Democracy the god that failed
Democracy the god that failed
Democracy The God That Failed
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Democracy The God That Failed
This sweeping book is a systematic treatment of the historic transformation of the West from limited monarchy to unlimited democracy. Revisionist in nature, it reaches the conclusion that monarchy, with all its failings, is a lesser evil than mass democracy, but outlines deficiencies in both as systems of guarding liberty. By focusing on this transformation from private to public government, the author is able to interpret many historical phenomena, such as rising levels of crime, degeneration of standards of conduct and morality, the decline in security and freedom, and the growth of the mega-state.
In addition, Hoppe deconstructs the classical liberal belief in the possibility of limited government and calls for an alignment of anti-statist conservatism and libertarianism as natural allies with common goals. He defends the proper role of the production of defense as undertaken by insurance companies on a free market, and describes the emergence of private law among competing insurers.
The author goes on to assess the prospects for achieving a natural order of liberty. Informed by his analysis of the radical deficiencies of social democracy, and armed with the social theory of legitimation, he forsees secession as the likely future of the US and Europe, resulting in a multitude of region and city-states. Democracy-The God that Failed ( is a brilliant and unflinching work that will be of intense interest to scholars and students of history, political economy, and political philosophy.
Democracy: The God That Failed
Democracy: The God That Failed is a book by German-American economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, first published in 2001, that is axiomatic deductive in style. The main theme of the book is an analysis of the effects of democracy on society, while also comparing and contrasting democracy to other forms of social and political organization such as monarchical or Hoppe’s concept of natural order. More specifically the book presesnts a number of arguments that essentially lead to the conclusion that democracy has not furthered freedom, prosperity, and overall societal advancement in the manner and to the degree which so many have come to believe.
One of the main concepts central to Hoppe’s arguments concerning the strength, or rather weakness of democracy is the idea of time preference. Time preference can be seen as the degree by which an individual prefers a good in the present over the exact same good in the future. Hoppe argues that in general an advancing society will see a decline in time preference towards zero (but never reaching zero), because as individuals become wealthier they will require a lower portion of their wealth to satisfy present needs and thus have a higher supply to dedicate to future needs. Or in other words, as society advances on average individuals will have a higher savings rate. This tendency of a fall in the time preference rate will continue to proceed as Hoppe states “so long as no one interferes with another’s acts of nature appropriation and production”. [1] This leads to one of the first arguments in the book against democratic governments which in fact can be applied to all forms of government. Hoppe argues that government interference in private individuals’ lives (be it a monarchical or democratic government) only leads to an increase in an individual’s time preference rate. Or in other words a decline in the savings rate and thus degradation or slowing of economic advancement. The primary reason for this is that governments greatly increase the uncertainty in people’s lives. Uncertainty, of the type created by governments, leads to an increase in time preference as individuals no longer know what proportion of their wealth they will be able to keep in the future because governments are constantly changing rates of taxation, inflation, and regulation.
Another one of the arguments Hoppe uses to support his claims against democracy are the problems that arise when as is the case with democratic governments, the leader(s) of the government are not the owners of government resources but rather the caretaker. This creates the motivation for the leader(s) to use them to the greatest extent possible in their given term as after they are out of office they will no longer have access to them. This is contrasted to monarchy where the king, queen, emperor, etc., is in fact the owner of the resources and therefore will be more motivated to maintain and maximize government wealth over an extended period of time and less likely to squander resources to the same extent.
While Hoppe does emphasize some of the benefits of monarchy over democracy, he does not advocate either as very desirable, rather he stresses that the superior order to them both is the idea of natural order:
Democracy: The God That Failed
Democracy: The God That Failed is a 2001 book by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, containing a series of thirteen essays on the subject of democracy and concluding with the belief that democracy is the primary cause of the decivilization sweeping the world since World War I, and that it must be delegitimized.
He characterizes democracy as «publicly owned government,» which he compares to monarchy—»privately owned government»—to conclude that the latter is preferable; however, Hoppe aims to show that both monarchy and democracy are deficient systems compared to his preferred structure to advance civilization—what he calls the natural order, a system free of both taxation and coercive monopoly in which jurisdictions freely compete for adherents. In his Introduction to the book, he lists other names used elsewhere to refer to the same thing, including «ordered anarchy,» «private property anarchism,» «anarcho-capitalism,» «autogovernment,» «private law society,» and «pure capitalism.» [ 1 ]
The title of the work is an allusion to The God That Failed, a 1949 work in which six former communist (or former communist sympathizer) authors describe their experience of and disillusion with communism.
Contents
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Publishing history
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Democracy the god that failed
November 12, 2001
At the request of LRC, Professor Hoppe discusses his extremely important new book, Democracy: The God That Failed (Transaction Publishers, Rutgers, NJ: 2001).
Theory and History
On the most abstract level, I want to show how theory is indispensible in correctly interpreting history. History — the sequence of events unfolding in time — is “blind.” It reveals nothing about causes and effects. We may agree, for instance, that feudal Europe was poor, that monarchical Europe was wealthier, and that democratic Europe is wealthier still, or that nineteenth-century America with its low taxes and few regulations was poor, while contemporary America with its high taxes and many regulations is rich. Yet was Europe poor because of feudalism, and did it grow richer because of monarchy and democracy? Or did Europe grow richer in spite of monarchy and democracy? Or are these phenomena unrelated?
Likewise, is contemporary America wealthier because of higher taxes and more regulations or in spite of them? That is, would America be even more prosperous if taxes and regulations had remained at their nineteenth-century levels? Historians qua historians cannot answer such questions, and no amount of statistical data manipulation can change this fact. Every sequence of empirical events is compatible with any of a number of rival, mutually incompatible interpretations.
To make a decision regarding such incompatible interpretations, we need a theory. By theory I mean a proposition whose validity does not depend on further experience but can be established a priori. This is not to say that one can do without experience altogether in establishing a theoretical proposition. However, it is to say that even if experience is necessary, theoretical insights extend and transcend logically beyond a particular historical experience. Theoretical propositions are about necessary facts and relations and, by implication, about impossibilities. Experience may thus illustrate a theory. But historical experience can neither establish a theorem nor refute it.
