Counter-Currents
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I enjoyed Fred Reed’s April 24 essay “Ignorance, Its Uses and Nurture,” which refers to universal suffrage in anything larger than a small town as a “crackpot” idea. In a mere thousand words, Reed painted the American public as entirely incapable and unqualified to understand United States foreign policy, let alone vote on it. Therefore, he concludes, the entire democratic system is a sham. Yes, the statistics he presents bolster his point admirably. But maybe not as much as epic burns such as this one:
If we ignore exceptions and degrees, the public can be regarded as a vast, semi-comatose polyp that knows only whether it is comfortable or cold and wet and has enough to eat. If the economy is good, people will vote for incumbents, whether these have any responsibility for the prosperity or not. If wars can be fought without inconveniencing them, in places not actually within their visual horizon, they will pay scant attention. They will not concern themselves with education as long as their children get good grades, however unrelated to anything learned. Their interests are local, though they can be stirred up over this football team or that, this Trump or that Biden, or morality plays about police brutality or the righteous heroism of Ukrainians.
Yeesh. Who would want to be ruled by a bunch of rubes like that?
While Reed does an excellent job promoting democracy’s drawbacks, he’s effectively painting only one half of the picture. Anyone wishing to highlight the uselessness and stupidity of universal suffrage must first get past the classic defense of democracy, which owns up to its drawbacks yet proclaims it superior to all other options — namely fascism, Communism, or any other system in which there is top-down authority that cannot be changed. Now, I am not going to defend this defense, since I too oppose universal suffrage. But it’s simply not enough to bash the voting public as lizard-brain peons, unless one can also show how putting decisive power in the hands of another group of people is the better way to go.
Then there’s the second, more substantive, defense of democracy – that authoritarian systems have drawbacks, too. They tend to work quite well — until they don’t. One of the first things we learn in political science classes is that the very best form of government is a monarchy run by a good king. And that’s great. Everybody loves a good king. But what happens when you get a bad king? Then all sorts of misery can follow, and history is rife with examples of that. Further, it is often impossible to know who is going to be a bad king until it is too late. And since, according to Graham Chapman, “Ya don’t vote for kings,” what do you do then? Convince your wealthy friends to bribe some charismatic military leaders into forming a junta and storming the palace, while you write up your lengthy assassination plans and hope not to get the oval end of a rope?
According to Robert Graves in his assiduously-researched historical novel I, Claudius, Rome went from having a more-or-less good and honorable king (Augustus) to a competent and corrupt king (Tiberius) to a delusional and sadistic king (Caligula) all within 25 years. And do you know why Tiberius selected the obviously insane Caligula to succeed him? Because he was concerned that his tepid popularity with the Roman public would taint his legacy, and so wanted to be followed by someone so fiendishly awful that he, Tiberius, could only look good in comparison. Of course, whatever damage this Caligula kid would end up doing to the Roman people after Tiberius’ inevitable demise was of little concern.
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Of all the petty, pig-headed, egotistical, and sand-poundingly stupid reasons for nearly destroying an empire, this has to take the cake. And you cannot pin that one on democracy.
In another assiduously-researched study, David Hoggan’s The Forced War (recently reviewed at Counter-Currents and The Occidental Observer gives us National Socialist Germany’s perspective on the lead-up to the Second World War. In my view, Hoggan convincingly argues that Adolf Hitler made reasonable demands throughout the 1930s for the sake of the Germanic people, which had been left scattered and disorganized across the European continent by the Treaty of Versailles. The war started not with Germany’s (and the Soviet Union’s) invasion of a clearly intractable and belligerent Poland, but with a warmongering England and America that used every underhanded tactic they could to goad Germany into starting a war.
Whether he realized it or not, Hoggan uncovered the Achilles’ heel of all authoritarian (read: non-democratic) governments: They are relatively easy to goad into war. Look at it like this: Democracy, in theory, will put people from all corners of the political spectrum into one room, where they can bicker all day about how best to waste taxpayer money. I know it may not be quite like that in reality, but any semi-functional democracy will end up with at least some people in government who not only possess opposing ideologies, but actual power as well.
