The new woke religion exploits liberal democracies’ freedom to be illiberal. By The Z-Man.
What is a liberal democracy, really?
[It] is the combination of a liberal political ideology that operates under a representative democratic form of government. The word liberal here means the political philosophy based on individual rights and liberty. Individuals are equal before the law and equal in their political relationship. …
Further, those laws are written down so everyone can understand them. … In general it is a society based in individual rights. …
It is a set of rules based on liberal moral philosophy where the people, through direct voting and through indirect representation, participate in the rule making of society.
There is a logical problem here, and it’s no longer academic because the woke are doing it:
Right away you can see a problem. If the people can make the rules, then they can vote to get rid of those rules that are based in liberal moral philosophy. The public could be persuaded that free speech is a bad idea and vote to suppress political speech.
Now, the usual suspects will jump up and down and say this is not so because those liberal rules are placed outside the democratic process. They are based in nature, maybe, or rooted in the ancient traditions of the people. In fact, they are written on a piece of paper which is kept in a museum. That way everyone knows that those rules are off limits to further tinkering. This is obviously not true, which is why America is shaking itself to pieces over those timeless rules. …
Since an axiom of all democratic systems is that no parliament can bind subsequent parliaments, all rules, even the timeless ones, are open to question. …
In theory, liberal democracy has the same problem as communism and libertarianism, in that it has no answer for what happens when people change their minds. It has no answer for what happens when a decent number of people decide that those liberal rules are no longer working. If authority lies in the people, which is true of all democratic systems, then whatever rules you make, however you describe them, will be subject to the whims of the people.
Communists solved this problem by creating a new class of people who will be the vanguard of the revolution. …
In the modern age, repressive tolerance has become the solution to popular dissent. In modern hands, this means those who are deemed a threat to our democracy are surrounded by the defenders of democracy and threatened with destruction if they continue. ,,,
This is why America has become increasingly chaotic as it has become increasingly democratic since roughly a century ago. In a time when a limited number of men of high status controlled the rule making, respecting those limits on the popular will was not just possible, it was necessary for their survival as a class. Once authority began to expand through expansion of the franchise, the cancer of democracy began to eat at the rules and the reasoning behind those rules.
As is true of other ideologies, the only way to make them work is to find some authority outside mankind to legitimize those fixed rules. Theocratical liberalism, for example, could work if the holy text codified the liberal moral code. A liberal dictatorship could work, assuming the people at the top saw an advantage in maintaining the liberal order for their people. Tradition could also work as a useful authority. …
Freedom includes freedom to be illiberal — hence the wokies:
In the end, liberal democracy suffers from the same central defect of all radical ideologies, which is that it seeks to free man of coercion. The liberals dreamed of a world free of political coercion. The Marxists dreamed of a world free of economic coercion, while the post-Marxists dream of a world free of cultural coercion.
As the last radical ideology standing, liberal democracy promises a world free of all coercion, which is a direct threat to society itself.
It turns out that humans evolved to live in societies and societies are nothing more than a system of rules. In order to maintain the rules, people must often be coerced into abiding by the rules. Therefore any ideology that promises to eliminate coercion is promising to destroy that which makes society possible. Liberal democracy is a direct challenge to the very idea of human society. it is a suicide pact, which explains the the lunacy of the current age.
Liberal democracy used to work, when people were more Christian, smarter, and everyone needed to work hard. And before the democracy was usurped by the administrative state and the sheer complexity of increasingly-totaliarian government .
