In this episode, Jonathan Bowden and Richard Spencer discuss the current state of democracy in the Western world, and why it needs to be reawakened. Who would win the election if there was only one candidate in the race, and who would be the next president?
00:05:22.220I think it's modern Western parties have become dreary and depressing in that they tend to the centre,
00:05:30.220which immediately puts a premium on philosophy of any sort.
00:05:34.120Anyone who's at all radical is weaned out of the process and excluded pretty early on.
00:05:39.980In the internal Republican contest, only Ron Paul seems to have an agenda,
00:05:45.640which could be said to be at all philosophical or ideological.
00:05:49.860Romney is an establishment and a moderate-statist Republican.
00:05:54.680Gingrich is difficult to determine from this distance.
00:05:58.380Sometimes he goes with the social conservatives and the Christians.
00:06:02.040Sometimes he goes with the libertarians.
00:06:04.860Sometimes he goes with the establishment of the party.
00:06:07.160And he seems to be a sort of megalomaniac politician from this distance on the other side of the Atlantic.
00:06:15.660I remember all the fuss there was about him when he was a congressional leader a while back.
00:06:20.980But that seemed to fizzle out and tail off, again viewed from a long way away.
00:06:26.000And 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
00:06:35.380or 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.
00:06:48.040And if you look at some basic polls outside of the Republican electorate in South Carolina, Gingrich is essentially hated.
00:06:59.720I also was thinking when he is a megalomaniac, I think all of these politicians are inherently narcissistic and kind of maybe even sociopathic.
00:07:08.560But he seems to be a great megalomaniac without being interesting.
00:07:12.060He's not exactly Captain Ahab or, you know, McBass or something like that.
00:07:21.040He's a megalomaniac, but then when you learn more about him, you wish you knew less.
00:07:26.520Why did he emerge as the Republican congressional leader so many years ago?
00:07:33.920I 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.
00:07:45.900And I think you could maybe just chalk it up to ambition alone.
00:07:49.940I think he was one of those types that always wanted to be in charge.
00:07:54.800And 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.
00:08:11.700And he wrote a memo to the dean and it was like, you know, I forgot the name of the college.
00:08:16.900It was like, you know, some, you know, Backwoods College of Georgia or something.
00:08:21.380He's like, Backwoods College of Georgia, the next hundred years.
00:08:26.820He's always been a very ambitious person.
00:08:29.460But 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.
00:08:43.240But what do you think this is about the kind of person that becomes a Democratic candidate?
00:08:51.040I 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.
00:09:00.440I think it's worth to delve into that deeper.
00:09:04.220I'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.
00:09:19.720But 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.
00:09:44.460So, what do you think about that, Jonathan?
00:09:48.600Yes, I think democracy does favor a particular type of psychology.
00:09:53.800It does favor candidates of a certain type that will emerge over time.
00:09:59.340It does favor narcissistic and self-regarding individuals.
00:10:04.360It favors social, psychopathic, for behavior forms.
00:10:09.220It favors gratification exercises psychologically in terms of the candidate that render them closer to particular types of salesmen, auctioneers, actors and actresses.
00:10:20.860And all of these have been accentuated by 24-hour media and the need to appeal to such a media on a regular basis.
00:10:29.960I also think there's been a sort of downgrading of expectation.
00:10:33.520If 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.
00:10:50.300There was a sort of quasi-erotic worship of the Kennedys as items, as movie stars, as moguls of politics.
00:11:00.100Camelot was considered to be a sort of phenomenon in its own right.
00:11:05.400I think it's the failure of Camelot and related projects, the scandal that brought Daniel Nixon down Watergate,
00:11:13.420the tarnishing of these quasi-authoritarian democratic figures, Kennedy very much on a level with Lloyd George in the British experience,
00:11:26.520who was only just about a democratic politician, and who made an appeal to the mass electorate, which was slightly undemocratic in certain respects.
00:11:37.860Churchill had an on-and-off reputation of a similar sort.
00:11:43.420It's noticeable that would either of those figures, and would Kennedy have survived in the present media bubble,
00:11:50.340given Kennedy's extraordinary private sex life, had a scintilla of that being known about in the early 1960s,
00:11:59.020that 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.
00:12:08.360Just think what the 24-hour media and satellite news would make of that.
00:12:14.340Clinton'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.
