Redefining Democracy
Could dictatorship be democracy’s “most authentic expression?
Over the years I have seen how Conservatives have changed over time. Old Conservatives like Eisenhower and Nixon were at peace with Liberalism. The Neocons that followed paid it lip service while the current iteration considers it the Enemy Within
Going back further in time we see that the majority of the Founders were Federalists they formed the Federalist Party of John Adams and many members would eventually become the Republican Party while the Democratic Republicans would split and many members joined the Democratic Party , while the Republican faction would join with the Whigs and become the Republican Party. Oversimplification maybe and some histories will reverse this since its become politicized, but no matter. Today we just got 2 choices but even as the name stays the evolution continues
John Adams of The Federalist Party was our first Vice President and 2nd President. He was born in the City of Presidents (Quincy, MA) where I grew up. He is known for the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 which he used to jail anyone who criticized him when he was President, including Ben Franklins grandson, Congressmen and a number of Newspaper publishers and journalists. Fortunately the Sedition Act expired in 1801 after he left office
Now what about Liberalism? Seems everyone has their own definition about various -ism’s but this is how JFK described it in 1960
What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label, "Liberal"? If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of "Liberal." But, if by a "Liberal," they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties—someone who believes that we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say that I'm a "Liberal.
It was a nice balance, liberals and conservatives were like the Yin and the Yang, complementing each other and resisting excesses by one or the other.
Of course, as Conservatives changed Liberals have as well, and neither for the better. In fact the liberal has gone out of liberals, at least when it comes to the welfare of all the people and being against War and Genocide and supporting free speech. Neither party is recognizable if compared to 1960
Eisenhower/Nixon Republicans would be called liberals today. Today both Parties and most of their followers only espouse economic liberalism, also known as neoliberal economics and bend the knee to Corporate Interests preaching free markets while subsidizing and protecting these markets with regulations to stifle competition, and providing subsidies and bail outs to these corporations, levying Tarrifs to protect them and even going to war to open up markets and resources for them. They call it Public Private Partnership (Mussolini called it Corporatism) and anything that gets in the way of profits is their enemy. That enemy includes you if you oppose them, much like with John Adams and The Federalist Party of 1798
Our elections are now dominated by big money from these Corporate Billionaires and their Super Pacs and their control of MSM and Social Media Platforms. Far different than elections in the 1960’s and 1970’s although money was still important but far less so since far less money was required thanks to the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time regulations. Voters could make up their own minds without relentless online nudging and one sided MSM/social influencers propaganda campaigns
So not only does Big Money control the Politicians and Government it also influences what Voters think to the point of Brain Washing of both the Left and Right using MSM, Social Media Platforms and Hollywood
To the Voter, Politics now is a mix of entertainment, sport and warfare. Facts are no longer important, all that matters is does it help your team win. No lie is too big for them to swallow and parrot, even when they know its a lie. Debate and reason are useless exercises except for some neutral bystanders in the middle, and many of them just pop in to see which way the wind is blowing and go with who they think will win or vote for who is funnier, cute or more entertaining
Which leads me to the point of this post. Like Politics Democracy is not a static thing. It evolves. We used to be a Republic then then became a Democratic Republic and then just a Democracy followed by having the Illusion of a Democracy but being more like a 2 Party Friendly Fascist State with Elections resembling Fake Wrestling.
One can argue the precise definitions but the point is there has been an evolution over time which has been constrained by the Constitution. Thats a good thing.
The Bad Thing is that following a failed bid to redo the Constitution with a Constitutional Convention in 1975 they did the next best thing. The Elite controlling both parties weakened the Constitution using SCOTUS
Today SCOTUS is dominated by judges who just make shit up to protect the Elite owned Corporations and Party that they are loyal to.
The Constitution is no longer a restraint to eliminating even the illusion of Democracy
Two words you will never see in the Constitution. Party or Corporation. The modern corporation was not yet in existence. The only corporations then were chartered by the state or church for a purpose serving church or state interests.
Yet somehow SCOTUS imagines not only that the Founders wish to give Corporations the same rights as Citizens while also allowing for privileges Citizens don’t have (lower taxes, eternal life and not having to go to jail when they break the law), but that their interests supersede the interests of the general welfare of its human citizens. Watch them do the same with AI.
So now we have a 3 Party Partnership. SCOTUS, Government, Global Corporations.
Pharma can misrepresent clinical trial data to get approval from FDA that harms human citizens but the courts taking is cue from SCOTUS says its OK since this is the Artificial Citizens Free Speech Right. Seriously. Clown World for sure.