The Austrian School
Economic and political theory, especially of the Austrian variety, is a treasure trove of such propositions. For instance, a larger quantity of a good is preferred to a smaller amount of the same good; production must precede consumption; what is consumed now cannot be consumed again in the future; prices fixed below market-clearing prices will lead to lasting shortages; without private property in production factors there can be no factor prices, and without factor prices cost-accounting is impossible; an increase in the supply of paper money cannot increase total social wealth but can only redistribute existing wealth; monopoly (the absence of free entry) leads to higher prices and lower product quality than competition; no thing or part of a thing can be owned exclusively by more than one party at a time; democracy (majority rule) and private property are incompatible.
Theory is no substitute for history, of course, yet without a firm grasp of theory serious errors in the interpretation of historical data are unavoidable. For instance, the outstanding historian Carroll Quigley claims that the invention of fractional reserve banking has been a major cause of the unprecedented expansion of wealth associated with the Industrial Revolution, and countless historians have associated the economic plight of Soviet-style socialism with the absence of democracy.
From a theoretical viewpoint, such interpretations must be rejected categorically. An increase in the paper money supply cannot lead to greater prosperity but only to wealth redistribution. The explosion of wealth during the Industrial Revolution took place despite fractional reserve banking. Similarly, the economic plight of socialism cannot be due to the absence of democracy. Instead, it is caused by the absence of private property in factors of production. “Received history” is full of such misinterpretations. Theory allows us to rule out certain historical reports as impossible and incompatible with the nature of things. By the same token, it allows us to uphold certain other things as historical possibilities, even if they have not yet been tried.
More interestingly, armed with elementary economic and political theory, I present in my book a revisionist reconstruction of modern Western history: of the rise of absolute monarchical states out of state-less feudal orders, and the transformation, beginning with the French Revolution and essentially completed with the end of World War I, of the Western world from monarchical to democratic States, and the rise of the US to the rank of “universal empire.” Neo-conservative writers such as Francis Fukuyama have interpreted this development as civilizational progress, and they proclaim the “End of History” to have arrived with the triumph of Western — US — democracy and its globalization (making the world safe for democracy).
My theoretical interpretation is entirely different. It involves the shattering of three historical myths. The first and most fundamental is the myth that the emergence of states out of a prior, non-statist order has caused subsequent economic and civilizational progress. In fact, theory dictates that any progress must have occurred in spite — not because — of the institution of a state.
A state is defined conventionally as an agency that exercises a compulsory territorial monopoly of ultimate decison-making (jurisdiction) and of taxation. By definition then, every state, regardless of its particular constitution, is economically and ethically deficient. Every monopolist is “bad” from the viewpoint of consumers. Monopoly is hereby understood as the absence of free entry into a particular line of production: only one agency, A, may produce X.
Any monopoly is “bad” for consumers because, shielded from potential new entrants into its line of production, the price for its product will be higher and the quality lower than with free entry. And a monopolist with ultimate decison-making powers is particularly bad. While other monopolists produce inferior goods, a monopolist judge, besides producing inferior goods, will produce bads, because he who is the ultimate judge in every case of conflict also has the last word in each conflict involving himself. Consequently, instead of preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision-making will cause and provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage.
Not only would no one accept such a monopoly judge provision, but no one would ever agree to a provision that allowed this judge to determine the price to be paid for his “service” unilaterally. Predictably, such a monopolist would use up ever more resources (tax revenue) to produce fewer goods and perpetrate more bads. This is not a prescription for protection but for oppression and exploitation. The result of a state, then, is not peaceful cooperation and social order, but conflict, provocation, aggression, oppression, and impoverishment, i.e., de-civilization. This, above all, is what the history of states illustrates. It is first and foremost the history of countless millions of innocent state victims.
The second myth concerns the historic transition from absolute monarchies to democratic states. Not only do neoconservatives interpret this development as progress; there is near-universal agreement that democracy represents an advance over monarchy and is the cause of economic and moral progress. This interpretation is curious in light of the fact that democracy has been the fountainhead of every form of socialism: of (European) democratic socialism and (American) liberalism and neo-conservatism as well as of international (Soviet) socialism, (Italian) fascism, and national (Nazi) socialism. More importantly, however, theory contradicts this interpretation; whereas both monarchies and democracies are deficient as states, democracy is worse than monarchy.
Theoretically speaking, the transition from monarchy to democracy involves no more or less than a hereditary monopoly “owner” — the prince or king — being replaced by temporary and interchangeable — monopoly “caretakers” — presidents, prime ministers, and members of parliament. Both kings and presidents will produce bads, yet a king, because he “owns” the monopoly and may sell or bequeath it, will care about the repercussions of his actions on capital values. As the owner of the capital stock on “his” territory, the king will be comparatively future-oriented. In order to preserve or enhance the value of his property, he will exploit only moderately and calculatingly. In contrast, a temporary and interchangeable democratic caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his advantage. He owns its current use but not its capital stock. This does not eliminate exploitation. Instead, it makes exploitation shortsighted (present-oriented) and uncalculated, i.e., carried out without regard for the value of the capital stock.
Nor is it an advantage of democracy that free entry into every state position exists (whereas under monarchy entry is restricted by the king’s discretion). To the contrary, only competition in the production of goods is a good thing. Competition in the production of bads is not good; in fact, it is sheer evil. Kings, coming into their position by virtue of birth, might be harmless dilettantes or decent men (and if they are “madmen,” they will be quickly restrained or if need be, killed, by close relatives concerned with the possessions of the dynasty). In sharp contrast, the selection of government rulers by means of popular elections makes it essentially impossible for a harmless or decent person to ever rise to the top. Presidents and prime ministers come into their position as a result of their efficiency as morally uninhibited demagogues. Hence, democracy virtually assures that only dangerous men will rise to the top of government.
