The danger to democracy is democracy itself 374

There is a danger to democracy in democracy itself: majorities can vote against it.

Two recent articles express, in deep pessimism, the conviction that America has chosen its own irreversible doom.

Mark Steyn thinks it may be all over for America. Its system has brought in forces of self-destruction driven by trivial concerns over climate, race, and sex.

He writes:

Is America past the point of no return? The more lavishly funded any activity is, the more it’s a racket. Fresh from taking two decades to lose a war to goatherds and reducing itself to a global laughingstock to allies and enemies alike, the Government of the United States decided that what a six-star joke really needed was the first four-star transgender admiral.

Now we have an incoming vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff telling the world that what a bloated lavishly funded military that can’t win a war needs to prioritize is “gender advisors”. …

Chairman Xi was a no-show at COP-26, because he has no intention of joining the west in committing economic suicide. But, if Joe and Justin and Boris are so eager to tank what remains of their livelihoods, he’s happy to sell them expensive ineffective “green solutions”. In other words, having annexed American manufacturing and American high-tech and American intellectual property, Beijing is happy to annex American virtue-signaling and profit from that, too.

There is no equivalent (not even Rome’s) to America’s form of great-power suicide. Britain lost global dominance because, for eighteen critical months , London and the British Dominions stood alone among the great democratic powers in resisting the Third Reich. It was a sacrifice that exhausted and bankrupted a mighty empire, but it was at least for something recognizable as a great cause. America is exiting the world stage because it’s hot for trannies and MS-13 cartels: has there ever been anything more pathetic?

Paul Gottfried points out at American Greatness that many an oppressive regime is in power not because their power was seized illegitimately, but because they were voted for.

Regimes that embattled minorities are on the streets protesting are not there by accident. Voters made choices.

And even when they do their worst, they can safely submit themselves for re-election:

Majorities, and often overwhelming ones, voted for the ruling class; and if an election were held tomorrow, the same rulers would likely win. …

He gives examples of popular authoritarian rulers in America:

Bill de Blasio won a second term as New York City’s mayor in 2017 with 65.4 percent of the tabulated vote. On November 4, 2020, Kim Klacik, an earnest young black woman, ran against Kweisi Mfume, the longtime incumbent in Maryland’s seventh congressional district, which includes Baltimore’s inner city. Klacik promised to fight for more police protection, and, unlike Mfume, she pledged to bring the races together. Against a notoriously philandering politician who gave up his birth name to assume an African one, Klacik lost the congressional race by 40 points, although remarkably enough, she amassed a large war chest. Politicians such as Mfume, Lori Lightfoot in Chicago, Maxine Waters in Los Angeles, Gavin Newsom in California, and Bill de Blasio in New York have all reached high political positions for the same reason: they attract lots of votes. …

If it is argued that almost as many Americans have voted for freedom as voted for dictatorship, the inherent danger in democracy is only emphasized: the will of many can be frustrated by the will of a few more. The choice of democracy itself is the hazard.

In which case, since all other systems are worse than democracy, there is no way that a free republic such as the Founders tried to establish can be secured.

If the “Biden” administration came in by cheating, it means that cheating is not just possible but practicable in a democracy.

How likely is it that after this turn to oppression, with another election another day America can go back to being the free nation it has been in the past?

Even if it can, even if it does, what will preserve it?

Posted under Democracy, United Kingdom, United States by Jillian Becker on Thursday, December 16, 2021

Tagged with , , ,

This post has 374 comments.

Permalink

Oligarchy 152

The Supreme Court has no way of enforcing its rulings.

It depends totally on the legislative and executive branches of government to enforce them.

If, as now, a party takes power (“takes”, not “wins”, being the right word for how the Democratic Party has come to have it) over both the legislative and executive branches and chooses not to obey the Supreme Court, there is nothing that can be done about it. Nothing. 

The Framers of the Constitution never imagined it could happen.

Now the Democrats in power know that they need not go to the trouble of packing the Supreme Court, they can simply disobey it. Ignore it. And that’s what they’re doing.

The Court ruled that a moratorium forbidding eviction for non-payment of rent is illegal – but the “Biden” administration went ahead with it.

The  period of the moratorium was due to end about now, but the administration has decided to extend it. Again the Court has declared that it is illegal. Again the administration has imposed it.

Imposed it how? Not even by administrative order of “President Biden”.  A  woman, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who heads the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has issued the order. And the administration gladly enforces the rulings of the CDC.

Landlords may not demand rent from tenants. But they must continue to pay property taxes and maintenance costs.

