Lies, barefaced lies and democracy, by Alexander Boot.
People everywhere, especially in the US, react to various word combinations featuring ‘democracy’ with Pavlovian alacrity. Some such combinations have attained idiomatic stability. For example, no one sees anything wrong with intellectually unsound phrases like ‘liberal democracy’.
Democracy refers to a political method used to decide who governs the country. Liberty, with its various cognates, refers to a desired effect of government, no matter who forms it and by what method.
Democracy is a physical technicality; liberty mainly has metaphysical connotations. …
The underlying assumption is that liberty is an integral property of democracy and vice versa. …
In theory, 50.1 per cent of the electorate may well vote for selling the nation into slavery, provided the price is good. The remaining 49.9 could scream themselves hoarse about the monstrosity of it all. Their protests would go unheeded: democracy has been served. …
The subjects of King George (choose any numeral) or King Louis (ditto) enjoyed the kind of individual freedom that isn’t even approached by the citizens of any ‘liberal democracy’ of today. To use one, far from the most important, example, no Western monarch would have dreamed of extorting over half of his subjects’ earnings – something that’s accepted as a fair privilege of any ‘liberal democracy’. …
No Western monarch could have conceived intruding on the people’s private lives to the same extent as modern ‘liberal democracies’ routinely do for ‘the common good’. (Michael Gove, supposedly the intellectual giant among the Tories, has foolishly praised Mrs May for using those words at every turn. He doesn’t seem to realise that ‘common good’ is the self-vindicating buzz phrase of every modern tyranny.) …
PC is a modern tyranny:
No lords or magistrates of the past imposed such tyrannical diktats on language as do today’s enforcers of political correctness. No government censorship of the past was as despotic as today’s self-censorship demanded by society.
The state throws its weight behind such demands, with any ‘liberal democracy’ prepared to punish people not for what they do but increasingly for what they say. This blurs the distinction between state and society, yet not many see this as a factor of tyranny.
Monarchy had some advantages:
Among many arguments in favour of monarchy is that, by and large, monarchs were professionals trained in statecraft since childhood. Democracy (as distinct from republicanism) is by definition rule by amateurs who typically have no time, once in office, to climb the learning curve. Someone like Trump, starting his political career at presidency, is akin to a soldier whose first rank is four-star general, unthinkable in either an army or a monarchy. That doesn’t mean that monarchs are invariably better than presidents or PMs, only that the odds go that way.
Note that all the major combatants in the First World War, arguably the greatest catastrophe in Western history, were either democracies or monarchies with strong democratic elements. The German Reichstag had to vote for war credits and, had it voted against, the war wouldn’t have happened.
hat-tip David Archibald
