[wharvle]

But the argument you'd prefer to focus on isn't connected to the topic in Scott's piece, because Scott's writing to address specific claims with predictive power (as in: we can "replay the tapes" of history and see if what we'd expect to see, if they're true, is evident—and they're strong and confident claims, so we'd expect it to be pretty clear if it is) in a couple other pieces, to which pieces the argument you want to make also isn't connected.

[pdonis]

> Scott's writing to address specific claims with predictive power

Which his model does not have. That was the point of the post of mine upthread that I referred you to. The actual cases he cites (French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Chinese Revolution) are a much better match for the Reactionary model (though with a caveat that I gave in my upthread post--the final "monarchy" step in these cases, e.g., Putin's Russia, is not an improvement) than they are for his alternate model. (His justification for his alternate model matching the Russian Revolution better is that Khruschev and Gorbachev were "more mellow" than Stalin, but step 6 of his alternate model says that the government "does pretty okay", which was not true of Gorbachev's USSR any more than it was of Khruschev's--not to mention Putin's Russia, as I said above.)

So why is Scott so confident of his alternate model, if it actually is worse, on net, than the Reactionary model he criticizes? Because he fails to realize that the US and UK (and other countries in the British Commonwealth like Canada and Australia) are not the historical norm, but are historical outliers. They have managed to settle into "liberal democracy" which might be "mellow" and doing "pretty okay" at home only by exporting all of the "state-sponsored violence" elsewhere, where their voters can ignore it and their politicians can pretend it's the fault of those other "repressive regimes".

In other words, the egregious historical errors Scott makes in this article, which was what I originally called out in my first post in this discussion, are closely connected to the main point of his article: he is only able to even entertain that point, much less write an entire article about it, because of the false historical narrative he has.

Here's another example, where Scott restates the article's central claim (from which its title is taken):

"A monarch who voluntarily relaxes their power before being forced to do so by the situation – like the constitutional monarchs of Europe or the King of Thailand – is performing a controlled burn, destroying the overgrowth that would otherwise cause a fire and skipping directly from 1 to 6."

Tell that to Tsar Nicholas II, who voluntarily abdicated when his high officials convinced him that it was for the good of the country. Russia not only did not "skip directly" from Scott's 1 to 6, it never reached his 6 at all (see above). Since this was one of the examples Scott explicitly chose, you'd expect him to at least check to see whether the actual historical facts matched his narrative.

[wharvle]

The claims he's addressing are, boiled down:

1) That leftist movements inevitably become more prone to violence (purges, genocide, violent repression of opponents in general, "reigns of terror") over time, and

2) Democracies have a strong-bordering-on-inescapable tendency to incubate such leftist movements, and to grow more leftist over time.

What we should expect to see, then:

1) Radical, violent leftist movements that gain power get ever-more violent over time.

2) Democracies become more unstable and prone to those specific sorts of violence, over time, and this unabated increase pushes ever closer to crisis points .

What we see instead is:

1) The worst leftist violence tends to be immediately preceded by authoritarian governments (which is what these fringe folks Scott's responding to want more of—this is a very specific and out-there movement making very specific and out-there claims, not the entire field of criticism of leftism or democracy), rather than to be preceded by democracy; to reach their fever-pitch very quickly; and to cool off over time rather than doing what we'd expect based on what was claimed to be true, which would be for them to typically get worse the more time passed.

2) Meanwhile, democracies seem... fairly stable, actually, without a clear, inevitably-trending-upward trend line on leftist-induced violence and chaos, or what have you. Fluctuating, sure, but where's the trend line for specifically that? Where are the ones ending in leftist reigns of terror? All of them are supposed to be heading toward a fever-pitch of leftist purges and genocide. Like, that specific thing is what was claimed. Does it look that way? LOL no.

I think what's key to following this is that the thing he's arguing against is a pretty fringe political view. He's not addressing some more-tame, more-mainstream criticism or model-for-the-development of either the left, or democracies, that might be stronger. He's trying to suss out whether the above, specifically, appears to describe actual, observable tendencies of leftism and democracies in the real world.

[pdonis]

> The claims he's addressing are, boiled down

As I said in my post upthread that I referred to, I am not arguing for the claims that Scott is arguing against. (I do say that Scott's "Reactionary model" is a better historical fit to the cases he cites, but only with the key caveat I gave about the final step, and that caveat directly opposes the claims that Scott's "reactionaries" make based on that model.)

I am arguing against the claims that Scott is making about his "alternate model". His article is not just rebutting his version of "Reactionary". He is making claims of his own. Those are what I am addressing. I have already explicitly quoted claims that he makes that are historically false. Those claims are what support his "alternate model", which his article is arguing for.

