The Auron MacIntyre Show - A Quick Rant About Democracy ｜ 1⧸12⧸24

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:31.600 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.400 I'm Oren McIntyre.

00:00:35.520 So, I've been talking a lot about democracy.

00:00:39.400 And I always kind of get very similar canned responses.

00:00:43.420 And so I wanted to go on a little bit of a rant.

00:00:45.680 Because there's a couple of different issues I run into over and over and over again

00:00:50.340 when I try to discuss this subject.

00:00:52.920 And it gets very frustrating.

00:00:54.700 So I'm hoping I can just kind of put everything out there.

00:00:58.200 Put some of these myths to bed.

00:01:00.020 And we can kind of move forward with this discussion.

00:01:04.360 So, the first thing I always hear when I talk about democracy.

00:01:08.280 What democracy is doing.

00:01:09.700 How it's impacting things.

00:01:11.360 The problems with it.

00:01:12.420 The first thing you always hear from a lot of conservatives is,

00:01:15.940 well, we're not a democracy.

00:01:17.380 So this doesn't apply to us.

00:01:18.840 We're a constitutional republic.

00:01:20.600 And look, I get it.

00:01:22.240 I totally understand.

00:01:23.440 I used to say this all the time.

00:01:25.780 I'm very familiar with it.

00:01:27.460 I used to believe this.

00:01:28.500 This was my line of reasoning.

00:01:30.100 I had the same response.

00:01:31.300 So I'm not angry that people do this.

00:01:33.840 I'm not surprised that people do this.

00:01:36.060 I'm not confused about where it comes from.

00:01:38.220 I totally get it.

00:01:39.160 Again, this is kind of where my reasoning went first.

00:01:43.060 Whenever you run into any kind of substantive criticism of the system,

00:01:48.160 just say, oh, no, this isn't the real thing.

00:01:50.260 That's not really what we're having.

00:01:51.520 We're not we're not really a democracy.

00:01:53.520 We happen to be a constitutional republic.

00:01:55.260 People just get confused.

00:01:57.020 So I want to clear that up first before we go any deeper.

00:02:01.360 So first, are we a democracy?

00:02:04.400 Are we a constitutional republic?

00:02:06.980 Well, first, you need to kind of define your terms,

00:02:09.040 because what I run into most of the time when I talk to people about this is

00:02:12.860 they don't really know the difference.

00:02:14.460 Like they don't really have an idea of what the difference could be.

00:02:17.720 They just say, well, a constitutional republic is where you have representatives

00:02:22.060 and a democracy is where you don't.

00:02:23.980 It's like, well, OK, if that's the case, if that's your definition,

00:02:27.720 then direct democracy is the only actual democracy.

00:02:31.060 That's the only legitimate form of democracy.

00:02:33.680 And anything else is a different form of government.

00:02:36.780 You could say that.

00:02:37.980 But then you're just saying that democracy doesn't really exist,

00:02:40.720 that you never really have democracy.

00:02:42.900 And OK, I can kind of go along with that.

00:02:45.680 I can kind of agree that no place anywhere actually has democracy.

00:02:49.440 But then you're just saying democracy isn't a real word.

00:02:52.140 And that's not very useful.

00:02:53.580 I think we all know what we mean when we're talking about democracy.

00:02:56.640 Now, to be fair to people who kind of define it this way,

00:03:00.080 so did James Madison.

00:03:01.220 If you look at Federalist Papers No. 10, you can see that he says,

00:03:06.220 well, a democracy is where everybody kind of deliberates on this stuff.

00:03:10.380 And a republic is where you have representatives who do it for you instead.

00:03:15.360 And the republic just allows you to scale this up.

00:03:18.400 So if that's your definition, OK, but you're just saying that democracies just don't exist.

00:03:23.920 And so none of this applies to you.

00:03:26.520 I don't think that's very helpful.

00:03:27.680 So I think people who are a little more honest are saying that usually a republic

00:03:33.580 is a little closer to an aristocracy.

00:03:36.020 Certain percentage of people have an input into who's going to run the show, right?

00:03:41.900 You have representatives.

00:03:42.940 Either way, you're saying representatives run the show.

00:03:45.980 But in a republic, you're going to have a lot of barriers between kind of the mob,

00:03:51.300 the democratic mob, and the government.

00:03:54.040 There's going to be many different protections against kind of mass rule.

00:03:59.460 And so that's going to be your difference between a democracy and a republic.

00:04:05.680 Now, I think a lot of people understood this, too.

00:04:08.720 I mean, Benjamin Franklin said it's a republic if you can keep it.

00:04:12.040 And so he kind of acknowledged that there's probably some way you could lose it.

00:04:16.160 There's probably and maybe he was thinking a monarchy.

00:04:18.340 Maybe he's saying, oh, you could lose it to authoritarianism.

00:04:22.000 But obviously, you could also lose it to a more democratic appeal by opening things up,

00:04:27.180 by allowing the mob more direct influence over the government.

00:04:30.860 You could lose your republic that way.

00:04:33.700 And so I think we need to understand that these barriers aren't permanent.

00:04:39.580 Just because you write something down in the Constitution at one point,

00:04:44.140 and at some point you were a representative republic,

00:04:48.840 that doesn't mean you are in perpetuity.

00:04:51.980 The Constitution, despite what many conservatives like to pretend,

00:04:55.880 is not chiseled in stone somewhere.

00:04:57.920 It gets changed and things morph over time.

00:05:01.740 And so, yes, we probably did have a representative republic.

00:05:05.080 I think that's probably saying you have a constitutional republic at the beginning.

00:05:08.420 That's probably a reasonable assumption.

00:05:10.800 That's a good argument at that time that it did start that way.

00:05:14.260 But that doesn't mean that's what we have now.

00:05:15.920 It doesn't mean you keep it in perpetuity.

00:05:17.460 And the Founding Fathers told you that in some of the most famous quotes.

00:05:22.120 So if we had a constitutional republic, what do we have now?

00:05:26.060 Like, what has changed?

