RadixJournal - Bowden! - 6 - Democracy

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Vanguard, a podcast of radical traditionalism.

00:00:24.660 Here's your host, Richard Spencer.

00:00:27.380 Hello, everyone. Today, it's a great pleasure to welcome back Jonathan Bowden.

00:00:33.880 So, Jonathan, how is everything over in England? I hope it's not too dreary here in late January.

00:00:41.640 Not too bad, not too bad. It's not particularly sunny, but it's a little overcast, but otherwise,

00:00:47.200 kind of usual, really, for this time of year.

00:00:49.580 Very good. Today, we're going to talk about democracy.

00:00:54.440 Democracy might be a kind of magic word in the English language and all languages in the Western world,

00:01:04.520 if not the world altogether, for that matter.

00:01:07.600 It seems that everyone supports democracy.

00:01:10.740 If you say something is democratic, that is assumed, that is inherently good, and so on and so forth.

00:01:17.320 And yet, at the same time, while democracy seems to be the most beloved form of government,

00:01:26.540 the world is almost universally unhappy with its leaders.

00:01:32.340 If you look at the United States, Congress, which is the most democratic institution,

00:01:37.860 at least it's designed by the founders, they have approval rates in the teens or maybe as high as 20.

00:01:47.520 I've seen some single digits.

00:01:49.240 They are basically not popular at all.

00:01:51.520 Most U.S., at least the last U.S. president and Obama himself have become quite unpopular.

00:01:56.440 And if you look at the world, the rest of the world, it becomes even more interesting,

00:01:59.860 and perhaps the emotions are even more violent.

00:02:03.140 You can think of, in terms of the Arab Spring, of course, in some cases,

00:02:07.240 those were reactions against leaders that were not elected.

00:02:11.660 But even in Israel, you had reactions, very strong public reactions, against rightfully elected leaders.

00:02:19.640 Things like the Occupy Wall Street movement and Tea Party certainly show that there is a powerful discontent in the air.

00:02:31.320 It seems like all governments are unpopular.

00:02:34.040 So we have an interesting situation, world situation, of democracy seems to be the reigning ideology,

00:02:41.960 and yet all of these regimes are suffering from a legitimacy crisis.

00:02:47.100 Well, okay, I've now set that up.

00:02:49.960 But let's, Jonathan, let's take a bite out of this topic by looking at something that I think all of our listeners can relate to,

00:02:59.460 and that is the election here in the United States.

00:03:04.620 And, you know, I have to say, it's hard not to look at this spectacle,

00:03:10.620 which will cost billions of dollars and billions and billions and billions more in, in a sense, opportunity costs.

00:03:19.440 And it's hard not to look at these candidates and not come to the conclusion that they're some of the most depressing,

00:03:29.340 uninspiring, if not loathsome individuals that this country is able to produce.

00:03:35.800 And yet, with, of course, the exception of Ron Paul, who's a kind of avuncular figure whom I respect,

00:03:42.820 when I look at all the rest of the politicians, I don't have any desire to be governed by any of them.

00:03:49.660 So what are your thoughts on this, Jonathan?

00:03:52.660 We seem to be in a very strange state of affairs here at the beginning of the 21st century.

00:04:00.900 Yes, I think democracy has not had its day, but needs a bit of renewal from somewhere.

00:04:08.140 The difficulty is to find out where it could come from.

00:04:12.060 There are no marks at all for anyone who says they're undemocratic or anti-democratic.

00:04:17.380 I've always privately favoured a sort of enlightened aristocracy,

00:04:21.100 but that's not coming back, enlightened or otherwise.

00:04:24.020 And the difficulty is if you exclude people from any say at all,

00:04:29.200 and democracy is a very partial say, let's face it,

00:04:32.460 you're left with a sort of emptiness of the core of citizenship, however defined.

00:04:38.420 One theory I always had is that you would have graded voters,

00:04:43.920 whereby you would never take anyone's vote away.

00:04:45.960 They've got that now, and to take it from them in any sense would be seen as widely regressive.

00:04:51.060 Yet you might add votes to certain people.

00:04:54.700 So certain people who you favour, certain philosophical gurus or people of alleged eminence,

00:05:01.880 might be given a million votes instead of one.

00:05:06.000 And that might make things rather interesting in certain respects.

00:05:09.380 For the old problem, of course, the old chestnut then comes up.

00:05:12.640 Who decides who would be given such a differential calculus in terms of what votes they could command?

00:05:19.680 So you're back to the old conundrum.

00:05:22.220 I think it's modern Western parties have become dreary and depressing in that they tend to the centre,

00:05:30.220 which immediately puts a premium on philosophy of any sort.

00:05:34.120 Anyone who's at all radical is weaned out of the process and excluded pretty early on.

00:05:39.980 In the internal Republican contest, only Ron Paul seems to have an agenda,

00:05:45.640 which could be said to be at all philosophical or ideological.

00:05:49.860 Romney is an establishment and a moderate-statist Republican.

00:05:54.680 Gingrich is difficult to determine from this distance.

00:05:58.380 Sometimes he goes with the social conservatives and the Christians.

00:06:02.040 Sometimes he goes with the libertarians.

00:06:04.860 Sometimes he goes with the establishment of the party.

00:06:07.160 And he seems to be a sort of megalomaniac politician from this distance on the other side of the Atlantic.

00:06:15.660 I remember all the fuss there was about him when he was a congressional leader a while back.

00:06:20.980 But that seemed to fizzle out and tail off, again viewed from a long way away.

00:06:26.000 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

00:06:35.380 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.

00:06:44.560 I think the latter is the case.

