"An elective despotism is not what we fought for."
No, Mr. Jefferson…but that's what you got.
Several years ago, I realized (with the help of a conversation with my wife) that I was trying to include too much in the book I was writing, so I made a “next book” folder and filled it with the topics that were not as well correlated with the main topic of my first book. I named one of these sub-folders, “Democracy is not enough.”
The earliest entries in it are from the start of 2016, so presumably it was during the year before that I first started to have the thought, however inchoate, that perhaps democracy is not the be-all-and-end-all system it has been built up to be. Given the current state of our nation and the world, it is time to do a little exploration of this topic.
Let us begin with a few caveats.
I know the distinction between democracy and a constitutional republic. I understand the differences as the American Founders saw them, and I know that the Founders gave us a constitutional republic. I am using “democracy” in the broadest sense, to describe any system in which people vote for representatives (or directly on policies, in plebiscites and the like), and in which any citizen can (in theory, at least) run for office or apply for government jobs. Democracy is thus a top-level category, which includes all such systems: direct democracy, representative democracy, republics, parliamentary systems, etc.
Think of it this way: at the very top level, humanity has had only two systems of government: one in which hereditary rulers have decision-making power (as shorthand, call it monarchy) and another in which citizens (either some or all, either directly or through representatives) have (or are supposed to have) decision-making power. As shorthand, call that democracy. From 36,000 feet, then, we see that we had HumanGovernance 1.0 (monarchy) in most places, for most of human history, and then, beginning in the 17th century, we began slowly replacing it with HumanGovernance 2.0 (democracy), a process that essentially finished at the end of WWI. That is a simplification, to be sure, but a useful one.Anything I say from here on is no no way intended to malign the Founding Fathers of America or the incredible gifts they bequeathed to us. I marvel at the brilliance of these men, and at the Divine Providence at work in the amazing fact that so many such men were together in one generation, at exactly the time they were needed. I marvel at the brilliance of the system they made. They managed to combine lessons from history and a deep understanding of human nature with new ideas to create something never before seen. Intricate compromises…dextrous balances…brand-new innovations—all intended to actuate classical-liberal philosophical principles into a political system. I could gush all day. Thus, understand that any critiques of the system they gave us come from a place of love and respect. And they occur with the confident belief that none of us could have done any better at the same time, under the same circumstances. So please do not burn me as a heretic if I henceforward suggest that there are fundamental flaws with democracy that, in the long run, not even their brilliant version could have overcome.
I am simply starting to believe that any democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction, and I won’t let my reverence for the Founders—or the fact that I have spent most of my adult life trying to help conserve their vision—stop me from discussing what I am seeing. I also must acknowledge the huge leap in my thinking on this topic that took place while reading Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed toward the end of 2022. That, when coupled with the eye-opening madness of the world situation right now, has allowed me to challenge many presuppositions that I, and humanity in general, have held for a long time.
I also believe that the system they gave us—even if ultimately doomed by the inherent flaws in any democracy—may have been necessary as a transitional force to move humanity away from monarchy. Not that every aspect of monarchy is bad, or even that every aspect of democracy is superior to monarchy (see Hoppe on that), but rather than we needed to get away from the notion that fixed classes of people were born to rule and other classes were born to be ruled. And if democracy was the only way to do that, then so be it—and if so, then the American system was, at least, a superior blueprint that we were lucky to have.In one of my first pieces on Substack, I noted that there would be times when I present ideas that I have very thoroughly worked out and other times when I would be working out ideas on the fly, with you. This topic and series will be a case of the latter. I am still thinking all this through, and I believe that it is a conversation we need to have, even if we do not have all the answers.
As important as it is to have an idea of better or alternative solutions, we won’t be covering that in this particular discussion. This will just be about the critiques. That said, just as info—I am not claiming that I believe that democratic elements (voting, participation, etc.) would have zero place in any such future alternative. It is simply a discussion for another time.
In the interests of making each installment comparatively brief, I will divide this up into a few parts, and we will allow this to serve as the introduction. However, as grist for future installments, allow me to pose this food for thought…
Democracy didn’t—or couldn’t—save itself.
If you are here reading this, then the odds are you know just how weird the world has become. If you have somehow reached March 1st, 2023, still believing in the fabricated Reality™ that we are being fed by the mainstream narrative-creation apparatus, then perhaps go spend a week on Twitter and then come back to this post. Now that Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, information is flowing fairly freely there, and conservatives and libertarians are driving most of the trends (revealing that we were in the majority all along, which is why they needed censorship to keep us down). Thus, Twitter has become a good place to learn—by reading, following links, etc.—that most of the things that were considered “conspiracy theories” in years past appear to be disturbingly, shockingly real.
In a nutshell…
It is statistically impossible for all the horrible things that have been happening, at the rate that they have been happening, to be random occurrences. Killer viruses, killer vaccines, sudden deaths of children and young adults, impossibly huge increases in fertility problems and all-cause mortality, chemical spills and explosions, attacks on food supplies and food production, and on and on—it cannot be the result of accidents or incompetence. There is agency behind all of it. Add in openly expressed plans to move us into 15-minute cities, explicit statements that words such as “freedom,” “sovereignty,” and “free will” are outdated, or tantamount to terroristic sedition—not to mention the widely held notion that there are too many of us, and that our very existence poses a threat to the “climate”—and we start to get the sense that things aren’t simply melting down; they are being melted down on purpose. For good measure, throw in the fact that many aspects of rule of law that we have come to take for granted—habeas corpus and due process chief among them—have been recently disposed of, all in the name of fighting manmade viruses and manufactured “insurrections.”
All of this is taking place in a world awash in democracies, and many of the nations with long-standing reputations for being the freest in the world have been the worst offenders. Suddenly, “democracy” is not looking very democratic. It’s looking a lot more like some combination of ideological forces and elite power-players are working an agenda that governments are actively participating in, with complete disregard for what “the people” want.
We’ve been voting—in most countries for more than a century, and in a few countries a lot longer than that—and this is what we’ve come to.
It is tempting to comfort ourselves with the notion that all of this is just a perversion of democracy. But is it?
How do we know that this sort of descent into oligarchic tyranny isn’t baked into the cake of democracy from the start—that something about voting itself, no matter how many bulwarks are erected—leads inevitably here? In the most charitable reading, we might say that voting was simply powerless to prevent our arrival here. That, at least, we must say. We are here. Voting did not prevent it.
Thus, either democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction, or it is powerless to prevent its own perversion. And that, my friends, starts to seem like a distinction without a difference.
We cannot eat that distinction when the last of our meat processing facilities has been burned down. We cannot breathe it when one too many trains is derailed and its poisonous cargo purposely set aflame.
We have questions that need to get answered, and they need to get answered fast.