Tag: liberal democracy

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I was surprised at how much I liked Disney’s live action Star Wars series Andor, so I watched the Mouse’s next Star Wars series, Ahsoka. It was a trudge across vast, dreary plains of pulp, nostalgia, and estrogen-sodden wokeness — punctuated with peaks of genuine magic and drama.

The character of Jedi apprentice Ahsoka Tano, an orange-skinned alien, was created by George Lucas and Dave Filoni and first introduced in the 2008 animated film The Clone Wars, which focused on her relationship with Anakin Skywalker. (more…)

Frank Herbert

2,488 words

This talk was delivered on Sunday, October 8th, at a Counter-Currents gathering in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I want to thank everyone who helped organize the event and everyone who came out to attend. I love Texas and am frankly puzzled by its one-star rating.

It is just a coincidence that today’s gathering falls on the birthday of Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, which is the best-selling and most influential science fiction book of all time. Without Dune, there would be no Star Wars. Without Dune, there would be no Warhammer 40K. (more…)

40 words / 25:12

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

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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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Part 9 of 9 (Chapter 1 here, Chapter 6 Part 1 here)

In a representative “democracy,” “public opinion” is a fiction. The people have no voice. They are never consulted directly on policy matters, and they are not given any mechanism through which they can express their honest opinion. Instead, an illusion of public sentiment is artificially generated by a small minority of private actors controlling institutions with disproportionate power and influence that can circumvent organic social pressures and coerce people into conforming to their artificially-produced social norms. (more…)

On Election Day in 2020 the AFL-CIO, then led by Richard Trumka (pictured), issued a joint statement with the US Chamber of Commerce calling for “all votes to be counted,” signaling a little-noticed alliance against American populism between corporate America and the Left.

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Part 8 of 9 (Chapter 1 here, Chapter 5 Part 2 here, Chapter 6 Part 2 here)

All of them portray themselves as defenders of democracy, but they’re attacking liberal democracy from the inside and using its concepts against it. That makes these people both new and potentially dangerous. – Alejandro Castrillón, Contemporary Far-Right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy (more…)

The National Guard imposes racial integration at gunpoint in Arkansas, 1957.

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Part 7 of 9 (Chapter 1 here, Chapter 5 Part 1 here, Chapter 6 Part 1 here)

The other most recent example of the progressive top-down technocratic elite transformation of society is the LGBT agenda. As the LGBT scholar Gary Mucciaroni explains, “sexual politics” in America is “a narrative about a heterosexist majority that has used religion and ideology to maintain its cultural and legal privileges.” The literature of the LGBT movement has always self-consciously identified itself as an elite, minoritarian revolution against this heterosexual majority. (more…)

President Lyndon Johnson signing the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act into law, surrounded by his supporters.

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Part 6 of 9 (Chapter 1 here, Chapter 4 Part 2 here, Chapter 5 Part 2 here)

When a term has become so universally sanctified as “democracy” is now, I begin to wonder whether it means anything, in meaning too many things. — T. S. Eliot (more…)

Karl Popper, one of the intellectuals who gave rise to the anti-populist conception of democracy that has prevailed in the West since the Second World War.

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Part 5 of 9 (Chapter 1 here, Chapter 4 Part 1 here, Chapter 5 Part 1 here)

Whereas liberal elites had always harbored a cynical and technocratic rejection of the fundamental premises of popular government, after the Second World War “the highly educated [also began] to deplore working-class movements for their bigotry, their refusal of modernity,” and their apparent instinctual tendency towards nationalism and authoritarian leaders. They became openly and dogmatically hostile towards all forms of “collectivism” and solidaristic political movements because they identified popular social organization as fundamentally incompatible with liberalism’s hallowed individual rights and liberties. Post-war elites embraced anti-fascism and anti-populism as two necessary tenets of contemporary liberalism. (more…)

Walter Lippmann, whose anti-democratic skepticism changed the course of American politics in the twentieth century.

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Part 4 of 9 (Chapter 1 here, Chapter 3 here, Chapter 4 Part 2 here)

Politically, democracy means the sovereignty, not of the average man — who is a rather narrow, short-sighted, muddle-headed creature — but of a matured public opinion, a very different thing . . . In the forming of this opinion the sage has a million times the weight of the field hand. With modern facilities for mind influencing mind, democracy, at its best, substitutes the direction of the recognized moral and intellectual élite for the rule of the strong, the rich, or the privileged. — Edward Alsworth Ross, Changing America (1912) (more…)

The Founding Fathers were not what they are often seen as today.

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Part 3 of 9 (Chapter 1 here, Chapter 2 here, Chapter 4 Part 1 here)

Of the things for which I summoned the people to assemble,
was there one I compassed not? . . .
This is how the people will best follow their leaders:
If they are neither unleashed nor restrained too much. — Solon, circa sixth century BC (more…)

Mark Weber

266 words / 1:01:23

Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review was Greg Johnson‘s guest on the latest broadcast of Counter-Currents Radio, which was a pre-recorded discussion on the perils of empire, and it is now available for download and online listening. (more…)

Alain de Benoist

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Introduction here; Chapter 2 Part 1 here

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Opinion democracy? Televisual democracy? Market democracy? Democracy is in crisis, and the pathologies which affect contemporary democracies increasingly occupy observers’ attention. The common opinion is that these pathologies, far from being inherent in democracy itself, result from a corruption of its principles. (more…)