00:06:46.580 I certainly don't understand it.

00:06:48.040 And if you look at some basic polls outside of the Republican electorate in South Carolina, Gingrich is essentially hated.

00:06:59.720 I also was thinking when he is a megalomaniac, I think all of these politicians are inherently narcissistic and kind of maybe even sociopathic.

00:07:08.560 But he seems to be a great megalomaniac without being interesting.

00:07:12.060 He's not exactly Captain Ahab or, you know, McBass or something like that.

00:07:21.040 He's a megalomaniac, but then when you learn more about him, you wish you knew less.

00:07:26.520 Why did he emerge as the Republican congressional leader so many years ago?

00:07:31.620 I don't know the full story.

00:07:33.920 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.

00:07:45.900 And I think you could maybe just chalk it up to ambition alone.

00:07:49.940 I think he was one of those types that always wanted to be in charge.

00:07:54.800 And I noted one of these, one popular website in the United States, they released a memo that he wrote while he was a assistant professor, you know, some very small professor at a small, you know, college in the South.

00:08:11.700 And he wrote a memo to the dean and it was like, you know, I forgot the name of the college.

00:08:16.900 It was like, you know, some, you know, Backwoods College of Georgia or something.

00:08:21.380 He's like, Backwoods College of Georgia, the next hundred years.

00:08:26.820 He's always been a very ambitious person.

00:08:29.460 But again, there's, you know, with other people of that sort, they seem to have, there's something interesting about them or you want to learn more about what drives them, but not so with Newt.

00:08:43.240 But what do you think this is about the kind of person that becomes a Democratic candidate? 0.83

00:08:51.040 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, you know, sociopaths and liars and used car salesmen or something. 0.70

00:09:00.440 I think it's worth to delve into that deeper.

00:09:04.220 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.

00:09:19.720 But also just the day-to-day of campaigning, the fact of just making promises, going, telling everyone that you, 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, will lead to only sociopaths succeeding in a democratic system as we know it.

00:09:44.460 So, what do you think about that, Jonathan?

00:09:48.600 Yes, I think democracy does favor a particular type of psychology.

00:09:53.800 It does favor candidates of a certain type that will emerge over time.

00:09:59.340 It does favor narcissistic and self-regarding individuals.

00:10:04.360 It favors social, psychopathic, for behavior forms.

00:10:09.220 It favors gratification exercises psychologically in terms of the candidate that render them closer to particular types of salesmen, auctioneers, actors and actresses.

00:10:20.860 And all of these have been accentuated by 24-hour media and the need to appeal to such a media on a regular basis.

00:10:29.960 I also think there's been a sort of downgrading of expectation.

00:10:33.520 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, or within a predatory democracy, there was this near cult of the Kennedys.

00:10:50.300 There was a sort of quasi-erotic worship of the Kennedys as items, as movie stars, as moguls of politics.

00:11:00.100 Camelot was considered to be a sort of phenomenon in its own right.

00:11:05.400 I think it's the failure of Camelot and related projects, the scandal that brought Daniel Nixon down Watergate,

00:11:13.420 the tarnishing of these quasi-authoritarian democratic figures, Kennedy very much on a level with Lloyd George in the British experience,

00:11:26.520 who was only just about a democratic politician, and who made an appeal to the mass electorate, which was slightly undemocratic in certain respects.

00:11:37.860 Churchill had an on-and-off reputation of a similar sort.

00:11:43.420 It's noticeable that would either of those figures, and would Kennedy have survived in the present media bubble,

00:11:50.340 given Kennedy's extraordinary private sex life, had a scintilla of that being known about in the early 1960s,

00:11:59.020 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.

00:12:08.360 Just think what the 24-hour media and satellite news would make of that.

00:12:14.340 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.

00:12:25.620 Similarly, Churchill's private penchant for depression and extreme drunkenness,

00:12:31.960 and Lloyd George's bigamy, where he had two families going at the same time,

00:12:38.220 one on the north of the Thames in London and one on the south of the Thames in London,

00:12:42.100 when he was prime minister and when he was wartime prime minister at the height of the Great War,

00:12:47.920 a war before which Britain could well have lost had it not been for his reorganisation of the Ministry of Supply militarily.

00:12:57.000 So, I think a lot of democratic politicians are the product of the contemporary media circus.

00:13:04.500 The fact that the flaws of would-be great men will always be exposed now,

00:13:10.480 but they won't be exposed by biographers 40 years after their deaths.

00:13:14.500 They'll be exposed before they even get into office,

00:13:17.780 and they'll be exposed in the early stages of being elected by their parties.

00:13:21.880 That's before even the electorate gets a chance to decide between them and other parties.

00:13:25.780 That's true. I don't think a normal person would want to run for office.

00:13:30.900 I mean, for instance, I've never been arrested or anything like that,

00:13:39.100 but I'm sure that when I think back, even over my relatively uneventful life,

00:13:44.540 you could find something and inflate it to make me look like a maniac or some kind of reprobate.

00:13:53.760 And I think in some ways, just a normal person who might have some healthy patriotic desires

00:14:00.320 doesn't want to put himself through that or his family through that.

00:14:05.420 Also, let me ask an even more jaundiced question.

00:14:09.780 In some ways, do you think the people have gotten worse?

00:14:13.440 And what I mean, and more degraded, what I mean by that is that if you look back at some 20th century democratic leaders,

00:14:23.520 Churchill, to a degree, obviously had an aristocratic background,

00:14:29.260 and he was clearly a great intellect.

00:14:33.300 I think he was a great failure as both a military leader and a statesman.

00:14:41.260 But we can save that for another podcast.