00:05:27.260 Well, I mean, the first thing you have to think about is,

00:05:30.800 how have the restrictions on democracy that were built into the Constitution changed over time?

00:05:37.380 Are we more or less democratic than we were when the Constitution was written?

00:05:43.520 Well, I think the answer is we're obviously much more democratic now.

00:05:47.140 I mean, think about what has happened.

00:05:48.900 We've vastly expanded the franchise through all kinds of different amendments.

00:05:53.700 We've lowered the voting age.

00:05:55.060 We've opened it up to all kinds of people.

00:05:57.220 We've also done things like gotten rid of barriers to, say, senatorial elections.

00:06:04.560 You know, senators used to be chosen by the states.

00:06:07.080 They used to be chosen by state governments.

00:06:08.820 And now they're chosen by election after the 17th Amendment.

00:06:13.160 We've also changed who can even be an American citizen through many different things,

00:06:18.560 including birthright citizenship, assuring that anyone who comes to the United States

00:06:23.440 and is born on American soil, even, let's say, if their parents came here illegally,

00:06:27.640 through birthright citizenship, through that understanding of the 14th Amendment,

00:06:32.280 is now a U.S. citizen and has a say in the vote.

00:06:36.040 And so all of this has greatly expanded the power of the democratic aspect of the country.

00:06:45.380 And a lot of people would say, oh, that's a good thing.

00:06:47.200 Like, a lot of people would celebrate many of those changes.

00:06:51.220 But it's undeniable to say that these were removals of barriers between the government

00:06:56.980 and the larger populace ruling, right?

00:07:00.800 This is more direct input.

00:07:03.140 You have more direct input at every one of these stages by expanding the franchise,

00:07:08.840 by removing these barriers.

00:07:10.480 You had a situation where the president is far more elected by the people than he was before.

00:07:17.120 You have a situation where senators are elected by the people

00:07:19.760 when they weren't really before.

00:07:22.100 And on top of that, you see a continued push for this, right?

00:07:27.300 Every time you have an expansion of the franchise,

00:07:30.380 it also is accompanied by an expansion of the government.

00:07:35.760 It's hard to argue with the fact that the more that we have removed the barriers to democracy,

00:07:42.000 the more the government has grown, not shrunk.

00:07:44.980 And so the input of the people has actually not restricted the growth of government.

00:07:50.660 It's done the opposite.

00:07:51.860 The more people who have been allowed to speak about the government,

00:07:57.320 who are allowed to have input on what the government's going to do,

00:07:59.920 what they're going to have a say in kind of where the government is going to spend its money 0.72

00:08:04.720 and its resources, have routinely expanded the role of the government.

00:08:08.940 They have not contracted it.

00:08:10.160 So this increase in democracy has gone along with an increase in the government every time.

00:08:19.080 And that shouldn't be shocking to you,

00:08:20.700 because if you look at the work of somebody like Alexis de Tocqueville,

00:08:24.700 who talked about democracy in America in his book, Democracy in America,

00:08:28.000 one of the things that he warns about, about how you could lose it,

00:08:31.500 is by saying, well, if the people figure out that they can vote themselves money,

00:08:35.960 right, then they'll start choosing their own interests over that of kind of the wider group

00:08:43.840 or the nation in general.

00:08:45.980 And who's more likely to vote themselves money?

00:08:48.300 Well, people who need it.

00:08:49.880 And so you kind of, and don't get me wrong, rich people do this all the time.

00:08:52.840 I'm not, I'm really not saying, oh, well, that this is only the poor will ever vote themselves money.

00:08:57.840 The rich certainly use the government on a regular basis to leverage this for their own advantage.

00:09:04.420 But we have to understand that as this franchise has expanded,

00:09:08.400 has this democratic aspect of the government has expanded,

00:09:13.140 the government itself has grown.

00:09:15.180 And that's not a bug.

00:09:17.160 That's a feature that there was a desired result.

00:09:20.540 And if you're confused about whether or not that's a desired result,

00:09:23.300 just look at the Democratic Party.

00:09:25.420 Obviously, both parties are guilty of wanting to expand the government in their own ways.

00:09:30.540 But the Democrats are just don't lie about it.

00:09:32.740 They're blatant.

00:09:33.360 That's their primary goal is to find a new program, a new spending program,

00:09:37.280 a new welfare program, a new way to hand out money to their constituents.

00:09:43.580 They don't hide the ball on that one.

00:09:45.340 That's an advantage they have with the Republicans.

00:09:47.360 They don't have to pretend that, right?

00:09:49.800 And so what are their goals?

00:09:52.380 What are their goals?

00:09:53.120 Well, at every opportunity, they want to expand the franchise.

00:09:56.280 They want to make sure more and more people vote.

00:09:58.480 They've taken a lot of this idea that, oh, well, everyone needs to have a say.

00:10:02.700 Like the key, what America is, is everyone having a say, having input into the system.

00:10:07.200 And they've expanded that to kind of its natural conclusion, which is you don't even really need to be an American citizen, right?

00:10:13.420 We should be figuring out a way to give everybody amnesty if they're not a citizen or allow non-citizens to vote. 0.91

00:10:20.500 It depends on which Democrat you're talking to as to what their solution is there.

00:10:24.420 But very consistently, they want to open it up to absolutely anyone at any time.

00:10:28.620 And they want to remove any barrier.

00:10:30.040 You don't need a license.

00:10:31.120 You don't need ID.

00:10:32.220 You don't need to have a matching signed ballot.

00:10:35.980 You should be able to mail in your ballot.

00:10:37.780 You could do it three weeks later.

00:10:39.520 You don't even have to show up ever to a polling place.

00:10:42.220 Someone can collect it for you, right?

00:10:43.840 Any opportunity to do this.

00:10:46.420 Why?

00:10:47.080 Well, because, well, I'll get to that in a second.

00:10:49.220 But I want to talk a little more about the ways that the Democrats are trying to remove still any barriers to the democratic process, right?

00:10:57.820 They want to get rid of the Electoral College, right? 0.96

00:11:02.280 That's a big thing.

