Non-US example. In India the “gherao” or encirclement action is used to target not just elected/appointed officials but civil service officers who nominally got their jobs through merit.
Legitimate? Yep. Civil service is 70% captured by caste politics.
Conversation
Btw a good measure of state illegitimacy is simply the wealth-accumulation premium people enjoy by getting into politics. If a state is functioning according to claimed ideal structure/intentions, there should be no alpha in politics. Just your public official salary and goodwill
1
12
52
All US appointed and elected officials enjoy a massive wealth accumulation premium.
In India, once you’re in the IAS your wealth potential is only limited by your incorruptibility.
1
4
25
Auditing public official wealth is basic to democracies. Including from before attaining office. Because capture starts far upstream of office. Whether it is law school admissions (courts) or cronyist wealth sectors that rely heavily on regulatory capture (real estate/Trump)
1
2
21
In general I tend to the view that even the “cleanest” wealth accumulation mechanisms like entrepreneurship are rooted in at least partly immoral captured historical advantages. The difference is, unlike in politics, nobody pretends they embody high-minded principles.
2
33
You will notice that those who derp on the most about the virtues of capitalism and free markets are the ones who operate in the least free, most cronyist, politically captured market sectors. Not an accident. Guilty overcompensation of sorts.
2
2
32
This is also why I think in general, while I am all for getting rich easy and quick, I can't chase money with any degree of real enthusiasm. While most of the $ I've made in my life has been on the cleaner end of the spectrum, I've used my share of morally shaky stepping stones.
1
1
20
For the same reason, I have an anti-Lindy bias: my priors are: the longer a thing has endured, the more likely it is to be not just corrupt, but irredeemably corrupt in entrenched ways it is hard to do anything about. The corruption of the new is both shallower and more obvious.
1
6
47
Perhaps the critics are right and NFTs are a scam. But I'd rather participate in that than in perpetuating FoundingFatherism by participating in politics. You can at least be on your guard and try to keep yourself honest.
2
25
I suspect those with a firmly progressive (not just liberal) bias like me share this basic suspicion of the self-serving logics of history and claims about the cleanliness of wealth-creation mechanisms.
1
20
The basic ideological priority of progressivism is to unwind the overhang of history over society. Break or weaken links to past to make room for the future. Operate on the assumption that the past is guilty until proven innocent, while trads operate on the opposite assumption.
Replying to
This can lend progressivism a sort of naively destructive optics. Progressivism flaunts all its ills very openly because it cannot do otherwise. Other ideologies, to varying degrees, launder and rationalize the parts of the past that bolster their suspect historical advantages
1
2
16
This critique btw, also applies to things labeled "progressive" that aren't really. For example, reason I find union politics suspect is simply that it is so damn old. As old as large-scale industrialization itself. You can't be about breaking from past if you rely on 150y of it.
1
3
22
Many of the pathologies of wokism can also be traced to its already long history. Crenshaw's intersectionality paper is now 33 years old. That age alone, quite apart from merits/weaknesses of arguments is reason for suspicion. Enough time has passed for capture processes.
3
18
Maybe my general politics here needs a distinct name, since everything starts aging (and by my model, acquiring anti-Lindy corruption and moral decay) the minute it is born. Something like "newism" or "birth innocenceism"
Only newborn things can be maximally innocent.
13
6
78
And even that can never be 100% (hence Rawlsian veils etc). Everything new has a genetic heritage of some sort. It's a kind of original sin doctrine which should be cashed out as fundamental existential doubt about morality of everything. The older it is, the greater the doubt.
2
1
23
Heh, this helps me clarify for myself why I think "progress studies" is ill-posed. It seems to frame progress as a kind of historical accumulation, whereas I think of progress as fundamentally a process of ongoing invalidation of history.
5
1
45
“History is merely a list of surprises...It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.” -- Vonnegut
History is just a list of all the ways we've been wrong so far. It can only prepare us to be wrong yet again. -- Me.
5
8
58
Replying to
One has a lot of its world already built, the other needs to clear room to get started
1
2
Show replies


