the case for threatening democracy

assessing the greatest threat to liberty: the call is coming from inside the house

every time i hear the phrase “threat to democracy” i start looking for the railroading or the scam. i do not think that’s it’s an accident that this unctuous utterance has become such common canon of late, i think it’s a sign of how prolific have become the schiesters and the snakes.

“defending democracy” is the false equivalence moral turpitude doppelganger of liberty clothed in the skinsuit of morality.

it portrays itself as the solution.

but it is, in fact, the problem.

liberty is neither created nor supported by democracy, it is destroyed by it. popular mandate serving as a sovereign is at once more tyrannical and less accountable than any king or despot. tyranny of the majority is ruthless, reckless, and impossibly stupid. it’s also implacable and damn near impossible to stand against because it has the backing of the mob behind it. this is well understood, but there is another, less appreciated aspect here, and that is:

“democracy is inherently immoral and a corrupter and destroyer of such ethics as once stood foundational to high trust societies of liberty and justice.”

this is a big claim. let’s explore:

i would argue that ideas like “democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard” from the always on point sage of baltimore are, alas, an optimistic case because, while absolutely accurate, they are only a first order idea. they focus on the “given the chance, people will vote for bad and shortsighted ideas and plunder one another” aspect.

but it’s the second order effect that’s the real killer.

consider the tytler cycle with which many here will be familiar.

many of these steps are so clear as to not require discussion, but let’s talk about one in particular: selfishness to apathy. how does that happen?

it happens when faith is lost and, perhaps worse, when the idea of being able to have such faith is lost.

this is not just a loss of trust but a loss of the idea of trust, of the concept that high trust is possible and that one can repeatedly sustain a high equilibrium of non defection in an iterative prisoners’s dilemma.

it happens when even those capable and willing to exhibit low time preference and to pass a marshmallow test of forgoing immediate smash and grab to have more in the future stop trying to pass the test because they stop believing in the idea that there will be a second marshmallow for good boys and girls. and where this calculus gets truly savage is when one can ask the question “well, are they correct about there being no second marshmallow?” and the answer is “yeah, they probably are.”

“it’s all about to go to hell in a bucket” is a real challenge for holding things together.

see where this leads?

this is the voting of largesse to self from the public purse. entitlements are one example, but there are 1000 more from subsidies to tax breaks to quotas and DEI, every damn thing from healthcare to scholarships to NGO grants, to industry porkulous graft, and cash for clunkers.

the US federal government and a fair few states and cities are deep diving in red ink with no obvious path out.

the problem is that there are no sidelines. you cannot sit it out, refuse to participate, decline to play. you can refuse to take, but you cannot refuse to pay. no amount of disinterest in this game will deter it from being interested in you. honestly, it will probably make it worse.

so where is the profit from morality or patience or trust in that?

how can one survive remaining high trust in an ecosystem where the apex predator is the demos?

once the ability to vote for such things is granted widely/universally, it sets off a moral rot, a fundamental destruction of the character of the demos. such a “democracy” is inevitably a system of plunder, that which takes from some that which is theirs and gives it to others and that preferences one group above another making prerogatives and rights unequal and negative sum predatory. it’s two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner menus and everyone feels like they have to stay in some sort of majority gang so they don’t get caught out and eaten.

this inherently destroys trust because where the ruler is the mob, then the majority shall always gang up upon the minority, and there are only two roles in this amorality play: boot and buttock and one shall forever kick the other and everyone has to play a part.

and the third order effect of this is perhaps worst of all because such regimes of mob plunder and predation never come and ring the doorbell and say “landshark, here to eat you!” they gin up and proselytize vast song and dance numbers of justification and rationalization to describe their predatory mob piracy as virtue and justice and use the mob itself as justification for mob tyranny.

once you mistake democracy for liberty or justice, “the majority rules” defense can paper over just about any behavior and pass off whatever caustic urine is being showered upon we the people next as the gentle rain of equity and inclusion.

bill maher had some interesting comments (here) on the constitution, but this one really struck me:

he laments this as a bad thing, but given what public schools are currently construing as history and civics, perhaps we’re actually winning here. the curriculums have become abject trash of a past that never was where the founders and framers were evil and history is written by the sinners who want you to believe that government is the solution and that tyranny of the majority validates it all muddled up in one big ball of the civics of popular kleptocracy.

all this “defense of democracy” is a pirate confederation vilifying pirate hunters. it’s an impositional and inculcated moral rot standing as the bodyguard of lies that defends the plunder and abrogation against those with an enthusiasm for the rights of the individual.

and it’s neither optional or accidental; it’s inevitable and emergent.

you cannot get “smarter guys next time” or “educate the demos so that democracy provides liberty” because democracy itself is antithetical to liberty and morality. democracy is mob rule supplanting self-rule.

it’s a game of plunder that everyone is forced to play and that punishes morality and marshmallow test passing by knocking it down, stealing its wallet, and then making up a story about how this was good and just and demanding that this be called ethics and empathy. you want to understand how selfishness becomes apathy? that’s how.

