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Daniel_Burfoot comments on Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Here is a simple argument for NRx: 1) democracy automatically produces communism and 2) communism is very evil. Proposition 2 is not very controversial. Proposition 1 just comes from extrapolating the trend line of government control over the economy out another couple of decades.
The paradigmatic cases of the evils of communism are Russia and China. Neither country was ever a democracy. The third paradigmatic monster of the 20th Century, Naziism, did arise from a democracy, but was not communism.
What is the X you are referring to, that democracy produces, and that produces evil, and what are the examples?
That's historically funny given that Marx argued that democracy can never produce communism.
Is that extrapolation justified?
I wouldn't say it's obvious, but here a graph of US government spending over time. It seems basically monotonic.
Monotonic as a percentage of GDP? Meaning the government will be 100% of GDP in finite time?
I wouldn't even go that far. I think it's reasonable to set aside the oscillations in the 1950-1980 period and call that bit basically monotonic, but WWI & WWII still wreck any underlying monotonicity (and arguably the Great Depression and Great Recession do too). Moreover, since 1975, the overall trend looks basically flat to me except for the Great Recession bump at the end.
Moving to my own country, I find an even stronger negative result: over the last 60 years the overall trend in public spending's share of GDP has been flat. (That, I must admit, surprised me a bit; I would've expected the government's share of spending to swell a bit over time because of aging populations and state provision of education & healthcare, which suffer from Baumol's cost disease. But apparently not.)