00:14:44.460 But Charles de Gaulle and others like the Kennedy phenomenon, others like that,

00:14:50.540 these were hardly perfect people.

00:14:52.200 I'm sure we have a wide variety of opinions on them.

00:14:54.280 But they were, in a sense, better than the average man.

00:14:58.360 The average man could look up at someone like de Gaulle and think that he's a great man,

00:15:04.400 that he's someone worth admiring, he's a military leader, and so on and so forth.

00:15:11.160 I think now, the people almost want some kind of person who's like them, in a sense.

00:15:18.180 I remember there was this woman named Christine O'Donnell.

00:15:21.520 I don't know if news of her crossed the Atlantic.

00:15:24.940 But she seemed to be a well-intentioned woman,

00:15:29.140 and she was a little bit of a kind of Puritan, kind of a Christian evangelical fanatic.

00:15:37.060 I think she had a Catholic background, but she was an evangelical Protestant.

00:15:40.320 She was involved in some kind of rocking-out-to-Jesus campaign and anti-masturbation campaign, of all things. 1.00

00:15:49.060 But I think what bothered me about her was that she was clearly quite stupid. 1.00

00:15:55.180 She probably had a room-temperature IQ that she had nothing more to say than the nice girl at the coffee shop has to say to you. 1.00

00:16:05.340 It just seems a little strange to elect the girl at the laundromat and make her a senator.

00:16:11.260 And I remember she had these ads where she would say, I'm you.

00:16:15.500 That was the end of the ad.

00:16:17.380 It seemed to be democracy in its essence.

00:16:21.260 But do you think, Jonathan, that we've seen kind of a transition from people wanting to look up to their leaders,

00:16:29.200 and now the public, they almost want to elect themselves or something.

00:16:33.800 They want someone who's normal.

00:16:36.060 It's not going to offend them.

00:16:37.480 I'll just throw in here as well, Obama had a State of the Union address last night,

00:16:43.800 and I had better things to do than watch it.

00:16:47.640 But I was just scanning some headlines today, and there was one magazine just picked up that they put it through an analysis,

00:16:54.540 and it was actually at an eighth-grade reading level, his State of the Union address.

00:16:59.780 So do you think things are becoming worse, that we're entering a kind of idiocracy, 0.97

00:17:05.140 where essentially the masses will have, you know, boobs like themselves ruling the country? 1.00

00:17:12.720 Yes, I think that's what's happened.

00:17:14.500 I think anything great has about it the nimbus of the sinister.

00:17:19.460 And people have been taught not to want that anymore, or taught to be suspicious of it.

00:17:27.180 In politicians of the past, there was room for more character.

00:17:32.460 There was room for more egotism that would show itself to the electorate.

00:17:36.960 With Churchill, there'd be moments of contempt, aristocratic contempt for the masses.

00:17:44.040 And with Lloyd George, there'd be moments of populist radicalism, which were genuine rather than feigned.

00:17:51.500 Although he was a deeply manipulative politician in his way,

00:17:55.340 and a precursor for many things later in the century,

00:17:58.940 that foreshadowed Roosevelt's New Deal and all sorts of things.

00:18:02.860 So George was, in Britain, very much a prototype, and a partial outsider as a politician as well.

00:18:09.920 Interesting example of somebody who supported the pacifist cause during a very popular war,

00:18:15.560 the Boer War, at the turn of the 20th century, when he was pro-Boer and anti-war,

00:18:20.820 and had to be guarded by the police because of threats to his life once at Birmingham Town Hall.

00:18:25.580 So it was quite a radical figure to come in from that fringe to be the great First World War leader

00:18:31.680 and the great populist manipulator of press and public opinion.

00:18:36.280 But there's no doubting whatsoever that these were gigantic figures in contemporary terms.

00:18:44.260 If you take politicians like Bill Clinton or John Major or Barack Obama or even Tony Blair,

00:18:53.700 they're cut from a much more minor cloth, and the public wants it that way.

00:18:58.020 Otherwise, there would be a yearning for greatness.

00:19:01.600 I saw over the weekend Ralph Fiennes' modern-day version of Corrinus, the Shakespearean play.

00:19:09.300 Corrinus is about a leader who despises the masses.

00:19:12.340 Corrinus, and despite being a military hero, is thrown out of Rome at the behest of the mob led by the tribunes

00:19:19.280 because he won't kowtow to the people, and he won't give them even what passed in ancient Rome

00:19:24.800 for what amounted to democratic sentiment.

00:19:29.020 And that's one of Shakespeare's less far-known plays from late in his career.

00:19:34.700 But that's something which almost couldn't happen now, because there are no aristocratic strands in politics left.

00:19:43.440 Politics is completely bourgeois and plugged into mass sentiment.

00:19:48.000 And even though some of the politicians like David Cameron in Britain come from an impeccably upper-class background,

00:19:54.500 they've learned to play the game, and the game is to give, to be totally unideological,

00:20:00.540 to be all things to all people, to give nothing away, to never say a remark that could be understood,

00:20:07.000 to never be sardonic or witty, because if that's dangerous, you exclude the majority from the debate,

00:20:12.820 which is perceived as truculent and threatening.

00:20:15.100 Never to be imprecisely precise, by which I mean somebody who gives loaded or slightly wolfish or dangerous answers to anything,

00:20:28.060 who must never appear to be dangerous at all.

00:20:31.320 Indeed, you have to campaign as an anti-politician, essentially,

00:20:35.300 somebody who doesn't really want political power and would never take a country to war,

00:20:39.740 which is all very ironic, because when these people get in, they hunger for political power as expressed and exercised,

00:20:47.420 and in the case of the United States, are highly prone to take the country to war.

