The idea that Germans carried a sense of supremacy stronger than that of other peoples seems very doubtful to me. My impression is the various units that became Germany weren't particularly nationalistic until the Napoleonic wars and occupations which left behind a sense of vulnerability to the West, and also Napoleon's own kind of modernized bureaucratic government. This lead to intensified sense of "German-ness" and a zeal for "catching up" which helped inspire the German style research university (which gave the world modern industrial chemistry and modern physics, as well as some very bad philosophy).
The mid-19c was another rude shock as technology accelerated colonialism. Steamboats that could ply the rivers of Africa set off a scramble among the main colonizing nations, giving them the raw materials for a huge acceleration of economic strength.
Bismark's consolidation made turned a somewhat medieval patchwork into a nation and left the world in no doubt of its strength. Wilhelm III was a reckless spirit who did much to put Germany on course to its first great disaster.
Antisemitism was strongest in Austria not coincidentally Hitler's home. Lately, I've read from a couple of sources that Jews were about 1% of the population of Germany, but Austria had to deal with a lot of ethnicities that they once dominated.
It was 14 years from the end of WWI to Hitler's becoming Chancellor, a period of shame and humiliation, and recent and continued encounters with socialism and Communism. The atmosphere seemed to breed only extreme parties. In the interim years, Hitler's propaganda conflated Jews and Communists, and he opportunistically took advantage of a sort of sense of moral superiority which often wells up among beaten people.
Hitler, like Mussolini (whose nation also was playing "catch up" in terms of modern national forms) was able with new technology to stage mass spectacles and nationwide radio events which with his talents whipped Germany into a kind of hysterical paranoia about the rest of the world and "will" to reverse the situation.
When it comes to "gaming democracy" Weimar democracy was very peculiar. Once Hitler had a kind of figurehead power (very insecure for the first months), he could control events with his private armies, the SA and SS, whose numbers dwarfed the official army severely limited in number by the Versailles Treaty. Whether or not the Nazis set the Reichstad fire, it gave them the excuse to raise the level of paranoia and declare a state of emergency during which the Socialist and communist parties were crushed -- mostly I believe not by the regular government, but by the SA and SS.
Hitler used his private armies, a force to anarchic to be precisely controlled to destroy order in Germany. Soon after, he decapitated the SA's leadership in the "night of the long knives". Had he not, the regular army would have seen Hitler as connected with them. It was his way of declaring to the General Staff "You don't have to worry about this band of thugs pushing you out of power, you are just what I want".
Much of the persecution of Jews was extra-legal until Krystallnacht, which occurred in 11/38, four years after the night of the long knives.
An incredible amount of system gaming that we'll probably not see the like of again. Hitler started off with millions in extra-governmental forces and up-front declared intentions such that when he was placed in power, the people looked around and, as his grip tightened, were apt to say the nation elected this guy, so this is the course the nation has set itself on (even if I personally can't condone it).
There is a wide general belief that somebody could gain power talking nice and democratically with a hidden agenda, and once in that seat, the reins of government would be his -- it is the myth of the Reader's Digest version of The Road to Serfdom, which turned Hayek's reasonable arguments and fears and concerns into a paranoid fantasy (see http://whatwasthecoldwar.blogspot.com/2010/07/illustrated-comic-book-in-fact-road-to.html) for an illustrated even more condensed summary.
I live in the UK, which has a very similar voting structure to the US for the purposes of this article. Nevertheless, it may differ on the details, for which I am sorry. I also use a couple of real-life political examples which I hope are uncontroversial enough not to break the unofficial rules here. If they are not, I can change them, because this is a discussion of gaming democracy by exploiting swing seats to push rationalist causes.
Cory Doctrow writes in the Guardian about using Kickstarter-like thresholds to encourage voting for minority parties:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/24/how-the-kickstarter-model-could-transform-uk-elections
He points out that nobody votes for minority parties because nobody else votes for them; if you waste your vote on Yellow then it is one fewer vote that might stop the hated Blue candidate getting in by voting for the not-quite-so-bad Green. He argues that you could use the internet to inform people when some pre-set threshold had been triggered with respect to voting for a minor party and thus encourage them to get out and vote. So for example if the margin of victory was 8000 votes and 9000 people agreed with the statement, “If more than 8000 people agree to this statement, then I will go to the polls on election day and vote for the minority Yellow party”, the minority Yellow party would win power even though none of the original 9000 participants would have voted for Yellow without the information-coordinating properties of the internet.
I’m not completely sure of the argument, but I looked into some of the numbers myself. There are 23 UK seats (roughly equivalent to Congressional Districts for US readers) with a margin of 500 votes or fewer. So to hold the balance of power in these seats you need to find either 500 non-voters who would be prepared to vote the way you tell them, or 250 voters with the same caveats (voters are worth twice as much as non-voters to the aspiring seat-swinger, since a vote taken from the Blues lowers the margin by one, and a vote given to the Greens lowers the margin by one, and every voter is entitled to both take a vote away from the party they are currently voting for and award a vote to any party of their choice). I’ll call the number of votes required to swing a seat the ‘effective voter’ count, which allows for the fact that some voters count for two.
It doesn’t sound impossible to me to reach the effective voter count for some swing constituencies, given that often even extremely obvious parody parties can often win back their deposit (500 actual votes, not even ‘effective votes’).
