I want to know why people think Democracy is cool.
I know of four reasons (if you don’t mind me giving a serious answer to a rhetorical question):
- The set of leaders who could win a civil war or popular uprising is roughly equal to the set of leaders who could win an election. Democracy is cool because it’s robust.
- It makes sense, even if it’s a bit counterintuitive, for someone to vote their own taxes higher as long as their competitors get higher taxes, too. Voluntarily refusing to use underhanded business practices is a competitive disadvantage, but voting to ban them isn’t. Democracy is cool because it’s a path out of defect/defect equilibrium.
- Even if the king is benevolent and sane, the prince might not be. If 51% of the population is insane, however, then no government structure will save you. Democracy is cool because distributed power is more stable than centralized power.
- Democracy is cool because it does a reasonable job of all those problems with relatively few moving parts. A modern democracy is pretty complex, but those are solutions to scale that any government that rules over such an enormous territory would have. Contrast with most utopian designs—if they solve the problems of robustness, game theory, and stability, it usually means they’re so complex that there’s no way to bootstrap them.