In particular, democracy is seen as promoting an increase in the social rate of time preference (present-orientation) or the “infantilization” of society. It results in continually increased taxes, paper money and paper money inflation, an unending flood of legislation, and a steadily growing “public” debt. By the same token, democracy leads to lower savings, increased legal uncertainty, moral relativism, lawlessness, and crime. Further, democracy is a tool for wealth and income confiscation and redistribution. It involves the legislative “taking” of the property of some — the haves of something — and the “giving” of it to others — the have-nots of things. And since it is presumably something valuable that is being redistributed — of which the haves have too much and the have-nots too little — any such redistribution implies that the incentive to be of value or produce something valuable is systematically reduced. In other words, the proportion of not-so-good people and not-so-good personal traits, habits, and forms of conduct and appearance will increase, and life in society will become increasingly unpleasant.
Last but not least, democracy is described as resulting in a radical change in the conduct of war. Because they can externalize the costs of their own aggression onto others (via taxes), both kings and presidents will be more than ‘normally’ aggressive and warlike. However, a king’s motive for war is typically an ownership-inheritance dispute. The objective of his war is tangible and territorial: to gain control over some piece of real estate and its inhabitants. And to reach this objective it is in his interest to distinguish between combatants (his enemies and targets of attack) and non-combatants and their property (to be left out of the war and undamaged). Democracy has transformed the limited wars of kings into total wars. The motive for war has become ideological — democracy, liberty, civilization, humanity. The objectives are intangible and elusive: the ideological “conversion” of the losers preceded by their “unconditional” surrender (which, because one can never be certain about the sincerity of conversion, may require such means as the mass murder of civilians). And the distinction between combatants and non-combatants becomes fuzzy and ultimately disappears under democracy, and mass war involvement — the draft and popular war rallies — as well as “collateral damage” become part of war strategy.
Finally, the third myth shattered is the belief that there is no alternative to Western welfare-democracies a la US. Again, theory demonstrates otherwise. First, this belief is false because the modern welfare-state is not a “stable” economic system. It is bound to collapse under its own parasitic weight, much like Russian-style socialism imploded a decade ago. More importantly, however, an economically stable alternative to democracy exists. The term I propose for this alternative is “natural order.”
In a natural order every scarce resource, including all land, is owned privately, every enterprise is funded by voluntarily paying customers or private donors, and entry into every line of production, including that of property protection, conflict arbitration, and peacemaking, is free. A large part of my book concerns the explanation of the workings — the logic — of a natural order and the requirements for the transformation from democracy to a natural order.
Whereas states disarm their citizens so as to be able to rob them more surely (thereby rendering them more vulnerable also to criminal and terrorist attack), a natural order is characterized by an armed citizenry. This feature is furthered by insurance companies, which play a prominent role as providers of security and protection in a natural order. Insurers will encourage gun ownership by offering lower premiums to armed (and weapons-trained) clients. By their nature insurers are defensive agencies. Only “accidental” — not: self-inflicted, caused or provoked — damage is “insurable.” Aggressors and provocateurs will be denied insurance coverage and are thus weak. And because insurers must indemnify their clients in case of victimization, they must be concerned constantly about the prevention of criminal aggression, the recovery of misappropriated property, and the apprehension of those liable for the damage in question.
Furthermore, the relationship between insurer and client is contractual. The rules of the game are mutually accepted and fixed. An insurer cannot “legislate,” or unilaterally change the terms of the contract. In particular, if an insurer wants to attract a voluntarily paying clientele, it must provide for the foreseeable contingency of conflict in its contracts, not only between its own clients but especially with clients of other insurers. The only provision satisfactorily covering the latter contingency is for an insurer to bind itself contractually to independent third-party arbitration. However, not just any arbitration will do. The conflicting insurers must agree on the arbitrator or arbitration agency, and in order to be agreeable to insurers, an arbitrator must produce a product (of legal procedure and substantive judgment) that embodies the widest possible moral consensus among insurers and clients alike. Thus, contrary to statist conditions, a natural order is characterized by stable and predictable law and increased legal harmony.
Moreover, insurance companies promote the development of another “security feature.” States have not just disarmed their citizens by taking away their weapons, democratic states in particular have also done so in stripping their citizens of the right to exclusion and by promoting instead — through various non-discrimination, affirmative action, and multiculturalist policies — forced integration. In a natural order, the right to exclusion inherent in the very idea of private property is restored to private property owners.
Accordingly, to lower the production cost of security and improve its quality, a natural order is characterized by increased discrimination, segregation, spatial separation, uniculturalism (cultural homogeneity), exclusivity, and exclusion. In addition, whereas states have undermined intermediating social institutions (family households, churches, covenants, communities, and clubs) and the associated ranks and layers of authority so as to increase their own power vis-a-vis equal and isolated individuals, a natural order is distinctly un-egalitarian: “elitist,” “hierarchical,” “proprietarian,” “patriarchical,” and “authoritorian,” and its stability depends essentially on the existence of a self-conscious natural — voluntarily acknowledged — aristocracy.
Finally, I discuss strategic matters and questions. How can a natural order arise out of democracy? I explain the role of ideas, intellectuals, elites, and public opinion in the legitimation and de-legitimation of state power. In particular, I discuss the role of secession — and the proliferation of independent political entities — as an important step toward the goal of natural order, and I explain how to properly privatize “socialized” and “public” property.
The book grew out of speeches I presented at various Mises Institute and CLS conferences during the 1990s. These conferences, organized by Lew Rockwell, Burt Blumert, and, until his death in 1995, Murray Rothbard, had the purpose of advancing libertarianism by locating and anchoring abstract libertarian theory historically, sociologically, and culturally and thereby creating what has become known in the meantime as paleo-libertarianism (in contrast to left-countercultural-libertarianism and cold-and-hot-war “new” and “neo”-conservatism). The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, the precusor to LRC, was the first and most immediate expression and reflection of this intellectual movement. Others included The Costs of War, Reassessing the Presidency, and The Irrepressible Rothbard. Democracy the God That Failed is my attempt to define and give expression to the paleo-libertarian movement.
Democracy:
The God That Failed
John McNaughton, Obamanation (detail)
Editor’s Note:
This is the transcript by V. S. of Richard Spencer’s Vanguard Podcast interview of Jonathan Bowden about democracy. You can listen to the podcast here.
