Democracy, oligarchy, and demagoguery

Nothing is as it seems in the midst of decadence

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

In order to “save democracy”, the leading candidate in the next French elections, Marine Le Pen, had her political rights suspended. A short while ago, the same happened to the leading Romanian candidate, Calin Georgescu. The former Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, also a leading candidate, also had his political rights suspended by the Supreme Court. Attempts to do the same to Donald Trump didn’t work that well, and despite a shocking case of lawfare that managed to turn one accounting trick into dozens of felony convictions, he was reelected President of the US.

What do all those cases have in common? It’s not just a matter of political incumbents persecuting their political opponents. The same tale about “protecting democracy” was used in all of them for a reason. Those who support the accusers really believe that the election of their opponents would jeopardize Democracy, with a capital “D”.

According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Democracy means:

government by the people : rule of the majority

such as

a form of government in which the people elect representatives to make decisions, policies, laws, etc. according to law

Now, a literal reading of this definition would be that the candidates picked by the majority — Le Pen, Georgescu, Bolsonaro, Trump — would have been elected to represent their constituents and should be able to make decisions, etc., “according to law”. It wouldn’t mean that “law” (in the sense of court decisions) should be used to “protect Democracy” by preventing the electorate from making bad decisions, picking the wrong candidate, and so on. The elected representatives would have to make their decisions “according to law”, but anybody could become a candidate, and the electorate, not the courts, would decide who would become its representative.

The question(s) of whether the French, Romanian, Brazilian, and American courts’ decisions were lawful according to each country’s laws is irrelevant to this article. I don’t even care much about Populism, except as a subject of study. Le Pen père was a disgusting person and his daughter is little more than a more politically correct, more presentable version of the same essential ideological dynasty. A Vichy zombie plastered with make-up to make good TV. Bolsonaro’s only redeeming quality is that he has always been anti-Communist; in the rare occasions he is right, it’s usually for the wrong reason. Trump is a TV-addicted, Mammon-worshipper ignoramus who paints his face orange and thinks he looks tanned, a caricature of all the worst aspects of American culture. I don’t know anything about Georgescu, so I’m neither his supporter nor his accuser. Neither do I like anything about the mass-produced candidates protected by the courts of so many countries from their Populist opponents, or about the very system that all those courts are trying to protect. I really don’t have a political axe to grind in all that mess. On the other hand, the whole situation is fascinating, like a slow-motion train wreck.

What interests me is the historical phenomenon of so many rejected Populist candidacies at once. What does it mean, in historical and sociological terms? It’s easy to say that the courts are “protecting Democracy”, but it begs the question. What are all those courts, in countries with vastly different legal systems, protecting Democracy from? Moreover, why have courts decided to vet candidates in so many countries, all of them trying to “protect Democracy” by disenfranchising leading candidates?

To answer these questions, we must first understand their working definition of “Democracy.” It’s different, or at least narrower than Merriam-Webster’s. It is not a coincidence that most of those candidates have been compared to Hitler, the boogeyman of modern politics, by their opponents. The latter see their lawfare as a necessary component of Democracy, a barrier against electing Hitler again, as the Germans (more or less) did some 90 years ago.

Democracy, then, isn’t just the rule of the majority: it’s a system — almost a way of life — that needs to protect itself against misuse by the same majority. It needs to prevent the majority from turning on minorities so that it doesn’t become “mob rule”, and as those candidates are perceived as “anti-minority” in various ways, the courts’ decisions are indeed protecting Democracy. This is the reasoning, at least.

But when has Democracy not been “mob rule”? What is the difference between a majority and a mob? The ancient Greeks, who invented democracy, saw it degenerate into demagoguery, and it’s perfectly possible to perceive Populism as a form of demagoguery. In that sense, the courts would be preventing the degeneration of their respective democracies. But are the systems they are protecting indeed democracies, in the strict sense? Have they ever been truly ruled by the majority?

I don’t believe in the sacredness of Democracy, nor do I think that Churchill was universally right when he said that “democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” It would be absurd to replace Swiss democracy with an authoritarian system, but in Spain, democracy’s track record is awful, leading to civil war and other assorted disgraces. In France, the guillotine and the almost predictable popular riots — which gave us the beauty of the wide Parisian avenues, expressly built to allow riot police to arrive quickly anywhere — don’t say much for the applicability of that system there, either.