00:20:52.080 So, it's, you almost run against what it is to be political,

00:20:57.740 and in the United States you have a very radical formulation of this,

00:21:01.300 whereby all of these candidates declare themselves to be anti-Washington outsiders.

00:21:05.940 Right.

00:21:06.380 Which, amongst many of them, is totally absurd, transparently so.

00:21:11.820 They've been insiders from the very beginning.

00:21:14.380 Yeah.

00:21:14.900 And possibly from the perspective of Western Europe,

00:21:19.260 a politician like Jimmy Carter, when he started out, may have been a genuine outsider.

00:21:24.800 And after the Republican White House mired in the Nixon scandals early in the 70s,

00:21:30.980 people wanted somebody who was an outsider.

00:21:34.420 But nearly every major American politician, I would probably guess, including Ron Paul as well, is an insider.

00:21:42.380 He may not be an insider's insider, but the idea that George W. Bush could run against Washington

00:21:49.740 is completely absurd when these are all pork-barrel politicians who are up to their neck in favoritism

00:21:56.560 and doing deals for people in their senatorial and congressional areas.

00:22:02.440 Without question, let's put a little pressure on that.

00:22:06.120 But 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.

00:22:15.820 I mean, this is huge amounts of money.

00:22:18.020 And in many ways, we do have a ruling class and an aristocracy.

00:22:22.320 However, it's one that dare not speak its name in a way.

00:22:28.300 It's one that justifies itself on not being an aristocracy or in a ruling class.

00:22:34.080 And I think in terms of a lot of the financial elite, it's literally invisible.

00:22:40.120 I think the average Joe on the street might see the politicians as kind of the rulers,

00:22:47.020 and he can strike out at one if he or she does some bad things.

00:22:52.620 But obviously, there's a bigger, more invisible ruling class that has an immense amount of power.

00:23:00.260 And I'm, of course, referring to the financial industry, the investment banking industry, and things like that.

00:23:05.180 So what would you say about this?

00:23:07.600 We have a kind of strange ruling class today.

00:23:12.080 It's one that is aristocratic in the sense that you have a lot of, you can actually define it by families and, you know, certain peoples, so on and so forth.

00:23:22.580 But then it's either invisible or it pretends it's not what it is.

00:23:27.940 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.

00:23:36.020 He'd have a, you know, he'd have a certain flamboyance to his outward demeanor.

00:23:40.840 He would say, I am aristocrat.

00:23:42.600 I am a ruler.

00:23:43.820 You know, I am the state in a way.

00:23:46.580 But now we have this ruling class that pretends it's not a ruling class.

00:23:54.500 Yes, it's almost a Marxist idea, actually, the class that does not rule.

00:23:59.800 Right.

00:24:00.400 The sort of, the ruling class that isn't one.

00:24:04.200 I think it's, 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.

00:24:13.420 And that's because everything has to be put to a prism of contesting itself before the people's assent.

00:24:21.240 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 four or five years.

00:24:33.080 In what is a pretty minimal sort of, a pretty minimal democracy, really, all you get is a couple of goes, twice a decade, occasionally a little bit more.

00:24:48.040 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.

00:25:00.980 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.

00:25:10.740 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.

00:25:26.100 Well, 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.

00:25:40.060 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.

00:25:55.880 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. 0.53

00:26:20.060 Yeah.

00:26:21.060 Because I don't think they're going to get elected otherwise.

00:26:24.060 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. 1.00

00:26:34.060 I may be wrong there, because I'm doing it from a great distance, but that's what has appeared to me.

00:26:40.060 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.

00:26:52.060 She was carrying a lot of baggage from the first Clinton White House, that's true.

00:26:56.060 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.

00:27:17.060 I think you're right.

00:27:19.060 What you're referring to is also what I call the majority strategy.

00:27:24.060 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 Primalow.

00:27:34.060 And it's this basic idea that the GOP is relying on white nationalism in a way.

00:27:42.060 I mean, I'm being a little bit cheeky in saying that, but it's kind of like people just get a sense that the GOP, it's not threatening to them.

00:27:55.060 It represents their values, so to speak.

00:27:58.060 You have white guys up there who aren't really offensive, you kind of trust them more.

00:28:04.060 And so the GOP gains power by white people rallying around it.

00:28:10.060 And yet, overtly, it's in many ways an anti-white party.

00:28:15.060 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.

00:28:31.060 They'll claim quite the opposite.

00:28:34.060 But then on the other side, you have essentially, as opposed to the majority strategy, you have the minority strategy.

00:28:40.060 But with the Democrats, it's totally overt.

00:28:43.060 We are the party of color.

00:28:45.060 And we can obviously help our election prospects quite directly by simply allowing in more immigration and doing some amnesties here and there.

00:28:56.060 Let me ask you, Jonathan, a little bit of a kind of philosophical question.

00:29:02.060 A lot of conservatives of the past, I'm thinking 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.

00:29:19.060 They thought it could get out of control.

00:29:21.060 They thought the people were too uncouth and too unsophisticated to make serious decisions.

00:29:29.060 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.

00:29:43.060 We can't allow populist, you know, sentiments and furious emotions to hold sway.

00:29:50.060 But then, so in some ways, you can ask, is democracy the problem?

00:29:55.060 Is it, is it this, you know, mass frenzy that's a real danger?

00:29:59.060 But you could turn that around and say that we have no democracy at all.

00:30:03.060 You know, I mean, every, 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.

00:30:11.060 You've got to go out and vote.

00:30:13.060 And yet nothing really changes.

