IT IS A COMMONPLACE expectation that newly established social and political institutions somehow accumulate a deepening stability with the passage of time. In the very long run, of course, once-established institutions may obsolesce, evolve into new forms, or be more brusquely overturned. But the timing of these terminal events, embedded as they will be in a complex nexus of change, seems almost impossible to forecast at long range. What is utterly predictable, however, is that threats to the survival of a new institution will be very high in its infant stages. In the degree that it can outlast these first precarious periods, it will typically have put forth roots of sufficient strength so that challenges to its very being diminish in number and those that do occur are warded off with increasing ease. It becomes sanctified and protected by “The weight of historical tradition.” [1]
Moldbug has asked the question repeatedly to people, what is the difference between populism and democracy? It’s a problem, because populism has been coded by the press and by paranoid liberal academics as a serious dilemma and potentially an existential threat to democracy. This article was written in the wake of legal attempts to bar Trump from being a candidate at the state level for the upcoming election [2], and in Germany there are now serious talks of banning the AfD [3] despite the fact that they are supported in polls close to or at 25 percent of the populace [4]. The question is, how can you justify, in the name of democracy, banning popular parties or previously elected presidents? Doesn’t it go directly against the spirit of the thing supposedly being defended?
The answer is a very obvious yes in the naive definition of democracy as collective decision making through voting with the aim of representing the majority preferences of the individuals involved. However, this is an overly abstract definition of democracy. One should be strictly neutral and pragmatic on forms of decision making, because they’re context dependent. Businesses broadly have monarchical structures of decision making, but there may well be features of workplace aristocracy and democracy. The benefits of all are weighed from a practical point of view depending on the circumstances. Having a vote on something, having a small group of elites decide, or having a leader make an absolute decision all happen all the time and have their place. The only kind of democracy we have interest in here is mass representative democracy.
Mass representative democracy in the modern west was first attempted in the French Revolution, and became completely dominant by the end of the 19th century. It may be called mass democracy because millions vote and this necessarily means that the vast majority of voters do not know each other or have meaningful personal connections. They become abstract numbers to be represented by parties for designated periods of time, where there is a competition by these parties to mobilise and convince a coalition out of the masses to put them back in power. The crux of why this system uses authoritarianism against its citizens is because all actually existing governments require an immune system which purges radical elements, radical of course being intersubjectively defined by the elites of the regime. So whilst superficially yes, banning Trump or the AfD may well be anti-democratic by any standard definition, the elites of mass-democratic regimes are keepers of the framework of norms and actionable ideas we call the “Overton Window” and they correctly see charismatic deviators from that frame as an existential threat. This may be seen from two points of view, either cynically as an attempt to stay in power, or sincerely as believers and promoters of their own frame, this is a major debate within elite theory which I will answer at a later point, but this debate goes back to Pareto as a cynic and Mosca a believer, and repeated with Sam Francis a cynic and Paul Gottfried a believer.
The quote at the top is from Philip Converse’s great paper Time and Partisan Stability. Institutions in their infancy are in a state of imminent danger. There isn’t an antecedently available base of knowledge of the set of practices needed for the institution to survive. Masses aren’t used to the system, and thus probably won’t be particularly helpful in defending the system from hostile remnant elites of the old regime. In early democracies such as the Second French Republic or the Weimar Republic radical parties persuaded the masses from the bottom up through populist strategy that that they deserved absolute power, which is why Napoleon III for the 19th century liberal-democrat and Hitler for the contemporary are quasi-theological satanic evils.
This may seem obvious when stated explicitly, but actually it’s the opposite story of what the ancients tell us. For the vast majority of history democracy was seen as an absurd system. In Plato mass-democracy was seen to inevitably produce majoritarian tyrannical events such as the execution of Socrates. Demagogues skilled in oratory and rhetorical manipulation would rouse the passions of the masses. This is just intrinsically encouraged by the system as the best strategy for any cynic looking to gain power. Thus for Plato democracy is part of a political cycle which naturally concludes in tyranny. Plato in the Republic prescribes as an alternative the rule of the philosopher-king. The other most important thinker of the ancient world, Aristotle, with his obsession of the golden mean, believed that republicanism with many constitutional balances to prevent the potential tyranny of a bad ruler on the one hand and the excesses of democracy as described by Plato on the other. It is relatively recent that any western thinker questioned this consensus, Rousseau for example only believed democracy could only work on a small scale, it’s only by the late 19th century that radical democratic optimism became respectable and capable of taking power in a very confident and powerful way beyond the violent scheming of Jacobinical characters.