The American experiment, which I don’t believe will last much longer, tried to place the individual above the mob (or the majority…), replacing the Absolutist king with an Executive whose hands would be tied by Congress and the Judiciary and counting on the irreconcilability of the wills of each Power to prevent the always-present specter of “mob rule.” It seemed to have worked for a while, at least if we forget such small matters as their Civil War. However, these days the same powers appear to be mostly united around a “mandate” that to its opponents closely resembles the dreaded “mob rule”. Or “Democracy.” Or “Authoritarianism”, at least if the expression of that rule of the majority is seen as incarnated in the no-longer-tied hands of an Executive that sees itself as the real-life expression of the popular will.

But it’s all a sleight-of-hand, for what is being threatened by Populism now is not Democracy, but what would be seen by the ancient Greeks as either Aristocracy or its degenerated form, Oligarchy. The American left has been quick to accuse the Trump administration of being oligarchic, but I think they are seeing the trees and failing to perceive the forest. The so-called oligarchs around Trump didn’t arrive now; they had been in cahoots with every previous administration, and the only difference now is that they are helping Trump dismantle a vast bureaucratic system he receives as his enemy while they previously worked hand-in-hand with the same system.

All countries whose population is mainly of European origin had in the last eighty years exclusively either Aristocratic/Oligarchic. In Eastern Europe and Cuba, they had Communist rule, but Communism, pace Marx and Lenin, is yet another form of Aristocracy or Oligarchy, in which a Nomenklatura rules and picks its own head of government.

The difference between an Aristocracy and an Oligarchy — again, its degeneration — is that an Aristocracy will try to serve its country, while an Oligarchy will try to serve itself.

Likewise, the difference between Democracy and Demagoguery is that in a democracy the majority rules aiming for the good of the whole country, and in demagoguery, the majority picks representatives who will rule on their own interest while throwing the majority some crumbs taken from the minorities to guarantee their support.

Finally, the difference between Democracy and Aristocracy is that in a democracy the majority rules, either directly (as in Switzerland) or indirectly (by picking representatives), and in an aristocracy an élite rules.

Purposefully, the American experiment created, or rather imported, an Aristocratic form of government — as proved by the vast genealogical commonalities between Presidents. Obama, the supposed herald of Change, descends from three different British kings! While some lip service has been given to a supposed Democratic ideal, the very essence of the American experiment consists of fomenting division within an incestuous ruling élite so that individual citizens can compete unencumbered against one another for a hard-to-win place among the rarified few who really matter.

The European (and Latin-American, in between military-rule interregnums) Post-War forms of government, however, painted themselves as true democracies while, unsurprisingly, working as Aristocratic governments most of the time. Political dynasties, genealogical or ideological, have always been the norm rather than the exception.

Those Aristocratic systems pretending to be democracies didn’t work for long before degrading into a vast worldwide-connected oligarchic system. Globalization is only a pretty name for the interconnectedness of oligarchies, in a system as incestuous and as distant from textbook-definition Democracy as the Early-Modern Absolutist Habsburg rule over most of Europe a few centuries earlier.

“Globalization”, in the sense of worldwide trade connections, is not a recent phenomenon. As I write, I can see in my typical Brazilian countryside garden a beautiful mango tree, probably descended from seeds brought from India by Portuguese traders 500 years ago, and an avocado tree whose distant ancestors were cultivated by Mesoamerican natives lost in the mists of time.

Likewise, ideas have always spread out from their geographic origins. The Spanish conquistadors made Mexico a Catholic country, bringing a Faith whose origins can be found in the Greek and Roman interpretations of something (or rather Someone) that happened in and around Jerusalem. In Mexico, they found corn and chocolate, now popular foods all over the world. Ideas and trade have always walked hand in hand.

The difference between the previous global networks of trade and ideas and the Globalization phenomenon of the end of the last century, the one that turned Aristocracies into Oligarchies, lies in the inversion of the classical definition of truth operated by Modern thinking. For Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas, “truth” means “the adequation of the intellect to the thing perceived”. In other words, if my idea of something corresponds to that thing as it is in real life, this idea is truthful. If it doesn’t, as when I mistake a wax apple for a real apple, it is not.

Modern thinking turned it upside down. “I think, therefore I am”, makes thinking (“the intellect”, in the definition above) the origin of the being (“the thing”). Truth becomes the adequation of the thing to the intellect, for the latter is what gives the thing its very existence. This is the origin of ideological thinking, which sees reality as an amorphous matter that needs to be forced to conform to the dictates of this or that ideology. Instead of looking around and trying to understand reality, ideologues try to force things into what they “understood” beforehand, into artificial systems that would give amorphous reality its being.

That is why, for instance, the American (very Modern) ideological experiment presupposes a rootless individual who is only connected to others by contractual obligations, failing to see, or condescendingly tolerating as “personal matters”, all that has always formed the backbone of any civilization: religion, familial links, culture, and so on. These essential aspects of humanity’s natural socialness are feared to the point that marriage — the formation of the elementary cell of society, the natural mechanism for the perpetuation of both society and species — demands a “license” provided by civil authorities, and religion is forbidden from touching governance.

