Not despite democracy, because of democracy
The failure of the right regarding tyranny of the bio-security state during the COVID outbreak has been notable.
A video clip on Twitter showed Australian policemen beating protestors opposed to movement restrictions, ones so harsh that they amounted to house arrest. The police were armoured and wielded truncheons, their targets were ordinary people, dazed and fallen to the ground. The top comment read, “I can’t believe this is happening despite us living in a democracy”. The reply below read, “It is happening BECAUSE you live in a democracy”.
The logic of representative democracy is the rule of the people for the people. In practice, it needs a ruling class to determine what “rule of the people” looks like. Oddly, whatever the answer, it always corresponds with the priorities of the ruling elite. The people will then be allowed to vote on the colour of the rosettes worn by the leaders; these politicians will cut the cake of resources slightly differently and pass around the slices in a different order than their rivals, though in all other respects the political groups are identical. When the governing elites determined that it would go into business with the pharmaceutical industry – using the handpicked experts and weighted polls, bribing and cajoling mass - and social-media giants – the putative liberties of both the compliant and the dissident populations were erased. There was no popular vote, representatives no longer responded to the electorate and (in the case of some countries) democracy was actually officially suspended outright.
The sham of democracy is dead but why has the right failed to identify this, at least publicly? The failure of the right regarding tyranny of the bio-security state during the COVID outbreak has been notable. While libertarians and English/classical liberals – that is, those of them who acted as they professed – retained some dignity and integrity in their dissent in their opposition, the right collapsed. In the face of unnecessary and intrusive medical procedures, invasion of privacy and restrictions on commerce, travel and family and private life, the right remained resolutely silent and failed to defend the individual. If the right had said, “You can see democracy only exists so long as the figment of its legitimacy serves the leftist liberal elite that controls the state; choose a more honest path,” it might have gained legitimacy and support.
It is not clear why the right has been so mute on lockdowns. If the right still considers that being honest about the dishonesty of democracy unacceptable, then they are not really on the right. If they worry about opposing democracy because they fear being shamed by the mass media or failing to win elections, then they are not really on the right.
The right should take up a saying, some sort of mantra or litany, along the lines of this: “Vaccine passports in France, mask mandates in America, closed churches in Canada, shot protestors in Rotterdam, quarantine camps in Australia. Democracy did not protect you. Democracy did this to you.” This is the sort of thing that should be learned by heart and taken as a foundational myth of the dissidents of the post-COVID age. Not, of course, a myth in the sense that it is untrue, but one that embodies a foundational creed. Something like this should be repeated in articles and online comments and podcast discussions. It is a saying that embodies what dissenters – rightists, reactionaries, English/classical liberals, libertarians and Christians – understand about the coercive power of elite technocrats operating via representative democracy. It is also something a curious sceptic could pick up and ponder. It is irrefutably true; it establishes the pattern; it shows how democracy was the route to injustice, not a defender against it.
Yes, to be sure, tyranny and injustice are not caused solely by democracy. However, those who live under theocracies, monarchies, autocracies, dictatorships and tribal societies realise that power has a will to power and that the average person exercises no power. It is only under the illusion of democracy that the average person is deluded into thinking he has a say, that the body politic protects individual freedoms and that he is ultimately sovereign. That has never been the case under any system of rule in any era; it is just that men living under non-democracy know the truth.
In a society with a robust leadership, one that was not beholden to a mass media that demanded lockdowns and a social media that censored dissent – and without the power to suppress these agents of fear and cowardice – that leadership could assess the danger and decide that there was no reason to punish the population, spend the state into bankruptcy, humiliate the people and waste precious credibility on an insignificant threat. Under such circumstances, autocracy protects the population against the wishes of the media, academia and international corporations. People can be freer under autocracy – both practically and in terms of intellectual understanding of how society functions – than under a representative democracy. Once people understand that, both future elites and the general population itself will come to see the benefits of doing away with representative democracy.
