If democracy proves to be a successful act in self-determination, there are elites who’ve made clear they will not abide by it.
September 26, 2022
By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP
The merits of democracy are worth revisiting. It’s heralded as some treasure of civilized society. I’m sure you’ve heard politicians over the years talk about:
“Saving the world for democracy.”
“These people are a threat to our democracy.”
It’s almost tropey at this point.
Democracy, unto itself, is just majority rule. Unbridled democracy is three wolves deciding that two sheep are dinner. There’s no inherent rules to it, and in fact it can be a justification for outright barbarism.
Evil tyrannical despots have been voted in democratically. Europe knows quite a bit about this, in fact.
So I’m not sure how democracy earned its emblematic position as the hallmark of civility. Civility is something that is more found in philosophy and culture than democracy or politics.
What keeps gang rape from being legal is that societies put major guardrails on democracy to stop it. Those guardrails are from our philosophical morals and our beliefs about what rights are.
Like any other form of government, it relies heavily on the benevolence of those participating. Whether it’s a monarch, oligarch, or democracy, if the people themselves are corrupt, the system fails. Systems are only as good as the people in them. So all the rules and labels are meaningless if you have people hell-bent on deviating away from them.
Lysander Spooner once famously said:
“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”
Switch out the word “constitution” for “democracy” and you still have a true statement.
Never underestimate the power of large groups of stupid people. (That’s the abridged history of how the US wound up in $30+ trillion in debt, by the way.) A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, so if the leaders are corrupt, and the voters are feeble, then what more can you expect than massive debt and tyranny?
In the US, just under 45% of the population that is of legal voting age, don’t vote in political elections. They are disenfranchised. As protests mount throughout the world, and people in power are more conspicuous with their power grabs, it’s no mystery why people are seeing elections as just an illusion of choice.
It’s funny because if you talk to strict constitutionalists, you’ll hear them argue that the states within the country of the United States were meant to be more like the European Union: individual nation-states that had trade agreements and pooled their resources for defense. Clearly, that’s not what the US or the EU are at all now.
Unelected (but rather, specially selected) bureaucrats are wielding a tremendous amount of power and control over the fates of large unions like the US and EU.
So all those wars for “democracy” and all those calls to “protect democracy”… hogwash. You’re not saving anything worthwhile, if it’s all a grift.
The latest out of the EU’s President of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen:
“We will see the result of the vote in Italy. If things go in a difficult direction, we have tools, as in the case of Poland and Hungary.”
In case you’re wondering what the “tools” are, it’s denial of financial support.
And, in case you’re wondering what the “difficult direction” is, she goes by the name of Giorgia Meloni. She is the nominee of the conservative-populist Brothers of Italy party, is poised to win the election.
The difference is, the EU doesn’t necessarily need Hungary or Poland to exist. The eastern countries are more about expansion than sustaining. But it absolutely needs Italy. It can’t place the same ultimatums on Italy that it did the Eastern counterparts.
Italy is the third largest economy in the EU to Germany and France. And her debts are no joke:
Italy’s debt problems thanks to the EU’s mad insistence of keeping control over Italy’s political system are far worse today than they were in 2011 when Silvio Berlusconi was ousted and technocrat Mario Monti was installed.
Mario Draghi only compounded the problem taking the ECB and all of Europe to negative interest rates for nearly a decade. Christine Lagarde was brought in to keep the ball rolling while Draghi was installed to ensure Italy was hog-tied to the EU Commission through COVID relief funds, a bill that Draghi was not able to get passed.
Today Italy’s TARGET2 liabilities are the EU’s liabilities. There is no mechanism to pay them back. There is only default, hyperinflation or both. The leaders of the center-right coalition about to take power in Italy have to realize their leverage in this situation.
Because it is immense and it renders every syllable of Von der Lyin’s threat as hollow and devoid of substance as the power she ultimately thinks she exercises.
People will talk a big game when it comes to freedom and democracy… until you choose something other than they want you to. You are free… to color
Then you are suddenly an extremist or any combination of assorted bigoted epithets they can conjure. Then suddenly freedom and democracy are being weaponized. They need to be reined in.
It’s uncertain who originally said it, but it is certainly true: If voting made a difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.
We are beginning to see the signs of this. For better or worse, Italy, along with Hungary and Poland, have made their choices. That the EU has a different agenda in mind, and cannot count on the cooperation of those leaders is going to reveal exactly what kind of people are running things there.
I don’t hate democracy, per se. I don’t like the idea of other people deciding the fates of others, however. But to the extent that people decide to declare themselves a democratic nation, their right to self-determination is sacrosanct. If they insist upon voting a certain way, they must be as free to the benefits as they are to the failures that come from those choices.
Leveraging condemnation and retribution from external parties is a contrived and malicious consequence. It is more accurately described as interfering in an election process.
Democracy is messy on a good day. It’s one of those things that sounds great in theory, but in practice leads to debt and tyranny. To avoid being crushed by its wake, it’s best to keep your options open. At some point you could become the sheep in a room full of wolves, and you’ll need something other than a vote to get out of there.
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