Doctrow wants to use the information co-ordination system to help minority parties reach a wider audience. I think it could be used in a much more active way to force policy promises on uncontroversial but low-status issues from potential future MPs. Let me take as an example ‘Research funding for transhuman causes’. Most people don’t know what transhumanism is, and most people who do know what it is don’t care. Most people who know what it is and care are basically in support of research into transhuman augmentations, but would definitely rank issues like the economy or defence as more important. There is a small constituency of people who oppose transhumanism outright, but they are not single issue voters either by any means (I imagine opposing transhumanism is strongly correlated with a ‘traditional religious value’ cluster which includes opposing abortion, gay marriage and immigration). Politicians could therefore (almost) costlessly support a small amount of research funding for transhuman, which would almost certainly be a sensible move when averaged across the whole country (either you discover something cool, in which case your population is made better off and your army more powerful or you don’t, and in the worst case you get a decent multiplier effect to the economy that comes from employing a load of material scientists and bioengineers). However we know that they won’t do this because while the benefits to the country might be great, the minor cost of supporting a low-status (‘weird’) project is borne entirely by the individual politician. What I mean by this is that the politician will probably not lose any votes by publically supporting transhumanism, but will lose status among their peers and will want to avoid this. There’s also a small risk of losing votes by supporting transhuman causes from the ‘traditional value’ cluster and no obvious demographic with whom supporting transhuman causes gains votes.
This indicates to me that if enough pro-transhumans successfully co-ordinated their action, they could bargain with the politicians standing for office. Let us say there are unequivocally enough transhumans to meet the effective voter threshold for a particular constituency. One person could go round each transhuman (maybe on that city’s subreddit) and get them to agree in principle to vote for whichever candidate will agree to always vote ‘Yes’ on research funding for transhuman causes, up to a maximum of £1bn. Each transhuman might have a weak preference for Blues vs Greens or vice versa, but the appeal is made to their sense of logic; each Blue vote is cancelled out by each Green vote, but each ‘Transhuman’ vote is a step closer to getting transhumanism properly funded, and transhumanism is more important than any marginal policy difference between the two parties. You then go to each candidate and present the evidence that the ‘transhuman’ block has the power to swing the election and is well co-ordinated enough to vote as a bloc on election day. If both candidates agree that they will vote ‘Yes’ on the bills you decided on, then send round an electronic message saying – essentially – “Vote your conscience”. If one candidate says ‘Yes’ and the other ‘No’ send round a message saying “Vote Blue” (or Green). If both candidates say ‘no’ send a message saying “Vote for the Transhuman Party (which is me)” in the hope that you can demonstrate you really did hold the balance of power, to increase the weight of your negotiation in the future.
If the candidate then goes back on their word, you slash and burn the constituency and make sure that no matter what the next candidate from that party promises, they lose. Also ensure that if that candidate ever stands in a marginal seat again, they lose (effectively ending their political career). This gives a strong incentive for MPs to vote the way they promised, and for parties to allow them to vote the way they promised.
Incidentally my preferred promise to extract from the candidates (and I don’t think this works in America) is to bring a bill with a particular wording if they win a Private Members’ Ballot (a system whereby junior members enter a lottery to see whose idea for a bill gets a ‘reading’ in the House of Commons, and hence a chance of becoming a law). For example, “This house would fund £1bn worth of transhumanism basic research over the next four years”. This is because it forces MPs to take a position on an issue they otherwise would not want to touch (because it is low-status) and one way out of this bind is to pretend the issue was high-status all along, which would be a good outcome for transhumanism as it means people might start funding it without the complicated information-coordination game I describe above.
One issue with this is that some groups – for example; Eurosceptics – are happy to single issue vote already, and there are far more Eurosceptics than there are rationalists in the UK. A US equivalent – as far as I understand – might be gun rights activists; they will vote for whatever party deregulates guns furthest, regardless of any other policies they might have and they are very numerous. This could be a problem, since a more numerous coalition will always beat a less numerous coalition at playing this information coordination game.
The first response is that it might actually be OK if this occurs. Being a Eurosceptic in no way implies a particular position on transhuman issues, so a politician could agree to the demands of the Eurosceptic bloc and transhuman bloc without issue. The numbers problem only occurs if a particular position automatically implies a position on another issue, so if there was a large single-issue anti-transhuman voting bloc, and there isn’t. There is a small problem if someone is both a Eurosceptic and a transhuman, since you can only categorically agree to vote the way one bloc tells you, but this is a personal issue where you have to decide which issue is more important and not a problem with the system as it stands.
The second response is that you are underestimating the difficulty of co-ordinating a vote in this way. For example, Eurosceptics – as a rule – will want to vote for the minority UKIP party to signal their affiliation with Eurosceptic issues. No matter what position the candidates agree to on Europe, UKIP will always be more extreme on European issues, since the candidate can only agree to sufficiently mainstream policies that the vote-cost of agreeing to the policy publically is less than the vote-gain of gaining the Eurosceptic bloc. Therefore there will be considerable temptation to defect and vote UKIP in the event of successfully coordinating a policy pledge from a candidate since the voter has a strong preference for UKIP over any other party. Transhumans – it is hypothesised – have a stronger preference for marginal gains in transhuman funding over any policy difference between the two major parties and so getting them to ‘hold their nose’ and vote for a candidate they would otherwise not want to is easier.
It is not just transhumanism that this vote-bloc scheme might work for, but transhumanism is certainly a good example. In my mind you could co-ordinate any issue where the proposed voting bloc is:
Some other good examples of this might be opposing homeopathy on the NHS, encouraging Effective Altruism in government foreign aid, spending a small portion of the Defence budget on FAI and so on.
Are there any glaring flaws I’ve missed?