Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

By: Bill Joslin

(via Brandon Hayes )

There are missing distinctions in the criticisms of democracy.

1) democracy in the anglo-sphere but not America, was a last resort offered to the polis before rebellion – a.proxy for violence. This decision being made during the restoration after the glorious rebellion etc (I’m sure you know this). It’s not, nor has it ever has been “the will of the people”.

Data on voting intentions (the wishes of voter when voting) and the resulting legislation has never had an impact more than about 30% and only in the negative (about 30% of the time a legislation the voters do not want will be blocked, but in terms of policies they do want – the vote has no impact) – this compared to lobbying groups where up to 70% of the time they get what they seek in negative and about 30% in the positive. This means the social changes we are concerned about are not a result of the wishes of the voting public.

2) there are many means in the American and British system from primaries to electoral vote which address the criticisms launched today at democracy – the “dumb voters trope” is false and based on strawmans.

The failure of our systems isn’t due to democracy it’s due to the conflation not legislation with weight of law which creates a product which politicians sell to special interests – a market for parasitism.

Democracy acts as the currency for those transactions. If we weren’t under democracy, this dynamic would persist with a different currency (this issue is law making not democracy).

3) Daniel Roland Anderson has some good screen shots of how the original documents of America where explicitly ethnocentric.

These legal documents didn’t prevent the dissolution of a homogeneous because, again, legislature can not be “under the rule of law” as.long as it makes law. This too isn’t a result of democracy but rather legislation being conflated with rule of law.

We’ve corrected for this via testimonialism, but also by having a separation of judicial and legislative branches which the judiciary holding supremacy, and one law, natural law of reciprocity.

We can correct the current problems via an alloy of kritocracy, stratocracy, aristocracy and democracy where aristocracy is constrained to via positiva commons creation, democracy to commons management, both of which are subservient and beholden to kritocracy, and stratocracy acts as the teeth for kritarchs (and can boycott if the kritarchs step out of line).

So – nobles for development of commonly shared property and community services (via positiva commons), management teams to manage the commons via contract – both inferior too and with out the power of the judges and both under the rule of the judges, with a.militia to back the judges.

If strict barriers exist within these four areas (judges can’t be generals, aristocrat can’t be judged etc) it prevents competition for power between these areas – it explicitly prevents a “product” that rules can “sell” without consequence.

Modernity had way more correct than not and wasn’t so much wrong as incomplete. I find most fascist and aesthetics arguments against modernity to be strawmans. Monarchy alone, aristocracy alone did not pull humanity out of the Malthusian trap and away from discretionary rule – modernity did.