More and more people in society lately are awakening to the fact that ‘Democracy’ is not only not all its cracked up to be, but that it may infact even be unnatural. And I don’t mean that in the sense that Democracy has merely been institutionally diluted or perverted in the West by way of the various cultural erosions, political schemes, and overreaches we’re now so used to grumbling about. No, I mean that Democracy even in its purest form can be argued to make no sense for a modern world which has outgrown the scope for which the system was originally intended.
Primarily, we’re talking about size. When applied to a country of sufficient size and population, Democracy loses its effectiveness as it devolves into little more than ‘mob rule’ of one region over the others. Of course, the arguments that America isn’t a ‘Democracy’ but rather a ‘Constitutional Republic’ for that very reason quickly take over. But those arguments generally revolve around the specific constitutional features of the thing, rather than ‘Democracy’ as the more loosely defined ethos that our ruling class would like us to believe animates our present day and age in the West; you know, Democracy in the flowery romanticization: the freedom, ‘rule of law’, and weirdly undefined moral superiority.
If you notice, these days Western leaders almost exclusively use the term in this more abstracted way; evoking the “feeling” of virtue over the ‘untamed jungle’ of the rest of the world. ‘Democracy’ is a term thrown around to simply imply moral high ground in some deliberately obscure and indefinable way, rather than the specific legislative contours of the original meaning.
Delving into it, one quickly realizes both ‘Democracy’ and ‘Constitutional Republic’ are equally incapable of addressing modernity’s chief issues, thus mooting the misdirecting arguments altogether. In ‘Democracy’, the mob rules all. When a country grows large enough, that means the votes of high population states—or even regions—like California and the Beltway outweigh and erode the intrinsic values of areas like, say, Appalachia. Regulations hatched by cosmopolitan liberals a thousand miles away come upon these regions like an invasive species of kudzu, unwanted and destructive.
But in the so-called ‘superior’ ‘Constitutional Republic’ model, the flaws are really no better. In a Republic, what you get is representatives who vote on your region’s behalf under the civic assumption that they’ll just happen to represent your best interests. But such a system is quickly corrupted by the ease with which these ‘representatives’ are bought out by special interest groups to only feign serving you, while in reality voting against you. In the end, you either get outvoted by radical migrants with an inimical ideological baggage from a high-population state a thousand miles away, or you get outvoted by a ‘representative’ bought out by Pfizer, JP Morgan, BlackRock, AIPAC, et al., and the same amount of harm is done to you and your family. Thus the argument of one style of government over the other is just another in a long line of obfuscations meant to perpetually pingpong us between a false dichotomy while the wealthy elites rob us blind.
Also, one must consider how the advent of political parties effectively destroys the remainder of anything remotely ‘democratic’ even in a constitutional republic due to the enforced partisanship it engenders. For example, 198 Democrats just voted to reject a bill requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration:
It’s difficult to imagine that without the partisanship of political parties, whose job is to ultimately form a false dichotomy to undermine true representation, a fundamental civic pillar would be profaned in such a way. And just look at what happened in France: Le Pen’s RN party won the most votes by far, yet was given third place in parliamentary seats due to a gaming of the parliamentary electoral system.
One of the issues is that Democracy itself is arguably an unnatural experiment. It may work, in theory, for a small polis, where cultural, religious, and behavioral ties are compatible. But when you scale it up to countries of modern proportions, it begins quickly breaking down—and often, it even devolves into disenfranchising the many by an organized, politically motivated few.
What is the solution, you ask? Unlike the pundits pushing monarchism and the like, I don’t claim to have a one size fits all answer, per se, but more an observation that it is modernity itself which is an aberration. All of humanity was never intended to live under the umbrella of one uniform cultural or legal model. The reason for that is culture itself springs in many ways from our biological realities, which themselves spring forth from environment and milieu. I previously enlarged on that here:
On Culture – From Whence Does It Spring?