00:30:15.060 You know, you might, you might tweak a, turn a knob and, and, and here and tweak something there.

00:30:21.060 But in terms of the, the general thrust of, of this country, at least nothing changes.

00:30:27.060 There's more debt, more multiculturalism, more, more, more regulations of your life, more white guilt, whatever you want to say. 0.72

00:30:35.060 It's, it just keeps getting worse.

00:30:37.060 So, and, and I would say in the European context, uh, there's some things about it that are, that are quite anti-democratic.

00:30:43.060 Uh, the Floms Belong was a legitimate, uh, you know, party that was, uh, achieved electrical, uh, some electoral, uh, electoral victories, uh, quite, uh, quite rightly.

00:30:56.060 And yet it was kicked out of the government because it was, you know, claimed to be anti-democratic, which means they held views that, uh, the, uh, the ruling order don't like.

00:31:07.060 Uh, so let, let me ask you, Jonathan, do you, do you think that our age that we saw the deer, the danger is too much democracy?

00:31:14.060 Or do you think the danger is that there's no democracy at all, that it's all an illusion?

00:31:21.060 Well, I think it's, it's because we basically have democracy with a system attached to it, and that system is liberalism.

00:31:29.060 Uh, perhaps the system could be called liberal democracy.

00:31:32.060 And you basically have to be a liberal to take part in the, the game, partly a very real game, partly a charade that takes place in the democratic tent.

00:31:43.060 Liberals themselves understand that their system, as it exists and can be described, is a toss-up between pure liberalism, theoretically, and democracy.

00:31:53.060 How much democracy you have can determine whether liberalism is endangered within the system itself.

00:32:00.060 Uh-huh.

00:32:01.060 Liberals always worry about what will happen if people start voting for illiberal candidates in a liberal democracy.

00:32:09.060 Uh-huh.

00:32:10.060 When do you choke that off? When do you say it's illegitimate? When do you ban the parties of such people?

00:32:15.060 Are you permitted to ban the parties of such people?

00:32:18.060 Uh-huh.

00:32:19.060 Or do you just demonize them through the media and put maximal pressure on them in that way?

00:32:24.060 Also, there are sort of religious and civic minorities, Muslims and so on.

00:32:28.060 They'll perceive not to wish to be part of a liberal democracy, or if they do put up parties of a sectional and sectarian type,

00:32:38.060 are seen to be threatening in relation to liberal democracy.

00:32:41.060 Their numbers are not enough to achieve critical mass.

00:32:44.060 But liberals opine and wring their hands about these issues all the time, the limits to freedom within democracy,

00:32:52.060 and the degree to which they have to chop and change between liberalism and a democratic tenet.

00:32:58.060 Some liberals will talk openly about dispensing the elements of democracy to preserve liberalism as a system.

00:33:05.060 You don't get that in the Anglo-Saxon world very much.

00:33:08.060 But in continental Europe, where things sometimes take a more theoretical cast of mind,

00:33:13.060 there are some people who will honestly talk in that way.

00:33:16.060 Others think that there can be no infraction upon democracy at all.

00:33:20.060 And you have radical libertarians of the Ron Paul type who believe in the maximum sort of participation

00:33:26.060 and the maximum freedom of speech.

00:33:29.060 Freedom of speech is highly curtailed in the Western democracies in order for multiculturalism to survive 0.99

00:33:37.060 and for multiculturalism not to be threatened in any way.

00:33:41.060 Indeed, there's probably more inhibitions in terms of mainstream freedom of speech

00:33:46.060 and there are more things that can't be discussed than ever before.

00:33:50.060 All of it taking place within an atmosphere where everyone is told that there is maximal debate.

00:33:56.060 Indeed, people have too much debate and there's nothing that cannot be said

00:34:01.060 and that censorship is the worst possible thing.

00:34:04.060 The grammar that liberalism polices democracy with is political correctness, which is a form of censorship.

00:34:11.060 There's no other way of looking at it if one is rational about it rather than emotive about it.

00:34:17.060 And you have a situation now where the slightest politically incorrect remark made by any candidate, left, right or sentry,

00:34:26.060 doesn't matter where they come from.

00:34:28.060 The litmus test which is applied to them is has their discourse been politically correct or not.

00:34:34.060 Every time Ron Paul is mentioned on this side of the Atlantic some obscure journalism that was associated with him

00:34:44.060 and that is regarded as quote unquote racist is mentioned almost in the same breath and in the same paragraph.

00:34:53.060 Now, I'm not close to the Paul candidacy from this distance, but I gather that it's pretty small beer really.

00:35:00.060 Yes.

00:35:01.060 But it's because they can link his name to something that's incorrect.

00:35:05.060 And if they could do the same with Gingrich, which they might be able to do given some of his remarks in South Carolina,

00:35:12.060 which could be seen to be subliminally politically incorrect and group oriented, they will try and do so.

00:35:20.060 So the debate is highly circumscribed and that's because of the size of society that you're living in.

00:35:26.060 All political correctness is in a root way is a way of giving in offense to the overwhelming majority of people

00:35:34.060 because people don't lose their group identities in a multiple group society.

00:35:40.060 So if people are to make the slightest comment that could be perceived as negative of any group numbering more than 10 people, that will be used against them.

00:35:50.060 Yes, I agree.

00:35:52.060 Let's move the conversation a little bit to the historical aspects of democracy.

00:36:00.060 And 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.

00:36:10.060 And if you sense, if you define democracy as the will of the people, and, you know, in some ways, the will of the people could be to round up this minority group and, you know, ship them off, you know, and throw them off into the ocean or something. 0.99

00:36:27.060 So people would consider that shocking and completely illiberal and unacceptable.

