Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The U.S. is mildly destabilizing, published by lc on August 18, 2023 on LessWrong.

We focus so much on arguing over who is at fault in this country that I think sometimes we fail to notice or alert on what's actually happening. I would just like to point out, without attempting to assign blame, that American political institutions appear to be losing common knowledge of their legitimacy, and abandoning certain important traditions of cooperative governance. It would be slightly hyperbolic, but not unreasonable to me, to term what has happened "democratic backsliding".

Let's imagine America of 2012 was measured 0.8 on the fictionally accurate "legitimate democracy index", and Hungary of 2012 was measured 0.5. My thesis is that the we'd now be at 0.75, and that the regression seems to have calcified despite the culture war calming down since 2020. Within the last three or four years we have seen:

The first presidential election in the history of the country ever contested by one of the main candidates; an election now considered probably or definitely illegitimate by nearly a third of Americans.

The world's largest protest-riot ever, when measured by estimated damage to property or number of participants.

Spontaneous mob assaults of the capitol building.

The leader of the opposition party being arrested on a mix of real and recently-invented process crimes in several different jurisdictions a year before his campaign.

Recent, and novel, movements by Republicans to fine and censure Democratic congressmen millions of dollars outside of the criminal justice system.

Serious attempts at dramatically expanding political control over the civil service and, if you can permit me to speak anecdotally, serious and successful attempts at unprecedented political loyalty testing of appointed silovik.

You can disagree with how any one political faction is characterizing the above events, or how I'm characterizing the above events. One take, for example, would be that Donald Trump is a clown and that all of his indictments are perfectly legitimate and that they ultimately demonstrate the dispassionate fairness of our nation's prosecutors. But even if that's the case, perception is the leading indicator for democratic stability and a large amount of Republicans do not agree with that interpretation. Since Republicans now believe that the arrests are politically motivated, and that Democrats are hitting "defect" by electing those prosecutors, they are pressuring their politicians to escalate and calling them traitors when they refuse to do so. This is itself bad.

It's of course possible to exaggerate the danger. I do not expect the entire political system of the United States is going to change anytime soon. But since 1989 I think it has been appropriate to have a degree of knightian uncertainty in predicting the eternal dominance of this or that regime, on the basis that modern technology and secret police make resistance impossible. If you currently habitually round probabilities of serious repression or further democratic backsliding in the West to zero, I suggest moving that up to 1%-per-decade and spending a little bit of time thinking about what you'd do if this continues for five more years and your estimate increases to 5 or 10 percent.

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