There are realities rooted in the local environment—its geography, topology, and the many secondary attributes as byproducts of that. In the above article I wrote, as example:
Similarly, in the United States, the cultures of each region can be said to emanate from those regions’ unique geographical features. For instance, the hardy Appalachians are often described as independent, lonesome, perhaps standoffish and wary of outsiders. The specific geographical feature of the tall and treacherous mountains which surround them inform these personality traits, stereotypes, values, and other characteristics which blossom into the umbrella term of ‘culture’. Even the physiognomy is affected, as people who live in remote, harder to reach places are likely to interbreed more, have ‘purer’ stocks and lineages compared to their urban-cosmopolitan counterparts.
Their lifestyle is dictated by their surroundings: hard mountain life, farming, etc., and the exigencies thereof dictate their apparel and accessories, which further informs the gestalt of what we consider their ‘culture’. Hardy, reliable denim, tough leather, music of the mountains and rivers. Even a throwback, hidebound disposition bred from the seclusion of the mountains; if you don’t get much in the way of travelers, you aren’t exposed to the latest cosmopolitan cultural developments brought with their travels. This necessarily foments a sort of rustic sentimentality, a backward-looking lifestyle of nostalgia alien to those forward-thinking urbanites.Recently, Kruptos expanded on this topic, arriving at some similar conclusions, albeit from a Christian-centric PoV:
The main problem is that modernity is not natural. What is natural and even healthy, is, to use a technical term, a high in-group preference. That is, I am biased to love and care for my family and my tribe, people with whom I have a kin relationship, ahead of others who are not.
Even when faith in Christ disrupts this somewhat, it is common to see people convert as whole families or tribes, even tribal federations. The Christian community becomes a family of faith. Even if you are aware of believers elsewhere, your relationships are with your local faith community. Your life is bound within a web of personal relationships to real people. There were natural variations and hierarchies mirrored around the family structure. Modernity disrupts these relationships.
With the rise of the merchant class in the west a number of ideas were introduced into the social consciousness. One of these being “equality.” Equality before the law. Equal representation. One man, one vote. This sort of thing.
This notion that society is based on the rights of the individual. Or that the individual was the basic unit of social and political organization was also disruptive. As was industrialization, which broke down the household as the basic social unit.German theorist Carl Schmitt carved out a similar critique in his seminal The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy:
Carl Schmitt argued that liberalism and democracy are based on different principles and their mixture leads to a crisis of the modern state. He believed that liberalism and democracy directly contradict one another. Point two:
Liberalism, according to Schmitt, seeks to create equality and a globalist society. It features the primacy of the private individual’s liberty. Liberalism is also associated with the idea of protecting individual rights and freedoms, promoting open debate, and limiting the power of the state.
On the other hand, democracy is based on the principle of equality and homogeneity of the collective. It emphasizes the power of the majority, the importance of participation, and the idea that all members of a society should have an equal say in decision-making. Point three:
Schmitt argued that these two principles are fundamentally at odds. The liberal emphasis on individual rights can conflict with the democratic principle of majority rule. For example, the majority might vote for policies that infringe on individual rights, leading to what is often referred to as the tyranny of the majority.
Furthermore, Schmitt pointed out that modern parliamentarism has lost its ideological and spiritual foundation. He believed that the principles of liberalism have been eroded in the parliamentary system, leading to a crisis of legitimacy.The entire point of a democratic process is to maximize social unity as much as possible by respecting the choices of the masses. It’s a process of a continual reversion to the mean, an ironing and smoothing out of society’s wrinkles toward uniform stability. Liberalism on the other hand favors either the individual, or conversely, a universal, abstracted ideal which is guised under some concern for a ‘greater good’, but in actuality privileges otherness over the native tribe—which is ultimately destructive to the homegrown cultural nomos of the society, and is thus the opposite impulse of stability.
Another interlinking concept of Schmitt’s, which slowly arches back to the opening thesis, is:
Particular Will vs General Will: Schmitt argues that the will that determines the outcome in democratic societies is a particular rather than a general will, and parliamentary openness functions only as an antechamber for special interests. In other words, he saw parliamentary debate as a stage where different interest groups compete for influence, rather than a forum for the expression of a unified, general will.