Richard Spencer: Hello, everyone! Today it’s a great pleasure to welcome back Jonathan Bowden. So, Jonathan, how is everything over in England? I hope it’s not too dreary there in late January.
Jonathan Bowden: Not too bad, not too bad. It’s not particularly sunny. A little overcast, but pretty usual for this time of year.
RS: Very good. Today we’re going to talk about democracy. Democracy might be a kind of magic word in the English language and all languages in the Western world, if not the world altogether for that matter. It seems that everyone supports democracy. If you say something is democratic then it’s assumed that something is inherently good and so on and so forth.
And yet, at the same time, while democracy seems to be the most beloved form of government the world is almost universally unhappy with its leaders. If you look at the United States, Congress, which is the most democratic institution, at least as designed by the founders, they have approval rates in the teens or maybe as high as 20%. I’ve seen some single digits. They’re basically not popular at all. At least the last US president and Obama himself have become quite unpopular and if you look at the rest of the world it becomes even more interesting and perhaps the emotions are even more violent.
You can think in terms of the Arab Spring. Of course, in some cases those are reactions against leaders that were not elected, but even in Israel you had very strong public reactions against rightfully elected leaders. Things like the Occupy Wall Street movement and Tea Party certainly show that there is a powerful discontent in the air. It seems like all governments are unpopular.
So, we have an interesting world situation of democracy seems to be the reigning ideology and yet all of these regimes are suffering from a legitimacy crisis.
So, what are your thoughts on this, Jonathan? We seem to be in a very strange state of affairs here at the beginning of the 21st century.
JB: Yes, I think democracy has not “had its day,” but it needs a bit of renewal from somewhere. The difficulty is to find out where it could come from. There are no marks at all for anyone who says they’re undemocratic or anti-democratic. I’ve always privately favored a sort of enlightened aristocracy, but that’s not coming back, enlightened or otherwise.
The difficulty is that if you excuse people from any say at all — and democracy is a very partial say, let’s face it — you’re left with a sort of emptiness at the core of citizenship, however defined.
One theory I’ve always had is that you would have graded voters whereby you would never take anyone’s vote away. They’ve got that now, and to take it from them in any sense would be widely seen as regressive. Yet, you might add votes to certain people. So, certain people that you favor. The philosophical gurus or people of alleged eminence might be given a million votes instead of one, and that might make things rather interesting in certain respects. But the old problem, of course, the old chestnut then comes up, “Who decides who would be given such a differential calculus in terms of what votes they could command?” So, you’re back to the old conundrum.
I think modern Western parties have become dreary and oppressing in that they tend to the center, which immediately puts a premium on philosophy of any sort. Anyone who is at all radical is weened out of the process and excluded pretty early on.
In the current Republican contest, only Ron Paul seems to have an agenda which could be said to be at all philosophical or ideological. Romney is an establishment and moderate-status Republican. Gingrich is difficult to determine from this distance. Sometimes he goes with the social conservatives and the Christians, sometimes he goes with the libertarians, sometimes he goes with the establishment of the party, and he seems to be a sort of megalomaniac politician from this distance on the other side of the Atlantic.
I remember all the fuss that was about him when he was a congressional leader a while back, but that’s fizzled out and tailed off. Again, viewed from a long way away and I’m not sure what his status is with the American population now and whether he has any sort of a democratic bounce in him or whether he’s just a stand-up politician because they want a contest and there has to be another candidate other than Romney for that to come about.
RS: I think the latter is the case. I certainly don’t understand it. And if you look at some basic polls, outside of the Republican electorate in South Carolina Gingrich is essentially hated. I also think he is a megalomaniac. I think all of these politicians are inherently narcissistic and kind of even sociopathic, but he seems to be a great megalomaniac without being interesting. He’s not exactly Captain Ahab or Macbeth or something like that. He’s a megalomaniac, but then when you learn more about him you wish you knew less.
JB: Why did he emerge as the Republican congressional leader so many years ago?
RS: I don’t know the full story. I think if you look at Newt’s life he’s always been kind of blustering and pompous and certainly has thought very highly of himself, and I think maybe you could just chalk it up to ambition alone. I think he was one of those types that always wanted to be in charge.
I know that one popular website in the United States they released a memo he wrote while he was an assistant professor, some very small professor, at a very small college in the South and he wrote a memo to the dean. I forgot the name of the college. It was like Backwoods College of Georgia or something. The memo was like, “Backwoods College of Georgia: The Next Hundred Years.”
He’s always been a very ambitious person, but again with other people of that sort they seem to have something interesting about them or you want to learn more about what drives them. But not so with Newt.
But what do you think this is about the kind of person that becomes a democratic candidate? I don’t think we should just look at the current ones we have now and say, “Oh, they’re a bunch of sociopaths and liars and used car salesmen” or something. I think it’s worth it to delve into that deeper.
I’ve always thought that democracy almost inherently favors this type of person who, on the one hand, is never going to offend anyone. So, he’ll never be radical. He’ll always try to please all. But also just the day to day of campaigning, the act of telling promises, telling everyone that you in a sense love them and they’re the greatest people on Earth and so on and so forth, the demands of that, the rigor of that, will lead to only sociopaths succeeding in a democratic system as we know it. What do you think about that, Jonathan?
JB: Yes, I think it obviously does favor a particular type of psychology. It does favor candidates of a certain type that will emerge over time. It does favor narcissistic and self-regarding individuals. It favors social psychopathic behavioral forms. It favors gratification exercises psychologically in terms of the candidate that rendered them closer to particular types of salesmen, auctioneers, actors and actresses, and all of these have been accentuated by 24-hour media and the need to appeal to such a media on a regular basis.
I also think there’s been a sort of downgrading of expectation. If you scroll back to the early 1960s and look at the Kennedy phenomenon when the Kennedys were considered to be, given the rapture that dictatorial figures are given within a plebiscitary democracy, there was this real culture of the Kennedys. There was a sort of quasi-erotic worship of the Kennedys as items, as movie stars, as moguls of politics.
Clinton’s presidency was turned into a misery and an utter nightmare for infractions which were, on the Kennedys’ register, quite minor in the maelstrom of the early 1960s.