00:11:03.020 Oh, Donald Trump and George Bush both won with the Electoral College.

00:11:07.120 They're recognizing that the demographic power is shifting, that the smaller states are losing their demographic power, and the larger states are obviously gaining it.

00:11:17.960 That's what it means.

00:11:18.520 But they recognize that the Electoral College is the main thing keeping Republicans in the game in a lot of ways, and so they want to get rid of that, saying that kind of a more direct democracy would be the right thing to do.

00:11:31.880 They want to, in many ways, abolish the Senate, right?

00:11:34.600 The Senate's already been more democratized through the 17th Amendment.

00:11:38.040 But on top of that, they want to go ahead and say, oh, well, actually, what we want to do is we want to get rid of this, or make that proportional, too.

00:11:48.840 We don't want the Senate to be equal number of people for each state.

00:11:52.280 We want that to also be proportional because it's not fair.

00:11:55.220 For some reason, we have to have everything has to be, well, it's not for some reason.

00:11:58.700 It's a specific reason because it will get them more power.

00:12:00.860 We want to open that up so we can use kind of our demographic advantage to wield power through the Senate as well. 0.99

00:12:07.700 We don't want it to be any kind of hindrance on our power there.

00:12:10.880 And then, of course, they're also now looking to alter the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court is kind of the last bastion of non-democratic governance, right?

00:12:21.020 It's the one place where you don't vote on a Supreme Court justice.

00:12:25.260 They just sit there for life, right?

00:12:27.180 And then that they're there.

00:12:28.400 But we're seeing that that is also being affected.

00:12:31.920 They're also trying to change that because they're saying we need to pack the court.

00:12:36.560 The court is making bad decisions.

00:12:37.920 They love the court back when it was doing everything they wanted, you know, when it was the Warren Court, when it was back in the 60s or something.

00:12:45.460 They would just win in all of these decisions.

00:12:47.780 They loved it when it was Obergefell.

00:12:50.120 They loved it when it was just forcing all of these decisions down and avoiding democracy then.

00:12:55.460 But now they're saying, oh, no, now the Supreme Court is a threat to democracy.

00:13:00.520 We have to pack the court.

00:13:01.680 And if we can't pack the court, we should go out.

00:13:03.520 You know, they want to go intimidate judges. 0.95

00:13:05.840 It's very clear that that's their goal.

00:13:08.140 The White House specifically told protesters to illegally gather on the lawns of Supreme Court justices to put pressure on them during the Roe v. Wade overturning.

00:13:20.800 And so this is something that they have focused on, right?

00:13:24.040 Destroying any one of these last barriers to democracy.

00:13:28.040 Now, you might say, but, you know, it says somewhere in the Constitution that we are one, and that's great.

00:13:33.740 Okay, I agree with you that we used to be, 100% agree that we used to be a constitutional republic.

00:13:41.420 But this is something that the left is correct about and the right doesn't get.

00:13:45.500 Like, the Constitution is, in many ways, a living document.

00:13:50.640 It will be interpreted.

00:13:52.320 It will be updated formally through the amendment process, which has made us less of a constitutional republic, not more, over time, as I've just laid out.

00:14:02.200 The constitutional amendment process, the one that you're supposed to follow, is something that has made us more of a democracy, not more of a constitutional republic, over time.

00:14:12.260 That has been the consistent trend going forward.

00:14:15.720 But on top of this, you know, but on top of this, these statutes are updated, even not formally, right?

00:14:24.100 They are reinterpreted.

00:14:26.580 They're manipulated over time.

00:14:28.760 If you have a population that no longer shares the moral visions and traditions of the people who wrote the Constitution, they don't have the history, they don't have the background, they don't have the understanding, they don't have the same vision of community and the future and the same care, then the words on the paper don't really protect you.

00:14:49.520 You have to have the political will to continue the traditions that are supposed to be captured on that page.

00:14:57.760 And so the Constitution saying certain things about you being a republic doesn't matter if in practice, everything you do actually makes you more and more of a democracy.

00:15:08.620 Now, why do the Democrats want more and more of a democracy?

00:15:11.740 Well, in one instance we already talked about, they want to expand government when they want to expand power, right?

00:15:16.660 But on top of that, they also want more of a democracy because they realize that actually we have transferred, right?

00:15:27.440 We're not really a democracy in the sense of the people choose because the people never really choose.

00:15:33.340 It turns out that one of the advantages to opening up democracy, having more and more democracy is that actually the power of social engineering increases, the power of the media increases, the power of academia increases, the power of the oligarchic class increases as you open up democracy.

00:15:54.120 Because the people who are most able to influence popular opinion are those oligarchs, right?

00:16:00.140 When you have popular sovereignty as your legitimating mechanism, then the best thing to do if you're an elite who wants to stay in power and all elites want to stay in power is manipulate the public.

00:16:12.980 I mean, manufacturing consent.

00:16:14.640 I'm not the first person to come up with this, right?

00:16:17.220 Chomsky saw it from the other side, but he's not wrong about this particular aspect, right?

00:16:21.200 You are in a situation where the people who control these levers of power want more and more popular input because they can control the popular input because they're the ones who have a constant ability because of their hegemonic control of these institutions, media, education, that kind of stuff.

00:16:41.080 They are able to shape the awareness of the people, they're able to focus the attention of the people where they want.

00:16:47.640 They're able to control the information that is delivered to them, and that allows them to manipulate the vote.

00:16:54.440 And if that doesn't work at the end of the day, they'll just do what they did in 2020, right?

00:16:59.640 Time magazine wrote a story celebrating the fact that all these organizations came together to alter the way that voting worked,

00:17:07.780 to alter the message, to control every piece of information that could go out to voters so that they could work together to defeat Donald Trump.

00:17:16.960 And so is that the will of the people?

00:17:19.240 Is that democracy?

00:17:20.640 I mean, in some sense, yes, right?

00:17:22.600 Because that's the mechanism they're using.

00:17:24.580 But it's not really the people who are in charge in that scenario, especially once we start getting to how votes get counted and that kind of thing.

00:17:31.180 But you don't even have to make any accusations in that area.