00:12:25.620Similarly, Churchill's private penchant for depression and extreme drunkenness,
00:12:31.960and Lloyd George's bigamy, where he had two families going at the same time,
00:12:38.220one on the north of the Thames in London and one on the south of the Thames in London,
00:12:42.100when he was prime minister and when he was wartime prime minister at the height of the Great War,
00:12:47.920a war before which Britain could well have lost had it not been for his reorganisation of the Ministry of Supply militarily.
00:12:57.000So, I think a lot of democratic politicians are the product of the contemporary media circus.
00:13:04.500The fact that the flaws of would-be great men will always be exposed now,
00:13:10.480but they won't be exposed by biographers 40 years after their deaths.
00:13:14.500They'll be exposed before they even get into office,
00:13:17.780and they'll be exposed in the early stages of being elected by their parties.
00:13:21.880That's before even the electorate gets a chance to decide between them and other parties.
00:13:25.780That's true. I don't think a normal person would want to run for office.
00:13:30.900I mean, for instance, I've never been arrested or anything like that,
00:13:39.100but I'm sure that when I think back, even over my relatively uneventful life,
00:13:44.540you could find something and inflate it to make me look like a maniac or some kind of reprobate.
00:13:53.760And I think in some ways, just a normal person who might have some healthy patriotic desires
00:14:00.320doesn't want to put himself through that or his family through that.
00:14:05.420Also, let me ask an even more jaundiced question.
00:14:09.780In some ways, do you think the people have gotten worse?
00:14:13.440And what I mean, and more degraded, what I mean by that is that if you look back at some 20th century democratic leaders,
00:14:23.520Churchill, to a degree, obviously had an aristocratic background,
00:21:14.900And possibly from the perspective of Western Europe,
00:21:19.260a politician like Jimmy Carter, when he started out, may have been a genuine outsider.
00:21:24.800And after the Republican White House mired in the Nixon scandals early in the 70s,
00:21:30.980people wanted somebody who was an outsider.
00:21:34.420But nearly every major American politician, I would probably guess, including Ron Paul as well, is an insider.
00:21:42.380He may not be an insider's insider, but the idea that George W. Bush could run against Washington
00:21:49.740is completely absurd when these are all pork-barrel politicians who are up to their neck in favoritism
00:21:56.560and doing deals for people in their senatorial and congressional areas.
00:22:02.440Without question, let's put a little pressure on that.
00:22:06.120But 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.
00:22:15.820I mean, this is huge amounts of money.
00:22:18.020And in many ways, we do have a ruling class and an aristocracy.
00:22:22.320However, it's one that dare not speak its name in a way.
00:22:28.300It's one that justifies itself on not being an aristocracy or in a ruling class.
00:22:34.080And I think in terms of a lot of the financial elite, it's literally invisible.
00:22:40.120I think the average Joe on the street might see the politicians as kind of the rulers,
00:22:47.020and he can strike out at one if he or she does some bad things.
00:22:52.620But obviously, there's a bigger, more invisible ruling class that has an immense amount of power.
00:23:00.260And I'm, of course, referring to the financial industry, the investment banking industry, and things like that.
00:23:07.600We have a kind of strange ruling class today.
00:23:12.080It'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.
00:23:22.580But then it's either invisible or it pretends it's not what it is.
00:23:27.940You know, you could expect that if you're talking about, you know, say, Wilhelm I or something, you know, he would wear martial uniforms.
00:23:36.020He'd have a, you know, he'd have a certain flamboyance to his outward demeanor.
00:24:00.400The sort of, the ruling class that isn't one.
00:24:04.200I 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.
00:24:13.420And that's because everything has to be put to a prism of contesting itself before the people's assent.
00:24:21.240I 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.
00:24:33.080In 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.
00:24:48.040Where 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.
00:25:00.980And 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.
00:25:10.740So, 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.
00:25:26.100Well, 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.
00:25:40.060And 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.
00:25:55.880And 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.
00:26:21.060Because I don't think they're going to get elected otherwise.
00:26:24.060It 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.
00:26:34.060I may be wrong there, because I'm doing it from a great distance, but that's what has appeared to me.
00:26:40.060And 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.
00:26:52.060She was carrying a lot of baggage from the first Clinton White House, that's true.
00:26:56.060But 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.
00:27:19.060What you're referring to is also what I call the majority strategy.