Similarly, Churchill’s private penchant for depression and extreme drunkenness and Lloyd George’s bigamy where he had two families going at the same time, one on the north of the Thames in London and one on the south of the Thames in London, when he was Prime Minister and when he was wartime Prime Minister at the height of the Great War, a war which Britain could very well have lost had it not been for his reorganization of the Ministry of Supply militarily.
So, I think a lot of democratic politicians are the product of the contemporary media circus. The fact that the flaws of would-be great men will always be exposed now but they won’t be exposed by biographers 40 years after their deaths, they’ll be exposed before they get into office and they’ll be exposed in the early stages of being elected by their parties. That’s before even the electorate gets to decide between them and other parties.
RS: That’s true. I don’t think a normal person would want to run for office. For instance, I’ve never been arrested or anything like that, but I’m sure, even when I look back over my relatively uneventful life, you could find something and inflate it to make me look like a maniac or some kind of reprobate. I think in some ways just a normal person who might have some healthy patriotic desires doesn’t want to put himself through that or his family through that.
I think now the people almost want a kind of person who is like them in a sense. I remember there’s this woman named Christine O’Donnell. I don’t know if news of her crossed the Atlantic. She seemed to be a well-intentioned woman and she was a little bit of a Puritan. Kind of a Christian Evangelical fanatic. I think she had a Catholic background, but she was an Evangelical Protestant. She was involved in some kind of rockin’ out to Jesus campaign and anti-masturbation campaign of all things, but I think what bothered me about her was she was clearly quite stupid. She probably had a room temperature IQ. She had nothing more to say than the nice girl at the coffee shop has to say to you. It just seems a little strange to elect the girl at the laundromat and make her a senator. I remember she had these ads where she would say, “I’m you.” That was the end of the ad. It seemed to be democracy in its essence.
But do you think, Jonathan, that we’ve seen a kind of transition from people wanting to look up to their leaders and now the public almost wants to elect themselves or something? They want someone who’s normal, who’s not going to offend them. I’ll just throw in here as well that Obama had a State of the Union address last night and I had better things to do than watch it, but I was just scanning some headlines today and one magazine put it through an analysis and it was actually at an 8th grade reading level, his State of the Union address. So, do you think things are becoming worse, that we’re entering a kind of idiocracy where essentially the masses will have boobs like themselves ruling the country?
JB: Yes, I think that’s what’s happened. I think anything great has about it the nimbus of the sinister and people have been taught not to want that anymore or are taught to be suspicious of it. In politicians of the past there was room for more character. There was room for more egoism that would show itself to the electorate.
With Churchill there would be moments of contempt, aristocratic contempt for the masses and with Lloyd George there would be moments of populist radicalism which were genuine rather than feigned, although he was a deeply manipulative politician in his way and a precursor to many things later in the century. He foreshadowed Roosevelt’s New Deal and all sorts of things. George was, in Britain, very much a prototype and a partial outsider as a politician as well. He’s an interesting example of someone who supported a pacifist course during a very popular war, the Boer War, at the turn of the 20th century when he was pro-Boer and anti-war and had to be guarded by the police because of threats to his life once at Birmingham town hall.
So, it was quite a radical figure to come in from that fringe to be the First World War leader and the great populist manipulator of the press and public opinion, but there’s no doubting whatsoever that these were gigantic figures in contemporary terms.
If you take politicians like Bill Clinton or John Major or Barack Obama or even Tony Blair, they’re cut from a much more minor cloth, and the public wants it that way otherwise there would be a yearning for greatness.
I saw over the weekend Ralph Fiennes’ modern-day version of Coriolanus, the Shakespearean play. Coriolanus is the type of leader who despises the masses and, despite being a military hero, is thrown out of Rome at the behest of the mob led by the tribunes because he won’t kowtow to the people, and he won’t give them even what passed in ancient Rome for what amounted to democratic sentiment. That’s one of Shakespeare’s less well-known plays from late in his career.
But that’s something which almost couldn’t happen now because there are no aristocratic strands in politics left. Politics is completely bourgeois and plugged into mass sentiment. Although some of the politicians, like David Cameron in Great Britain, come from an impeccably upper-class background, they’ve learned to play the game and the game is to be totally unideological, to be all things to all people, to give nothing away, to never say a remark that could be misunderstood, to never be sardonic or witty, because that’s dangerous. You exclude the majority from the debate, which is perceived as truculent and threatening. Never to be imprecisely precise, by which I mean somebody who gives loaded or slightly wolfish or dangerous answers to anything. You must never appear to be dangerous at all. Indeed, you have to campaign as an anti-politician essentially. Somebody who doesn’t really want political power and would never take a country to war, which is all very ironic because when these people get in, they hunger for political power as expressed and exercised and, in the case of the United States, are highly prone to take the country to war.
So, you almost run against what it is to be political, and in the United States you have a very radical formulation of this whereby all of these candidates declare themselves to be anti-Washington outsiders, which amongst many of them is totally absurd. Transparently so. They’ve been insiders from the very beginning. Possibly, from the perspective of Western Europe, a politician like Jimmy Carter, when he started out, may have been a genuine outsider and after the Republican White House mired in the Nixon scandals early in the ‘70s people wanted somebody who was an outsider. But nearly every major American politician, I would probably guess to include Ron Paul as well, is an insider. He may not be an insider’s insider, but the idea that George W. Bush could run against Washington is completely absurd. These are all pork barrel politicians up to their neck in favoritism and doing deals for people in their senatorial and congressional areas.
RS: Without question. Let’s put a little pressure on that. As you are saying, in terms of doing deals, we have a military-industrial complex that one can measure in the trillions. This is huge amounts of money. In many ways, we do have a ruling class and an aristocracy. However, it’s one that dare not speak its name, in a way. It’s one that justifies itself on not being an aristocracy or ruling class.
In terms of a lot of the financial elite, it’s literally invisible. I think that the average Joe on the street might see the politicians as the kind of rulers and he can strike out at one if he or she does some bad things, but obviously there’s a bigger and more invisible ruling class that has an immense amount of power. I’m, of course, referring to the financial industry, the investment banking industry, and things like that.
