Angina Monologue 28

His Majesty has been much preoccupied lately.

I think that’s part of it, anyway.

Ever since suspending his Presidential campaign, on the grounds that he can no longer plausibly claim to be an alternative to voting for the lesser evil, his breakfast small talk has been just that. Small talk. Oh, he still chortles over the sillier stories in the paper. There is still that malicious gleam in his eye when he reads the advice column. But his conversation never seems to wander off into a monologue any more.

The preoccupation is probably with his own mortality. Palpatine is an elderly Sith now, and he is having an increasingly hard time denying it. And now he’s facing shoulder surgery, which I think has actually got him a little scared, if you can believe it.

The trouble started some months back. It turns out that Palpatine keeps a vicious cat. Well, maybe that’s harsh. But the cat will occasionally turn on you when you’re petting her. You’ll have the cat purring and enjoying herself as you rub her head and flanks, and suddenly she’ll turn and nip you. I understand this is not uncommon with neurotic cats, and this cat was a rescue kitten Palpatine fostered for the local shelter and then decided to keep for himself. You can see why the cat might be a bit neurotic.

The problem is that Palpatine jerked his arm back rather abruptly when the cat move to nip at him. A normal reaction, even for a Sith. But something in his shoulder didn’t like it, and His Majesty was actually dancing around in pain for a few moments afterwards. It was a touch hard on the cat, too. But after a few minutes, the pain subsided, thought the shoulder was still tender.

A week or so later, he was down in the basement reorganizing things (Palpatine being an unfortunate combination of pack rat and neatness freak) and he tripped over something. I was upstairs working on the imperial bills, and I heard a loud crash, followed by a few moments of ominous silence. Then, in a quiet voice that could not quite hide the pain: “Anakin?”

He hasn’t called me that in many years.

When he started going down, he instinctively threw his arms out. You’d think someone so strong in the Force would have no trouble catching his balance, but, as I said, he’s getting very old and downright frail. And when he threw his arms out, he really threw the one arm out, if you follow me. And then landed on it. He would never have allowed himself to show it, but I think he was in real agony for quite a while afterwards. He refused my offer to take him to the physician. He would be fine, he insisted.

Well, it’s been several months, and the shoulder just hasn’t gotten better. In fact, it’s getting worse, to the point where he actually made the appointment with the local orthopedic surgeon himself. I’m no physician, but his symptoms all match a badly torn rotator cuff. It looks like there’s a fair chance they’ll be cutting on his shoulder soon.

You may recall he had an abscess surgically debrided not quite a year ago. He snarked about surgery becoming a birthday tradition (he turns <mumble mumble> at the end of March) but has otherwise been very quiet about this. Which worries me: It reminds me way too much of the terrible patience of a very old pet that is no longer interested leaving its bed, even to eat and drink, and you know it won’t be with us much longer. Odd that the thought of losing the old monster actually grieves me.

Perhaps finally admitting to himself that he was in pain and wasn’t getting better, and doing something positive about it, has improved his disposition. He started monologuing at breakfast Monday morning, for the first time in weeks.

It began, as is so often the case, with him cackling over a news story. Well, a column in the newspaper, anyway; not exactly news. An editorial praising George Washington as the indispensable man of the American Revolution, and lamenting how the holiday has been converted into a generic Presidents’ Day when the father of our country really deserves a holiday all his own. It’s a sentiment I share, actually.

<snort> Praising Washington for his contribution to making democracy the political norm around the world. Have you ever heard anything more risible? — Oh, all right; it’s campaign season, so you probably have, and recently. Still.

For one thing, there’s a serious assertion of fact not in evidence here: That democracy is actually the political norm around the world. We’ll leave that aside for now.

More hilarious is the notion that democracy is a desirable thing, or that Washington would have thought so. We’ve discussed this before. The Founders, or at least those who shaped the Constitution, had something close to a horror of pure democracy. They were committed republicans, of the small-r variety, and considered this to be a very different thing from a democracy. Even Jefferson, who came closest of the major founders to embracing pure democracy, spoke of a natural aristocracy. Which is the real difference: In a republic, the people reign, but their elite rule; in a democracy, the people both rule and reign, to their sorrow.

It really is am important difference, Lord Vader. Voting is a terrible way to make important decisions. A system where things are decided by popular vote, and where my vote has exactly the same weight as that of an unemployed high school dropout with a baby out of wedlock, is flat insane. Particularly when the system gives us an equal say in whether taxes will be spent to give the high school dropout free food and housing, or spent instead on a professional police force up to the task of humanely protecting me from the antisocial behavior of said unemployed high school dropout and his homies.

His Majesty is not notable concerned with whether he shows the correct attitude of compassion towards the poor.

I have the considerable advantage of not being a Christian, Lord Vader. Which leaves me free to make all the distinctions I wish between the working poor and the social parasites. Oh, I know: Your flavor of Christianity has in its scriptures that the idler shall not wear the garment or eat the bread of the laborer. But that’s just hypocrisy on your part. I know, because Steve Colbert told me.

It’s easy to tell when His Majesty is uttering a mixture of things he actually believes with thing he doesn’t, because that would be all the time. The trick is knowing which is which.

I’m also constantly surprised by how much he knows about my belief system.

Notwithstanding my reputation, I actually favor improving the lot of the working poor. Oh, don’t mistake this for altruism. There’s really no such thing. The uncomfortable truth, Lord Vader, is that you do charitable things because you hunger for treasure in heaven.

