Anantonese Journal of Economics and Theory

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How Kalistan has Resisted Political Liberalism
The Long Standing Status Quo bias of Kalistan

Dr. Ricardo Martinez, Ph.D. University of Suldanor

Introduction
Besides the Republican Interlude from 5286 to 5458, Kalistan has been under the control of the Ananto Family since 5159, a total of 340 years over two separate dynasties. In all those years, support for liberal democracy has never exceeded 50% in any poll, official or non-, ever taken. The populist fervor that returned the Republic to power in 5286 had more to do with the Ananto Emperor William I Ananto's informal reduction to figurehead status by the National Assembly that was controlled by an anti-monarchical party who obtained a bare plurality using, or some would say, abusing democratic institutions. The rejection of the Republic nearly 200 years later was celebrated by wide majorities, and the removal of the last vestiges of democracy in Kalistan through the Single Party Act following the Restoration was met with nationwide approval and celebration in many circles.

Throughout the years, it seems that noticeable but not large minorities have been interested in flirting with democratization, or at least some amount of liberalization, only to pull back support when bad actors predictably emerged specifically to exploit the system. Every effort at liberalization has been a gateway to civic violence, and the reaction of large majorities has been to retreat back to the safe embrace of absolutism. But this seems to fly in the face of nearly all of Terra's non-Kalistani political thinkers, where a liberal bias is simply assumed of all people: People are naturally self-interested, so they claim, to the exclusion of any other person or any other interest. They all dream of themselves as a governor of themselves, even if they are politically illiterate, as most voters in liberal democracies are by Kalistani standards, to the exclusion of everyone else in the society, and that they all assume that they know what's best for themselves, what's in their own interests, those interests are purely material, and can be quantified by behavioralists, they are always rational and have complete information about the outcomes of all the choices they make in the marketplace of society, and their aggregate choice is almost always the correct one, even if it greatly upsets the social order. People will pursue their interests and only their interests no matter what it costs for the rest of the society.

Kalistan, as a case unto itself, demonstrates that the liberal bias in the researchers tends to guide the conclusions of the researchers. In Kalistan, poll after poll shows rock solid support for the Institution of the Absolute Monarchy. 17 out of every 20 respondents averaged over more than 150 years of questioning respond favorably when asked about how they think the Monarch is doing. Criticism tends to focus on specific policies, while the Monarch and her government, the Institutional Party, and the Kalistani system of government remains immune. The same polls also show high political literacy among Kalistan's population: Not only do they support the Absolutist system in Kalistan, they also understand why it works, which is not something most voters in other nations, who vote overwhelmingly based on party affiliation, one or two main issues, or how their parents voted, can say at all.

Kalistan, from top to bottom has rejected democracy and liberalism. Part of this happens to be the anti-liberal bias in Kalistan's universal political education, but its more than that in Kalistan: education doesn't explain why reform movements frequently go nowhere, and rarely ever achieve more than 20% support in the nation. In other nations, people are ideologically committed to democracy, as a matter of principle. That preference simply does not exist in Kalistan.

Instead, Kalistanis tend to speak of rights and liberties in social, group terms. There is not a strong individualistic concept in Kalistan: Kalistanis see themselves as part of a collective. And so they think of freedoms and liberty in terms of society: they think of benefits in terms of collective, rather than individual benefit. And they think hyperindividualism, and the notion that individual people or groups of people should attempt to gain benefits from the society, which is prevalent in liberal societies, as aberrant. This leads to a very strong status quo bias among the population. That not only contributes to an outright rejection of political liberalism, society wide, but also it tends to lead to very strong support for a fully depoliticized society that is very committed to support for and defense of the Monarchy.

The Kalistani Status Quo Bias
International communism and fascism are revolutionary ideologies. They tend to focus on changing everything, often for the sake of change. The old order is the source of the problem, and the revolutionary ideology aims to wipe the old order completely out so it can have a fresh bed of social soil, so to speak, to plant its own seeds into. These are totalist ideologies which can accept no variance at all within them and in this sense are the opposite of sort of status quo ideology that is common in Kalistan, which treats Society as a garden that must be tended obsessively, cultivated diligently, and weeded systematically, year after year, to produce all the people need, whether in terms of food, medicine, or natural and morally uplifting beauty.

But in this sense, liberalism also feels revolutionary. Democracy does not concern itself with good government. It merely focuses on aggregation of the more votes. If there is a contest between a good governor who asks people to sacrifice and a bad one who says society can have whatever it wants without having to pay anything for it, the one that gives people a free choice and tells them that they can have whatever they want for free is the one who wins. We know that the person who usually wins an election is the person who appeals to the most people, and the way to appeal to the masses is to promise them "candy" or things they like which aren't necessarily all that good for them. That system only rewards the person who can promise the most candy. And if that person can't deliver, that person is voted out of office by the next person who promises more candy.