What would you say about this? We have a kind of strange ruling class today. It’s one that is aristocratic in the sense that you can actually define it by families and certain peoples and so on and so forth, but then it’s either invisible or it pretends it’s not what it is.
Now, you could expect that if you’re talking about, say, Wilhelm I or something he would wear martial uniforms, he’d have a certain flamboyance to his outward demeanor. He would say, “I am an aristocrat. I am a ruler. I am the state.” But now we have this ruling class that pretends it’s not a ruling class.
JB: Yes, it’s almost a Marxist idea, actually: the class that does not rule.
RS: Right.
JB: The ruling class that isn’t one. I think it all feeds into the idea that everything’s mixed together and in a strange, surreal way isn’t quite what it seems to be and that’s because everything has to be put through a prism of contesting itself before the people’s assent. I think you would find the ruling groups in Western Europe and North America will be much more naked and much more transparent if they didn’t have to consult the people every 4 or 5 years in what is a pretty minimal democracy, really. All you get is a couple of goes twice a decade, occasionally a little more, where you put a cross or a tick on a ballot in a plebiscitary way for parties that represent a range or spectrum of allowed and permitted opinion and for prominent personalities within those parties.
Usually, a lot of voting is negative where people are voting deliberately to keep somebody out rather than voting because they want a particular candidate. So, one wonders next time how many people will vote against Obama come what may whatever he said, how many people will vote along purely ethnic and racial lines in the United States where from a distance the Republicans seem to be essentially a White party with a few stringers and a few hangers-on from other groups. But essentially it’s the party White Americans feel comfortable in voting for and the Democrats have some working class White voters and union votes, but other than that are essentially a minority, ethnic mish-mash party with some feminist input as well.
You almost have a demographic deficit now whereby it’s going to be increasingly difficult for the Obama effect, in relation to the Democrats, to be resisted because I can see one of the two candidates in every presidential election, president and vice presidential candidate, being ethnic from now on into the future with the Democrats, because I don’t think they’re going to get elected otherwise. It struck me from a distance that Hillary Clinton ran a harsher campaign against Obama than the Republican official ticket did when it came to the presidential election. I may be wrong there because I’m viewing it from a great distance, but that’s what it appeared to me and I wonder whether she would have been the candidate of choice had it not been for certain ethnic changes in the demography of the Democratic Party which meant that in the end she couldn’t get the votes. She was carrying a lot of baggage from the first Clinton White House. That’s true. But maybe she couldn’t get elected because, basically, when you add up the Latino bloc and the Black bloc and the mixed bloc you’re not really going to necessarily elect that many White candidates again in terms of the Democratic Party.
RS: I think you’re right. What you’re referring to is also what I call the majority strategy. It’s something Sam Francis wrote about quite a bit in the ’90s and Steve Sailer has written about it more recently, as well as Peter Brimelow. It’s this basic idea that the GOP is relying on White Nationalism in a way. You know, I’m being a little bit cheeky in saying that, but people just get a sense that the GOP is not threatening to them, it represents their values, so to speak, you have White guys up there who aren’t really offensive, you kind of trust them more, and so the GOP gains power by White people rallying around it.
And yet overtly it is in many ways an anti-White party. I mean, I don’t think none of those people, even the Christian Right, or especially the Christian Right, would claim that this is an Anglo-Saxon country and that we have a long tradition with Europe or something like that. They’ll claim quite the opposite.
But then, on the other side, you have essentially, as opposed to the majority strategy, the minority strategy. But with the Democrats it’s totally overt. It’s, “We are the party of color, and we can obviously help our election prospects quite directly by allowing in more immigration and doing some amnesties here and there.”
Let me ask you, Jonathan, a little bit of a philosophical question. A lot of conservatives of the past — I’m thinking of people like Burke, but certainly many others and this would probably include, actually, most of the Founding Fathers of the United States — had a fear of democracy. They thought it could get out of control. They thought the people were too uncouth and too unsophisticated to make serious decisions. Essentially, there’s been a tradition of a conservative critique saying “we need wise rulers, might limit their power, but still we’ll have these people make sound decisions on the matter. We can’t allow populist sentiments and furious emotions to hold sway.”
So, in some ways, you can ask, “Is democracy the problem? Is it this mass frenzy that’s a real danger?” But you could turn that around and say that, “We have no democracy at all.” Every election that we have it’s claimed in the media and by all the politicians that, “This is the most important election of your life! You’ve got to go out and vote!” And yet nothing really changes. You might turn a knob here and tweak something there, but in terms of the general thrust of this country, at least, nothing changes. There’s more debt, more multiculturalism, more regulations of your life, more White guilt, whatever you want to say. It just keeps getting worse.
And I would say in the European context there are some things about it which are quite anti-democratic. Vlaams Belang was a legitimate party that achieved electoral victories quite rightly and yet it was kicked out of the government because it was claimed to be anti-democratic, which means they held views that the ruling order don’t like.
So, let me ask you, Jonathan. Do you think that in our age the danger is too much democracy or do you think that the danger is that there’s no democracy at all, that it’s all an illusion?
JB: Well, I think it’s true that we basically have democracy with a system attached to it and that system is liberalism. Perhaps the system could be called liberal democracy and you basically have to be a liberal to take part in the game. Partly a very real game, partly a charade that takes place in the democratic tent.
Liberals themselves understand that their system as it exists and can be described is a toss-up between pure liberalism theoretically and democracy. How much democracy you have can determine whether liberalism is endangered within the system itself. Liberals always worry about what will happen if people start voting for illiberal candidates in a liberal democracy. When do you choke that off? When do you say it’s illegitimate? When do you ban the parties of such people? Are you permitted to ban the parties of such people? Or do you just demonize them through the media and put maximum pressure on them in that way?
But liberals opine and wring their hands about these issues all the time. The limits to freedom within democracy and the degree to which they have to chop and change between liberalism and the democratic tenant. Some liberals will talk openly about dispensing with elements of democracy to preserve liberalism as a system. You don’t get that in the Anglo-Saxon world very much, but in continental Europe where things sometimes take a more theoretical cast of mind there are some people who will honestly talk in that way.