00:17:34.720 You can look at books like Rigged by Molly Hemingway, which do a great job of laying out all the out-in-front ways that the election was controlled by people like Mark Zuckerberg.

00:17:48.480 You don't have to get into crazy speculation, even though I don't think a lot of that speculation is crazy.

00:17:52.860 You don't have to get any kind of dicey or spicy territory to say that the 2020 election was manipulated,

00:17:58.900 because the people who did it were very proud about it, and it's well-documented, again, by people like Molly Hemingway.

00:18:05.700 So we're seeing this scenario where whether you like it or not, we are in a democracy, right?

00:18:11.880 That is what's happening.

00:18:14.520 Now, why did that happen?

00:18:15.860 Again, lots of natural incentives.

00:18:18.320 I mean, one of the problems is the United States became an empire.

00:18:21.520 And empires and representative republics, they don't scale very well.

00:18:27.820 Eventually, you get so removed from kind of the core voters, the core constituents, the core people you were supposed to represent,

00:18:37.240 that you just don't care about them as much anymore.

00:18:39.400 For many of these people, many of these people in the ruling class, it's much more advantageous to control, again, and to retain power,

00:18:47.840 to just bring in new voters, since the old ones don't agree with them anymore, or to bribe voters in kind of their interests.

00:18:55.700 And that's kind of the problem we're at now, right?

00:18:58.320 Because there's an asymmetry in our political situation.

00:19:04.220 There's an asymmetry between our two parties.

00:19:07.320 The Democrats do what works in a democracy, and the Republicans don't.

00:19:14.200 The Democrats are not shy about what works in a democracy.

00:19:17.880 They have constituents.

00:19:19.280 In fact, they feel proud of telling you who their constituents are, right?

00:19:23.320 We're for LGBT folks.

00:19:25.040 We're for Latinos.

00:19:26.560 We're for African Americans.

00:19:28.500 And we're going to get these communities the things that they need and they deserve.

00:19:32.700 And then they go out and they secure that money and they drop it on these people, right?

00:19:38.120 Now, not all of it.

00:19:38.960 They keep a lot of it.

00:19:39.960 Don't get me wrong.

00:19:40.920 This is a patronage network where they pay themselves first.

00:19:45.560 They take that graft, that money that they take from kind of middle America.

00:19:49.900 And when they redistribute it to their patrons, they keep a large amount of it.

00:19:54.240 They make sure that they pay off their corporate donors with it.

00:19:57.120 They make sure that they funnel up through the university systems and all their other networks,

00:20:02.080 you know, the different unions and such.

00:20:04.720 They make sure that their people get paid, their activists get paid so that they'll stay

00:20:08.940 loyal to them.

00:20:09.840 And they keep a lot of it for themselves.

00:20:11.820 But at the end of the day, they are buying votes because it works.

00:20:15.480 That's what works in a democracy.

00:20:17.580 When you no longer have a clear, unified interest in the country, when you have expanded too

00:20:26.700 far to where people can actually kind of see each other as part of the same system, then

00:20:32.440 it all just becomes about groups fighting inwardly for what they can get.

00:20:37.440 And the Republicans do exactly the opposite, right?

00:20:39.720 We're the opposition.

00:20:40.980 So that means that we don't know we can't we can't take money and give it to our own

00:20:45.980 people.

00:20:46.740 We can't fight for the interests of our our groups that support us because that's not

00:20:52.120 what we do.

00:20:52.740 We're fighting against what the what the left does, what the Democrats do.

00:20:55.880 Well, that's great.

00:20:56.760 I mean, some of those principles I actually agree with, but they don't work in this form

00:21:01.980 of government.

00:21:02.380 The incentive structure is not on your side.

00:21:05.500 And everyone understood that that's why so many founding fathers warned about us becoming

00:21:12.940 an empire.

00:21:13.800 Some founding fathers did want us to become an empire.

00:21:16.260 I think it's pretty clear that there's a there's a specific kind of group inside our

00:21:23.040 founding fathers that wanted to become an empire.

00:21:24.860 But many of our founding fathers warned against things like having a standing army because that

00:21:30.140 encourages you to use it to go invade other places and to expand in there.

00:21:34.400 And once you do, then, you know, the interests of the areas you expand into, the foreign peoples

00:21:39.640 that you bring in, even if you're conquering them, that's going to that's going to change

00:21:43.540 the way that you do things.

00:21:44.360 And this is a tale as old as time.

00:21:45.920 This isn't some disease that's specific to America.

00:21:49.340 When Rome had a standing army, when they acquired a standing army, especially when they went through

00:21:55.600 things like the Marian reforms, where they became a more professional fighting force, it was no

00:22:00.280 longer about people who had enough money to buy their own equipment coming in instead.

00:22:06.120 Equipment and salaries were paid to the troops.

00:22:08.680 So instead of having a citizen army based on kind of your aristocratic class and your

00:22:12.980 citizen class, instead, you had a professional army that was paid to constantly kind of be

00:22:17.620 fighting and they were more mercenary.

00:22:20.100 That changes the dynamic, right?

00:22:22.220 And that's many people will point to that as one of the key turning points where the Roman

00:22:25.960 Republic turns into the Roman Empire.

00:22:28.280 Yeah, Julius Caesar and the rise of Octavian is usually marked as kind of like the final

00:22:32.840 nail in that coffin.

00:22:33.560 But that process is going on for a long time.

00:22:36.160 Why?

00:22:36.500 Well, when you got the standing army, you got to use it.

00:22:39.260 Again, Rome was expanding for a long time.

00:22:41.500 Obviously, this isn't just the Marian reforms that kind of make Rome expand.

00:22:45.260 But that's certainly a big step in that continuation.

00:22:48.240 And again, this is why so many founding fathers warned against this.

00:22:52.980 But it's very clear today that, you know, the United States is a global empire at this

00:22:58.520 point.

00:22:59.020 You know, we've expanded.

00:23:00.500 You know, we have we have boundaries that go from sea to sea.