the whole system becomes a prisoner’s dilemma failure state race to the bottom as mob surges against mob to see who can tyrannize whom while making up the best justification theater about having done so.

this is universal solvent for ethics and a sort of infinite epoxy to corrupt and ossify institutions of majoritarian tyranny.

the calculus gets dark.

when not only do those who do the right thing not get a second marshmallow tomorrow but the demos then comes ‘round to take the first one too and when, if your tribe is not using the system to extract advantage over other groups then you just get preyed upon and taken advantage of until you stand as second class citizenry and milch-cow to the mob all while being expected to tug your forelock and give thanks for the privilege and fed some line of “original sin” doctrine that you somehow had this coming and that “popular suffrage justifies popular suffering,” well, of what use is objective morality?

pretty much none.

but moral people do not go away and high function, high trust objective moralists who internally instantiate ideas like golden rules begetting golden ages will only stand for so much of the plunder, decline, and vilification before they remember ideas like “rights standing paramount to the state and the whims of the demos and the facile story spinning it uses to justify running roughshod upon you” used to work pretty damn well and would again if returned to primacy.

provocation mounts until that which is unendurable ceases to be endured.

apathy begets dependence and dependence bondage and all of it encourages and elevates moral decay because such a decadent state is the soil required for democracy to appear a solution rather than a problem and for the mob to go on casting wreckage as progress.

and while i suspect this will not be much of a “spoiler alert” moment, you know what fixes this?

hint: it’s not democracy.

past a certain level of corruption, you simply cannot fix a system from within. you need to step outside the rules and this creates some very strange math. people see “dictatorship” as the sort of gutter ball state of “well, you failed” and while this can certainly be true, it’s also possible that it’s essentially the only antibiotic left that will kill the infection and create the possibility of recovery.

this is not to speak in favor of dictatorship as some swell idea. it’s a deeply dangerous genie to summon and one whose historical track record is generally (but not inevitably) pretty grim. it has manyfold flaws and dangers but, and this is the real rub here, there are never perfect solutions, there are only trade offs and there is such a thing as a current system that is so bad and debased that the objectively moral high trust marshmallow test passer golden rulers start looking at the lamp and saying “yeah, it’s an evil genie, but is it really worse than this? at least i recognize him.”

questions like “are we not basically in a dictatorship already?” get asked alongside “could a king actually be any more tyrannical than these freaking lunatics?”

notions like “collapse is coming and someone is going to jump in and be tyrant, so better if it’s us than the other guy” pervade. and both sides of the US political spectrum are doing this right now. and both think that the other either wants to become a dictator or perhaps already is, neither trusts the other, and their moral visions have become not only incompatible but incomprehensible to one another as the war for the justification source code for mob rule edges ever closer to going hot.

this is a perfect table set to fail a prisoner’s dilemma and if you really, sincerely believe that the other side is going to do this, doing it first and doing it so hard that it cannot be resisted or rolled back becomes the rational choice, even for people who conceive that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. past a point, a mugging becomes so egregious that you just stop caring about those who voted for it and you exclude them from your social contract and the social contract that remains goes to war.

we are not outside of history nor of these cycles no matter how aggressively we fail to teach it or newspeak mindwipe it away. it can happen here. centers can and will fail to hold and dictatorship does get loosed upon the world, often by people who just saw no other path back to civil society and basic rights and (perhaps aptly) conclude that a tin hat tyrant would be a helluva lot better and less oppressive a ruler than the rapacious race to the bottom of the mob DBA “the demos.”

it’s bleak stuff. i do not lay this out as blackpill or as inevitability, i lay it out as reality. this is what is happening and will happen if we keep this up. no great civilization has yet passed this test and navigated the scylla and charybdis of collapse and dissolution vs dictatorship without either winding up in the whirlpool or the monster tummy, but that does not mean it cannot be done.

we can get a hold of the state, stop acting like jerks about wielding its power to rob and rugpull one another and get the fiscal house in order before it ruins us, but that window is finite and we’re running out of runway which makes it all the more upsetting that we seem to be mostly arguing about all the wrong things and reveling in our inability to even secure elections as opposed to, say, “balancing the budget” and eliminating the power of the state to take and redistribute and to pick winners and losers.

if you want civilization back, you need to slay leviathan. morality and equity and comity cannot survive a state this big driven by the demos. the perverse incentives and prisoner’s dilemmas it creates are the fountainhead of moral rot, a race to debase trust and rights and to join the mob of looters.

that’s what needs to be internalized.

mob rule cannot be an end or value unto itself and anyone telling you that it can is either a fool or an aspiring majoritarian tyrant.

the true role of any just state is never “protecting democracy” it’s “protecting we the people from democracy.”

democracy ends in dictatorship.

a rights based republic is the path away from one.

and one has to choose.

“i didn’t say that it would be easy, only that it would be the truth”