The first thing to notice about Sir Alexandreu’s programme is that it’s a
Peculiarist programme. This may well come as a shock to members of both Peculiarist parties, and indeed to Sir Alexandreu himself who, I believe, strongly identifies as a derivatist. But Peculiarism means the rejection of the concept that Talossa should seek to model itself on other, “real” countries. Sir Alexandreu singles out for criticism three reforms in the post-Reunision era which I believe to be real democratic gains:
- Pushing back on the powers of the monarchy.
- A “professionalised” form of administration where the Government “gets its act together” behind closed Cabinet doors first before announcing matters or introducing them to the Ziu.
- The Cosa (or at least 2/3 of it) restricted to people who were actually elected, i.e. voted for, rather than seats to be given out at a party leader’s whim to interesting newbies and whoever else.
In real countries that actually exist today,
all these things are standard best practice. They are a Derivatist platform, in other words. Sir Alexandreu suggests that all three of them are bad things which have made Talossa less fun; i.e. that being “fun” should override the urge to imitate the best practice of other “real” nations.
That is a pure statement of Peculiarism. We might call it Conservative Peculiarism, to distinguish it from centrist (PNP) or radical (NPW) Peculiarism, but it’s Peculiarism nonetheless. This is distinct from when this was the status quo under the RUMP – that was simply conservatism, with the considerable bonus feature that it meant it was very hard to displace a party which had a Cosa majority and good relations with the King.
So my counter-argument can be best framed as follows:
- I am a Derivatist, and for me fun in Talossa means setting up “working models in miniature” of “real” nation states. For me, an argument such as “this is how it’s done in New Zealand/the United States/Vietnam/Eswatini” is a good argument for trying it in Talossa, if appropriate. I can’t argue someone else’s sense of fun and I won’t try, but this is how I like it. I wonder what Sir Alexandreu thinks of the secret ballot – probably the most important of all the post-Reunision democratic reforms? Has that ruined people’s fun, or not?
I should note that in passing that one recent innovation that Sir Alexandreu seems to like – interview of Uppermost Cort Justice candidates by the Senäts – is copied directly from the United States and is thus a Derivatist initiative.
- I am a Free Democrat, and the slogan of the Free Democrats is “liberty and democracy first”. Even if we were to concede the argument of Sir Alexandreu that the three reforms mentioned above have made Talossa less fun, or less inviting for new citizens, they are democratic. Pushing back on monarchical power and restricting the Cosa to people who’ve actually won votes are democratic reforms, i.e. they increase the accessibility of political power in Talossa to people who politically disagree with the King, or with whichever happens to be the biggest political party with the most seats to give away.
You can make an argument that democracy (or efficient administration) are not “fun” – but I’ll never accept that argument. I cannot have fun in a community where a single person and a political party/group of friends associated with him has a permanent veto over what can happen. I joined Talossa 23 years ago on the promise of “a freewheeling multiparty democracy”, which turned out to be a sham – and I’ve spent 23 years trying to make it come true. This is a sign of bad mental health on my part, I’m sure.
The part where Sir Alexandreu does have a point is that integrating new citizens into Talossan politics is harder if we can’t just give them seats in the legislature. I must admit that I assumed that, for example, a new citizen who wanted a Cosa seat would join a political party and aim to get on its list, or wait until the next election, start their own party and vote for themselves. For whatever reason this hasn’t happened in a while. At the recent Council of Governors, I suggested that this might be substituted by giving new citizens preferential roles in
provincial government; but this idea is still to be fleshed out.
As to Sir Alexandreu’s other points:
a lot of the silly fluff that was fun, like the RUMP parade, was really easy to mock, and so now it's gone;”
First off, there’s that question of “fun” again. For those of us who chafed under 9 terms of single-party RUMP government, it certainly wasn’t “fun” watching the ruling party celebrate their own greatness all over Wittenberg. I got a lot of trouble for posting a THIS PARADE IS NOW ILLEGAL meme. The political point was of that was that RUMP parades reminded me of Orange parades in Northern Ireland; a dominant cultural/political group parading to rub the noses of their political opponents/cultural Others in their own powerlessness and exclusion.