00:36:33.060 But that would be the will of the people, 51% of the vote decided it was so.

00:36:39.060 So there is a strong antagonism between democracy and liberalism.

00:36:47.060 And let's think about this a little bit historically.

00:36:51.060 And I want to bring up the work of Hans Hermann Hoppe, who's a economist and political thinker.

00:36:59.060 And he talked, if you, if you talked to your, you know, average Joe bag of donuts, and you tell them about a king or an aristocratic ruler, and you asked, do you think you're more free today?

00:37:14.060 I think the answer would most likely be yes, and probably an enthusiastic yes.

00:37:21.060 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.

00:37:37.060 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 and America.

00:37:55.520 Louis XIV was not a totalitarian by any stretch of the imagination.

00:37:59.960 If you look at just objectively speaking, there was more liberty in his society than there is now in democracy.

00:38:09.320 And so I think why someone thinks they're free now is that they think that we are the government, so to speak.

00:38:19.040 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.

00:38:35.300 And I'm sure the state looked upon its subjects with the same light.

00:38:38.420 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.

00:38:55.160 But we now have this illusion in the modern world that we are the government.

00:39:00.100 So in a sense, we are going to go to war in Iraq. 0.63

00:39:03.240 What tax rate should we have?

00:39:05.900 What kind of multicultural or immigration policy should we have?

00:39:10.240 It's not the idea that we are the government.

00:39:12.720 So this seems to be a, how do I say, a historical consciousness of the highest order.

00:39:23.000 It's a big thing that people, not only in the Western world, but really around the world, think.

00:39:29.340 And so, Jonathan, where do you think this is going, this we are the government?

00:39:36.040 Where did it come from?

00:39:37.720 Where is it going?

00:39:38.820 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?

00:39:52.380 I think the only way you could get out of this conundrum is direct democracy, which Alan de Benoit, on behalf of Greece and the New Rights, has often advocated.

00:40:04.280 This is closer to the type of democracy that exists in cantonal Switzerland, for example.

00:40:09.600 Switzerland is 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.

00:40:21.020 They've avoided participation in both great European wars, World War I and World War II, of course.

00:40:26.580 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.

00:40:40.540 They're also extraordinarily socially conservative.

00:40:45.740 Women didn't get the vote until very late in Switzerland. 0.94

00:40:50.240 And this is seen as regressive and sort of unduly conservative by most champions of liberalism and democracy.

00:41:01.140 But there is something to be said for direct democracy.

00:41:03.640 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,

00:41:14.840 and certain federal things, such as the European Union in a Western European context.

00:41:20.240 are decided for by tiny elites, and the population is largely excluded.

00:41:26.200 And popular wishes in these matters that are regarded as ignorant and uninformed, and are often against them, are swept to one side.

00:41:33.960 Now, that doesn't say too much for democracy.

00:41:37.000 Yet, at the same time, you have an ultra-democratic spirit that believes that everything needs to be put out to tender,

00:41:43.840 put out to poll, and assessed by the popular will.

00:41:47.440 So, direct democracy, where people decide on issues, not on candidates, and don't vote for parties, but vote for issues,

00:41:55.760 like should we be inside or outside the European Union in the British context,

00:42:03.120 where you will probably have a majority to lead the European Union,

00:42:05.780 totally contrary to the political instincts of the British ruling class, which contains a lot of scepticism about the Union,

00:42:14.100 but always wishes to remain within it.

00:42:16.420 One of the issues where democracy and liberalism are most fraught, and at variance with one another, is the issue of crime,

00:42:26.820 particularly crime and punishment.

00:42:28.420 This shows up a great difference between the United States and Western Europe.

00:42:33.300 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,

00:42:43.900 not to allow mass instinct in relation to the issues of law and order to gain a hand.

00:42:50.280 This is why punishments, and so on, for all sorts of infractions, from the most serious to the least serious,

00:42:57.960 in Western Europe, are considered by the populace to be absurdly soft, and not stringent enough at all.

00:43:04.920 Whereas in America, well, I think, what is it, about 37 states have the death penalty?

00:43:11.000 Well, I'm sure it's something like that. We have the largest prison population in the world.

00:43:15.540 The death penalty in Western Europe is regarded as the sort of harbinger of political leniency.

00:43:23.260 Only those who are totally outside the system dare advocate the death penalty, even though there's quite a few Tory MPs privately support it.

00:43:32.260 The last time there was a debate in the House of Commons on that was a long time ago.

00:43:36.700 There was even an attempt to frustrate the having of such debates, because it could canalise sort of dangerous psychological energies on behalf of the masses.

00:43:46.660 The masses support the death penalty 67% through 90%, depending on the clientele of the poll and how you ask the question.

00:43:55.400 But there is absolutely no question that the masses would be allowed to decide on issues like that,

00:44:01.820 where they would give regressive and reactionary answers, according to the political establishment.

00:44:07.020 And those views would be considered to be regressive and reactionary by conservative politicians in Western Europe,

00:44:14.040 never mind liberal or leftist politicians.

00:44:16.140 So there are enormous areas where the popular will is frustrated by the democratic mandate.

00:44:25.560 And the only way that could be broken is if people decided on a half-yearly basis, a six-month basis,

00:44:32.880 on five key questions, which would put out a referendum and put out a debate.

00:44:39.580 The political class would say that this would end up in chaos, because the masses don't know what they want.

00:44:45.420 It could be easily swayed by demagogues and by media interests, which, of course, is a possibility.