Does this lead to consistency in government? Does this lead to the sort of government that is capable of carefully and diligently tending the garden of society? No: How can it when the government could theoretically change with every election. In this sense then, from Kalistan's perspective, even liberal democracy, which encourages at best, wild shifts in governmental policy every election, and at worst, complete paralysis of government which allows it to become susceptible to totalist erosion, seems inherently revolutionary, dangerous, and alien.

The Kalistani status quo bias aims to prevent insane shits in the society that are the norm in all democratic nations. In some nations, the ruling majority has collapsed under plethoras of parties, each holding tiny slices of the number of seats necessary to effectively govern. Some other nations, like Trigunia, have become entirely unhinged, with multiple legislative bodies, each with hundreds, or in one case a thousand seats. Defenders of these systems claim that people supposedly demand wild, completely unwieldy, and absolutely opaque and unrepresentative systems like this. It would be the average Kalistani's opinion that the completely mindboggling and absolutely unnecessary complexity of these systems merely serve to allow elites to continue to rule while tricking the people into thinking that they want what the elites have decided to do anyway. But each of these systems also remain entirely open to manipulation by bad actors, which is unfortunately the norm in democratic nations rather than exception.

Whether it be in terms of fighting corruption, or ease of access, or just telling the truth, the status quo bias of the Kalistani population would not permit such incomprehensible institutions that are absolutely ubiquitous in democracy to govern Kalistani society. They are far too chaotic, far too susceptible to corruption and absolutely disingenuous in how they are composed to ever provide anything like good government, that works for the entire society, rather than just a particular faction.

The Sources of the Status Quo Bias
The source of the status quo bias, ironically, is the old Socialist Party of Kalistan. During the republican era in Kalistan's history, between the third and fourth Dynasties, (generally between 1917 CE and 5159, or from 4056 when the previously moribund Empire was formally abolished and all previous titles were vacated) Kalistani politics were generally dominated by the Socialist Party of Kalistan. Itself originally a revolutionary leftist Party, a large fascist incursion known as The Fifth Crisis moved the Socialist Party to the political center and it soon took up the mantle of Kalistani Institutionalism as a primary focus of its platform.

As hard right or left Parties gained ephemeral pluralities in a regular succession of waves, proceeded to wipe out long standing Kalistani institutions for no reason at all, and then having laid waste the guarantors of social peace and material equality in Kalistan, disappeared into the long forgotten lists of ephemeral parties, it was the Socialist Party who returned to rebuild those social institutions, restore peace and social tranquility, and ensure continuation of the status quo that existed before the ephemeral Party began their destructive work.

The people long rewarded Kalistani Socialists for protecting Kalistani institutions. Socialists governed Kalistan for centuries, always resisting the change in the social contract which Kalistanis preferred, and then, when removed by new ephemeral parties who exploited weaknesses in Kalistan's democratic system, diligently rebuilt what the bomb throwers had eagerly destroyed, so that Kalistani institutions in place today would be as recognizable to Kalistanis of 3671 as they are to Kalistanis of 5671. But the main weakness of the Socialist Party was that it lacked the power or the desire really to stop the source of the turbulence. The problem was democracy itself, and specifically the multiparty aspects of it. The Socialists were assiduously pro-democratic, and could not imagine a Kalistan without a multi Party system.

The Institutional Party was formed by a faction of Socialists who were more committed to stability, domestic tranquility, and general prosperity than they were to the façade of democracy. The fight between the Institutionalists and the pro-Democracy Socialists was bitter, but thankfully short. And the people of Kalistan demonstrated which side of the argument they preferred when they roundly rejected the Socialist Party after a particularly horrific bout of emphemeralism and in September of 5146, handed the Institutionalists a mandate to re-establish an empire with the aim of preventing political turbulence that was interrupting domestic tranquility and general prosperity, and from that Kalistan began the long slow process of depoliticization.

That status quo bias has as its greatest expression an absolutist monarchy, with a legislature that does not exist as a forum to work out political fights or give people weapons to fight their stupid little wars against one another, but which functions to turn the dictates of the monarch into law for the people. The people of Kalistan have willingly traded political combat for social tranquility, and popular government (which all know provides terrible government far more often than not) for good government. These trade offs, along with guaranteed civil liberties and general prosperity, allow people to fully realize their own lives within the context of the entire society, and nearly all people understand that the trade off is small: Most people in democracies will never rule themselves or anyone else. Characterization of democracy as "self government" is deliberately and mendaciously deceptive. Elites still rule in democracies: the people do not, even in governments like Trigunia where the size of their legislatures require a statistically significant portion of the population to actually sit in government. So to lose the façade of "self government" was no real loss after all.

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