Now to get to my main point I am going to continue doing my Trump Weave and take you back to 1932.
During my reading of Peter Thiels papers I noticed he made frequent mention of Carl Schmitt.
Schmitt’s earlier work laid the foundations the German Conservative Revolution and the Third Reich where he became known as the “Crown Jurist”. I suppose its a coincidence that Thiel was born in Germany and like Musk lived in Apartheid South Africa
Disgusted by the political impasses of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s post-World War I experiment with democracy, Schmitt constantly assailed liberalism for being overbearing and hypocritical, for trying to ram pluralistic tolerance down people’s throats.
Schmitt elaborated on the ideas that would make his name, including the “friend-enemy” distinction, “decisionism” and the “state of exception.”
Genuine politics, he maintained, was not a matter of negotiating among different interests and compromising accordingly. Politics was about distinguishing between friend and enemy.
Given such apocalyptic thinking, Schmitt scorned the endless haggling of “the liberal constitutional tendency” and venerated the decisionism of an unencumbered sovereign.
A “state of exception,” or a state of emergency, “is principally unlimited authority,” he wrote. The sovereign has the right to total power — and gets to decide when to claim it: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”
A real democracy requires “elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.” Then it could dispense with liberalism, with all of its onerous rules and procedures, which only served to thwart a homogeneous people’s will.
“Democracy and dictatorship could become not only perfectly compatible,” Jan-Werner Müller writes in “A Dangerous Mind,” his critical study of Schmitt; but dictatorship could in fact be democracy’s “most authentic expression.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/books/review/carl-schmitt-jd-vance.html
The philosophical basis for Thiel’s founding of Palantir is found in an essay titled “The Straussian Moment,” published in 2007 in the volume Politics and Apocalypse, to explore the relationship of the ideas of Leo Strauss and his friend Carl Schmitt.
According to Thiel, adopting Schmitt’s rejection of the Enlightenment, 9/11 “called into question… the entire political and military framework of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and indeed of the modern age.”
Effectively, Thiel believes that the West has become squeamish about violence, as a legacy of the Enlightenment and its search for rational alternatives. Instead, Thiel proposes, Schmitt’s the Concept of the Political, helps us to realize that the dichotomy of us versus an enemy is inevitable.
https://ordoabchao.ca/volume-six/techno-libertarianism
Schmitt showed how authoritarians can claim the mantle of democracy by basing their legitimacy not on divine right, but on the support of the “true” people against foreigners or others outside of the homogenous polity
A government is “democratic,” Schmitt argues, if it bases its legitimacy on support from the people’s will. But this depends on how you define the “people” and choose to assess their “will.” …..by definition, no democracy rests on universal human equality before the law. Instead, the idea of “equality” in democracy really means equality amongst the people in a political community that shares a certain identity and core agreements.
He wrote in a 1926 preface to the second edition of Crisis. “Every actual democracy rests on the principle that not only are equals equal but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity.”
The false notion of universal equality, Schmitt argues, is a liberal concept rather than a democratic one—and “modern mass democracy rests on the confused combination of both.”
Democracy is not compatible with Liberalism. Peter Thiel prefers to say Democracy is not compatible with Freedom but Freedom is but a subset of Liberalism
Politics, for Schmitt, is primarily and essentially about defining who is a “friend” (inside the political community) and who is an “enemy” (outside of it and, thus, a potential target for violence). Politics in Democracy will necessarily come into conflict with liberalism—which seeks to supplant conflict and exclusion, the true essences of politics, with impossible attempts at universality.
Schmitt claimed that every democracy must always exclude someone in some manner. It did not matter, for Schmitt, what the reasons for that exclusion were. “Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy,” he writes in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political.
So long as people on the right side of the line provided popular support for the government, it could claim the mantle of democracy. Those on the other side did not matter or may even be designated as the domestic “enemy”—one that could be legitimately marginalized, warred upon, and even exterminated.
Schmitt provided a blueprint for engaging in democratic politics that replaces equality, the foundational idea of democracy in its modern iteration, with hierarchy—specifically, the hierarchy of one group over all others.
By positioning his argument not as an attack on democracy, but a democratic attack on liberalism, he invented a kind of authoritarian politics that operates fully inside of democracy without ideological contradiction.
