The Coronation of Napoleon, by Jacques-Louis David. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Neoreaction is difficult to pin down: due, perhaps, to the persecution they might face if they were to expound upon their ideas clearly, many neoreactionaries write, if not with hidden meanings, with a deliberately obscure style that makes high demands of its readers. Most normals give up before even finishing their first Moldbug post. This obscurantism is compounded by the fact that there seem to be as many schisms within neoreaction as there are neoreactionaries. Even those who emphasize thick communities, it turns out, are surprisingly individualistic.

But if there is one idea that represents a common article of faith to this community, it is this: democracy is bad. Perhaps the most colorful statement of why this is so comes from philosopher Nick Land: “The democratic politician and the electorate are bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, in which each side drives the other to ever more shameless extremities of hooting, prancing cannibalism, until the only alternative to shouting is being eaten.”

I have some sympathy for this belief — I am a conscientious non-voter, myself. Not only have I read Bryan Caplan, I’ve guest lectured in his class. Democracies do a lot of stupid and evil stuff that members of the American Economic Association say they would never do were power handed to them.

But what is the relevant point of comparison for an (ostensibly) political movement? Surely it should not be what people in armchairs say they would do if they were in power. Does the social science literature have anything to say about how democracies stack up against real-world nondemocracies in terms of policies? I’m glad you asked.

In a 2004 paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, economists Casey Mulligan, Ricard Gil, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin empirically examine whether the world’s democracies and nondemocracies have different policies, with intriguing results. They find, controlling for economic and demographic variables, that democracies have similar government consumption, education spending, social spending, corporate tax rates, and payroll tax policies as nondemocracies. The only economic or social policy that the authors tested that significantly differed under democracy was income tax progressivity — democracies, it turns out, have flatter tax codes than do nondemocracies.

These results eviscerate much armchair political economic theorizing, of both the academic and Internet varieties. Models that rely on formal allocations of power through voting (i.e., most of the academic literature) are contradicted, because they all assume that the distribution of votes alters the distribution of power. So are the implicit models used by the neoreaction — if democracy creates a giant political commons, then why do nondemocracies have basically the same economic and social policies that democracies do?

We can make sense of Mulligan et al.’s results if we assume that nondemocracies are approximately as sensitive to the will of the people as are democracies. Why might this be the case, if the people have no formal say over policy? An obvious hypothesis would be that there are more of the people than there are of the rulers, and that therefore the rulers are still largely constrained to do what the people want. If the rulers ignore the popular will too much, they risk a trip to the gallows. Rulers who lexicographically prefer being alive and in power over any particular policy choice, then, can use a simple heuristic to govern: brutally suppress would-be usurpers, but otherwise give the people what they want.

Wouldn’t it be neat if Mulligan, Gil, and Sala-i-Martin found evidence of this brutal political suppression in nondemocracies? It would, and they do. Nondemocracies are statistically more likely to practice widespread torture, to have the death penalty, to spend more on the military, to allow fewer civil liberties (including freedoms of the press and assembly), and to regulate religion.

Democracy is just like nondemocracy — it has the same (admittedly bad) social and economic policies — only without the widespread torture and restrictions on the free exchange of ideas. Perhaps even those neoreactionaries with a high tolerance for “breaking a few eggs” ought to think twice lest they end up with broken eggs and the same substantive policies they despise.

A determined antidemotist might object to reasoning from empirical results on 20th-century nondemocracies. After all, most (American) neoreactionaries appear to support Enlightenment-era monarchy or a for-profit shareholder state, not a brutal modern dictatorship. Nevertheless, reasoning about how modern dictatorships work can illuminate why those milder forms of nondemocracy are an unlikely equilibrium.

The key conclusion to draw from the Mulligan study is that political competition doesn’t go away when you switch away from democracy; rather, it moves to the metapolitical level. Competition within political systems is a substitute for competition over political systems. When the former is stifled, the latter becomes more important, which is why nondemocratic rulers must take greater pains to prevent an overthrow of government than democracies do. There is no limit on the level of metapolitical competition under a dictatorship other than the state of technology available to the state and to its would-be usurpers. On this model, we should expect new, neoreactionary 21st-century nondemocracies to be a lot like observed 21st-century nondemocracies, not like 400-year old monarchies or completely new forms of for-profit governance that take the property rights of shareholders, at least, for granted.

Of course, Mulligan et al. also provide some limited ammunition for the neoreaction. That nondemocracies have essentially the same social and economic policies as democracies undercuts a key tenet of the demotist religion: that formal (and equal) voice is an important channel by which policies come to reflect the will of the people. If nondemocracies have many of the same policies, then it is clear that democracy is not necessary to implement the will of the people on some policy issues, at least.

Rather than securing the will of the people on policy, the relative strength of democracy is in enabling some measure of political freedom — the right not to be tortured by police, for instance. Contra Moldbug, this is not inconsequential. Indeed, if you take the view, supported by the data, that social and economic policy are largely determined by economic and demographic factors, then the question of political freedom is largely what is left to be decided. Allowing political competition (distasteful as it may be) to occur within the system, instead of banishing it to the metapolitical level, begets more political freedom at the minimal cost of being made to ignore political discourse. If I voted, I’d vote for democracy.