The Slippery Slope of Democracy
Think not of what we might gain, but of what we have already lost.
I have recently been involved in an interesting discussion thread on John Sullivan’s Substack in which, in part, I attempt to justify my recently coalescing view that democracy is an unworkable, fatally flawed, and morally problematic system. (I love the fact that Substack exists and such conversations can take place on it.) In the course of casual defense of that view, I say,
And what democracy we do have is so gamed and oppressive that even the lowest-level officials are tyrants. The councilors in the City of Bath about to unilaterally herd people into 15-minute cities. Here in the States, school board members are able to tell parents that their kids are going to be exposed to all sorts of sexual indoctrination (and encouraged to mutilate themselves) and there's not a damn thing they can do about it.
A defender of democratic systems1 might offer a reasonable reply along these lines:
But look—videos of those school board meetings have gone viral, and as a result, several school boards were flipped in the last election. We just need to do more of that.
When that possible response first occurred to me, it did seem reasonable for a moment. But then I started to project my thoughts not forward in time to the possibility of winning future school board elections, but backward in time to everything that has led up to this point.
So let’s do a brief review…
Over a century ago, a small number of leftist ideologues decided to transform the American education system. Their goal was not the boilerplate pablum we hear in defense of public school today. Their goal was to use the education system to remake America in the socialist/leftist/collectivist blueprint. Full stop.
They then used the vaunted systems of “democracy” to force this on everyone.
Don’t like the word force? Perhaps you think that because we were able to vote on this, we “consented” to it.
Did we? Did you? Can you escape it? It has existed for a century. Do you see it going away any time soon? Milton Friedman was talking about school choice and vouchers over a half century ago. In that time, only a smattering of locales have passed even the most modest of school-choice programs.
Look, we just passed a school-choice bill. We’re winning!
Are we? At the rate we are going, we will have gotten school choice everywhere by the year 7000.2 And all we will have gotten is a clunky, flawed solution to fundamentally rights-violative system…
Right now, you pay to use your own property (property tax). Then they tack on school taxes, which you pay whether you have kids or not, whether you have kids in school or not, and whether you think that public schooling is a good idea or not. Refuse to pay and lose your house. And the holy grail for defeating this monstrous system? A voucher system in which the government—if finally forced to do so if your area after 5,000 years of “democratic action”—will generously refund you some of that money to send your children to a school that you choose. So long as the government approves of that school.
Wow. I feel so free.
For decades, the cost of public education has steadily risen, yet outcomes (math, reading, science, writing, etc.) have stagnated and begun to fall off. Our children have been losing ground to the rest of the world for years. Even if that weren’t the case, public schools would still violate the human right of choice, but the fact that it is true is appalling and inexcusable.
Schools today have become sex-reassignment indoctrination facilities. The leftists who created the public school system (John Dewey et al) may not have anticipated this exact outcome, but this outcome was nonetheless inevitable. (And this is but one of myriad ways in which public schools are not good for children: indoctrination… leveling effects…what they did during covid—don’t even get me started!)
Don’t think it’s a healthy environment for your kids? Don’t want men in dresses reading stories about sexual orientation to your toddler?
Haven’t you heard? YOU have a say in how these schools are run. It’s called democracy, hater.
You can vote on your local school’s budget. If you vote no, they will hold another vote and another vote until you vote yes. (They do this in my district.) Democracy!
Not enough democracy for you? Okay, well they’ve also given us—oh, and you’re gonna love this…wait for it…
SCHOOL BOARDS!
You can run for school board. You can vote for school board members. You can go to meetings. Show me what democracy looks like… THIS is what democracy looks like.
Yeah, except here is how it has worked out in practice…
Leftist ideologues have taken over school boards. Leftists are, by definition, more interested in activism and change; conservatives are more interested in just getting on with life. Thus, leftists are always going to be drawn into fields that give them power. Those leftists run the show.