Schmitt argues that both Communism and fascism are “certainly antiliberal but not necessarily antidemocratic.” Even though Schmitt admits that “Italian Fascism seems to place no value on being ‘democratic’” in its rhetoric, it still attempts to appeal to a homogenous group of Italians and build a mass political state—thus for him qualifying as a potentially democratic political movement.
Before Hitler took over as an unelected Dictator Germanys Conservative Movement had some uncanny parallels to today
Consider the words of Herman Heller in 1933. He was Schmitts contemporary opponent. Heller was born in Austria in 1891, fought during the World War on the Eastern front where he suffered a heart disease that caused later on his death in 1934, or so we are told. Heller was a prominent figure in the disputes among public lawyers in the Weimar Republic, debating Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt regarding questions of sovereignty and the relation between law and politics
He wrote
Upper-class bourgeois capitalism demonstrates the greater force of assimilation; conservatism becomes bereft of all social ainhibitions and is drained of its last drop of social oil. Hugenberg, former director of Krupp and a newspaper mogul, becomes the chairman of the former conservative party.
Matching this sociological transformation, the ‘authoritarian’ state represents a consistent further development of national liberalism. Most appropriately, it is to be addressed as authoritarian liberalism.
Note: referring to economic liberalism, as in todays neoliberal economics
Choosing this designation for the political ambition of liberalism is justified primarily by how its proponents position themselves vis-à-vis the cardinal problem of the present, that is, the question of the economic order. For as soon as it concerns the economy, the ‘authoritarian’ state waives its authority altogether. Its purportedly ‘conservative’ spokesmen recognise merely one slogan: Freedom of the economy from the state!
Emphatically, Papen avows ‘the idea of the private economy’ and the ‘initiative and free labor power of all economically active people’. He wants the state and the economy to be ‘strictly’ separate from one another.
Note: Of course separation is an impossibility. Like today what resulted was a partnership although unlike today the leading partner became the state
The state has to take up a full ‘retreat’ from the economy. The conservatives who are excited about the ‘authoritarian’ state look confusingly similar to the old Manchester men if they, like Papen, want chiefly to avoid ‘undercutting the economy’s agility through new artificial constructions.
The fact that millions believe with religious fervour in redemption from all plight through belief in the Führer—to an extent going far beyond anything explicable in sociological terms—exacerbates the by no means minor difficulty of forming political majorities and forming democratic governments.
Note: Today the Savior Complex is no less real
In a crisis-ridden state of exception, a conception of the state that—like Carl Schmitt’s—declares rules and norms as insignificant and the exception as decisive can be successful. For a year and a half, this conception has attempted to demote democratic authority in favour of the dictatorial authority of the state.
Note:Today we call it State of Emergency or National Emergency which Trump says he will declare on day 1 to combat illegal aliens
Carl Schmitt, on the basis of an altogether audacious logic, seeks to present the state of exception as the true and proper ordinary state, and to espouse the permanent autocratic dictatorship, unrestricted to emergencies, as the true democracy.
Note: We have pretty much remained in a perpetual State of Emergency since 1933
Basically, he recognises only a single ‘authoritarian’ state, namely the fascist dictatorship as epitomised by Mussolini, which in its ‘ancient simplicity’ imposes on the whole of political life the will of one man. For the ‘greater glory’ of this ‘authoritarian’ state, all institutions and ideas of constitutional democracy need to be stripped of their authority.
Papen, however, would not be the representative fighter for the ‘authoritarian’ state if he were not simultaneously fighting against the ‘welfare state’.
Note: Papen was national conservative, he served as the chancellor of Germany in 1932, and then as the vice-chancellor under Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1934. Papen is largely remembered for his role in bringing Hitler to power.
Papen, believing that Adolf Hitler could be controlled once he was in the government, pressured Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor and Papen as vice-chancellor in 1933 in a cabinet ostensibly not under Nazi Party domination. Seeing military dictatorship as the only alternative to a Nazi Party chancellor, Hindenburg consented. Papen and his allies were quickly marginalized by Hitler and he left the government after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, during which the Nazis killed some of his allies and confidants.
Presumably this does not mean abstinence on the part of the state where subsidising large banks, large industry and large agricultural enterprises is concerned. Rather, it means the authoritarian dismantling of social policy. Through the mouth of its apologist Schotte, the authoritarian government of Mr. von Papen teaches us that health insurance has done damage to public health and that unemployment is not worker’s fate—‘the abundance of moonlighting proves that’. Unemployment insurance has to be regarded as nonsense: ‘most often, the individual has to help himself!’
