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Jan. 10, 2018 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
57:51
Bowden! - 6 - Democracy

Richard and Jonathan discuss democracy: It’s the world’s most beloved form of government and yet everywhere is in crisis. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Welcome to Vanguard, a podcast of radical traditionalism.
The Vanguard Here's your host, 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 here in late January.
Not too bad, not too bad.
It's not particularly sunny, but it's a little overcast, but otherwise kind of usual, really, for this time of year.
Very good.
Today we're going to talk about democracy.
Democracy might be a kind of magic word in the English language.
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, that is assumed, that 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 it's designed by founders, they have...
Approval rates in the teens or maybe as high as 20. I've seen some single digits.
They are basically not popular at all.
At least the last U.S. 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 of 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 reactions, very strong public reactions against rightfully elected leaders.
Things like the Occupy Wall Street movement and Tea Party certainly show that there is 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.
Well, okay, I've now set that up.
But let's, Jonathan, let's...
Let's take a bite out of this topic by looking at something that I think all of our listeners can relate to, and that is the election here in the United States.
It's hard not to look at this spectacle, which will cost billions of dollars and billions and billions more, in a sense, opportunity costs.
And it's hard not to look at these candidates and not come to the conclusion that they're some of the most depressing, uninspiring, if not loathsome individuals that this country is able to produce.
And yet, with of course the exception of Ron Paul, who's a kind of avuncular figure whom I respect, when I look at all the rest of the politicians, I don't have any desire to be governed by any of them.
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.
Yes, I think democracy has not had its day, but 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.
And the difficulty is if you exclude 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 of the core of citizenship, however defined.
One theory I 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 seen as widely regressive.
Yet you might add votes to certain people, so certain people who you favour.
Certains 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.
For 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 it's...
Modern Western parties have become dreary and depressing in that they tend to the centre, which immediately puts a premium on philosophy of any sort.
Anyone who's at all radical is weaned out of the process and excluded pretty early on.
In the internal 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 a moderate-statist 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 there was about him when he was a congressional leader.
A while back, but that seemed to fizzle out and tail 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.
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 was thinking he is a megalomaniac.
I think all of these politicians are inherently narcissistic and kind of maybe even sociopathic.
But he seems to be a great megalomaniac without being interesting.
He's not exactly Captain Ahab or, you know, Macbeth or something like that.
He's a megalomaniac, but when you learn more about him, you wish you knew less.
Why did he emerge as the Republican congressional leader so many years ago?
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 high of himself.
And I think you could maybe just chalk it up to ambition alone.
I think he was one of those types that always wanted to be in charge.
I noted one popular website in the United States.
He released a memo that he wrote while he was an assistant professor, some very small professor at a small college in the South.
And he wrote a memo to the dean and it was like...
I forgot the name of the college.
It was Backwoods College of Georgia.
He's 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, there's 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 mean, 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 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 who will never be radical, who will try to please all, but also just the day-to-day of campaigning, the fact of just making promises,
telling everyone that you, in a sense, love them, and that they're the greatest people on earth, and so on and so forth, that the demands of that, the rigor of that, Yes, I think democracy does favour a particular type of psychology.
It does favour candidates of a certain type that will emerge over time.
It does favour narcissistic and self-regarding individuals.
It favors social, psychopathic behaviour 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, where the Kennedys were considered to be, given the rapture that dictatorial figures are given within a predatory democracy, there was this near cult of the Kennedys.
There was a sort of a quasi-erotic worship of the Kennedys as items, as movie stars, as moguls of politics.
Camelot was considered to be a sort of phenomenon in its own right.
I think it's the failure of Camelot and related projects.
The scandal that brought Daniel Nixon down Watergate.
The tarnishing of these quasi-authoritarian democratic figures.
Kennedy very much on a level with Lloyd George in the British experience.
Who was only just about a democratic politician and who made an appeal to the mass electorate which was slightly undemocratic in certain respects.
Churchill had an on-and-off reputation of a similar sort.
It's noticeable that would either of those figures, and would Kennedy have survived in the present media bubble, given Kennedy's extraordinary private sex life?
Right.
Had a scintilla of that been known about in the early 1960s, that he was on these various drugs for the ailments that he had, wasn't it, that made him sort of suffer from satiriasis, as it appeared.
Just think what the 24-hour media and satellite news would make of that.
Clinton's presidency was turned into a misery and an utter nightmare for infractions which were on the Kennedy's 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 before which Britain could 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 even 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 a chance to decide between them and other parties.
That's true.
I don't think a normal person would want to run for office.
I mean, for instance, I have I've.
I've never been arrested or anything like that.