00:23:04.760 On top of that, we got, you know, bases everywhere in the world and in places, even when we don't

00:23:10.560 have military presence, our economic presence is dominating everything.

00:23:13.980 And that means there's a lot of interest.

00:23:15.780 Everybody has some kind of interest in the United States because we're involved in everybody

00:23:20.560 else's affairs.

00:23:21.460 And so they have to be involved in ours.

00:23:23.520 And that brings in a lot of foreign interests.

00:23:26.240 And it brings a lot of people who move here who want to advocate for their own interests.

00:23:30.340 And that means you have, again, that democratic impulse is what drives your politics, not one

00:23:36.960 that is representative of kind of the core values of the people, the core traditions of the

00:23:42.500 people that started this whole thing, right, that you can't continue those if you're constantly

00:23:47.800 putting yourself in a position where you're bringing a lot of people in who are not going

00:23:52.340 to be directly connected to those values.

00:23:54.160 That's just common sense.

00:23:56.900 And so I guess here's my point.

00:23:59.800 I hear a lot of people complain about when does fast grocery delivery through Instacart

00:24:06.260 matter most when your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the

00:24:11.000 grainy mustard, when the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill when the in-laws

00:24:15.480 decide that actually they will stay for dinner.

00:24:18.460 Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer.

00:24:21.100 So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes.

00:24:24.360 Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.

00:24:28.380 Service fees exclusions and terms apply.

00:24:30.680 Instacart, groceries that over-deliver.

00:24:34.880 Basically where we are now.

00:24:36.780 They're like, oh, well, why would people keep voting for these Democrats?

00:24:42.120 Or, you know, why won't they just be smarter?

00:24:45.680 We need the electorate to be smarter.

00:24:47.560 We need the electorate to choose better.

00:24:49.580 The electorate doesn't know what's good for it.

00:24:51.080 And we have to kind of elevate the electorate.

00:24:54.360 And that's the wrong way to win in Democratic politics.

00:24:56.740 If you're lecturing your electorate, that's not helping you at all.

00:25:01.500 That's not going to improve things.

00:25:04.120 That's not the kind of system you're in.

00:25:06.120 You're not really, because you don't have a shared vision of the good.

00:25:09.060 You can't even begin to speak the same language to each other about what would be advantageous.

00:25:14.720 And you can't make persuasive arguments on shared values to people who don't share your values.

00:25:20.220 And you've kind of guaranteed that you have a population that doesn't and that you include as many of them as possible in your decision-making process.

00:25:28.140 And, again, the things that work are controlling information, controlling people's understanding of the issues, and paying them off.

00:25:37.520 Like, that's what works in a democracy.

00:25:39.560 There's a reason that democracies consistently devolve into oligarchies.

00:25:44.400 And I think it's hard to pretend that we don't have that kind of government today.

00:25:48.780 And so I think what a lot of people say, okay, Oren, that's great.

00:25:52.520 And democracy, not good.

00:25:54.540 We understand.

00:25:55.360 We're stuck in it.

00:25:56.200 Okay.

00:25:56.900 What do we do, right?

00:25:58.100 Like, what's the road back?

00:26:00.660 Because I don't want to be here anymore.

00:26:03.640 Understandable.

00:26:04.400 So a lot of people will say, okay, well, the key is fixing the Constitution, right?

00:26:08.900 We need a convention of the states.

00:26:11.000 This is an idea that's very popular with a lot of constitutional conservatives.

00:26:14.640 They say, we have a convention of the states.

00:26:18.060 We hold it outside of the Washington, D.C.

00:26:20.280 And then the Washington swamp can't get involved because, you know, we're in another state.

00:26:26.200 And it's the normal process that holds the whole thing captive isn't involved.

00:26:31.460 And you can have your own new process where people can write, you know, you can fix the interstate commerce clause.

00:26:38.120 You can fix holes in the 14th Amendment.

00:26:39.880 You can fix all these, you know, problems that we have in the Constitution now.

00:26:44.140 And then everything will be fine.

00:26:46.340 There's a problem with that.

00:26:48.760 When, again, the problem isn't just what the words of the Constitution say.

00:26:53.200 It's not like the Constitution had some bugs.

00:26:56.000 And once you kind of figure those out, then you're fine.

00:26:58.980 Constitution is a perfectly fine document for governing the people who lived under it at the time.

00:27:04.100 The problem is that we decided to fracture ourselves and expand too far.

00:27:09.300 And we have too many competing interests.

00:27:10.940 And so there's too many people interested in manipulating the language of the Constitution.

00:27:15.980 I mean, you could fix the language of the Constitution, sure.

00:27:19.120 But, I mean, look at the Second Amendment.

00:27:20.500 The Second Amendment is very clear about its intention.

00:27:22.900 And yet, you know, it took us how long until we actually got a constitutional or a Supreme Court ruling that defends, you know, you finally get the Heller ruling that defends the ability of an individual to own a firearm.

00:27:39.420 And even then, still, many areas, many Democratic areas, just ignore that constitutional ruling to this day.

00:27:46.200 And so the problem isn't just the words in the Constitution.

00:27:48.160 Because the Democrats can sit around and say, well, the Second Amendment doesn't matter.

00:27:51.900 If liberals, progressives, the left can say, well, you know, that's not what that means.

00:27:56.440 Well, you can do that to anything, right?

00:27:58.040 It doesn't matter what you say.

00:27:59.260 I mean, maybe fixing some of the words in the Constitution are good.

00:28:02.620 But it's not the expansion of the Constitution.

00:28:05.220 It's not the addition of constitutional amendments.

00:28:08.260 That's going to fix this problem.

00:28:10.780 The problem is the way that we understand ourselves as a nation.

00:28:15.400 And until we solve that problem, until we can return to a place where we have shared values and a shared understanding of the good, and we have a tradition that actually moves itself forward, that informs the way that we live our lives, the way we interact with each other, and the way that we want government to interact with us, no, this is going to get fixed.

00:28:34.740 Now, I'll be honest, and you won't be surprised by this.

00:28:37.740 I'm not very hopeful about that happening at a national level.