Others think that there can be no infraction upon democracy at all and you have radical libertarians, the Ron Paul type, who believe in the maximum participation and the maximum freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is highly curtailed in the Western democracies in order for multiculturalism to survive and for multiculturalism not to be threatened in any way. Indeed, there are probably more inhibitions in terms of mainstream freedom of speech and there are more things that can’t be discussed than ever before. All of it taking place within an atmosphere where everyone is told that there is maximal debate. Indeed, people have too much debate and there’s nothing that cannot be said and that censorship is the worst possible thing.
The grammar that liberalism polices democracy with is political correctness, which is a form of censorship. There’s no other way of looking at it if one is rational about it rather than emotive about it. You have a situation now where the slightest politically incorrect remark made by any candidate — Left, Right, or center, it doesn’t matter where they come from — the litmus test which is applied to them is, “Has their discourse been politically correct or not?”
Every time Ron Paul is mentioned on this side of the Atlantic some obscure journalism that was associated with him and that is regarded as “racist” is mentioned almost in the same breath and in the same paragraph. Now, I’m not close to the Paul candidacy from this distance, but I gather that it’s pretty small beer really.
RS: Yes.
JB: But it’s because they can link his name to something that’s incorrect, and if they could do the same with Gingrich, which they might be able to do given some of his remarks in South Carolina, which could be seen to be subliminally politically incorrect and group-oriented, then they will try to do so.
So, the debate is highly circumscribed and that’s because of the sort of society that you’re living in. All political correctness is, in a root way, is a way of giving inoffense to the overwhelming majority of people, because people don’t lose their group identities in a multiple group society. So, if people make the slightest comments that could be perceived as negative of any group numbering more than 10 people that will be used against them.
RS: Yes, I agree. Let’s move the conversation a little bit to the historical aspects of democracy. Just to set up this aspect of the discussion, there is an important distinction to be made between liberalism and democracy. If you define democracy as the will of the people and in some ways the will of the people could be to round up this minority group and ship them off or throw them off into the ocean or something. So, people would consider that shocking and completely illiberal and unacceptable, but that would be the will of the people if 51% of the vote decided it was so. So, there is a strong antagonism between democracy and liberalism.
Let’s think about this a little bit historically. I want to bring up the work of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who’s an economist and political thinker. If you talk to your average Joe Bag-of-Donuts and you tell him about a king or an aristocratic ruler and you ask, “Do you think you are more free today?” I think the answer would most likely be, “Yes.” And probably an enthusiastic, “Yes!” But, as Hoppe points out, if you want to judge liberty by any real criterion then in the age of democracy liberty has declined precipitously.
If you look at rulers of the past: Genghis Khan — he conquered people with the sword — he would never conceive of taxing their income at the rates incomes are taxed in Europe and America. Louis XIV was not a totalitarian by any stretch of the imagination. If you look just objectively speaking, there was more liberty in his society than there is now in democracy.
And so I think why someone thinks they’re free now is they think that we are the government, so to speak.
What Hans-Hermann Hoppe points out is that earlier people would look at the state and essentially think that, “Oh, the state is doing that. The aristocrats are doing that. And that’s not me. They have their own interests, so I better keep them in check.” And I’m sure the state looked upon its subjects in the same light. There was maybe a good tension that was productive and kept liberty alive but then also allowed the aristocrats to perform their real function, which is the protection of the realm and the use of violence.
But we now have this illusion in the modern world that we are the government. So, in a sense, “We are going to go to war in Iraq. What tax rate should we have? What kind of immigration policy should we have?” This idea that we are the government.
So, this seems to be an historical consciousness of the highest order. It’s a big thing that people in the Western world, and really around the world, think. So, Jonathan, where do you think this is going, this “we are the government”? Where did it come from? Where is it going? And do you think there are any prospects that we might be able to move past this notion of representation or really identity between the people and the state?
JB: I think the only way you could get out of this conundrum is direct democracy, which Alain de Benoist on behalf of GRECE and the New Right has often advocated. This is closer to the type of democracy that exists in cantonal Switzerland, for instance.
Switzerland is quite an interesting example because Switzerland has avoided for most of the 20th century much of the things that have come in other democracies. They avoided participation in both great European wars, World War I and World War II, of course. The Swiss are highly privately armed and can put 2 million people in the battlefield with heavy military and armed training, and yet they haven’t fought a war and haven’t needed to for 500 years.
They’re also extraordinarily socially conservative. Women didn’t get the vote until very late in Switzerland. This is seen as regressive and unduly conservative by most champions of liberalism and democracy.
But there is something to be said for direct democracies. Certainly, the elitist liberalism that you have in the West now on all sorts of things, such as multiculturalism and who you go to war with and certain federal things such as the European Union in the Western European context, are decided for by tiny elites and the population is largely excluded and popular wishes in these matters are regarded as ignorant and ill-informed and are often against them are swept to one side.
Now, that doesn’t say too much for democracy, yet at the same time you have an ultra-democratic spirit that believes that everything needs to be put out to tender, put out to poll, and assessed by the popular will.
One of the issues where liberalism and democracy are most fraught and at variance with one another is the issue of crime, particularly crime and punishment. This shows up a great difference between the United States and Western Europe. In Western Europe, liberal elites have contrived, basically by coming to dominate the thinking of these center-Right and center-Left parties in their respective parliaments, not to all mass instinct in relation to the issues of law and order to gain a hand. This is why punishments and so on for all sorts of infractions from the most serious to the least serious in Western Europe are considered by the populace to be absurdly soft and not stringent enough at all.
RS: Well, I’m sure it’s something like that. We have the largest prison population in the world.
JB: The death penalty in Western Europe is regarded as a sort of harbinger of political lunacy. Only those who are totally outside the system dare advocate the death penalty even though quite a few Tory MPs privately support it.
RS: Right.