But I'm sure that when I think back, even over my relatively uneventful life, you could find something and inflate it to make me look like a maniac or some kind of reprobate.
And 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.
Also, let me ask an even more jaundiced question.
In some ways, do you think the people have gotten worse?
And what I mean, more degraded, what I mean by that is that if you look back at some 20th century democratic leaders, Churchill, to a degree, obviously had an aristocratic background, and he was clearly a great intellect.
I think he was a great failure as both a military leader and a statesman.
But we can save that for another podcast.
You know, Charles de Gaulle and others like the Kennedy phenomenon, others like that.
These were hardly perfect people.
I'm sure we have a wide variety of opinions on them.
But they were, in a sense, better than the average man.
The average man could look up at someone like de Gaulle and think that he's a great man, that he's someone worth admiring, he's a military leader, and so on and so forth.
I think now, the people almost want some kind of person who's like them, in a sense.
I remember there was this woman named Christine O'Donnell.
I don't know if news of her crossed the Atlantic, but she seemed to be a well-intentioned woman, and she was a little bit of a kind of 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 rocking out to Jesus campaign and anti-masturbation campaign, of all things.
But I think what bothered me about her was that 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.
And I remember she had these ads where she would say, I'm you.
It seemed to be democracy, you know, in its essence.
But do you think we've, Jonathan, that we've seen kind of a transition from people wanting to look up to their leaders and now the public, you know, they almost want to elect themselves or something.
It's, you know, they want someone who's normal.
It's not going to offend them.
I'll just throw in here as well, 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 there was one magazine just picked up that they put it through an analysis, and it was actually at an eighth 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, you know, boobs like themselves ruling the country?
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 taught to be suspicious of it.
In politicians of the past, there was room for more character.
There was room for more...
Yeah.
With Churchill there'd be moments of contempt, aristocratic contempt for the masses.
And with Lloyd George there'd be moments of populist radicalism which were genuine rather than feigned.
Although he was a deeply manipulative politician in his way and a precursor for many things later in the century.
They 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.
Interesting example of somebody who supported the pacifist cause 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 great First World War leader and the great populist manipulator of 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 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 Corrinus, the Shakespearean play.
Corrinus is about a 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.
And 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.
And even though some of the politicians like David Cameron in 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 understood, to never be sardonic or witty, because if 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, who 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.
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, including Ron Paul as well.
He's an insider.
He may not be an insider's insider, but the idea that George W. Bush could run against Washington is completely absurd when these are all pork-barrel politicians who are up to their neck in favouritism and doing deals for people in their senatorial and congressional areas.
Without question, let's put a little pressure on that.
Obviously, as you're saying, in terms of doing deals, I mean, we have a military-industrial complex that one can measure this in the trillions.
I mean, this is huge amounts of money.
And 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 in a ruling class.
And I think in terms of a lot of the financial elite, it's literally invisible.
I think the average Joe on the street might see the politicians as kind of the rulers, and he can strike out at one if he or she does some bad things.
But obviously there's a...
Bigger, more invisible ruling class that has an immense amount of power.
And I'm, of course, referring to the financial industry, the investment banking industry, and things like that.
So 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.
So and so forth.
But then it's either invisible or it pretends it's not what it is.
You know, you could expect that if you're talking about, you know, say, Wilhelm I or something, you know, he would wear martial uniforms.
He'd have a, you know, have a certain flamboyance to his outward demeanor.
He would say, I am aristocrat.
I am a ruler.
You know, I am the state.
In a way.
But now we have this ruling class that pretends it's not a ruling class.
Yes, it's almost a Marxist idea, actually.
The class that does not rule.
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.
We'll be much more naked and much more transparent if they didn't have to consult the people every four or five years.
In what is a pretty minimal democracy, really, all you get is a couple of goes, twice a decade, occasionally a little bit more, where you put a cross or a tick on a ballot in a plebiscitary way.
For parties that represent a range or a spectrum of allowed and permitted opinion and for prominent personalities within those parties.
And 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 the party that 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 mismatched party with some feminist input as well.
And 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.
Yeah.
Because I don't think they're going to get elected otherwise.
It struck me from a distance that Hillary Clinton run a harsher campaign against Obama than the Republican official ticket did when it came to the presidential elections.
I may be wrong there because I'm doing it from a great distance.
But that's what has 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 EU 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.
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 Saylor has written about it more recently, as well as Peter Premalow.
And it's this basic idea that the GOP is relying on white nationalism in a way.
I mean, I, you know, I'm being a little bit, um, if she said, if she cheeky and saying that, but it's kind of like, uh, you know, people just get a sense that the GOP, it's not threatening to them.
It represents their values, so to speak.
