[Democracy] risks extinction because the authorities that run our societies seem to find the practice, values, and very spirit of democracy to be increasingly intolerable.In France, where the ruling government maintains power despite being the most widely hated in decades, the most popular candidate of the most popular political party has been barred from challenging that government in upcoming elections, on legal grounds that are openly political.In Romania, when the “wrong” outsider candidate appeared poised to win an election, authorities canceled the election outright and then had him arrested, the unelected national security state inventing entirely unsupported excuses about foreign meddling to justify their coup d’état against the democratic process.In Germany, the state has now begun the process of banning the country’s most popular party, supported by more than a quarter of the voting population, in order to avoid facing any real political opposition. “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary,” is how a former European Commissioner confidently foreshadowed events on live television a few months ago....In Brazil, a single Supreme Court judge, in alliance with the country’s leftist president, has effectively established a judicial dictatorship, locking up political rivals by decree, silencing the speech of opposition figures, and utilizing state leverage over the financial system to punish political enemies by banishing them from public economic life.
But of course Brazil’s authorities learned these tactics by observation. Observation of Canada, to be precise, where Justin Trudeau’s government first employed debanking — along with a little brute force — as a tool to crush peaceful protest of his draconian and disastrous pandemic lockdown policies.
As we've just seen in the Epstein case, even when a rejected candidate gets elected they often go along with the managers. The managers are the real danger; they are the real problem. Getting rid of them will not be accomplished by elections. What else?
Great article.
ReplyDeleteThe managers are the real danger; they are the real problem. Getting rid of them will not be accomplished by elections.
I'm interested to see how well Trump does against the managers. I think he'll have an impact, but in 4 years he can't solve a problem that's been developing for more than a century, at least.
As Lyons wrote, the people are part of the problem. Our nation needs a renewal of our original culture; not a going back, per se, but rather finding in ourselves what those early Americans had and strengthening it. He doesn't quite say that the first battle against the managers is to kill the manager in ourselves, but he comes close.
Because it sees the ultimate problem to manage as being human nature itself, managerialism is as much an anthropological project as a political one.
ReplyDeleteIt’s been a while since I read it but I believe this is Sowell’s “unconstrained vision”, the idea that man can be perfected.
Similarly Sarah Hoyt wrote recently about Elon Musk’s “engineer brain” and the idea that “If only everyone would just”. As she says, never in the history of ever has “everyone just.” And hus the elites desire to replace humanity with entities that *will* "just".
Managers, and people, and "if only...," and "elites desire"--these are central to why our Founders and authors of our Constitution wrote a divide and conquer structure of government, spreading out governmental powers, and authorities, into mutually exclusive and competing branches.
ReplyDeleteThe structure slows the erosion. And this: the courts, or at least the one that matters, the Supreme Court, are (is?) coming around to the idea that Presidents really can fire the folks who work in the Executive Branch. That's a hopeful bit of progress, especially with a President who moves at the speed of business rather than the speed of politics. He's started out inside politicians' Do Loops, and moving from there.
The branches are starting to get separated out again.
Eric Hines