According to Mr. von Papen, the ‘authoritarian’ state is of course social, but von Papen defines as social a state ‘that defends work as a duty, as the psychological happiness of its people’
Aside from retreating from economic and social policy, this ‘authoritarian’ state is supposed to retreat from socio-cultural policy as well.
Formerly, the conservative in Prussia took pride in compulsory schooling and in the school principal that purport- edly prevailed in the battle of Königgrätz. Today we hear from Mr. von Papen that one will have to examine the tendencies of cultural policy from the standpoint of downsizing state activity. Indeed, the state was ‘not obliged to offer general education as a “handout”; those entitled to it should make sacrifices on their own. That the expenses for elementary school education have tripled since the time prior to the War is, I believe, an untenable situation’.
Note: DOGE will deliver the same downsizing of state activity directed toward social benefits. Musks Defense Contracts will be safe
Through these references, a rough estimate of the substance of authoritarian liber-lalism appears to have been more or less adequately characterised: retreat of the ‘authoritarian’ state from social policy, liberalisation (Entstaatlichung) of the economy and dictatorial control by the state of politico-intellectual functions.
According to Schmitt’s quite credible reassurances, such a state has to be strong and ‘authoritarian’, for only a state of this type is able to sever the ‘excessive’ connections between the state and the economy. Of course, the German people would not tolerate for long this neoliberal state if it ruled in democratic forms.
Possibly, the German citizen takes comfort for now from the reassurances given by Carl Schmitt to the Langnam Association to the effect that an enhancement of the power of the state was precipitated through an increase of technological means, especially military technology, by contrast with which all earlier ideas of revolutions and revolt would pale into insignificance.
Note: Imagine what they could have done with todays Technology
History may not repeat but it may rhyme, and today sounds an awful lot like 1932
Conclusion- Todays Conservative Revolution led by Billionaires Thiel and Musk (Todays PAPEN) and other Tech Populists and using Trumps Political Populism as a Front intend to Reinvent the definition of Democracy. Dictatorship is Democracy. Will they have better luck than Papen?
Maybe we will still be able to vote or maybe as Trump told a Catholic audience during the Election that “You wont have to Vote anymore”.
Anyone opposed to this is the Enemy Within
On June 1, 1798 — two weeks before the Alien & Sedition Acts passed Congress by a single vote — Jefferson wrote a thoughtful letter to his old friend John Taylor.
“This is not new,” Jefferson said. “It is the old practice of despots; to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order. And those who have once got an ascendancy and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantage. “But,” he added, “our present situation is not a natural one.”
Donald Trump has told us he’s going to use the Act and the 1807 Insurrection Act to declare a state of emergency, which will allow him to round up not only undocumented immigrants but also his political opponents, who he refers to as “the enemy within.”
Hopefully I am wrong. I guess time will tell.
"It was a nice balance, liberals and conservatives were like the Yin and the Yang, complementing each other and resisting excesses by one or the other. / Of course, as Conservatives changed Liberals have as well, and neither for the better. In fact the liberal has gone out of liberals ... Neither party is recognizable if compared to 1960... [etc. etc.]"
Could we first try to distill our labels by focusing on the words themselves? Everywhere (obviously well beyond this essay, and for many decades), we get lost in the weeds, but I don't think it's rocket science.
-- Liberal and Conservative are both, literally, terms of time relativism that should not have any permanence with policy.
-- In America, Democratic and Republican are both de facto shells for 150-200 years. Each uses an ostensibly necessary American characteristic, but each has been used for the names of our now permanent-duopoly parties for all kinds of reasons.
We know quite well that all four of them continually change connotations and actual policy and behavior so that it all now looks FUBAR.
-- Instead, I'd say we need to get back to use of consistent Left and Right, use the other four terms as temporary overlays, and keep serious and clear about it.
"What," you may say, "they're just as screwed up as the others, or worse!" In practice, yes. At root, no, and for quite a long time. Right has (while waxing and waning) been about individual excellence and freedom, while Left has (while waxing and waning) been about social/cooperative excellence and fairness. Iteratively, over time, each also reacts to the excesses of the other. The reason is that these are *both* well-grounded, complementary needs of humans in a polity, and collectively, we change prioritization of one over the other at different times. That's why they exist in perpetuity. We must stop getting distracted by all the propaganda, pro and con and irrelevant, that our dear "leaders" constantly fling at us, not to mention the unavoidable evolution of the politics of populations.
Let's find a way to ground our language here and dismantle this political tower of Babel. Our history is confusing, and well arguably useless, even destructive, as a forward guide.