Uh, you have, you, you, you have white guys up there who aren't really, uh, offensive.
You kind of trust them more.
And so the, the GOP gains power by, I mean, I don't think...
None of those people, even the Christian right, or even especially the Christian right, would claim that this is an Anglo-Saxon country, 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, you have the minority strategy.
But with the Democrats, it's totally overt.
We are the party of color.
We can obviously help our election prospects quite directly by simply allowing in more immigration and doing some amnesties here and there.
Let me ask you, Jonathan, a little bit of a kind of philosophical question.
A lot of conservatives of the past, and I'm thinking conservatives, People like Burke, but certainly many others, and this would probably include actually most of the founding fathers of the United States, they had a fear of democracy.
They thought it could get out of control.
They thought the people's...
The people were too uncouth and too unsophisticated to make serious decisions.
And essentially there's a tradition of a conservative critique of 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.
But then, 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.
I mean, 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's some things about it that are quite anti-democratic.
The Floms Belong was a legitimate party that achieved some electoral victories quite well.
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 our age, the danger is too much democracy?
Or do you think the danger is that there's no democracy at all?
Well, I think it's because 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.
It's 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 maximal pressure on them in that way?
Also, there are sort of religious and civic minorities, Muslims and so on, who perceive not to wish to be part of a liberal democracy, or if they do put up parties of a sectional and sectarian type, are seen to be threatening in relation to liberal democracy.
Their numbers are not enough.
To achieve critical mass.
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 a democratic tenet.
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 of the Ron Paul type who believe in the maximum sort of 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's 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.
And 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.
It 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.
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 seem to be subliminally politically incorrect and group-oriented, they will try and do so.
So the debate is highly circumscribed, and that's because of the size of society that you're living in.
All political correctness is, in a root way, is a way of giving in offense to the overwhelming majority of people, because people don't lose their group identities in a multiple-group society.
So if people are to make the slightest comment that could be perceived as negative of any group numbering more than 10 people...
Yes, I agree.
Let's move the conversation a little bit to the historical aspects of democracy.
There is an important, just to set up this aspect of the discussion, there is an important distinction to be made between liberalism and democracy.
And 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, 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, 51% of the people.
So there is a strong antagonism between democracy and liberalism.
Let's think about this a little bit historically.
And I want to bring up the work of Hans Hermann Hoppe, who's an economist and political thinker.
And he talked, 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're 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 the liberty by any real criterion, then in the age of democracy, liberty has declined precipitously.
And that is, if you look at rulers of the past, you know, Genghis Khan, who, you know, he conquered people with the sword.
He would never conceive of taxing their income at the rates that incomes are taxed in Europe.
Louis XIV was not a totalitarian by any stretch of imagination.
If you look at 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 that they think that we are the government, so to speak.
And what Hans 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.
And they have their own interests.
So I better keep them in check.
And I'm sure the state looked upon its subjects with the same light.
There was a kind of 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 multicultural or immigration policy should we have?
It's not the idea that we are the government.
So this seems to be a, how do I say, a historical consciousness of the highest order.
It's a big thing that people, not only in the Western world, but really around the world, think.
And 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?
I think the only way you could get out of this conundrum is direct democracy, which Alan de Benoit, on behalf of Gress and the New Rights, is often advocated.
This is closer to the type of democracy that exists in cantonal Switzerland, for example.
Switzerland's quite an interesting example because Switzerland has avoided, for most of the 20th century, many of the things which have come in 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 arms 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.
And this is seen as regressive and sort of unduly conservative by most champions of liberalism and democracy.
But there is something to be said for direct democracy.
Certainly, the elitist liberalism that you have in the West now works 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 a Western European context.
Are decided for by tiny elites, and the population is largely excluded, and popular wishes in these matters that are regarded as ignorant and uninformed, 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.
Direct democracy, where people decide on issues, not on candidates, and don't vote for parties but vote for issues, like should we be inside or outside the European Union in the British context, where you will probably have a majority to leave the European Union, totally contrary to the political instincts of the British ruling class, which contains a lot of Scepticism about the Union, but always wishes to remain within it.
One of the issues where democracy and liberalism are most fraught and at their end 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 the centre-right and centre-left parties in their respective parliaments, not to allow mass instinct in relation to the issue Mm-hmm.
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.
Whereas in America, Well, I think, what is it, about 37 states have the death penalty?
Well, I'm sure it's something like that.
We have the largest prison population in the world.
The death penalty in Western Europe is regarded as the sort of harbinger of political leniency.
Only those who are totally outside the system dare advocate the death penalty.
Quite a few Tory MPs privately support it.
The last time there was a debate in the House of Commons on that was a long time ago.