I won’t deny it, but another reason is because I find genuine delight in seeing another made better off by something I did. And this makes it a lot easier to look at myself in the mirror in the morning.

Meh. Your brain is wired to take delight in the good of another, because this gave your ancestors a decided evolutionary advantage. Their tribe’s genes were mostly their genes, which are now your genes. Regarding this as altruism is as silly as trying to take credit for the intelligence you were born with.

But there are numerous practical reasons for improving the lot of the poor. For one thing, it’s a lot safer to be surrounded by happy people than unhappy people. Plus, the working poor are the traditional recruitment ground for non-cloned storm troopers, and you want your storm troopers coming from healthy and intelligent stock. And you don’t want to have to grow your own food and weave your own clothes and do your own plumbing. Make the working poor better off, and they can be persuaded to do these things for you, and do a decent job of it.

The trick is that most people aren’t happy because they score well on any absolute measure of well-being. They’re happy when they see themselves better off than they were a year ago, and have reasonable expectations that they will be better off still a year from now. If they are not on a positive trend, they’re unhappy, even if in absolute terms they live better than the overwhelming majority of humans throughout history. Which almost every citizen of a Western nation today does.

So the trick is to give them the impression that the future is bright and they have a stake in it. That’s a difficult thing to sustain, but it helps that people have very short memories and very plastic ideas about the world around them. It’s the best explanation for Bernie Sanders I’ve been able to come up with.

The funny thing is, no one really believes in democracy. No one. It’s all lip service and everyone knows it.

What’s instructive is the difference in how Democrats and Republicans let slip the fact that, no, they don’t really believe in democracy.

With Democrats, the tell is that they positively relish wise Latinas and the “best and brightest” bureaucrats running as much of society as possible. If this isn’t obvious proof that they don’t really believe voters are up to making the big decisions, I don’t know what is. In fact, the point is so obvious that I’m not going to belabor it.

Republicans are more interesting, in part because their view is more schizophrenic, and I find psychosis enthralling. A good chunk of the Republican intelligentsia works very hard to convince itself, and us, that they really do believe in democracy. This requires finding an explanation for why an electorate in whose common sense they profess so much faith keeps handing them so many electoral defeats. Granted, they are winning a bit more than they are losing lately, but only by the narrowest of margins; and the people they are barely holding their own against are the likes of Obama and Biden and Reid and Pelosi. So you hear these kinds of Republicans going on about media bias (which is real enough) and the Left’s stranglehold on education (also real enough) and the need to recapture the culture (which is not wrong) and how when these things are corrected the voters will give them all power to transform America into a garden of earthly delights. Which leaves me wondering if SETI is even capable of building a radio telescope powerful enough to establish communications with the planet they’re living on.

The more realistic and intelligent kind of Republican understands that voting is a lousy way to make decisions, but his response is not to turn those decisions over to judges and bureaucrats. Instead, he seeks a government that is required to make as few decisions as possible. The vast majority of decisions are farmed out, through the mechanisms of markets and other private social institutions, to folks who will pay most of the costs of those decisions. And then Conquest’s First Law will save us: Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

It’s a happy thought. No, really, I understand the appeal. But one must not forget Conquest’s Second Law: Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

Still, it’s our best shot. We just have to remember to make our social institutions as right-wing as possible. I wish the Republicans could have the guts to make this argument explicit: Voting is a really lousy way to make decisions. So let’s make as few decisions that way as possible, by being serious about limited government.

I think that ship has sailed. Our citizens are much too accustomed to having many important decisions made by an arm of the government. Whom, paradoxically enough, they do not trust.

It’s partly a matter of trusting other institutions even less. I don’t know that I fully understand it myself, but when a society begins to lose confidence in its own institutions, in its own ruling elite, the government is the institution they lose faith in last.  Never mind what polls say (which is that government is deeply distrusted); the revealed preference of the voters is to go on trusting the government after they’ve lost faith in everything else.

It occurs to me that this is a consequence of the myth of the power of democracy. Voters still feel like they control their own government, and we trust what we think we control.

Another problem with telling voters that they make lousy decisions on broad policy matters is the Dunning-Kruger effect. Voters overestimate their own competence.

All you have to do is remind them of some spectacularly lousy decisions past voters made. Let them believe that they, themselves, are a lot more competent than they really are; but what if the idiots take over again? Then they’ll be glad they acted to limit the power of government.

All this raises the interesting question of why we have democratic elements in our government at all. Legitimacy?

Don’t say it like it’s a dirty word. Yes, legitimacy. The democrat wants a government where everyone gets a voice in making all the decisions. The republican wants a government where the very best make decisions, but only decisions of a strictly limited scope and nature, and from which the voters can withdraw their consent to be governed at any time. They’re really very different political visions.

Neither of which was yours.

That’s not completely fair. The Republic had long been something approaching a pure democracy, with all its disadvantages, and I was merely the last of a long line of demagogues. Well, why not? If the voters were going to follow a demagogue anyway, then why not me?

Well, there you hit on the real problem. We have a nominally republican form of government. But we have the worst elite in the history of the Republic. There’s no one deserving of our consent to exercise even the very restricted powers enumerated by the Constitution — let alone the sweeping powers lusted for by the Sanders, Clintons, and Trumps of the world.

Just so. Excuse me; I think Game of Thrones is about to come on.

He headed for the television room, wincing slightly as he picked up the remote. With the wrong hand.