I suppose a totally unscientific, armchair theoretician’s scatterplot of such a theoretical democratic government might look like this, with the colors representing political parties and sizes representing a certain individual’s power or influence:
As you can see, the elites in this theoretical democratic country have drastically different perspectives and agendas. In order for the elites of another country to goad this one into war without actually attacking it, they would have to alienate quite a few people in quite a few different ways. This is not particularly easy to do, as the British discovered in the late 1930s. President Franklin Roosevelt really did want to declare war on Germany, but was hamstrung because he was merely the President of a democracy. He faced too much ideological opposition in government to get away with such a bold move.
On the other hand, an equally unscientific armchair analysis of Nazi Germany’s government might look something like this (and take a wild guess at who the big circle in the middle represents):
Because the leaders of Nazi Germany were so concentrated in one section of the 2D ideological continuum and shared so many of the same concerns and sensibilities, it was relatively easy for its enemies to goad them into war. Make a few angry threats over Danzig, harass the German minority in Poland, fabricate a hoax or two, spread propagandistic lies about the German leaders, call them “Huns” in a radio broadcast, and soon enough you’ll have a majority of the German leadership that matters ready and willing to launch an invasion. Yes, it wasn’t quite as simple as that, but could the goading tactics used against Germany have worked against Roosevelt or Neville Chamberlain? Probably not — not because those men wanted peace at all costs, but because they were leading fractious democratic governments that had been given to them by the people, which, due to constant ideological squabbling, are not suited for quick, bold action without a quick, bold form of instigation — such as a Pearl Harbor (or for that matter, a Fort Sumter, a Maine, a Gulf of Tonkin, or a 9/11).
I’m reminded of the “Romantics and Utilitarians” chapter in Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, which praises the slowness of conservative government. Governments that are strapped by checks and balances and must go through a tremendous rigmarole to get things accomplished can be frustrating. At the same time, however, such a government will be less tempted by tyranny.
In the view of men like [Edmund] Burke and [Sir Walter] Scott, the slowness and clumsiness of old-fashioned law must be tolerated (at least until gradual adjustment may be arranged) for the sake of the safeguards to liberty and property that wither away in any legal system which accords pride of place to speed and neatness.
You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s Solzhenitsyn and the Right here.
Democracy as we know it today is rather like that. Having the shrewd brainwash the dumb into electing the corrupt, and then giving the corrupt and their shrewd handlers trillions in Monopoly money, is certainly an invitation for all sorts of domestic acrimony and shady shenanigans. But such a government will not be easily goaded into war, because in such a clown show there is a good chance that some of the bickerers might sympathize with the people doing the goading.
That’s basically my point, and I could be right or wrong about this. But I think that any condemnation of democracy should at least pay lip service to the fact that it was democracy’s opposite that may have contributed most to the onset of Western civilization’s greatest catastrophe.
In closing, I would like to point out a few things that this essay is not:
- As with any political theory, I’m sure there are historical examples which either do not support or outright refute it (Iraq War, I’m looking at you). My point is that relatively speaking, it may be easier to goad a more authoritarian and centralized government into launching full-scale invasions of other countries than a more democratic, decentralized one. It can be argued that without 9/11 there would not have been an Iraq War, while the reasons for Hitler’s invasion of Poland were much less dramatic and easier to pull off.
- A condemnation of Nazi Germany or fascism. Despite their virtues, any system of government will have its natural drawbacks. It could very well be that having big, prominent buttons which say “Don’t push me!” is one of those for both of these systems.
- A criticism of Hitler’s decision to invade Poland. At least according to Hoggan, the Poles, as a result of their hostile and deceitful behavior in the late 1930s, were practically asking to be invaded by the Germans. The point is that it was basically Hitler’s decision, and he could have reversed it if he had wanted. On the other hand, it took a Pearl Harbor and over a thousand dead American servicemen to convince not Roosevelt, but a majority of his political and ideological opponents in the American government to go to war. That’s a big difference.
- An argument in favor of universal suffrage. Reed does an excellent job of blasting this idea. I do see the upside in the constant bickering among lawmakers in a functioning democracy, however. The fact that we have so many special interests wrangling dishonestly over whatever wasteful and self-serving projects they can foist upon their opponent’s constituents before their representatives get voted out may be a bad thing, but it may also be a good safeguard against a powerful dictator waking up one morning and feeling war in his loins.