00:44:53.480 But we'd have a controlled management of mass instinct through liberal democracy and representative politics,

00:45:02.240 where often people get a version of what they don't want, and all they do is vote to prevent something worse.

00:45:08.800 Do you think also that the kind of world that de Benoit is imagining really requires a racially homogenous

00:45:19.220 and really culturally homogenous, if not religiously homogenous, population?

00:45:25.040 I think I agree that Switzerland is a civilized place.

00:45:30.320 I've actually spent some time there.

00:45:31.540 It was a little bit a while ago, but I enjoyed it.

00:45:35.060 They obviously have a stable and healthy culture.

00:45:41.200 At the same time, as an American, when I hear someone talking about direct democracy,

00:45:47.220 I can just imagine people voting on their television sets and voting the country free ice cream

00:45:54.240 or voting that we should take away all the money of every person who earns more than a million dollars

00:46:01.880 and give it to the people.

00:46:04.380 Some of these, I almost find myself siding with the Eurocrafts or something on that issue. 0.96

00:46:12.580 I think a Swiss population could come up with some sound decisions, 1.00

00:46:17.780 but the America as it's currently constituted could.

00:46:22.920 But maybe no population could.

00:46:24.420 I mean, I kind of, you know, I'm not a fan of Weymouth Buckley,

00:46:28.300 but I think he did say, he had a very nice line that is worth repeating.

00:46:33.700 And he said that he wanted America to be like Switzerland.

00:46:38.880 And he said that he was talking to a Swiss man, and he asked him who the leader of his country was.

00:46:45.980 And the man said, oh, yes, he's a good man, but at the moment I can't remember his name.

00:46:51.380 And Buckley, in one of his good moments, said that is a good political system

00:47:00.840 where the population is depoliticized, in a sense.

00:47:04.900 They're not, you know, getting riled up by demagogues.

00:47:07.900 They're not, you know, watching Fox News every day.

00:47:13.380 They're living their lives and, you know, having a family, maybe having a business or something.

00:47:17.900 And I don't know, I think there's something quite healthy sounding about an order like that.

00:47:26.500 Well, Jonathan, as we bring it to a close, let me just ask you to look in a crystal ball for a little bit.

00:47:34.420 What do you think is the future of democracy?

00:47:38.320 And, you know, I mentioned this when we first began this discussion, that we seem to be – we had some time of stability, one could say,

00:47:49.980 where, you know, the Cold War was ending.

00:47:53.300 You had great big credit booms and, you know, economic booms in the Western world.

00:47:59.520 We had a kind of, you know, notions of the end of history and so on and so forth.

00:48:03.360 But we seem to be entering a new world now.

00:48:07.420 And I think things like the Arab Spring, maybe even Occupy Wall Street or the Occupy movement are harbingers of this,

00:48:16.820 that we seem to be entering a world where there's going to be a lot more anger.

00:48:20.580 There's going to be a lot more people on the streets, even in the wealthier countries.

00:48:27.180 There's just going to be a different kind of politics.

00:48:30.320 We seem to be entering a new world.

00:48:32.780 So maybe you could talk a little bit about what you see going forward and how democracy will fit in all this.

00:48:43.220 I think it's all determined by economic stability.

00:48:46.140 If the fact that Britain, for example, is a trillion pounds, a billion, billion pounds in debt this week is –

00:48:57.860 and although there are attempts, of course, to manufacture reduction in the budget deficits,

00:49:03.140 if this ever triggered a major economic catastrophe such as has hit a small European nation like Greece, Iceland or the Republic of Ireland,

00:49:16.180 if there are storms hit a major European country like Spain, Italy, France or Britain,

00:49:22.100 Germany would be much less likely on present scenarios.

00:49:26.520 Then I think all bets are off.

00:49:28.100 I think you would see a fracturing in democracy.

00:49:30.660 You would see a lot more generalised protest.

00:49:33.800 You'd see a lot more loutishness.

00:49:36.000 You'd see a lot more associated apathy.

00:49:38.820 The two would go together.

00:49:40.060 You would see vanguardism by militant minorities.

00:49:42.840 And you would see greater disengagement on behalf of larger and larger publics.

00:49:50.120 I think that's already accelerating.

00:49:52.780 I think democracy will invert itself and become a purely minority game, 0.99

00:49:58.340 whereby in the future only important and triggered minorities actually vote.

00:50:03.300 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.

00:50:14.640 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.

00:50:23.000 I could well see a situation where democracy in the 21st, 22nd centuries approximates to democracy in the 19th century,

00:50:32.780 whereby you had a restricted franchise and the majority didn't vote because they weren't able to.

00:50:39.840 In Britain, all women couldn't vote. 1.00

00:50:42.280 And in 1867, key parts of the professional and up on the middle class got the vote.

00:50:48.140 But nobody else did apart from those above them in the hierarchy.

00:50:51.280 So a very small number of people decided the elections, but they were genuine elections.

00:50:56.480 I think what you're going to have in the future is that a very small number of people will decide them,

00:51:00.520 and yet everyone can still vote.

00:51:02.880 It's just the majority chooses not to.

00:51:05.900 Out of apathy?

00:51:07.480 Out of apathy, out of reverse anger,

00:51:12.400 out of not understanding the difference between the candidates as the differences become more and more nuanced

00:51:18.660 and less and less observable.

00:51:21.280 I do think the end of ideological politics in the West,

00:51:24.540 as it is perceived by many who belabor the fact that they can't tell the difference between the parties anymore,

00:51:31.380 the difference between the British parties is minimal.

00:51:35.420 The difference between the Canadian parties is minimal.

