Dominic Cummings: belief

Transcript context

…Why does democracy work? Or does it work? And why do some democracies work better than other democracies? Britain’s been a “democracy” for 80 to 100 years depending on how you define it. There’s been a particular kind of regime in most of Europe post 1945 of a kind of pseudo American empire which has entrenched a certain kind of democracy in various countries. But that’s a very, very small change in the sweep of history. It’s like asking questions about 250 BC in 100 BC about the Roman Republic. Well, the Roman Republic has lasted for a century so far. You certainly can’t say now that democracy has proved to work. I would say the one thing you see in history is regimes are constantly changing and everyone thinks in their own time that we’re not going to change. What we’ve got is going to persist. But it’s always wrong. The most that things persist is a few generations, and then there’s always chaos and then there’s always a change. What is the next thing going to look like? And what should it look like? And the reason I asked that question is, one of the justifications of democracy is it’s nonviolent error correction and you can fix these mistakes. But on this account of what’s going on in the government now, not only are errors not being fixed, they’re accumulating and constantly increasing. So then is there a system in which these errors are constantly pruned away? What would that system look like?…

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