- A theory without a proposed solution. Maybe there is a way we can distill the best aspects of democracy while eschewing the worst. Perhaps forming a meritocratic aristocracy among the populace to determine who gets to vote and who doesn’t might be an improvement on what we’ve encountered in the past century. In this way, the squabbling in government won’t change, but the quality of the people doing the squabbling will — all while preserving the natural safeguards against going to war. This may be a topic for a future essay.
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18 comments
We can never move forward until our base publicly admits and recognizes we don’t support the existence of democracy. We support our freedom. We don’t support a system where a majority votes to tell us what we can and can not and we abide by it. That’s slavery. It’s no more noble that 100 million people vote or 1 King or dictator decides.
We can complain about election fraud, outside interference from Israel or China, and media propaganda but no matter what freedom can’t be won with elections on a national level. We have substantial numbers and until we have leaders who tell us democracy is the enemy of freedom and we should not casually sit by and abide by it, we’ll just have more of the same that we’ve had for the last 100 years.
Certainly we should not be defending democracy.
We should try to survive as a race whether we win elections or not. When there is an antiwhite. non-White majority, or when there are antiwhite, non-White minorities of such size and unity of purpose that they can and will vote for Whites to be destroyed, we should stop respecting “democratic” votes.
That time is coming in every White country that is afflicted with non-White mass immigration, whether it is legal or illegal.
When that time comes arguments about the ideal form of the state will be irrelevant.
That said, what is the ideal form of the state if we can get it?
I argue that the genetic quality of the mass of the people is the true treasure of a nation, that the people are the true owners of their own genetic heritage, and that the people at the top in the state are stewards of the national treasure, not owners who would have the right to give it away, adulterate it, or destroy it.
This implies that legitimacy flows from the broad base of the social pyramid up, not from some purported god-king at the top down.
This statement about where legitimacy comes from implies democracy, or at least some form of state with democratic elements.
If war was good for us Whites then democratic government’s slowness to go to war would be a vice and anti-democratic government’s quickness to go to war would be a virtue.
War is very bad for us Whites. Dysgenic slaughter has been the ruin of us. We need peace with all races and above all with each other.
Any system of checks and balances in a parliament is useful only if the society of the country is sufficiently homogeneous, even if not biologically and ethnically, but at least culturally. That is, if a people considers itself one whole with common interests, and does not consist of different ethnic and cultural groups whose interests do not coincide and even contradict each other. Especially if these groups have powerful lobbying forces that can influence elected parliamentarians and presidents.
Yes, Roosevelt needed Pearl Harbor to drag the United States into the war, but he was pushed to this by the group of Soviet agents of influence around him, all these Whites and Hisses, who,and this should be noted, were not elected by anyone in the US. As later, the entire course of the war for Americans was influenced by some Harry Hopkins, also not an elected politician, but simply a major official. In Britain I know of no cases of prominent executive officials working for foreign powers, for neither Philby nor the rest of the Cambridge Five were senior enough to be mentioned as such, but even in the British Parliament there were Soviet agents of influence, like Michael Foot. In France, the executive branch had a whole network of Soviet agents, all Frenchmen, known as Sapphire, which later was described in Leon Uris’s novel “Topaz” and in the Hitchcock film based on it. But there were especially many agents of influence both in the executive branch and in parliament in West Germany, where there were a lot of KGB and Stasi agents.
It is clear that such forces can, if desired, persuade the country’s leadership to certain decisions and even drag the country into a military conflict. At the same time, the country can be democratic, not dictatorial. Currently, all Western countries are filled with agents of Red Chinese influence, both in the spheres of government and also in the economy, business, media, culture and art, and these pro-Chinese lobbies greatly influence the decisions made by Western parliaments and presidents. At the same time, they are completely uncontrollable by the people.
This suggests that a king, a dictator, and a democratically elected parliament all can be both useful and harmful for a country, it all depends on the quality of this country and its people itself and on the presence of important non-official groups influencing politicians – namely, whether they influence in the interests of the indigenous people or in the interests of foreign powers or some aliens.