So, there are enormous areas where the popular will is frustrated by the democratic mandate, and the only way that could be broken is if people decided on a six months basis on five key questions, which would be put out to referendum and put out to debate. The political class would say that this would end up in chaos because the masses don’t know what they want and could be easily swayed by demagogues and by media interests, which of course is a possibility, but we’d have a controlled management of mass instinct through liberal democracy and representative politics where often people get a version of what they don’t want and all they do is vote to prevent something worse.
RS: Yeah. Do you think also that the kind of world that de Benoist is imagining really requires a racially homogenous, and really culturally homogenous if not religiously homogenous, population? I agree that Switzerland is a civilized place. I’ve actually spent some time there a little while ago. I enjoyed it. They obviously have a stable and healthy culture.
At the same time, as an American, when I hear someone talking about direct democracy I can just imagine people voting on their television sets and voting the country free ice cream or voting that we should take away all the money of every person who earns more than a million dollars and give it to the people or something. You know, I just almost find myself siding with the bureaucrats on that issue. I think that a Swiss population could come up with some more sound decisions than America as it’s currently constitute could.
But maybe no population could. I’m not a fan of William F. Buckley, but he had a very nice line that is worth repeating and he said that he wanted America to be like Switzerland and he said that he was talking to a Swiss man and he asked him who the leader of his country was and the man said, “Oh yes, he’s a good man, but at the moment I can’t remember his name.” And Buckley, in one of his good moments, said, “That is a good political system where the population is depoliticized” in a sense. They’re not getting riled up by demagogues. They’re not watching Fox News every day. They’re living their lives, maybe having a family, maybe running a business or something. I don’t know. I think there’s something quite healthy sounding about an order like that.
Well, Jonathan, as we bring it to a close let me just ask you to look in a crystal ball for a little bit. What do you think is the future of democracy? I mentioned this when we first began this discussion that we had some time of stability, one could say, where the Cold War was ending, you had great big credit booms and economic booms in the Western world, we had notions of the end of history and so on and so forth, but we seem to be entering a new world now. I think things like the Arab Spring, maybe even Occupy Wall Street or the Occupy movement, are harbingers of this, that we seem to be entering a world where there’s going to be a lot more anger, there’s going to be a lot more people on the streets even in the wealthier countries. There’s just going to be a different kind of politics. We seem to be entering a new world.
So, maybe you could talk a little about what you see going forward and how democracy will fit in all this.
I think that’s already accelerating. I think democracy will invert itself and become a purely minority game whereby in the future only important and triggered minorities actually vote. You may get a situation where 60% vote, but within that the election is decided by small, little groups that cross over party and other boundaries. So, the number of people who change their minds between elections and the number of voters who are targeted by one side or the other make the decisive switch.
I could well see a situation where democracy in the 21st and 22nd centuries approximates to democracy in the 19th century whereby you had a restricted franchise, and the majority didn’t vote because they weren’t able to. In Britain, all women couldn’t vote, and in 1867 key parts of the professional and upper middle class got the vote, but nobody else did apart for those above them in the hierarchy. So, a very small number of people decided the elections, but they were genuine elections.
I think what you’re going to have in the future is a very small number will decide them and yet everyone can still vote. It’s just the majority chooses not to.
RS: Out of apathy?
JB: Out of apathy, out of reverse anger, out of not understanding the difference between the candidates as the differences become more and more nuanced and less and less observable.
RS: Yeah.
JB: Only the injection of religion into politics, as it appears from a Western European distance, gives some sort of charge, partly to react against by some people, over the water in the United States.
But I personally predict that democracy and the liberal humanism that floats on it at the present time are going to be in trouble, but it’s going to be different types of trouble in different settings. In some places, it will be militant minorities going into the streets and courting trouble of all sorts. In other situations, it will be the apathy of the overwhelming majority.
I think in the United States the inability that there seems to be to cut the deficit in any effective way and the logjam that appears from a distance to exist in congress now that you have a president of one party and assemblies of the other is all to do with the delegitimatization of both. I think Obama doesn’t have legitimacy, but apart from canalized anger in his midterm neither really do the Republicans who’ve come in to force him.
RS: Well, before we go, do you think that when this liberal age, or if this liberal age, really implodes on itself, if all those trillions in debt come home to roost that there could be maybe an opening for the kind of aristocratic politics that you and I would want to see? Maybe even one could gain power, certainly by force of arms, of course, but also one could gain power by charisma alone. When this whole order is delegitimized that people might begin to look towards someone who’s a kind of visionary.
JB: Yes, I think that could only occur if what exists now was totally discredited in the minds of the people who are alive now or in the future under such systems. I think that if such a discrediting did occur then all bets are off and although aristocracy in the sense of the ancient world or even 18th-century Europe prior to the bourgeois revolutions at the end of that century will never come back in the same form.
The notion of aristocratic rule could return maybe with a restricted franchise, maybe with an elect caste that’s seen to be the sort of philosopher-kings of a society, maybe with quasi-military figures who have to be civilian in order to rule but come from a military background, particularly if there’s a lot more social chaos around and that’s felt to be necessary.
But with 24-hour media, if the halters that liberalism provides that prevent charisma as an end in itself and prevents phenomena like a more aristocratic version of the Kennedys from emerging periodically and coming about, if those tendencies were annulled, arrested, or staid then you would see something else. I think that at the present time there are too many inhibitions that prevent the emergence of that type of politicking. People would always cluck as soon as it began to emerge that so-and-so is a dangerously authoritarian or sleek candidate, that so-and-so is a dangerously charismatic candidate and we know where that ends up, that so-and-so has undemocratic credentials or a whiff of elitism about them. Elitism, of course, being one of the most wounding politically incorrect charges. It’s not used very much because hardly any politician dares to make any elitist statements.
But as soon as the thing begins to tumble you will see elitist politics reemerge. It’s difficult at this stage of the game to see the forms that would take, but you’d know it as soon as you saw it. It’s only when the masses are prepared to embrace it again, because they would have to. We live in mass societies now. Even if the masses were prepared to have less of a say they would have to endorse that, paradoxically enough.
RS: Well, we can all hold out hope. Jonathan, thank you for being back on the program. This was a wonderful discussion and I look forward to talking with you again next week.
JB: Thanks very much! It’s been a pleasure to be here.