Code Monkey Ramblings

Jerry Pournelle doesn't quite get it about democracy:

The sad truth is that democracy itself is often unstable. Intellectuals lose faith. Democracy is not flashy. It falls out of fashion. The intelligentsia feel scorned, unappreciated, and turn to new theories. There are other pressures. Republics stand until the citizens begin to vote themselves largess from the public treasury. When the plunder begins, those plundered feel no loyalty to the nation--and the beneficiaries demand ever more, until few are left unplundered. Eventually everyone plunders everyone, the state serving as little more than an agency for collecting and dispensing largess. The economy falters. Inflation begins. Deficits mount. Something must be done. Strong measures are demanded, but nothing can be agreed to.

The democratic process began to fail the moment that it gave into the great myth of equalitarianism. He quotes John Stuart Mill who said that a degenerate people unfit to rule themselves should consider themselves lucky to be ruled by a Charlemagne, but not once is it discussed how the people became degenerate and unfit to rule themselves in the first place! Little consideration is given to how the unproductive got ahold of the political power to use the machinery of state to rip away the property of the productive.

Here's the dark, dirty secret: you can blame it all on universal democracy. The seeds of the destruction of liberty were sewn the moment that the only qualification for wielding political power was citizenship and a pulse. When you give every mouth-breather the right to vote, the demagogue's job is just that much easier because he need only equip himself with a loudspeaker to rally them to the polls.

We find ourselves in this position because the modern mind is so incredibly stuck on the means that the end is irrelevant to it. Better a tyranny that we vote for ourselves, than a liberty which an elite that is unaccountable to most people gives to us. The thought of having no power to influence the system is far scarier to many than the thought of losing real liberty. Ironic, considering the fact that the odds that any one vote will have any impact on actual liberties or an election are the odds that a butterfly's wings will trigger a hurricane.

As the system became more "democratic," so much tyranny has been rubber stamped with the faux legitimacy of the will of the people. The franchise has given the tyrant a cheap excuse that placates the same mobs that would have resorted to regicide or tyranicide with far greater haste under a less democratic system. Tyrants know that, and that's why the one right that they will never take away is the right to vote.