America the outlier

Critics of neoreaction argue that democracies are more stable than monarchies; for example, Britain’s parliamentary monarchy. But many of the examples cited are not pure direct democracies, but rather are constitutional/parliamentary monarchies, such as Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.

However, South America is an obvious counter-example, especially Venezuela. However, one can argue that South American countries have illiberal democracies and therefore are not true democracies, but even Brazil, which has a transparent election process in which the votes are counted on TV, still has a lot of unrest, dysfunction, and corruption in spite of such elections.

Reactionaries understand that democracies work better in high-trust, less populated, rich, high-IQ countries. But America is a notable exception. Unlike the Nordic countries, America has a very high population, has a long history of racial strife, has a large and poor low-IQ underclass, is low-trust, and only has a national IQ of 100, so it has the ingredients for increased civil unrest, yet America is remarkably peaceful and stable in terms of crime and other metrics, even relative to countries that are higher trust and higher IQ such as Northern European countries.

There are mitigating factors than can explain America’s stability:

The U.S. is a constitutional republic. One may dismiss this as semantics, but it matters. A direct democracy, especially with immigration and a large underclass, would be a disaster and the Founders had enough foresight to know this. This is a reason why the U.S. is stable, because there is more redundancy in having a tripartite system of government and having electors, and by not concentrating too much power in either the hands of a monarch or “the people”, but rather by spreading it out among the gentry class, the political elite, and the private sector. A strong and autonomous private sector helps greatly, because it funds social programs, employs a lot of people, improves livings standards and quality of life, and negates some of the ineptness from the public sector. Compared to America, most liberal democracies such as in Europe and South America have much weaker private sectors, so the result is higher unemployment and lower standards of living, hence more unrest.

I don’t think the reactionary-right has done enough to address the contradiction of how America is remarkably stable when there are reasons for it not to be, which is what I have tried to address in some of my posts (such as here, here, here, and here). Usually the argument is, either America is in a cultural decline or that collapse is imminent. I don’t find these arguments that convincing. Cultural change, even if in an undesirable direction, does not imply the collapse of america economically or as a contiguous nation. It’s possible there will be collpase, but as I discuss in my recent post about elites, the data, whether it’s economic data or crime statistics, and especially relative to the rest of the world, does not show it.

Vox Day has repeatedly said that diversity and immigration will lead to civil war and the eventual break-up of America, but, again, the evidence shows otherwise, that diversity attenuates conflict, and as discussed here, countries that have less diversity, even high-IQ European ones, have more civil unrest (such as protests, riots, etc.) that cause worse property damage and more injuries and deaths.

America, since its inception, has been moving in the direction of increasing diversity yet crime and unrest, in spite of all the talk of supposed unrest due to Trump, is at multi-generational lows, and much lower than that of Western and Southern Europe and South America, which have less ethnic diversity and more unrest. This not an endorsement of diversity, but rather and obvious counterpoint to Vox’s argument that should be addressed. One could argue that elites promote diversity because it mitigates the possibly of there being unrest that threatens their power.

Also, Vox does not explain the mechanism or trigger for how diversity leads to civil war. One can also try to draw parallels between the American Civil War and the issue over immigration, but there are so many differences that the analogy isn’t useful. For example, in the Civil War, nether side wanted to deport the slaves, but rather the South sought slavery for economic reasons whereas the North wanted to emancipate them. The fall of Rome is also cited, but but the Germanic invaders were the result of Rome already being in decline, not the cause of it.