrimination.
Lots of support for a “strong leader” would rapidly vanish, when the strong leader is putting in policies that the supporters don’t like.
It should be noted that the Churchill quote was made in the context of an argument in support of the House of Lords[1]. The “Second Chamber’s” veto power had already been restricted in 1911, and when Churchill gave the speech (1947) further restrictions were being debated (such restrictions were eventually put in place in 1949)[2].
That is not to say that he was arguing against democracy, but rather that we should not confuse the elected institutions with the will of the people, and that the former should not be given too much power in the name of serving the latter.
[1] http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1947/nov/11/parliament-bill
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_Acts_1911_and_1949
For my part, I think that the erosion of support for democracy is more of a side-effect of an erosion our government’s perceived legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Legitimacy is perhaps the most important quality of a successful government, but it can only be maintained directly by the government (i.e. by means of force) in very limited an unsustainable ways.
For a sustainable legitimacy, a government must rely upon the support non-governmental social institutions (what we might call “legitimizing institutions”). In the United States, the dominant legitimizing institutions have been (at least in the past century) the press, the universities, and the political parties.
The credibility of these institutions has continuously eroded over the past half century, and the current presidential election has been exposing (and to some extent, exacerbating) this erosion.
While I do think that withholding full legitimacy from the government helps keep it in check, a sharp decline in legitimacy tends to make governments panicky. Panicky governments look for any means they have to shore up legitimacy, which generally means some increase in violence against their own population.
I think a political insider being elected president would only further harm government legitimacy (undermines the people’s belief that they have a voice in how government operates) so I hope that doesn’t happen. But outside of this election cycle I think the legitimizing institutions need to either reform themselves.
Well, yes, there is a decline in support for capitalism and democracy. We can simply update this from Mises regarding the cultural conditions in Germany at the turn of the 20th century.
“For more than seventy years the German professors of political science, history, law, geography and philosophy eagerly imbued their disciples with a hysterical hatred of capitalism, and preached the war of “liberation” against the capitalistic West. … At the turn of the century the immense majority of the Germans were already radical supporters of socialism and aggressive nationalism.”
The professors are not only German anymore and because of the Nazi atrocities, they’ve abandoned the aggressive nationalism. The professors never really abandoned the imbuing of their disciples with a “hysterical hatred of capitalism” or the overthrow of the democracy that interfered with the manifest trend toward the German pattern of socialism, Zwangswirtschaft (“compulsory economy”).
Even libertarian professors bought off on the myth that it isn’t socialism unless ALL the means of production are owned by the state. The conveniently forget the control of the means of production through government interventionist regulation. Not to mention, no one seems to have settled definition of capitalism, easily succumbing to calling corporate cronyism and malfeasance “capitalism”.
So where in their “education” would the young receive an accurate representation of democracy or capitalism? It’s possible to learn these things, but not if one sticks with the curriculum of K-12 or the universities and most students are unwilling to read beyond the requires syllabus. And to broach the topic in a class is to imperil the student’s credential award.