An Unraveling Democracy

Show me a democracy in which people deride and denounce and devalue public conversations, I’ll show you a democracy that’s unraveling and on its way to authoritarian rule.

John Dewey, cited in No Safe Spaces, edited by Dennis Prager and Mark Joseph, pg.224

Democracy?

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Winston Churchill, cited in The Smart Words and Wicked Wit of Winston Churchill, edited by Max Morris, pg.22

For a Democracy to Function -- Ideas

For a democracy to function, there must be a free exchange of ideas. Leftists do not believe in this. For the leftist, the consent of the governed and the opinions of the voters must be manufactured through the use of propaganda and the censoring and punishment of wrong-think. The propaganda and censorship is everywhere. It begins in preschool and continues throughout one’s education. Leftist­-approved correct-think is provided in every format—television, movies, books, magazines, video games, and even in standardized test questions. Expressing wrong-think is dangerous, physically and financially.

The result is massive censorship even though the US is a “free” society where speech is “protected.” However, in the surveillance systems being imposed worldwide, only leftist speech is protected; rightist speech is ruthlessly suppressed.” I am sorry, Sir. Your card has been declined because of your political views. I am afraid we’ll be closing your bank account too. Consequently, the dissident right must meme, troll, write books “in a mood of revelry and laughter,” and speak in code. This is something Straussians understand. This fact gets to another reason that leftists hate democracy; censorship of wrong-think cannot be enforced in the privacy of the voting booth.

B.A. Pervert, The Dissident Right Embraces Realism, Not Nihilism

For a Democracy to Function -- Fair Play

For a democracy to function, there must be fair play. Leftists do not play fair; as noted, they cheat. Everywhere you look, in leftist states and enclaves, the voting rules are skewed toward cheating. Laws are passed allowing paper and mail-in ballots that are easily manipulated, voting machines that are easily hacked, ballot harvesting on election day and night and over-night, the use of erasable pencils in voting booths, voting without the need for voter ID, and more. Aside from rules which destroy the integrity of the ballot, leftists cheat outright: “voters” are bused from one polling place to another, ghost polling places are set up, ballots are cast by the dead and by illegals, loyalists cast the correct votes for an entire nursing home, and so on. Immigration, too, is a method of stuffing the ballot box.

If cheating does not work, the leftists will keep changing the rules until the vote is forever a leftist vote. The “jungle primary” is a good example of how the voting rules can create a one-party state. See California and Louisiana. Vote splitting is another method of not playing fair. The creation and support of alternative parties to split the rightist vote is common in Europe. In the US, evidence supports the conclusion that the Libertarian party was formed by leftists to siphon off votes from the Republican Party to enhance the chances of a leftist victories. And vote splitting works: see for example the 2018 midterm elections. Pretend Republican candidates are also run who immediately switch parties upon being elected. Expanding the franchise is another tactic, be it giving the vote to felons or “Irish voters” who live someplace other than Ireland. There is no fair play among the leftists; voting is just a mechanism for the exercise and accrual of raw power.

B.A. Pervert, The Dissident Right Embraces Realism, Not Nihilism

Democracy Will Degenerate to Anarchy

Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.

John Adams (1763)

Identity Group Politics is From Leftists, and is About Control

The starting position of liberalism—and at the same time a final perspective—is a hypothetical situation in which relatively independent units cooperate through a system of contracts. The democratization turned liberalism into a doctrine in which the primary agents were no longer individuals, but groups and the institutions of the democratic state. Instead of individuals striving for the enrichment of social capital with new ideas and aspirations, there emerged people voicing demands called rights and acting within the scope of organized groups. These groups subsequently petitioned state institutions and exerted pressure on them to change legislation and political practices; over time, they began to affect judicial decisions by the courts, demanding legal acceptance of their position and acquired privileges. In the final outcome the state in liberal democracy ceased to be an institution pursuing the common good, but became a hostage of groups that treated it solely as an instrument of change securing their interests.

The state, more and more involved in the process of supporting group aspirations, largely lost its general republican character and turned into a conglomerate of the social, economic, cultural, and other policy programs enacted and imposed through democratic procedures. This, in turn, meant that the state had to take over more and more specific responsibilities, far beyond the normal operations of the state apparatus. As the new expectations of the groups had more and more to do with their status and social recognition, the traditional means of the state policy were no longer sufficient. It became necessary to intervene deeply into the social substance—where the roots of status and recognition resided—either through direct political action or indirectly by changing the laws, making appropriate judicial decisions, and adjusting morality and social mores drastically to guarantee equality.  The state representatives, armed with the rhetoric of anti discrimination, felt if was their duty to regulate matters that for too long had remained unregulated, which often means giving privileges to certain groups and taking them away from others.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.61-62

Liberal Democracy Is Like Communism

[H]e is able to demonstrate that liberal democracy, as it has developed in recent decades, shares a number of alarming features with communism. Both are utopian and look forward to “an end of history” where their systems will prevail as a permanent status quo. Both are historicist and insist that history is inevitably moving in their directions. Both therefore require that all social institutions—family, churches, private associations—must conform to liberal-democratic rules in their internal functioning. Because that is not so at present, both are devoted to social engineering to bring about this transformation. And because such engineering is naturally resisted, albeit slowly and in a confused way, both are engaged in a never-ending struggle against enemies of society (superstition, tradition, the past, intolerance, racism, xenophobia, bigotry, etc., etc). In short, like Marxism before it, liberal democracy is becoming an all-encompassing ideology that, behind a veil of tolerance, brooks little or no disagreement.

John O’Sullivan, Forward to Ryszard Legutko’s book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. 

Democracy Keeps People in Perpetual Childhood

I think then that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world. I am trying myself to choose an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it, but in vain . . .  I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. . . . Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate.  That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.

Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America