Secondly, if I knew all I had to do to make things go away was to mock them, I would have done it much earlier. Seriously, this was always a bone of cultural contention between the 2005-11 Kingdom and the Republic. There was an incident with a photo of Sir Trotxa Betinéir and a Republican making a Monty Python joke about it, which on the Republican side was seen as good-natured trolling, and on the Kingdom side was seen as a vicious and unacceptable personal attack. It seemed to we Republicans sometimes, to use a phrase from the US culture wars, that the vaunted RUMP culture could only exist in a “safe space”. Mockery could not be allowed, nor could any sign that Republican or reformist Talossans might not respect the culture of an “ersatz aristocracy” which had sprung up in the post-KR1 Kingdom. But an even worse blow to RUMP culture seemed to be the loss of their perpetual majority in the Cosa. Rightly or wrongly, the words
“sore loser” came to many minds on this subject.
Simply put, there is no reason, if the RUMP Party still exists, that the RUMP parade couldn’t happen again. As the expression of the culture of a Talossan minority, rather than a ruling party’s “in your face”, it would be a harmless expression of Peculiarity and face much less opprobrium. In a future speech to the Ziu, I intend to address the question of to what extent “Talossa’s activity crisis” is in fact a political strike, or boycott, by the conservative faction.
Talossa has always been
both a “goofy pretend country” and a “political/democratic simulation” (and for a while it was a nasty personality cult, but alhamdulillah those days are now gone). In some ways what we have seen here in our own “culture wars” mirrors that split. If you prefer the goofy pretend country stuff, of course you’ll dig etiquette, “staying in character”, deference to established authority etc. If you prefer the latter side of Talossa, you’ll want everything to be up for grabs if it can be democratically and constitutionally organized for, and you’ll tolerate “robust expressions of disagreement” and even the occasional slanging match. I’m interested in finding a way for both “ways of Talossanity” to be honoured. But I simply will not agree with backpedalling on democracy because it’s less “fun” (at least, less fun for the former ruling faction).
“any new potential political groups would need to endure some cruelty, and it's just not worth it;”
We’ve dealt above with the fact that, if you’re used to living with privilege, mockery or even opposition feels like “cruelty”; but this has no bearing on reality. I have three letters for those who argue that any new party would get monstered by those in power: NPW. As I will address in my speech to the Ziu later, the problem of “a lack of political diversity” right now is a real one, but should be laid at the feed of conservatives who boycotted the election or – even worse – collected conservative votes and threw them in the trash.
But perhaps more importantly: has anyone not noticed that
that there has been a lot less miéida flying around this term? And that's probably not unrelated to the lack of a strong political opposition in the Cosa (sorry ESB!). Is flying miéida a price we play for democracy which means something, rather than being a roleplaying game of sorts?
“a lot of people in charge don't prioritize the major problems (inactivity, voter decline, lack of political diversity) as highly as the changes they personally wish to make to the country regarding their specific hobby-horses; …
“a lot of schemes for encouraging activity have been dumb because they relied on the assumption that restricting people from doing some fun stuff would force them to do less fun stuff, but in reality people just skipped the whole thing.”
Here we still have the problem that “what you’re doing doesn’t help X issue” is not helpful when you yourself don’t have any idea (or have a secret plan?!?) for what
would help. Sir Alexandreu’s programme has the helpful feature that it suggests some ways that we could help things – sadly, all those are rolling back post-Reunision democratic reforms, which are not going to happen unless the Free Democrats and our allies are politically defeated. Of course, this Government is quite realistic and humble about the fact that– aside from the successful setting up of SIGN and the resolution of the 13-year war over Talossan spelling – our serious cultural programme this term has fallen rather flat. That, again, is something I wish to raise in the Ziu.