There was even an attempt to frustrate the having of such debates because it could canalise dangerous psychological energies on behalf of the masses.
The masses support the death penalty 67% through 90% depending on the clientele of the poll and how you ask the question.
But there is absolutely no question That the masses would be allowed to decide on issues like that, where they would give regressive and reactionary answers according to the political establishment.
And those views would be considered to be regressive and reactionary by conservative politicians in Western Europe, never mind liberal or leftist politicians.
So there are enormous areas where the popular will is frustrated by the democratic mandate, and the only way that could be broken.
If people decided on a half-yearly basis, a six-month basis, on five key questions, which would put out a referendum and put out a debate, the political class would say that this would end up in chaos because the masses don't know what they want.
It would be easily swayed by demagogues and by media interests, which, of course, is a possibility.
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.
Do you think also that the kind of world that de Benoit is imagining...
Really requires a racially homogenous and really culturally homogenous, if not religiously homogenous, population.
I think I agree that Switzerland is a civilized place.
I've actually spent some time there.
It was a little bit a while ago, but 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.
Some of these, I almost saw my I think a Swiss population could come up with some sound decisions, but the America as it's currently constituted could.
But maybe no population could.
I mean, I kind of, you know, I'm not a fan of William F. Buckley, but I think he did say, he had a very nice line that 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.
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?
And, you know, I mentioned this when we first began this discussion, that we seem to be...
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.
And I think things like the Arab Spring, maybe even Occupy Wall Street or the Occupy movement.
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 bit about what you see going forward and how democracy will fit in all this.
I think it's all determined by economic stability.
If the fact that Britain, for example, is a trillion pounds, a billion, billion pounds in debt this week, and although there are attempts, of course, to manufacture reduction in the budget deficits,
if this ever triggered a major economic catastrophe such as this hit, A small European nation like Greece, Iceland or the Republic of Ireland, if the storms hit a major European country like Spain, Italy, France or Britain, Germany would be much less likely on present scenarios.
Then I think all bets are off.
I think you would see a fracturing in democracy.
You would see a lot more generalized protest.
You'd see a lot more loutishness.
You'd see a lot more associated apathy.
The two would go together.
You would see vanguardism by militant minorities.
And you would see greater disengagement on behalf of large, 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, 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 up on the middle of the cast got the vote, but nobody else did apart from 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 that a very small number of people will decide them, and yet everyone can still vote.
It's just an election.
Out of apathy?
Out of reverse anger.
Out of not understanding the difference between the candidates, the differences become more and more nuanced and less and less observable.
I do think the end of ideological politics in the West, as it is perceived by many who belabor the fact that they can't tell the difference between the parties anymore, the difference between the British parties is minimal.
The difference between the Canadian parties is minimal.
The American parties, I think, probably were the mainstream candidates of a Romney sort.
The difference between him and a centrist Democrat is, I would imagine, meaningless, really.
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 causing trouble of all sorts.
In other situations, it will be the apathy of the overwhelming majority.
There comes a point when in local elections and so on, if so many people subtract from the process and you have two-thirds not voting in pre-state elections in Western Europe, there comes a moment when those elections lose all validity and when the system itself becomes unable to operate.
This is true now at the level of the European Union.
One of the reasons the European Union can't function isn't because they can't decide to go forward to a European state, a federal Europe, a U.S.E., like the United States of America, United States of Europe, or to backtrack to the nation state.
They are caught in the middle of those two polarities.
That is true.
But it's because the European populations do not give the political class the endorsement required to make decisive decisions.
That's why the debt-based crises in individual nation states can't be ameliorated effectively.
The popular will is important, and mainstream politicians don't have it, and therefore can't arrive at sort of long-lasting solutions.
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, Well,
I think Obama doesn't have a decision to say that apart from canalized anger in his midterm, neither really do the Republicans who've come in to thwart him.
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, so on and so forth, 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.
Certainly by force of arms, of course, but also one could gain power by charisma alone.
When this whole order is delegitimized, people might begin to look towards someone who's a kind of visionary.
Yes, I think that could only occur if what exists now is totally discredited in the minds of the people who are alive now.
In the future, under such systems.
I think 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 spiritual 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 cast that seem to be the sort of philosopher kings of the society, maybe with quasi-military figures who have to be civilian in order to rule, but who 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 prevents charisma as an end in itself and prevents a phenomenon like the sort of more aristocratic version of the Kennedys from emerging periodically, from coming about, if those tendencies were annulled, arrested or stayed, 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 cut, 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.
You 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 re-emerge.
It's difficult at this stage of the game to see the forms that that would take.
But it's not difficult to...
You 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.
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.
Thanks very much.
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