00:28:40.900 I don't really think that at any point you're going to see California start agreeing with Alabama.

00:28:46.940 I don't really think you're going to see New York agree with Florida, except if you keep moving all of New York to Florida.

00:28:52.480 And so the solution is probably going to be extreme federalism to the point of national divorce.

00:28:59.580 Now, I've said this many times before.

00:29:00.920 I don't think we're ever going to see like an actual secession of any of these states.

00:29:05.000 I don't think you're really going to see, you know, a formal removal kind of upfront of these states from each other.

00:29:12.860 But I think over time, there's a high degree of possibility that the incredibly incompetent system that we have now that can't keep planes in the sky, can't keep plane doors bolted on, you know, can't keep the power on.

00:29:27.420 Eventually, that system is not going to be able to control the individual states.

00:29:30.240 They're just going to lose their capacity to do that.

00:29:32.460 We're already seeing Greg Abbott in Texas possibly taking action.

00:29:36.920 I'm very interested to see what happens there.

00:29:38.620 I don't want to I don't want to count my chickens first, but he has apparently removed the Border Patrol from Eagle Pass so that his National Guard can enforce the actual boarding laws.

00:29:51.400 Since it's clear that the federal government has no interest in defending the border, he said, I'm just going to do it.

00:29:57.640 Now, this is only in one small area.

00:29:59.180 It's it's not going to fix the problem, but it's the step in the right direction.

00:30:02.560 And if more actions are taken, like Greg Abbott's, if he actually does, if this isn't just some kind of, you know, show move, if he's actually going to do this, if he's actually going to start enforcing the border, that's that those are those are real games, right?

00:30:19.340 That's not fake politics anymore.

00:30:21.460 That's not the fake GOP politics we're used to seeing.

00:30:24.020 Again, I don't know if Abbott's going to really make good on this, but if he does.

00:30:27.300 The more power to him and I hope other people follow him.

00:30:31.260 But that's the kind of stuff that could change the dynamic.

00:30:34.580 That's the kind of stuff that could actually return you to a governable size where you might be able to reinstitute something of a constitutional republic.

00:30:45.320 You could actually concentrate enough people in Texas or Florida or somewhere else where they share enough values, they share enough culture, they share enough tradition and they share enough moral vision where they could forge an identity together and then move forward with a constitutional republic or another form of government.

00:31:06.560 Who knows? Maybe, you know, I'm with Joseph de Maestro, that every nation has a has a natural form of government that kind of works with the spirit of its people.

00:31:15.560 And some might be a constitutional republic, but I don't think many are.

00:31:19.660 I think most are probably monarchical in some way or, you know, or, you know, far less democratic.

00:31:27.820 And we see this outside of the West. Right.

00:31:29.560 But, you know, I think each people does have a natural sense of the way that they run things.

00:31:34.760 And I'm not sure how that will shake out.

00:31:36.520 What I'm sure of now is that whether we like it or not, whether it was the intention of our founders or not, whether it's what Republicans want or not, what we have now is a democracy.

00:31:47.500 It's very clear that we're ruled by oligarchs through a democratic process.

00:31:53.900 And I don't like that. You may not like that.

00:31:56.260 But denying that doesn't help any of us just saying, well, it's a constitutional republic.

00:32:00.360 Sorry, it's not a republic. You couldn't keep it.

00:32:03.080 And so we have to ask now is what works in this scenario?

00:32:07.460 What works in the situation we're in now?

00:32:10.480 Maybe if we get power, we could change the scenario and make what works change.

00:32:16.880 We could change it to what we want.

00:32:18.620 But that's not the system we're in right now.

00:32:20.580 And we need to have a realistic understanding of the system we're in now if we're going to have any chance of getting out of this.

00:32:26.920 All right, guys, that's my quick rant.

00:32:29.040 Not that quick, but, you know, quick-ish rant about democracy.

00:32:34.160 I'm going to go ahead and switch over.

00:32:36.460 We've got some super chats over here.

00:32:38.260 Let me check these out real quick.

00:32:40.840 Kruber Weido says, have you tried democracying even harder, though?

00:32:44.520 That does seem to be the general kind of advice from Republicans, right?

00:32:49.480 That you should democracy as hard as possible.

00:32:51.320 If we could just democracy a little harder, we'll figure this all out.

00:32:55.120 I'm skeptical about that, but that does seem to be the refrain.

00:32:59.540 Mint 20 says, the Constitution matters exactly as much as the elite want it to.

00:33:03.100 Yeah, well, and I'll say this.

00:33:04.920 So, yes, that's true.

00:33:05.940 But in many ways, it's what the culture, what the people will let your leaders get away with, right?

00:33:14.380 Leaders who need to stay loyal to the ideas and traditions of the people have much less leeway than leaders that are not bound by that.

00:33:26.660 But you can't control that if you don't have people, right?

00:33:30.040 If you don't have a people.

00:33:30.960 If you don't have a people, then there's no way to control, there's no way to tie the elites to the values of that people.

00:33:38.540 So that's kind of an essential thing, which is why, you know, Democrats are working as hard as they can to ensure that you don't have a cohesive culture in the United States.

00:33:47.900 That you don't have cohesive traditions, moral visions in the United States, because that benefits them.

00:33:52.120 It allows them to become rootless, cosmopolitan, globalists that don't have to be tied to any specific people or tradition.

00:34:00.800 Joshua Beebe says, the conservative case for dropping the voting age from 16 to 12, service guarantee citizenship in the future, it's a long way down.

00:34:12.300 Yeah, I mean, you know, the only the only problem with the service guarantee citizenship thing right now would, of course, be that the military is controlled by very woke people.

00:34:20.700 But yeah, having some level of skin in the game is key, right?

00:34:24.340 Having some kind of way to ensure that the people who are making decisions on behalf of your country are tied to the interests of those communities and the country that it impacts.

00:34:37.000 And again, the way to do that is to tie the elites to a particular tradition, a particular people, a particular moral vision, and make sure that they're invested in that.

00:34:47.400 If the elites are rootless, if the elites are cosmopolitan, if the elites are not tied to any particular idea of the good, then they don't have to do that.

