Amerika

Francis Fukuyama famously observed that liberal democracy had taken over the world in the postwar period; Samuel Huntington rejoined with the notion that now humanity was split into civilizations formed of specific religions, ethnicities, and cultures.

Liberal democracy however snowballed from constitutional systems designed to preserve rights to civil rights based systems designed to enforce norms. This has caused some confusion about what constitutes a democracy and whether we are getting more or less of this magical ichor:

The study surveyed over 6,000 people from the United States, Italy, Egypt, India, Thailand, and Japan: countries with highly different political regimes, democratic histories, geographic regions, levels of development, and cultural backgrounds. The study explored how people prioritize nine different attributes in their understanding of what makes a country democratic, using examples of hypothetical countries.

Overwhelmingly, the two most important factors identified by participants were competitive elections and strong protections for civil liberties. The relevance of these was consistent regardless of people’s age, gender, education, minority status, or political ideology.

Participants were significantly more likely to view countries that select their leaders through free and fair elections as more democratic than countries without elections. Participants were also significantly more likely to view countries with strong protections for civil liberties as more democratic compared with countries without such protections.

Elections and civil liberties won the popular poll, and interestingly, the socialist welfare state did not. Perhaps the human population is signaling that it wants the regular old democracy as a protector of the people instead of democracy as the scientific management and social engineering of populations.

In any case, by “democracy” people seem to mean liberal democracy which combines voting with constitutions guaranteeing natural or civil rights:

liberal democracy, a form of democracy in which the power of government is limited, and the freedom and rights of individuals are protected, by constitutionally established norms and institutions.

To address the old trope that divides democracy/republic from one another, we should look into what a republic is:

a government in which the power belongs to a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by the leaders and representatives elected by those citizens to govern according to law

The key phrase here is “according to law,” which corresponds to the civil liberties and constitutional democratic process of modern liberal democracies as used in the first definition. Liberal democracies are by nature republics, and most republics on Earth are liberal democracies.

“Civil liberties” presents a bit of a mystery since it includes both natural rights, which are prohibitions on government infringing on behaviors we can engage in within a state of nature, and civil rights, which are government-created rights that it can selectively bestow or take away according to our degree of compliance:

Unlike other rights concepts, such as human rights or natural rights, in which people acquire rights inherently, perhaps from God or nature, civil rights must be given and guaranteed by the power of the state.

“Civil rights must be given and guaranteed by the power of the state” mirrors the language of the 14A “equal protection of the laws.” Government is not just given the power to make people equal, but a mandate; if it fails to make people equal, it is liable or at least, illegal.

Natural rights on the other hand are believed to exist independently of government and therefore, government is constrained from infringing upon them, following the Bill of Rights. Natural rights came from natural law, which holds that there is an order to nature that human societies must nurture into natural rights:

Locke argued in detail, mainly in writings associated with the English Glorious Revolution (1688–89), that certain rights self-evidently pertain to individuals as human beings (because these rights existed in the hypothetical “state of nature” before humankind entered civil society); that chief among them are the rights to life, liberty (freedom from arbitrary rule), and property; that, upon entering civil society, humankind surrendered to the state—pursuant to a “social contract”—only the right to enforce these natural rights and not the rights themselves; and that the state’s failure to secure these rights gives rise to a right to responsible, popular revolution. The philosophes, building on Locke and others and embracing many and varied currents of thought with a common supreme faith in reason, vigorously attacked religious and scientific dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and social and economic restraints.

In liberal democracy, civil rights replace natural rights.

Further, because the “equal protection of the laws” includes the need to subsidize citizens, liberal democracies at this point are almost entirely mixed economic systems or socialist-capitalist hybrids:

A mixed economic system accepts private property and permits economic freedom in the use of capital, but also allows for governments to interfere in economic activities in order to achieve social aims.

National Socialism, Maoism, and Fascism were the furthest extensions of this idea, but for most societies now, it simply means a Keynesian circular Ponzi scheme (KcPs) grafted onto a market economy, a situation that requires constant “growth” in order to avoid collapsing inward.

Since Keynesian stimulus needs pity-objects, we have expanded our franchise from “the poor” to “the diversity,” which as it turns out is an old American tradition of buying immigrant votes with warlord gifts of entitlements and favors, formally or informally:

The group was organized in 1789 in opposition to the Federalist Party’s ruling “aristocrats.” The Society of Tammany was incorporated in 1805 as a benevolent body; its name derived from a pre-Revolutionary association named after the benevolent Indian chief Tammanend. The group became identified with the city’s Democratic Party. The makeup of the society was substantially altered in 1817 when Irish immigrants, protesting Tammany bigotry, forced their right to membership and benefits. Tammany later championed the extension of the franchise to white propertyless males. Nevertheless, the society’s appeal to particular ethnic and religious minorities, the doling out of gifts to the poor, and the bribing of leaders of rival political factions, among them the notorious boss William Magear Tweed, made the name Tammany Hall synonymous with political corruption.

To translate, we exist in an Asiatic system of democracy plus sinecures that grant favors for loyalty, which is a perfect system of control but inverts what made the West great, namely rewarding people for the most realistic and excellent acts rather than conformity and obedience.

Liberal democracy conceals this system of moving as one behind euphemism and idealistic symbolism. However, the more this system succeeds, the more it turns people into rent-seeking self-centered individualists who promptly destroy anything good in their quest for power. We are heading toward third world status as a result.

Tags: circular ponzi scheme, civil rights, francis fukuyama, liberal democracy, natural law, natural rights, political machine, samuel huntington