Tag: democracy

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Last week I was having a good early morning over coffee. While reading a blog, I saw a reference to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, a government agency I suspected was invented to employ people with no practical experience and psychopathic tendencies at high salaries. (more…)

4,702 words

Part 4 of 4 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

And even if all financial incentives were totally eradicated from politics, this would not — and could not — exclude non-monetary forms of lobbying and influence, where private entities influence politicians in ways that do not involve any form of financial compensation. In the words of Rep. Maggie Wood Hassan, “When you are in the legislature, it can be hard to distinguish the loud from the many.” The distant nature of political representation ensures that even the most well-meaning politician’s perspective can be biased and distorted by dozens of external influences. (more…)

Hunter Biden sells his own paintings for up to $500,000 apiece, and the buyers’ names are a closely-guarded secret.

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Part 3 of 4 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 4 here)

Aside from campaign contributions, wealthy donors and special interest groups can also be gateways to extremely lucrative career opportunities after a politician’s time in office. These special interest groups often lace their campaign contributions with extremely tempting and lucrative private-sector opportunities such as book tours, speaking tours, and privileged consulting positions and careers at the apex of the corporate world, which have allowed many politicians to monetize their political careers and become extraordinarily wealthy. (more…)

AIPAC is one example of a lobby that has outsized influence over US elections.

3,709 words

Part 2 of 4 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

“The dollar votes more times than the man,” goes the century-old political proverb. Before voters enter the equation, political parties need donors to finance their campaign. This means that political parties will not necessarily adopt the preferences of voters, because “no party can afford to take up the median position that represents the views of the vast majority if investors disagree.” (more…)

3,530 words

Part 1 of 4

Under our constitution it is We The People who are sovereign. The people have the final say. The legislators are their spokesmen. The people determine through their votes the destiny of the nation. — Citizens United v. FEC (more…)

The Paris Commune of 1871, one of Europe’s first attempts to seek an alternative to liberalism.

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Part 3 of 3 (Introduction Part I here, Introduction Part II here, Chapter 1 Part 1 here)

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Let us sum up. Man is a “social animal” whose existence is consubstantial with that of society. Justice in the first instance is not a matter of rights but of measure; i.e., it is only defined as a relation of equity between persons living in society, so there are no holders of rights outside social life, and within it there are only those to whom rights are attributed. (more…)

3,272 words

The French-language news portal Breizh-Info has published a long interview in French with Hungarian Member of Parliament László Toroczkai, who is the leader of the opposition nationalist parliamentary group Mi Hazánk Mozgalom. The following is an English translation.

László Toroczkai has been a leading figure in Hungarian nationalism for 25 years. His biography has few equals in this political milieu. He began as a young parliamentary assistant working with the Hungarian Justice and Life Party, or MIÉP, in the late 1990s, which was a nationalist party that had parliamentary representation between 1998 and 2002. (more…)

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July Fourth always inspires a nostalgic feeling in me. When I was a kid, the holiday roughly marked the halfway point of summer break. Then, and now, it also means the beginning of the dog days of summer. The term “dog days” originated with the ancient Greeks, who coined it to describe the longest days of the year, which brought with them the most oppressive sunlight. (more…)

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F. Roger Devlin talks about translating Alain de Benoist’s The Populist Moment as well as about how populism developed out of the traditional Left-Right dichotomy in this video from the 2023 Counter-Currents Spring Retreat. The text of the talk is here. (more…)

Alain de Benoist

3,032 words

The following is the text of a talk that was given at the recent Counter-Currents Spring Retreat.

The term populism has been on people’s lips in the United States since Donald Trump’s rise, and its popularity goes back a bit farther in Europe, where it had already gained currency as a kind of curse word for anti-immigration protest parties. Following the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election, books on populism began proliferating in the English-speaking world. I expect many of these were solicited by the publishers, hoping to capitalize on a suddenly fashionable subject. During the Winter of 2018-19, Counter-Currents published a series of reviews of these new titles; I contributed four. (more…)

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“Reality”: the world or the state of things as they actually exist.

One succinct way to characterize the Western “democracies” is that they are, in all their various manifestations, anti-reality regimes. For starters, they are not really what they piously call themselves — “democracies” — in any accepted definition of the term. The governments of these countries are cabals of oligarchs who use political parties as fronts for advancing the interests of backroom, money-connected players. (more…)

Theodoros Pelecanos, Ouroboros (1478)

6,611 words

Part 1 of 7 (Part 2 here)

One of the most startling historical truths is that Europeans invented the writing of history as “a method of sorting out the true from the false,” as a conscious search for a rational explanation of the causes of events, while rendering the results of their investigations in sustained narratives of excellent prose. The other peoples of the world, including the Chinese who maintained for centuries a tradition of chronological writers, barely rose above annalistic forms of recording the deeds of rulers or the construction of genealogies devoid of reflections on historical causation. This would not have been judged a controversial view a few decades ago. (more…)