00:34:57.780 If they don't have to make any sacrifices when they make bad decisions, then they're going to make bad decisions.

00:35:02.840 And, you know, service guaranteeing citizenship is certainly one of the ways to do that.

00:35:07.460 But some mechanism by that has to be the case.

00:35:12.180 Mitt 20 says, but have you considered voting out the elite?

00:35:15.060 Uses a smug face.

00:35:16.380 Yes.

00:35:16.720 Again, very many people who do not understand how democracy operates will think that you can, you know, just kind of switch it out.

00:35:26.660 What actually happens is the elite just switch out you.

00:35:29.500 Right.

00:35:30.740 We're seeing that hit it pretty aggressively.

00:35:32.840 Tatila says, I've been reading Jefferson Davis's book and the northern elite class really haven't changed much.

00:35:40.920 The period before the Civil War was one long power grab by the North under the guise of democracy. 0.61

00:35:45.580 I mean, obviously, there's a lot of tensions.

00:35:47.460 And this is one of the problems about, you know, people reducing the Civil War to slavery.

00:35:51.480 Now, Civil War was, you know, the slavery was a significant issue at different points in the Civil War.

00:35:56.980 It's undeniable that that's the case.

00:35:59.040 But when you reduce it to just that aspect, you don't understand the context in the history.

00:36:03.940 It's very clear.

00:36:04.920 I mean, why did you have slave states fighting on the side of the Union? 0.65

00:36:08.080 You know, why did Abraham Lincoln go out of his way to say it wasn't about slavery in many cases until it became advantageous to use that as a wedge against the Confederacy gaining any kind of legitimacy among European powers?

00:36:20.820 It's a lot more complicated.

00:36:22.820 And I think you're right to point out that, you know, that you could say the North and South, and that's true. 0.87

00:36:27.940 In many ways, I think it's more the kind of the urban ruling class versus the rural in many ways.

00:36:35.360 Now, that's most, I think, aggravated in the North and South.

00:36:38.680 But if you look at Shays' Rebellion, Shays' Rebellion, which pretty much no one talks about, which led to the Constitution and the kind of the destruction of the original government of the United States, the Articles of Federation, that was a battle of the farmers and the bankers, right?

00:36:52.580 The bankers and, you know, the kind of more the urban elite who wanted a shipping empire, you know, wanted to be able to collect taxes and centralize government.

00:37:03.880 They wanted to be able to pay off their debts. That was a big part of it, too.

00:37:08.180 And so, you know, they were taxing farmers, right?

00:37:11.220 And the same thing with a lot of kind of the changes that happened throughout America.

00:37:17.140 Many times the kind of rebellions that occurred that, again, we don't talk a lot, like the Whiskey Rebellion, a lot of the changes that occurred were in this tension between the rural versus the elite or the urban elites.

00:37:30.120 You know, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, you know, that this is a big part of that contention.

00:37:36.500 And so I think that that's one of the tragedies of reducing the context of Civil War to just slavery, even though slavery is a big part, is that you don't understand the larger ramifications, the tensions that existed and still exist to this day in the United States.

00:37:54.700 KJ says the Constitution only has teeth so long as the religious values and interests of the very limited electorate and ruling elite were aligned.

00:38:03.720 Yes, 100 percent. Right.

00:38:05.000 Again, we love we love to quote people like, you know, John Adams, who said that the Constitution is only good for religious people.

00:38:18.200 All right. Doesn't work for any other. But we don't think about the implications of that. You need to have those interests, the interests align.

00:38:24.380 The wider you make the electorate, the more you expand the franchise, the less likely the interests are to be aligned.

00:38:31.860 The more likely you're going to have multiple interests that are going to buy for that.

00:38:35.340 You might say, well, or, you know, there's a lot of important interests that are added.

00:38:38.720 OK, that might be true. But what you're doing is making it more democratic.

00:38:42.380 You're no longer a constitutional republic. You're moving closer and closer to those things.

00:38:47.280 You may like that change. That's OK. You can advocate for that change.

00:38:50.120 But we just can't lie about what that does.

00:38:52.080 And we also have a hard time not noticing that as that happens, as that expansion occurs,

00:38:58.180 the leaders are less and less interested about kind of their the country's long term interests and more and more interested in factionalism or more interested in the and more and more interested in their own aggrandizement

00:39:11.040 because they can play different factions against each other or they can globalize.

00:39:14.740 You know, they can expand rather than having to deal with a core interest of particular constituencies.

00:39:22.040 Let's see. Friendly says, can you explain the purpose of a system idea as it pertains to outcomes such as Wilkel pointed out?

00:39:31.180 I don't think it's as clear as people are saying.

00:39:33.280 Sure. Yeah. So I was on Twitter and one one guy had posted.

00:39:39.840 I don't know where it came from, but explaining that the purpose of the system is what it does.

00:39:44.900 And I said, this is something I have to do a lot.

00:39:48.140 I have to explain to conservatives that your education system isn't failing.

00:39:53.080 They'll say, oh, we have a failing education system.

00:39:54.960 It's not producing, you know, people who are good at math.

00:39:57.900 It's not producing people who are good at science.

00:39:59.500 It's not producing people who can read very well.

00:40:02.440 It's not producing people who can write good papers.

00:40:05.620 And the thing is, oh, well, it's failing.

00:40:09.360 Well, no, it's not failing.

00:40:10.900 It's good at what it's what it does.

00:40:13.560 Your system now, at some point, your education system was designed to do those things.

00:40:17.700 But what it's designed to do now is increase the power of the federal government

00:40:22.000 and indoctrinate children in leftist ideology.

00:40:26.260 And it's very good at that.

00:40:27.700 The system isn't failing.

00:40:28.740 It's for what it does now.

00:40:31.840 It's been co-opted into this thing, right?

00:40:35.040 Same thing is true, say, your border security, right?

00:40:37.900 Under the Biden administration, the border security doesn't secure the border.

00:40:41.680 It just lets everybody go.

00:40:43.380 It walks them in.

