Surprise Veep Pick?

James Hanley in reply to BlaiseP says:

Serious question, Blaise: Do you agree to the $100 challenge? Do you have the confidence to put money on the line?

Now here’s why I say you’re wrong. It’s tremendously easy to claim someone is wrong when you fundamentally misrepresent what they are arguing. I don’t think you are purposely misrepresenting Rummel, but I suspect you didn’t read him carefully–if you actually read him at all–and you simply don’t actually understand what he is arguing, so that your criticism is based on misunderstanding him.

Rummel is not arguing that democracies are completely peacelike and never go to war. He is operating from the theory of democratic peace, which doesn’t say that democracies don’t go to war, but that they don’t go to war with each other, or in a less strong version, that they are less likely to go to war with each other than a) authoritarian states are and b) than democracies are to go to war with authoritarian states. While there’s still debate about the theory among political scientists, that debate is more about what the structural causes are than about the outcomes; there just seems to be fairly little dispute that the more fully developed democracies states are, the less likely they are to go to war with each other.

Oddly, you suggest commerce might be an impediment to war–that was a view developing prior to WWI, a war which is one of your examples. And yet as everyone learned, increasingly close economic ties between those countries did not prevent that war, a war in which well-developed democracies did not fight each other.

But to focus on war is to wholly miss Rummel’s focus, which is not war but democide, the killing by a state of the people under its authority. This is a concept broader than genocide, that incorporates genocide as as a subcategory. This frequently happens during war, but it also happens during periods when governments are not at war, such as in China during the cultural revolution.

Democide is an important concept because throughout the 20th century–which has been Rummel’s primary focus–democide deaths have dwarfed battle deaths. In Death by Government he claims 169 million deaths by democide. More recently he has revised that estimate upward to 262 million.

Compare that to battle deaths, which Rummel puts at 39 million. Democide deaths are 4 to 7 times as great as battle deaths. To some extent they can’t be wholly separated, since democide is so frequently connected with war, but even so they suggest that the biggest concern with war is not battle deaths, not “collateral damage” of civilian deaths, but governments non-accidental killing of civilians within the territories they control.

Is it true that authoritarian states do this more than democracies? The evidence says so. The “megamurderers,” states that killed one million or more civilians, are:
– USSR
– People’s Republic of China
– Nazi Germany
– the Kuomintang government of China/Taiwan
– Japan in the 1930/40s
– Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge
– Turkey in the early 20th century
– Poland following WWII
– Pakistan from the 1950s-80s
– Yugoslavia under Tito

How many democracies are on that list? Turkey? At best it was in the very early stages of trying to establish a democracy, one that was frequently co-opted by military regimes.

The only democracy to appear in Rummel’s top 20 is the UK, which appears near the bottom of the list, with less than 1 million killed, and that due almost entirely to its colonialism, it’s least democratic aspect. Other democracies are imperfect, too, again, mostly because of colonialism. The French have an ugly history in SE Asia and North Africa. The U.S.’s actions in the Philippines are too little known. But these atrocities are too small to even make the list of top democides.

The USSR killed more than 60 million civilians. The PRC killed over 70 million. The KMT, 10 million. the Khmer Rouge, only 2 million, but in a country of only 7 million.

Noticeably, Blaise, you have not even attempted to contradict those numbers. Perhaps they’re overstated, so let’s cut them in half: they still vastly outweigh battle deaths or anything democracies, admittedly imperfect democracies, have done.

Finally, is it true that Rummel has too simplistic a distinction between authoritarian and democratic states? No. In Death By Government he says,

The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more power is diffused, checked, and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide. At the extremes of Power, totalitarian communist governments slaughter their people by the ten of millions; in contrast many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers.

Rummel’s language here is clear–“more,” “less,” “at the extremes.” These are words relating to a non-dichotomous variable. And he has, in his books, a graph showing a “power curve,” with three categories, democratic, authoritarian, and totalitarian. Could that be made even more finely tuned? Absolutely. We could, for example, use a Freedom House scale of free to partly free to not free. Would doing so reveal anything different about the relationship between government power and democide? There’s no evidence to suggest so; the break between clearly authoritarian and clearly democratic countries is so sharp that little increased insight is gained from the exercise.

So, in a nutshell: Blaise misunderstands the theory of democratic peace; he misunderstands Rummel’s focus on democide rather than war; and he doesn’t even attempt a rebuttal of Rummel’s evidence that authoritarian governments kill far more civilians than democratic governments.Report

James Hanley in reply to BlaiseP says:

Rummel’s thesis is that democracies are less warlike, period. You must prove he said otherwise.

I like this. You make a claim, but you accept no responsibility for proving it. He who disputes you must bear all responsibility.

I can’t respect that, but I can respond to it. And the response is that again you are misinterpreting things. I didn’t claim Rummel didn’t say democracies are less warlike–he does. But the ways in which they are less warlike is primarily in that they don’t go to war with other democracies and they don’t kill mass numbers of civilians subject to their control. In all, they kill fewer civilians.

What’s most bizarre here is your refusal to address Rummel’s real focus: democide. You want to nibble at the peripheral issue, and declare him fundamentally wrong because of your disagreement there. But you shy away from what is really his fundamental argument, which is that democracies don’t kill their own citizens at anything like the rate authoritarian countries do.

You also claim democracies do go to war with each other, but provide exactly zero examples. Even Rummel admits you might be able to find a few:

(depending on how war and democracy are defined, some might prefer to say that [democracies] rarely fought or fight each other).

Democracies vs. democracies: 0
Democracies vs. non-democracies: 155
Nondemocracies vs. nondemocracies: 198

These are empirical claims. If Rummel is wrong, it should be easy to show the evidence of where he is wrong.Report

James Hanley in reply to BlaiseP says:

Whether we count the U.S. Civil War as in fact a civil war or as two democracies fighting each other is a difficult question. I’d caution against a facile latching on to either interpretation.

But in general, let me say that this is in fact the way to argue: examples, evidence, not mere assertions. To whatever extent I may disagree with interpretations (and I’m more in the position of pondering them than being certain about agreement or disagreement), this I respect.Report