00:51:38.060 The American parties, I think, probably were the mainstream candidates of a Romney sort.

00:51:45.040 The difference between him and a centrist Democrat is, I would imagine, meaningless, really.

00:51:51.400 Only the injection of religion into politics, as it appears from a Western European distance,

00:51:59.460 gives some sort of charge, partly to react against by some people over the water in the United States.

00:52:07.540 But I personally predict that democracy and the liberal humanism that floats on it at the present time are going to be in trouble.

00:52:17.900 But it's going to be different types of trouble in different settings.

00:52:21.360 In some places, it will be militant minorities going into the streets and causing trouble of all sorts. 0.95

00:52:29.280 In other situations, it will be the apathy of the overwhelming majority.

00:52:34.120 There comes a point when in local elections and so on,

00:52:36.740 there's so many people subtract from the process and you have two-thirds not voting in pre-stated elections in Western Europe.

00:52:46.800 There comes a moment when those elections lose all validity

00:52:50.320 and when the system itself becomes unable to operate.

00:52:56.140 This is true now at the level of the European Union.

00:52:58.840 One of the reasons the European Union can't function

00:53:01.040 isn't because they can't decide to go forward to a European state, a federal Europe, a U.S.E.,

00:53:09.300 like the United States of America, the United States of Europe,

00:53:12.080 or to backtrack to the nation-state.

00:53:14.340 They are caught in the middle of those two polarities.

00:53:17.860 That is true.

00:53:19.080 But it's because the European populations do not give the political class

00:53:23.020 the endorsement required to make decisive decisions.

00:53:26.200 That's why the debt-based crises in individual nation-states can't be ameliorated effectively.

00:53:33.260 The popular will is important and mainstream politicians don't have it

00:53:38.600 and therefore can't arrive at sort of long-lasting solutions.

00:53:43.720 I think in the United States, the inability that there seems to be to cut the deficit

00:53:48.220 in any effective way and the logjam that appears from a distance to exist in Congress

00:53:54.540 now that you have a president of one party and assemblers of the other

00:53:59.620 is all to do with the delegitimization of both.

00:54:05.160 I think Obama doesn't have legitimacy, but apart from canalized anger in his midterm,

00:54:10.960 neither really do the Republicans who've come in to thwart him.

00:54:13.860 Well, before we go, do you think that when this liberal age or if this liberal age really implodes on itself,

00:54:25.360 if all those trillions in debt come home to roost, so on and so forth,

00:54:31.520 that there could be maybe an opening for the kind of aristocratic politics

00:54:37.500 that you and I would want to see, maybe even one could gain power,

00:54:44.060 certainly by force of arms, of course, but also one could gain power by charisma alone,

00:54:50.180 that when this whole order is delegitimized, that people might begin to look

00:54:57.460 towards someone who's a kind of visionary.

00:55:02.280 Yes, I think that could only occur if what exists now is totally discredited

00:55:09.160 in the minds of the people who are alive now or in the future under such systems.

00:55:15.360 I think if such a discrediting did occur, then all bets are off.

00:55:20.660 And although aristocracy in the sense of the ancient world or even 18th century Europe

00:55:26.540 prior to the spiritual revolutions at the end of that century

00:55:30.440 will never come back in the same form, the notion of aristocratic rule could return,

00:55:36.640 maybe with a restricted franchise, maybe with an elect cast that seem to be

00:55:42.180 the sort of philosopher kings of the society, maybe with quasi-military figures

00:55:48.220 who have to be civilian in order to rule, but who come from a military background,

00:55:53.180 particularly if there's a lot more social chaos around, and that's felt to be necessary.

00:55:57.640 But with 24-hour media, if the halters that liberalism provides that prevents charisma

00:56:06.940 as an end in itself and prevents a phenomenon like a sort of more aristocratic version

00:56:15.440 of the Kennedys from emerging periodically, from coming about,

00:56:19.660 if those tendencies were annulled, arrested or stayed, then you would see something else.

00:56:25.780 I think that at the present time, there are too many inhibitions that prevent the emergence

00:56:32.680 of that type of politicking.

00:56:35.060 People would always cut that as soon as it began to emerge,

00:56:38.600 that so-and-so is a dangerously authoritarian or sleek candidate,

00:56:43.080 that so-and-so is a dangerously charismatic candidate.

00:56:45.980 You know where that ends up.

00:56:47.700 That so-and-so has undemocratic credentials or a whiff of elitism about them.

00:56:55.860 Elitism, of course, being one of the most wounding politically incorrect charges.

00:57:00.600 It's not used very much because hardly any politician dares to make any elitist statements.

00:57:05.460 But as soon as the thing begins to tumble, you will see elitist politics re-emerge.

00:57:13.940 It's difficult at this stage of the game to see the forms that that would take.

00:57:18.680 But it's not difficult to...you know it as soon as you saw it.

00:57:21.900 Yeah.

00:57:22.160 It's only when the masses are prepared to embrace it again, because they would have to.

00:57:28.780 Yeah.

00:57:28.960 We live in mass societies now.

00:57:31.560 Even if the masses were prepared to have less of a say,

00:57:34.960 they would have to endorse that, paradoxically enough.

00:57:39.540 Well, we can all hold out hope.

00:57:42.500 Jonathan, thank you for being back on the program.

00:57:45.240 This was a wonderful discussion, and I look forward to talking with you again next week.

00:57:50.500 Thanks very much. It's been a pleasure to be here.

00:57:52.620 Thank you.

00:57:58.960 Thank you.

00:58:28.960 Thank you.

RadixJournal - January 10, 2018

Bowden! - 6 - Democracy

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript