This project started when I read an article about Aung San Suu Kyi, a woman described in the press as a “pro-democracy activist”. She seems by all accounts to be a genuinely admirable woman, who has put herself in no small amount of personal peril by opposing what appears to be a very nasty and repressive government in her home country. For this, she deserves real praise, however, if her answer to a terrible government is more democracy, I believe that she is seriously wrongheaded. In fact, democracy – by which I mean any system of popular sovereignty, including the vaunted representative republics of the west – is a dangerous, awful form of government; corrosive to tradition, faith, and decency, a seedbed for libertinism and insolvency, and ultimately doomed to degeneration and collapse. It is perhaps not the worst system of government ever devised (that honor belongs to the execrable, and thankfully mostly-abandoned system of Communism), but it is not far behind at all, and any flippant defense that “it’s the worst, except for all the others” is thoughtless, unexamined nonsense. Furthermore, democracy is, I am sorry to tell Mrs. Kyi, no guarantee of liberty (which is, I believe, what she actually wants in her country), and the conflation of voting with liberty, much less with good government, is the great fraud of our time – which, considering that we live in an age of fraud, is quite an accomplishment.
My ideas are not ones that in any sense easily mappable to the current political landscape. What the “right” seems to be these days confounds me; what the “left” is horrifies me. I am a reactionary; a traditionalist – I have seen what almost everyone on the “right” has not; that democracy is inherently leftist and irreligious. The longer it exists, the further towards the left and away from God and tradition it goes. There is no fixing or reforming that fact. There is no amount of voting for this or that party, or candidate, which will fix it. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature, and the problem with the “right” is that they have not yet woken up to the stark and inescapable truth: you can have your God, your culture, and your traditions (and economic solvency while we’re at it, though that’s another story), or you can have democracy. But you can’t have both. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to make a choice.
I have, and so I am that rarest of voices; an anti-democracy activist. This isn’t a joke, or a “troll”, it’s not a “Modest Proposal”-type satire or a Colbert-style hipster mockery of these ideas. It is simply the truth.
And if not democracy, what then? All government is a necessary evil, but of all of the available choices, I agree with Hans-Hermann Hoppe that monarchy is generally the least worst of them – though whether an absolute hereditary monarchy is really the best system is a subject for some valid debate. I retain a certain fondness for a Venetian-style monarch, elected from among an aristocracy and beholden to several competing centers of power in civil life, all of which he must strive to keep satisfied.
But really, if there’s anything my time on Planet Earth has shown me, it’s that if one values good government and a stable, virtuous civil society, almost anything is preferable to democracy.
That said, I do not plan to start with my complete case against democracy. This space will contain my thoughts on all manner of subjects relating to, as Count Evola might say, “life among the ruins”. Some postings will be long and complicated, others short and sweet; some will be in rapid succession, and others may have longish spaces between them. If it pleases you, I will be happy; but I write it only for myself, because I must.
Let the activism begin!
AntiDem 