In modern society more or less the whole world takes democracy as a total dogma and we can observe the opposite of what Plato described happens. Democracy being initially chaotic but increasingly stabilising over time [5]. The question is how do democratic institutions endure and solidify themselves, as they did in the latter half of the 19th century. The elite theorists of Italy and their followers all thought that mass-democracy would be short lived. Society would always have the famous triangular power structure with an elite circulation rather than genuine mass participation. This was powerful due to the political maelstrom of the 19th and early 20th century as well as the good empirical evidence for elitist positions on a number of different issues.
Only democracy prevailed and stabilised, and because of this the elitists overwhelmingly were seen to have “lost” the debate with the democratic theorists. Jonathan Bowden talked about how Maurice Cowling [6] painted an incredibly detailed picture in his many tomes about the vast cast and characters of the 19th and early 20th century elites in Britain and their various schemes and conflicts. High up members of the Anglican clergy that no one has heard of today, forgotten academic movements, aristocrats and so on all vying for dominance over the public doctrines which would prevail in Britain, with detailed analyses on major British political and foreign policy shifts through a painstaking account of these conflicts [7].
Bowden was astonished at how this entire world seems to have disappeared. The elites in Britain after Suez and the Profumo affair have pretty much all decisively embraced multiracial egalitarianism and social liberalism as an absolute dogma, as has happened more or less everywhere in the west. Politics today is very difficult to read in terms of elite conflict, this isn’t to take a side on the aforementioned elite theory debate as to whether they’re cynical or not. It’s just to say that after the earlier monarchist consensus we seem to have emerged out of the intermediate clash of worldviews to a unified elite who have a consistent frame again. Debates from within the confines of officialdom and elite opinion seem mind numbingly hollow.
So as opposed to the classic Platonic notion of mass-democracy as an extreme which results in tyranny our general experience of mass-democracy in modernity teaches us the opposite, that it massively restricts political conflict over time. The reason for this is because people have become politically socialised to the system, a radical alternative is seen as either abhorrent, impractical, or looney tunes in the political imagination of the “normie”. People in the west are absolutely habituated to vote (for the most part) in a two party system where if they think anything is going wrong they punish the ruling party in favour of the alternative major party. People have to go through what democratic theorists refer to as “political socialisation” which basically means outsourcing their thinking to one of the major parties of the system, and stably voting for them. The portions of the electorate which are at the bottom quintile of intelligence and which aren’t even capable of developing partisan loyalties aren’t a threat because they’re a fixed constant: they vote punitively based on random single issues or events within the 6 month memory span to the election. They’ve also been habituated to the system and are harmless to the elite.
Populism, not in the sense of the so far failed political projects they’ve embarked upon, but as a mass media strategy, is an existential threat to the system because it has the very real potential to dehabituate the normie from the elite frame. Thus shutting down any real opposition to the mainstream narrative as is defined by academia, the press, the NGO complex, and the other parts of the machinery of the elite frame in our society is a logical way to defend our democracy. It’s a necessary element of the continuity of the real institution of mass democracy which Karl Popper understood in his paradox of tolerance and which the postwar German left was intimately aware of with its retrospective on the fate of the principled democratic Weimar Republic. The paradox of democracy can be summed up in another spin on Marx’s phrase, the goal of democracy isn’t to represent the people, it’s to change them.
This is just the first part of a series of posts on mass-democracy and the vital lessons we need to learn in a short span of time, not with a determined number now because the process of writing can massively enlarge short projects.
[1] Converse, P. E. (1969). Of Time and Partisan Stability. Comparative Political Studies, 2(2), 139-171.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/learning/some-states-have-removed-trump-from-the-ballot-is-this-a-good-thing-for-democracy.html
[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68029232
[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germanys-afd-hits-record-high-poll-after-budget-chaos-2023-12-19/
[5] This hasn’t and won’t happen in the third world for obvious reasons.
[6] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqh18zsPJlr5MgGx3O0IIQMrg5uRwxS_H&si=WASynW0ohGR89RDG
[7] most famously his analyses of British foreign policy leading up to WWII and the great reform acts.
Great piece, I look forward to more.
What do you think of the distinction between democracy and "demotism"? The first is just a standard multi-party system that regularly convenes elections. The second is the idea that almost all governments since the 20th century justify their rule by through political formula of "rule by the people". In this sense many non-western "non-democratic" regimes like Russia, NK, China etc etc may have rigged elections even though it's obvious who is in power.
I think this is important since even if Western style democracy is increasingly under scrutiny, the question is what is the imagined alternative? In the minds of most people its just more obviously corrupt governments that rig ballots, are naked kleptocracies, but still justify themselves in democratic terms.