I’m not a Libertarian and strongly disagree with most of their doctrines. However, one important point that is usually lost in the dictatorship debate is the role of what Prof. Harry Elmer Barnes called Totalitarian Liberals.
The world-redeemer, Woody Wilson did not have to do much to get into World War I. He even campaigned for reelection in 1916 on the slogan “he kept us out of war” ─ only to diligently start warmongering as soon as he was secure in his second term for the messianic cause to “make the world safe for Democracy.”
Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, the principled and populist Democrat known for his 1896 Cross of Gold speech, even resigned in protest at the end of the first term over the President’s bellicose rhetoric.
Furthermore, this was at a time when the effects of the 17th Amendment had not reared its ugly head by commodifying the Senate for global special interests with direct elections. At one time the Senate was an Isolationist and Nationalist body.
In addition, it could be argued that the notion that the Federal government had no legitimate Constitutional role in directing economic progress ─ other than in making war ─ could easily be held up to scrutiny itself by actually promoting the course of World War II interventionism.
By 1937, most of the New Deal was dead with the exception that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been somewhat successful in accumulating more and more bureaucratic power under the Executive branch. New York Governor Al Smith famously decried his Hyde Park colleague’s “Alphabet Soup” agencies.
FDR already effectively had a rubber-stamp Congress and was nearly successful in packing the Supreme Court. If the Depression is defined by the rate of unemployment, then little progress had been made in at least two terms of FDR and his New Deal in office.
But now the President found that one New Deal program after another was being ruled Unconstitutional. It is no mystery that this is when FDR starting seeing the old Wilsonian virtues of quarantining “aggressors” and scheming for war.
FDR took Monroe Doctrine farther than Teddy Roosevelt’s Corollary and saw the virtues of promoting Democracy and Capitalism not as a nation or an empire but as an imperial regime with the face of a globally crusading behemoth.
This interventionist cancer remains with us today, and the plutocratic elites did not need to be convinced as long as they did not have to pony up too much in taxes.
Notably, the National Labor Relations Act (1935), aka the Wagner Act, was NOT ruled unconstitutional by the “nine old men” on the Supreme Court.
The NLRA used a classic Fascist principle of having a governmental body arbitrate between the interests of Labor and Management in the overall interest of the nation as an organic whole.
Considered one of a long line of laws ostensibly being the “Magna Charta of Labor,” the Wagner Act actually lived up in fair measure to the hopes. It set up a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which could arbritrate between the interests of Labor and Management, and prohibiting “Unfair Labor Practices” with the belief that Marxist class-warfare was an underlying disease.
What was God was not either Liberty or Capital, nor certainly not the class-struggle, but the organic national whole. This is classic Fascism and is represented by the Federalist Fasces symbol and the slogan on U.S. coinage, etc. that out of the Many are One whole.
In the United States, unionization has rarely been run by Marxist cabals, as they were held to some national standards about whether or not they could earnestly represent their working constituents. And there were at least some regulatory mechanisms that would deal with corruption from many quarters in labor conflicts.
As a former IBEW shop steward when I worked as an engineer in Radio and TV before the Internet was a thing, I would certainly have some perspectives on this. I found that the GOP were rarely sympathetic to ANY worker concerns, believing that all that was needed for economic growth was low capital gains taxes and low regulatory barriers to bootstrap small businesses, and to promote free trade for an international specialization of labor. This means that wages race to the bottom unless you are a real estate speculator or some such. And the big worry of the budget hawks is to keep it so that the tax code keeps it that way. All of this completely ignored systemic issues like stagflation and rising healthcare and housing costs before outsourcing was even a thing.
The Democrats were not any better, however. They gave lip service to Labor and worker’s rights ─ and sometimes, if the Clintonistas were to be believed, getting Negroes off the gravy train with better job training, and curbing violent crime with better law enforcement and incarceration. But in reality all they were interested in was globalization, open borders, and the ever-woke ideology of Marx or Marxist Lite.
The Capitalists and Marxists have always played the Right and the Left pincers on the same ravenous creature.
Any kind of meaningful political reform will have to do more than “punish” one party but will have to effectively destroy BOTH somehow. The GOP don’t give a damn about whether White people vote for them or not; they will not suffer in any way if White Nationalists vote elsewhere. And the other guys are much worse.