00:27:24.060It'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.
00:27:34.060And it's this basic idea that the GOP is relying on white nationalism in a way.
00:27:42.060I 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.
00:27:55.060It represents their values, so to speak.
00:27:58.060You have white guys up there who aren't really offensive, you kind of trust them more.
00:28:04.060And so the GOP gains power by white people rallying around it.
00:28:10.060And yet, overtly, it's in many ways an anti-white party.
00:28:15.060I 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.
00:28:45.060And we can obviously help our election prospects quite directly by simply allowing in more immigration and doing some amnesties here and there.
00:28:56.060Let me ask you, Jonathan, a little bit of a kind of philosophical question.
00:29:02.060A 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.
00:29:19.060They thought it could get out of control.
00:29:21.060They thought the people were too uncouth and too unsophisticated to make serious decisions.
00:29:29.060Essentially, 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.
00:29:43.060We can't allow populist, you know, sentiments and furious emotions to hold sway.
00:29:50.060But then, so in some ways, you can ask, is democracy the problem?
00:29:55.060Is it, is it this, you know, mass frenzy that's a real danger?
00:29:59.060But you could turn that around and say that we have no democracy at all.
00:30:03.060You 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.
00:30:37.060So, and, and I would say in the European context, uh, there's some things about it that are, that are quite anti-democratic.
00:30:43.060Uh, 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.
00:30:56.060And 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.
00:31:07.060Uh, 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?
00:31:14.060Or do you think the danger is that there's no democracy at all, that it's all an illusion?
00:31:21.060Well, I think it's, it's because we basically have democracy with a system attached to it, and that system is liberalism.
00:31:29.060Uh, perhaps the system could be called liberal democracy.
00:31:32.060And 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.
00:31:43.060Liberals themselves understand that their system, as it exists and can be described, is a toss-up between pure liberalism, theoretically, and democracy.
00:31:53.060How much democracy you have can determine whether liberalism is endangered within the system itself.
00:35:01.060But it's because they can link his name to something that's incorrect.
00:35:05.060And if they could do the same with Gingrich, which they might be able to do given some of his remarks in South Carolina,
00:35:12.060which could be seen to be subliminally politically incorrect and group oriented, they will try and do so.
00:35:20.060So the debate is highly circumscribed and that's because of the size of society that you're living in.
00:35:26.060All political correctness is in a root way is a way of giving in offense to the overwhelming majority of people
00:35:34.060because people don't lose their group identities in a multiple group society.
00:35:40.060So 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.
00:35:52.060Let's move the conversation a little bit to the historical aspects of democracy.
00:36:00.060And 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.
00:36:10.060And 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.
00:36:27.060So people would consider that shocking and completely illiberal and unacceptable.
00:36:33.060But that would be the will of the people, 51% of the vote decided it was so.
00:36:39.060So there is a strong antagonism between democracy and liberalism.
00:36:47.060And let's think about this a little bit historically.
00:36:51.060And I want to bring up the work of Hans Hermann Hoppe, who's a economist and political thinker.
00:36:59.060And 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?
00:37:14.060I think the answer would most likely be yes, and probably an enthusiastic yes.
00:37:21.060But 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.
00:37:37.060And 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.
00:37:55.520Louis XIV was not a totalitarian by any stretch of the imagination.
00:37:59.960If you look at just objectively speaking, there was more liberty in his society than there is now in democracy.
00:38:09.320And so I think why someone thinks they're free now is that they think that we are the government, so to speak.
00:38:19.040And 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.
00:38:35.300And I'm sure the state looked upon its subjects with the same light.
00:38:38.420There 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.
00:38:55.160But we now have this illusion in the modern world that we are the government.
00:39:00.100So in a sense, we are going to go to war in Iraq.
00:39:38.820And 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?
00:39:52.380I 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.
00:40:04.280This is closer to the type of democracy that exists in cantonal Switzerland, for example.
00:40:09.600Switzerland 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.
00:40:21.020They've avoided participation in both great European wars, World War I and World War II, of course.
00:40:26.580The 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.
00:40:40.540They're also extraordinarily socially conservative.
00:40:45.740Women didn't get the vote until very late in Switzerland.
00:40:50.240And this is seen as regressive and sort of unduly conservative by most champions of liberalism and democracy.