One of the few journalists who have chosen to tell the public about this is John Daniel Davidson who writes (in part) at The Federalist:

An astonishing thing happened this week in Washington that didn’t get much critical coverage from a media establishment loath to criticize President Biden. At the behest of congressional Democrats, Biden flouted the Constitution and broke his oath of office by issuing a ban on evictions that he and his advisers know to be illegal.

By “ban on evictions” I mean the president issued a blatantly unconstitutional decree that renters all across America don’t have to pay rent. If landlords try to evict tenants for not paying rent, they could face criminal penalties including fines and imprisonment.

The eviction moratorium is one of the most important stories of the COVID-19 lockdowns but also one of the least covered, because the left doesn’t want to draw undue attention to its evisceration of property rights under the guise of public health.

Nationwide nearly half of the landlords are people who own a second house or apartment that they rent out. Many of these people have gone a year without receiving any rent, yet they’re still liable for taxes, upkeep, and mortgage payments. Landlords  are supposed to be able to survive because of a $46.5 billion federal government rental relief fund. The problem is, the money isn’t being used. With trillions of government aide already creating incentives for people not to return to work, the eviction moratorium creates an incentive not to pay rent.

The way all this has gone down illustrates a deeply disturbing reality about the Democrats running the pandemic response in Washington: They’re lawless, and as the pandemic drags on, they’re becoming bolder about it.

The background here is that a nationwide ban on evictions expired on Saturday. Since then, Democrats in Congress have been agitating for an extension of the ban despite a determination by the U.S. Supreme Court in June that the CDC has no legal authority to do that, as anyone with a passing familiarity of the U.S. Constitution could tell you.

The utter contempt for the rule of law shown in all of this is simply staggering.

The notion that a federal agency tasked with the control and prevention of infectious diseases could simply by fiat impose an “eviction moratorium” on the entire country, effectively nationalizing housing, is shocking and outrageous. Biden himself knows this. At a press conference on Tuesday, he said “The bulk of the constitutional scholars say it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.”

It sure isn’t. But later that same day he did it anyway.

*

What all this means is that America is no longer a democracy, no longer a free republic. It is a dictatorship.

This country is now governed dictatorially. 

The power to dictate is in the hands of an oligarchy.

The oligarchs are the very rich. The richest men who have ever lived. They are technocrats who own the means of mass communication, newspapers, television news media, the “social” media. They own the politicians through whom they will transform the world.

So it is a plutocratic oligarchy.

The plutocrats are almost all men. Their executive consists increasingly of women: women governors, public prosecutors, mayors, police chiefs, member of congress, cabinet members, directors of government agencies. Lifted into office by the oligarchs, one could reasonably call them the dictators’ “temps” – the Grand Temps of the American oligarchy.

And there is nothing that can be done to bring the dictators down.

Vote them out of power? Can we really believe that there will be fair elections ever again? If a (constitutionally required) election is held at all, it will be rigged. On the excuse that there is a dangerous virus threatening the nation so that voters must keep far apart from each other – which,  the CDC will assure them, they must do to survive – elections will be by mail and “drop box” only. Staff under the Grand Temps will collect the ballot sheets, count them in closed offices, and announce the result: a huge majority (why not 100%?) for the re-election of the oligarchs’ chosen executors.

It is more than likely that the position of Oligarch will become hereditary. Then it will be an aristocratic oligarchy. Who knows but there may even be a monarch?

The dictators of the twentieth century – Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Mugabe, Chavez – became rich by becoming dictators.

The new American oligarchic dictators became rich first, then became dictators.

They will not be satisfied with dictatorial power over America. They are “globalists”. They desire global power. Plutocrats from everywhere on earth meet at Davos, and it was there, in the small Swiss town on a mountain, that the decision was taken to “reset” the way human beings will live and how they will be governed.

The world they intend to create is very different from the world we have known.

There will be no nation states. No borders. The impoverished peoples of what was once called the Third World will continue for a time to move in vast numbers into what used to be called the First World. It does not matter to the oligarchs where people settle. The oligarchic power will extend over them all wherever they may be.

Individuals, other than the oligarchs, will own nothing. No house, no money, no clothes, no car … Not even an electric car. Not even a bicycle. Everything will be provided for them by the Global Oligarchy. What they “need” will be decided by their masters.

They will be allowed the temporary use of things – clothes, maybe a bicycle.

They will be housed, each in a tiny apartment in a vast building. (Herding people together is useful for the spreading of disease when population needs to be reduced.) They will be fed communally. There will be no families.  Breeding will be controlled. Children will be raised by staff of the Oligarchy.

Only some children will be taught to read and write and reckon. All will be taught obedience to the authorities.

Adults will be assigned jobs. The product of their labors will be distributed by the authorities.

A permanent aristocracy will rule over a world of slaves.