Both parties respond to plutocratic interests only ─ and the golems will always slouch along towards Babylon.
🙂
The world-redeemer, Woody Wilson did not have to do much to get into World War I.
The British did it for him, didn’t they? On the other hand, the Germans had to blame themselves for this, for Zimmermann’s Telegramm etc.
Yeah, good reason not to route unsecured diplomatic traffic through enemy cables.
🙂
Wilson was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, who dreamed of a Nobel peace prize, just like Teddy Roosevelt’s, for brokering a peace in the war. He was a liar who never wanted peace, but schemed to drag America into the conflict.
But in reality all they were interested in
was the good money from Beijing.
Democracy can work when the voters have skin in the game. Heinlein’s STARSHIP TROOPERS limited the vote to those who fulfilled a term of national service, for instance. Formerly in the US one had to be a property owner.
I was reviled on Facebook a few years when I posted a photo of sign in San Francisco with “Vote Here” in six languages. “The thing that’s wrong with elections today,” was my caption.
All it took in 1990 was the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter lying about babies ripped from incubators to stampede the Americans into Kuwait and Iraq. Then there was more lying about WMD in 2003 leading into round two. If the media is largely controlled by a single entity war can be drummed up effectively whatever the system of government.
Limited suffrage is the best idea in my view. I’d lean towards male only perhaps but strongly lean towards either being land owning and/or net tax paying over a 5-10 year period as being the prerequisites
I would (if it were up to me) not support male-only, but ideally I would draw a bright line between Citizenship and birthright or naturalized Nationality.
For example, move the voting age up to 25 and be of White-European descent without any serious felony convictions, AND be either a married parent in a household or some other qualifier like college graduate and military service/honorable discharge or having been a taxpayer for ten years.
We can end this “nation of immigrants” crap by allowing only native-born citizens who meet the above critia for full citizenship to hold major public offices like Federal judge, Congressman, and FED Chairman. (Dual or Israeli citizenship automatically voids American citizenship and nationality, obviously.)
And I would limit serving on juries to native-born citizens or nationals who can at least score above average on an IQ test.
I would also repeal the 15th and 17th Amendments, limit the 16th Amendment to put a cap of 10 percent on income tax, and modify the 14th Amendment slightly to end automatic or “GPS citizenship.”
🙂
Some age restrictions would also do good. Not younger than 30 and not older than 70, for example.
However under the monarchy you at least know whom to blame if something goes wrong. A bad king risks his power and sometimes his head, even if the executed monarchs were mostly not the worst comparing to another ones. Under the dictatorship a dictator is made to be guilty too, even if he mostly listens to his unelected and publicly unknown advisers. (We speak about bad Lenin, bad Stalin, bad Mao Zedong, bad Hitler, bad Castro, but we never speak about people who influenced those dictators and brought them to make these decisions and not another ones.)
But under democracy you really do not know who makes decisions. You know that presidents or parliaments are just figureheads, some kind of puppets, but you never know who are the puppetmasters.
You’ve made one massive assumption here. You presume that voting is legitimate. I don’t think it is. Just think about it for a minute. Why would the system give us the means to dismantle said system? Obviously, it wouldn’t. Mark Twain famously quipped that if voting really worked, we wouldn’t be allowed to do it.
While there are certainly some legitimate criticisms of democracy out there (and particularly universal suffrage), a lot of the anti-democratic talking points strike me as reflexive, knee-jerk, right-wing horseshit. I offer the following list of things that America would have never been cursed with if it were a pure democracy: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Immigration Act of 1965, Brown v. Board of Education, gay marriage, forced busing, the Civil Rights Act of 1991, World War I, and that’s just off the top of my head. It’s not as simple an issue as my fellow rightists try to make it out to be. The vast majority of our problems are caused by our very real oligarchy and its paid henchman, the kritarchy. Democracy is the least of our worries.
I honestly gave it some serious thought. I’m trying to more pragmatic in my thinking, and the average American is really attached to our political forms.
But, I can’t endorse democracy. I don’t know a single person worthy of it. The average person is just as egocentric and solipsistic as our current elites.
We need strong leaders of good character to make space for an awakening among our people. Then, maybe, we can handle some sort of democratic representation again.
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