[pdonis]

Your claim 2) does not imply your "expect to see" 2). Why? Because democracies don't have to incubate leftist movements in their own country. They can incubate them elsewhere. Which, indeed, they do, as I have said.

This, in itself, is not an argument for the "reactionary" claims Scott is arguing against, for reasons I have already given. But it is an argument against Scott's "alternate model".

Also, democracies can grow more leftist over time (which, I would argue, they have) without becoming internally unstable, as long as a majority of voters continue to vote for policies that move further and further left. Which I think is a fair description of what has happened in "democracies" over the past century or more. Whether this tendency can continue indefinitely is a different question.

[wharvle]

These are interesting claims and points, perhaps, but remain disconnected from the original material. In particular:

> They can incubate them elsewhere. Which, indeed, they do, as I have said.

This needs an immense amount of development to maybe qualify as both connected-enough to this topic to belong in Scott's piece, and a strong enough claim to be worth either explaining and refuting, or adopting and defending. You're claiming that things like declining to prosecute a war against the USSR after WWII is an example of an action that acted as an outlet for what would otherwise have become domestic US leftist political violence in the US. There are, like, several things about that, and your other examples, that need to be filled in before it might be clear that makes any sense at all, plus some kind of pattern of this kind of thing increasing over time needs to be established that can't easily be explained by other, more-straightforward factors. Notably an awful lot of these examples are failures to act—what's that about? How's that an outlet for a kind of "energy" that would otherwise push the US closer to a reign of terror? Why should we think that sort of thing can act as such an outlet? What's the connection between those things? I see none whatsoever—it is not obvious this should be entertained as a relevant and strong line of inquiry.

> Also, democracies can grow more leftist over time (which, I would argue, they have) without becoming internally unstable, as long as a majority of voters continue to vote for policies that move further and further left.

Maybe! But it doesn't appear to make them ever-more violent in the specific way in question. The real events and trends we have before us really don't appear to fit—not to fail to fit your claims, but by the claims made by the folks Scott wrote the piece to address. (This isn't me arguing against you—I follow that you do get that what you're aiming at is Scott's alternative model, not that you're arguing in support of the Reactionaries)

You have proposed some reasons different from Scott's that this may be the case, and fault him for not addressing your proposed reasons, but it remains unclear to me that there's a strong line of argument there, specifically as it relates to the topic at hand. It's not clear to me that he should have brought it up, or that it makes his argument weaker that he did not, let alone that it's part of some set of "schoolboy mistakes" to have not done so.

What I don't find any of this back-and-forth convincing about, is that this piece of Scott's is in error for failing to address this stuff. I definitely am not convinced that failing to entertain (or even mention) some kind of, "the 'temperature' of US leftist domestic political violence has, perhaps, remained cool only because we did stuff like not do much to help Chiang Kai-shek" explanation, constitutes an elementary error.

[pdonis]

> You're claiming that things like declining to prosecute a war against the USSR after WWII is an example of an action that acted as an outlet for what would otherwise have become domestic US leftist political violence in the US.

I am making no such claim. My claim is simpler: Scott's argument is that "liberal democracies" are the best way to prevent "state-sponsored violence". But that argument can't possibly be valid if "liberal democracies" in fact cause violence in other countries.

Scott's rebuttal to that claim is to gerrymander the definition of "state-sponsored violence" so that it only counts if it's against the citizens of the "liberal democracies" themselves. But that is exactly the problem: people like Scott can pat themselves on the back about how great "liberal democracies" are only by ignoring the historical record of "liberal democracies" sponsoring all kinds of violence in other states besides their own.

If Scott were to remove the blinders he put on by defining "state-sponsored violence" in such a narrow way and take an honest look at the historical record of "liberal democracies", he would never have even tried to write such an article. Instead he would be directing his intellectual resources towards a much more useful inquiry: why do "liberal democracies" sponsor so much violence in other countries--especially when, in every other country besides their own, sponsoring all that violence never even leads to liberal democracy? Why don't they see the obvious contradiction between their stated principles and the actual results of their actions? But that question isn't even on Scott's radar, because of his ignorance of history.

[pdonis]

> What I don't find any of this back-and-forth convincing about, is that this piece of Scott's is in error for failing to address this stuff.

Scott's argument--not his anti-Reactionary argument, but his argument in favor of his alternate model--depends on particular historical claims. Those claims are false, and they're false because of the historical errors he makes. Those historical errors are not about small or peripheral points. They are about points that are central to his argument. I have already explicitly quoted and discussed them and I won't repeat them here. I just find it difficult to see how Scott is not in error for failing to spot these historical mistakes that he makes, particularly in view of his reputation for supposedly being much better than average at making valid arguments. Making valid arguments is not just a matter of using reason correctly. It's a matter of reasoning from correct premises, and making sure that you are in fact doing so.