00:40:44.640 It hands them like a phone.

00:40:46.300 And then it just lets them roam around the country.

00:40:48.540 Or even better, it goes out of its way to fly people or bus people to places that the Democrats want to transform.

00:40:55.740 Demographically, for their own voting advantage.

00:40:59.060 So, what is that system for?

00:41:01.460 Is it for border patrol?

00:41:03.380 Is it actually patrolling the border?

00:41:04.880 I mean, it says that, right?

00:41:06.520 So, this is a problem for conservatives.

00:41:08.240 Is they look at the name of the system and then they say, oh, well, that's what the system does.

00:41:15.200 The Department of Education educates.

00:41:17.700 The border patrol patrols the border.

00:41:20.240 But that's not the case, right?

00:41:21.880 That's not actually what those systems do.

00:41:23.560 So, that may be what they were designed to do originally.

00:41:26.920 But if you want to understand what a system does, look at what it does.

00:41:31.200 If you want to understand what a system is for, look at what it continues to do, right?

00:41:35.200 Because if a system didn't work over a long enough timeline, if it failed routinely at its intended purpose, somebody would fix it.

00:41:43.680 Someone would take steps to do that.

00:41:46.620 If they're not doing that, then that means there's an incentive to not do that.

00:41:50.400 And if it's doing the opposite, then that means there's an incentive for it to produce that result instead.

00:41:57.040 So, a lot of my time is spent explaining to conservatives, no, this system is selecting for something.

00:42:06.120 Just because it has a specific name, just because you slapped something, a name on something, doesn't mean that's actually what it does.

00:42:12.960 And so, you need to be looking at what result it's intentionally and consistently producing, understand its real function, not just the name that's slapped on the side of the building.

00:42:24.320 That's one of the problems for conservatives. 0.95

00:42:26.640 They're like, well, just reform this institution to do what it's supposed to do.

00:42:29.540 Except everything about that institution is now specifically altered to do something else.

00:42:35.180 The FBI isn't there to stop crime at this point.

00:42:39.880 It still stops some crime, but the FBI is very clearly, in addition to whatever else functions it performs, the FBI is very aggressively an organization created to punish right-wing voters, right?

00:42:53.140 To punish people like Trump supporters.

00:42:55.420 That's its purpose.

00:42:57.240 And just going like, well, it says the Bureau of Federal Investigation, so it must investigate crime.

00:43:01.620 That's the only thing it could do.

00:43:02.960 Well, no.

00:43:03.560 Actually, no.

00:43:04.820 It's very clear that we don't investigate Antifa.

00:43:07.780 Antifa, in fact, the FBI director will specifically tell you Antifa is just an idea, right?

00:43:13.560 So, if the job of the FBI was to investigate crime and Antifa are criminals, why aren't they investigating Antifa?

00:43:19.500 Well, you could say, oh, the FBI is broken.

00:43:22.280 Well, no, actually.

00:43:23.800 The FBI is doing what it's intended to do now.

00:43:26.700 Maybe not what it was intended to do when it started, but most certainly what it's intended to do now.

00:43:30.680 So, the purpose of the FBI, whatever its original purpose, its purpose now is to make a partisan difference when it comes to law enforcement.

00:43:43.800 Its purpose is to get rid of people or put people in jail or prosecute people or scare people who vote Republican.

00:43:52.960 Again, that's its purpose.

00:43:54.860 It may do some other things.

00:43:56.020 It stops some important crime still.

00:43:58.960 But that's a key part of its function now is it's a secret police force.

00:44:03.580 It's a Praetorian Guard for Joe Biden.

00:44:07.280 Not really Joe Biden.

00:44:08.100 He's not really running anything.

00:44:09.360 He's a senile old man who can barely find his door to go where he's going.

00:44:14.480 Whoever's running the government, that's what they're for.

00:44:17.300 They're there for protecting them.

00:44:18.540 So, that's what I meant by that.

00:44:19.860 That's what I was getting at.

00:44:21.400 Locals got an agenda, so he was just angrily running off with something else.

00:44:25.340 He wasn't even really addressing the point.

00:44:26.760 He just wanted to be angry.

00:44:29.620 Super Joe's Midlife Crisis says,

00:44:31.360 Oren, very simple message to repeat from now on.

00:44:35.700 What works for the whole rightoid sphere, Wiggs Delinda asked.

00:44:39.720 Yeah, we're getting rid of Wig history for sure. 1.00

00:44:43.640 That is critical.

00:44:46.480 And then Friendly says,

00:44:47.480 Yes, I understand those arguments,

00:44:48.720 but what about the argument that the systems are designed to imprison black people? 0.60

00:44:52.580 Again, yeah. 0.54

00:44:53.100 So, I don't know.

00:44:55.380 Again, Wokal is just getting angry. 1.00

00:44:58.240 So, you'll have to ask him what he was trying to understand there.

00:45:03.280 He was misunderstanding the entire argument, I think probably on purpose.

00:45:06.460 And so, I mean, he's Canadian.

00:45:11.840 He's kind of a leftist.

00:45:13.060 I don't know what to tell you.

00:45:14.080 He wouldn't probably describe himself as such.

00:45:15.800 But, I mean, he's playing those games for a reason.

00:45:18.600 I don't know what else to tell you.

00:45:19.920 All right, guys.

00:45:20.540 So, let's go ahead and wrap this up.

00:45:22.920 I think that's all of the chats for today.

00:45:26.280 Thank you, everybody, for coming by.

00:45:28.120 It was great talking to you.

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00:45:36.280 I get a lot of people saying,

00:45:37.400 Hey, I don't know when the streams are coming on.

00:45:38.920 I know, YouTube.

00:45:39.860 You got to do the notification thing.

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00:45:44.000 And, of course, if you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts,

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00:45:55.060 It really helps with the algorithm magic.

00:45:57.040 Tell everybody about the show.

00:45:58.780 Appreciate you guys spreading the word.

00:46:00.840 And, as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - January 12, 2024

A Quick Rant About Democracy ｜ 1⧸12⧸24

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