If regular democracy isn’t doing so well, maybe it’s time to fall back on “Irish Democracy.”
That’s what Yale political scientist James Scott calls the passive resistance of a society that doesn’t like what its rulers are doing to it. In his book “Two Cheers for Anarchy,” he writes, “One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called ‘Irish Democracy,’ the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.”
These are the opening paragraphs of Glenn H. Reynolds, “The irrational COVID regime is driving many Americans to a healthy non-compliance,” New York Post, October 14, 2021. Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and a well-known blogger at Instapundit.
He goes on to detail some of the ways people are ignoring the oppressive regulations that various governments in the United States have imposed with Covid as their justification.
I basically agree with him. The “silent, dogged resistance” is quite healthy.
I do worry, though, about longer-term effects. I remember Milton Friedman saying in a talk, many decades ago, words to the effect: “The British follow all the laws, good and bad, the French ignore all the laws, and the Americans follow the good ones and ignore the bad ones.” I’m not saying his empirical observation was right even then. But I do worry that we will fall into ignoring the good rules as well as the many bad ones.
READER COMMENTS
KevinDC
Oct 16 2021 at 12:44pm
Reading this triggered the little memory imp that lives in my brain about this post Bryan Caplan made several years ago that covers some similar ground. Specifically, it touches on the worry that engaging in rule breaking in the face of bad rules could lead to breaking good rules too. Caplan raises a couple of solid counterpoints to that worry, but I think the best treatment of that concern is the chapter “The Psychology of Authority” in Michael Huemer’s book The Problem of Political Authority, which argues that humans are absurdly, excessively deferential to authority, by default. As he sums it up:
Looping back to James Scott and Two Cheers for Anarchy, I’m reminded of his essay in that book where he talks about the need to engage in “anarchist calisthenics” from time to time – it’s mentally healthy to make an effort to break rules that are unfounded or unjust, to keep yourself from calcifying too much into a mindset of doing as you’re told, simply because you were told to do it.
David Henderson
Oct 16 2021 at 1:48pm
Thanks, KevinDC.
That makes me feel better about Irish democracy and worse about people.
But, on net, better. The reason is that that fact about people is “baked in the cake.” In other words, what I’m observing is a result of what you and Huemer are pointing out. So the new information, the delta, if you will, is the civil disobedience.
Mark Brophy
Oct 17 2021 at 5:33am
Reynolds gives no examples of people resisting. The cops in Chicago and the Southwest pilots are resisting but they’re alone, everyone else is going along. Even the most oppressive places, colleges, are having no trouble attracting customers.
The government told people to wear two masks several months ago, essentially admitting that a single cloth mask is useless. Nevertheless, I see many people wearing masks in grocery stores, including many people younger than 40.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Oct 16 2021 at 4:46pm
But how does one individually resist trade and immigration restrictions, low density zoning, regressive tax cuts, failure to tax net CO2 emissions?
Philo
Oct 16 2021 at 10:26pm
Resistance is most practicable where enforcement is spotty.
Matthias
Oct 18 2021 at 7:38am
Not sure about resisting, but you could start by voting with your feet?
Mark Brady
Oct 16 2021 at 11:00pm
This is not the first time that Glenn Reynolds has referred to James Scott’s use of the phrase “Irish Democracy” in Two Cheers for Anarchy. Several years ago in January 2014 he referenced Scott in “How Americans can kill Obamacare, legalize pot” in USA Today. That said, the concept was not coined by Scott, but by Alexis James Oliver FitzGerald, a lawyer and, later, a senator in the Irish legislature, who wrote an essay entitled “Irish Democracy” in University Review published by the Graduates Association of the National University of Ireland in 1960. It’s well worth a look. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25504475
David Henderson
Oct 18 2021 at 1:02pm
Thanks, Mark.
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