Heavily loaded expressions are flying around in the public conversation about ‘fascism’, racism, ‘xenophobia’ ‘socialism’, ‘communism’, ‘capitalism’ and most importantly: ‘democracy’ with almost as many interpretations as speakers. What makes all of them interesting is the way they are used, the instinctual certainty about their meaning and the assumption that their understanding and interpretation is widely shared. The looser the definition, the greater the scope of its possible use.
Still, one must wonder what is in the head of the person in the picture above. What is her (his? their?) concept of democracy (and the fascism implied on the placard)?
One could wonder what is in the heads of the antifa folks about Putin’s denazification efforts. Do they see him as a comrade? Will they agree on the meaning of fascism?
One should wonder what was in the heads of the 2000 mules exposed in Dinesh di Souza’s documentary of the same title. Were they ‘saving democracy’ with their obviously criminal activities?
Liberalism
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As we should also wonder what is in the heads of the many thousands of operatives actively working on stealing the next US presidential election. It requires tens of thousands of operatives to strategically distribute millions of illegal immigrants into swing states and voting districts and to provide them with the documents and mail-in ballots to vote.
What is in the heads of their handlers? Do they see themselves as the defenders of democracy by destroying its most basic principles? Is a democracy that can only be maintained by massive fraud worth preserving? Can it even be called democracy?
Although they would not state it publicly, most democrats seem to think ‘YES’ and prove it with their actions, but the answer is ‘NO’ according to a comment I just received to my previous post. @treece thinks that the US is already fascist state.
She has a point, but is she right?
“I think the predominate problem in America is Fascism. This is evident through the fasces symbolism displayed behind the podium in the United States House of Representatives. The fasces was the origin of the name of the Nationalist Fascist Party of Italy (from which the term fascism is derived).
Is fascism the best way to describe the present state of Western liberal democracies? Isn’t it distinct enough to deserve its own name?
In practice, the words ‘democracy’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘liberalism’ are used to describe “that thing we have” or to mean whatever the speaker chooses it to mean – “neither more nor less”.
They are just vague descriptors of the things that we are for or against.
Do I know the answer? No, but we can start thinking about it. I already wrote several posts about democracy; you can find the links at the end of this post. They are dealing with the conceptual problems with sets of pragmatic questions to show why it cannot work.
To find an answer, to know where we are and why, we have to know what the terms we use mean and how did we get to where we are. Let’s start with the terms:
- Democracy is a fundamentally flawed concept. It has more problems than merits.
- It is, by design, the tyranny of the majority
- It cannot exist without some degree of delegation which makes it inherently corruptible.
- It is a blunt instrument destined to surrender its decision-making power to ever growing bureaucracies
- Democratic socialism and crony capitalism are oxymorons. Sort of….
They are just lame attempts to explain away the inherent problems of democracy.
‘Democratic socialism’ is socialism, but not the bad kind, you see, as it is redeemed by the goodness of democracy. It is socialism, because that is what “the people” want; shown through their democratically expressed general will.
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‘Crony capitalism’ shouldn’t blamed on the flaws of democracy, but on the evils of profit driven exploitative capitalism. - Liberalism has a split personality. Well, I should say it is utterly confused. Just do a quick search on the ‘History of liberalism’ to understand what I mean. It is a big subject that would deserve a post on its own. What matters for this conversation is the split that started about a hundred years ago in America which was founded on the ideas of Hobbes and Lock, on the ideas of personal freedom and responsibility, natural rights and equal opportunity.
The political left of the time got tainted with the eugenics of the Fabian socialist and the epistocratic arrogance of the authoritarian progressives like Woodrow Wilson.
They needed a new label, so they hijacked the word ‘liberalism’ to mean various ‘universal’ and ‘human’ rights to other people’s money, managed by a benevolent, redistributive government.
Classical liberalism means individual liberty with personal responsibilities while modern liberalism means economic and social privileges without obligations.
This means the liberal democratic welfare state with various groups competing for a bigger slice of the shared resources and an ever growing bureaucracy controlling it.
It also means, of course, all the libertine stuff of selfish, irresponsible licentiousness and the celebration of hedonism and perversion.
None of it is sustainable. The irreparably corrupt liberal democratic welfare state of the USA with its global hegemonic role is dying in front of our eyes. The rest of the Western world and their global organizations are on the same path.