Parents are busy. Parents don’t know the true nature of the people for whom they’re voting, or the details of what is really going on in the schools. They’re not there, and their kids cannot always provide accurate accounts. Parents don’t want to have to show up at school board meetings. (And why should they have to?)
And then, when what has been going on for decades (and ramping up to fever pitch in recent years) finally comes to light and they start showing up to school board meetings, they are dragged out by police and investigated as domestic terrorists by the government.
THAT is what democracy looks like.
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We have all been steeped, like a soggy bag of tea, in two centuries of reverence for democracy and inured by ten millennia of submission to the involuntary state. Critique of either as fundamentally flawed is usually met with horror or derision. When the dust settles from that, this is usually the best one can hope for:
Hey buddy, all we need to do is win some elections and we can fix this!
That tragically misses the point. Elections got us here. All the vaunted procedures of democracy led us to this point. Even the genuinely brilliant mechanisms of our constitutional republic were unable to stop this. The system, by its own nature, not only allows itself to be gamed by the left—it invites it.
We could call it an anomaly if it were only happening in America, but it is happening in democracies across the globe. The only Western democracies that are not dying of this cancer are in Eastern Europe, and I strongly believe that the only reason is because they still have people alive who remember the horrors of two generations under communism. As soon as that memory, and those people, die off, those democracies will be ripe for the picking too.
And it's not just the left who are gaming the system. Democracy is designed to be slow and inefficient—to keep from radical lurches or accumulations of power. The concept makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, this inefficiency allows democratic countries to be controlled behind the scenes by shadowy figures who are not constrained by the strictures of the democratic system—an oligarchy of billionaires, creepy globalist weirdos, leftist ideologues, corporate bigwigs, and the like, all pulling strings behind the scenes. The administrative state continues to grow, creating byzantine pathways for the exercise of that power—pathways we normal people have never seen and will never tread.
And we continue to tell ourselves that because we can vote, all of this is somehow consensual. We continue to believe that we can fix this with more democracy—that all we need is the right people and the right laws. We fail to notice that we got here not in spite of democracy, but because of it.
I realize that the most likely response here will be, Okay, smart guy—what’s the alternative? Millennia of statist propaganda, plus a sensible skepticism about human nature, leave us all feeling that there are NO alternatives other than monarchy or chaotic, Hobbesian anarchy. That isn’t so. There are alternatives. Carefully worked-out ones. Provocative ones. Now is not the time to go into all that, but reasonable, workable possibilities do exist.
My only point here is to get you to think not just about the gains we might make in the next election, but the losses over the last two centuries. How do they compare?
And also to think about the fundamental immorality of the system itself.
What if I don’t want to run for school board?
What if I don’t want to go to school-board meetings? What if I don’t want to have to fight with radical leftists and maybe somehow stop them from putting sexually explicit gender-indoctrination materials in the hands of my third-grader? What if I don’t want to be dragged off by police who are rather mindlessly doing the bidding of this system?
What if I don’t want to send my kids to such schools at all?
What if I don’t want my money forcibly taken from me to pay for all of this?
What if I want to choose where I send my children to school with what little money I have?
WHY SHOULDN’T ALL OF THIS BE MY CHOICE?
Why are we acting like democracy, as a system of political organization, is somehow consensual and free…when it so obviously is not?
Before you scold me that this is a constitutional republic, please read this. (Short version: I know it is.)
Possibly hyperbolic, but you get the point.
“Why are we acting like democracy, as a system of political organization, is somehow consensual and free…when it so obviously is not?”
This is such a good question. We are living in a world of beliefs based on assumptions passed down to us plus the deliberate attempts over centuries to destroy us by every means possible. But miraculously many have survived sane, intact and able to to see what is happening and write about it! Thanks Christopher.
I came across Charlotte Iserbyt recently. This is just a short video https://youtu.be/DDyDtYy2I0M - Deliberately Constructed Idiocracy, but she has a uTube page titled, Exposing The Global Road To Ruin Through Education. She worked to expose this until her death in death in 2022. Born 1930.