He believed that the democratic process often reflects the interests of specific groups rather than the collective will of the people.Here Schmitt is saying that it is Democracy itself that is fatally susceptible to the erosion of serving “particular wills”—of the special interest varieties—rather than the general will of the common masses. It means Democracy invariably succumbs to subversion by a group of small, powerful voices which gain an edge in drowning out the typically oblivious, or at least more passive, masses.
The following article discusses the key mechanisms by which this happens:
It’s related to Karl Popper’s Paradox and minority rule, which essentially states that a small organized group which has strong preferences or intolerances will slowly convert the majority of society to their bent, when that society is indifferent to the issue. The example used: almost all drinks in America are Kosher. Why? Because drinking non-Kosher products is an important intolerance to Jews which they will actively fight against. But since Kosher-izing the drinks doesn’t change them in any real way, the rest of society passively accepts it, since it doesn’t noticeably affect them.
By this mechanism small but focused groups with strong intolerance preferences are apt to hijack the cultural movements in a given society. Once one norm is overturned or installed, they gain leverage in eventually turning over the next stone. Little by little over time such groups are able to ‘re-normalize’ society to their ends, distorting its fundamental fabric in ways that ultimately subverts the silent majority.
Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.As long as some new regulation does not inconvenience us too much, we abide in passive silence and remain indifferent. After all, our lives are busy and don’t lend us the luxury to agitate for every minor inconvenience. But over time, our cultural pillars can be eroded under our noses by this very indifference.
Some might argue that the grievances in this article do not describe Democracy in its purest ideal sense, but rather a bastardized version, tainted by the erring hand of fallen man. But this brings us back to the earlier point: Democracy itself is infinitely ‘taint-able’ when it comes to a ‘polis’ of unwieldy dimensions, as in modern nation-states. The idea of Democracy first sprouted from the time of city-states—poleis of social and cultural contiguity. Modern nation-states are in effect abominations: the unnatural by-blows of the Age of Conquest’s ruined empires. These monstrosities are forced to compete against each other, growing ever larger, accumulating power and wealth in insecure self-defense from the threat of a competitor one day gobbling them up. In the eyes of American policymakers, for the U.S. to survive against China, it must grow by tens of millions each decade, while still maintaining the errant guise of ‘Democratic’ virtues, even when they suffocate its own subjects under the agony of cultural intrusion.
The only possible reconciliation that can allow our modern systems to work is the reversion back to strong federalized decentralization and states’ rights. There’s no other way for local peoples, with their own unique cultural identities, to possibly have their voices heard and represented. Locally elected representatives must facilitate the legislation of laws protecting local customs which are immune to national, cosmopolitan, and globalist subversive meddling.
Russia has had several autonomous federal subjects; republics like the Chechen Republic and Republic of Dagestan, Autonomous Okrugs and Oblasts, etc. These were even allowed to have their own presidents, and their own ‘national language’ elevated to equal stature with Russian. However, due to foreign meddling, Putin was forced to curb these powers of autonomy—and there lies the danger in it. But vestiges still remain, and Russian autonomous regions continue having special cultural privileges. For instance, four of Russia’s Islam-heavy regions legally introduced ‘Islamic banking’ experiments, which are banks with reduced or eliminated usury, and special precautions against financing alcohol, tobacco, or other haram vices.
The ultimate paradox of modernity is that the only long term solution lies in small independent, autonomous community-building, while all modernity’s motive forces push inexorably toward global centralization.
Imagine if the federal government allowed Texas, Appalachia, Florida, etc., to govern themselves without the heavy-handed meddling currently seen, where, for instance, these states are hardly allowed to pass their own abortion, LGBT, or ‘gender affirming care’ laws without the Supreme Court being sicced on them; or, in the case of Texas, being federally prohibited from even stopping armies of migrants from swarming over Texas’ own border. If you allow states to govern themselves, most of the country’s problems would conceivably be fixed on their own. Instead of bitterly fighting their ideologically-hostile neighbors, most people would naturally sift themselves into the appropriate state or region which happens to suit their views—a perfect, self-correcting process. It is inhuman madness to throw people of ideologically-clashing dispositions together into a pot, proceed to stir it all up, and hope for the best; that is simply not how human nature works, and will in every case devolve into a Hobbesian nightmare of bellum omnium contra omnes.