00:41:01.140But there is something to be said for direct democracy.
00:41:03.640Certainly, 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,
00:41:14.840and certain federal things, such as the European Union in a Western European context.
00:41:20.240are decided for by tiny elites, and the population is largely excluded.
00:41:26.200And popular wishes in these matters that are regarded as ignorant and uninformed, and are often against them, are swept to one side.
00:41:33.960Now, that doesn't say too much for democracy.
00:41:37.000Yet, at the same time, you have an ultra-democratic spirit that believes that everything needs to be put out to tender,
00:41:43.840put out to poll, and assessed by the popular will.
00:41:47.440So, direct democracy, where people decide on issues, not on candidates, and don't vote for parties, but vote for issues,
00:41:55.760like should we be inside or outside the European Union in the British context,
00:42:03.120where you will probably have a majority to lead the European Union,
00:42:05.780totally contrary to the political instincts of the British ruling class, which contains a lot of scepticism about the Union,
00:42:14.100but always wishes to remain within it.
00:42:16.420One of the issues where democracy and liberalism are most fraught, and at variance with one another, is the issue of crime,
00:42:28.420This shows up a great difference between the United States and Western Europe.
00:42:33.300In 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,
00:42:43.900not to allow mass instinct in relation to the issues of law and order to gain a hand.
00:42:50.280This is why punishments, and so on, for all sorts of infractions, from the most serious to the least serious,
00:42:57.960in Western Europe, are considered by the populace to be absurdly soft, and not stringent enough at all.
00:43:04.920Whereas in America, well, I think, what is it, about 37 states have the death penalty?
00:43:11.000Well, I'm sure it's something like that. We have the largest prison population in the world.
00:43:15.540The death penalty in Western Europe is regarded as the sort of harbinger of political leniency.
00:43:23.260Only those who are totally outside the system dare advocate the death penalty, even though there's quite a few Tory MPs privately support it.
00:43:32.260The last time there was a debate in the House of Commons on that was a long time ago.
00:43:36.700There 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.
00:43:46.660The masses support the death penalty 67% through 90%, depending on the clientele of the poll and how you ask the question.
00:43:55.400But there is absolutely no question that the masses would be allowed to decide on issues like that,
00:44:01.820where they would give regressive and reactionary answers, according to the political establishment.
00:44:07.020And those views would be considered to be regressive and reactionary by conservative politicians in Western Europe,
00:44:14.040never mind liberal or leftist politicians.
00:44:16.140So there are enormous areas where the popular will is frustrated by the democratic mandate.
00:44:25.560And the only way that could be broken is if people decided on a half-yearly basis, a six-month basis,
00:44:32.880on five key questions, which would put out a referendum and put out a debate.
00:44:39.580The political class would say that this would end up in chaos, because the masses don't know what they want.
00:44:45.420It could be easily swayed by demagogues and by media interests, which, of course, is a possibility.
00:44:53.480But we'd have a controlled management of mass instinct through liberal democracy and representative politics,
00:45:02.240where often people get a version of what they don't want, and all they do is vote to prevent something worse.
00:45:08.800Do you think also that the kind of world that de Benoit is imagining really requires a racially homogenous
00:45:19.220and really culturally homogenous, if not religiously homogenous, population?
00:45:25.040I think I agree that Switzerland is a civilized place.
00:48:32.780So maybe you could talk a little bit about what you see going forward and how democracy will fit in all this.
00:48:43.220I think it's all determined by economic stability.
00:48:46.140If the fact that Britain, for example, is a trillion pounds, a billion, billion pounds in debt this week is –
00:48:57.860and although there are attempts, of course, to manufacture reduction in the budget deficits,
00:49:03.140if this ever triggered a major economic catastrophe such as has hit a small European nation like Greece, Iceland or the Republic of Ireland,
00:49:16.180if there are storms hit a major European country like Spain, Italy, France or Britain,
00:49:22.100Germany would be much less likely on present scenarios.
00:49:52.780I think democracy will invert itself and become a purely minority game,
00:49:58.340whereby in the future only important and triggered minorities actually vote.
00:50:03.300You 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.
00:50:14.640So 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.
00:50:23.000I could well see a situation where democracy in the 21st, 22nd centuries approximates to democracy in the 19th century,
00:50:32.780whereby you had a restricted franchise and the majority didn't vote because they weren't able to.