Operating on a different set of ideas to which reality should be made to conform, Communism tries to destroy the same elements of human-ness, but instead of proposing or presupposing a rootless individual, it can only see a vast amorphous mob inhabiting a world defined by the property of the means of production — from industrial machinery to kitchen utensils. A lathe or a loom is more real than a family, and the common (or rather governmental) property of the former is what gives the members of the latter their existence as members of Communist society.

The ideology of Globalism, developed within the élite-perpetuating institutions of Post-War Western Europe, is a mishmash that tried to combine the “best” of both ideological sides. The same basic elements of human socialness are equally denied, albeit in a way that combines both the Capitalist way of smothering human-ness with money and consumption and the Communist heavy-handed approach towards (the denial of) culture.

That’s why, for instance, their ideological denial of religion prevents Eurocrats from noticing the sheer otherness of Islamic culture, forcing them to unsuccessfully treat Islam as the more-or-less successfully treated Catholicism. As Islam has no equivalent to the Catholic injunction to render unto Caesar what is Casar’s, however, it simply doesn’t work. Their ideological blinders prevent them from seeing it, though, and only when a huge minority of Muslims refuse to adapt to their host society and their view of women as almost chattel becomes a serious social problem they will look around and try to understand, in their terms, what is going on. To no avail, of course, as their ideology blinds them to reality.

The rootless individual presupposed on both sides of the Atlantic is seen as an agencyless cog in the vast machinery of society in Globalist ideology. Unlike its “traditional” American counterpart, the Globalized individual is not supposed to spend his life in a usually vain attempt at reaching the top. He won’t fall into a destitute condition, he will not become homeless or suffer hunger, but he won’t be allowed to raise his head above his peers, either.

The societal “values” each rootless individual is supposed to embrace are determined by the same élite that slowly passed from an Aristocracy to an Oligarchy, that is, that ceased to work on behalf of (their idea of good) society and increasingly embraced their naked interests, both ideological and related to the preservation of power in the same hands. It was not sudden, but the result of a slow process during which the élites distanced themselves from society, embracing notions that only made sense within their incestuously enclosed intellectual environments, at the same time reducing to absurd their own ideological errors and failing to see their absurdness.

Some elements of their radical ideologies played the same way on both sides of the Atlantic. For instance, on both sides society had to swallow the top-down imposition of social acceptance for sexual aberrations, beginning with the equivalency of sodomy and marriage, passing through the substitution of “gender fluidity”-derived identities for the social roles of each sex and now aiming at a Brave-New-World-like normalization of pre-puberty sexual activity.

Others had deeply different social consequences. While Globalist ideology on both sides, ideologically blinded against the perception of the importance of cultural differences, imposed unrestricted immigration, Canada and Europe imported millions of people molded by utterly different cultures (Indians in Canada and, even more radically opposed, Muslims in Europe), the US imported, for geographical reasons, mainly people whose cultures were also informed by the same late European civilization.

As Hungary’s populist ruler Viktor Orbán once stated, the US was very lucky. The Catholic immigrants who flooded the American borders were much closer to the origins of Western civilization than the American societal experiment they now inhabit, having a civilizing effect on it. In Europe, on the other hand, millions of Muslims formed Islamic ghettoes that police cannot enter without armored cars and in which an alliance of drug dealers and Muslim clerics force women to choose between wearing a veil or being raped if they step outside their controlled-rent apartments.

This difference, however, was not only due to sheer geographical luck, but also invisible to both Globalists and their equally ideologically-blinded opponents. The cultural differences between the “traditional” population and the newly arrived never entered the equation, in the view of those fomenting immigration, as their ideology blinds them to culture. They believe man to be a tabula rasa, 100% molded by his political and legal environment, and it never crossed their minds that Muslims would fail to see women as identical to men (not only in social rights but in everything, for such is a premise in Globalist ideology) or to reflexively accept as socially valuable the vast compendium of sexual teratomas whose promotion the long-suffering natives had slowly swallowed during the previous decades.

Their opponents, however, are just as blind. Trumpism completely fails to see what Orbán pointed out and treats a social group whose arrival strengthens the Western values in American society as if it were antithetical to it, mistaking Catholics for Moors. Part of it comes from the racist element that has always been present in American society, but it’s amazing how people who call themselves “conservative” can fail to perceive that a brown-skinned Mexican Catholic immigrant brings a much more valuable cultural contribution to American society than a white-skinned Boer farmer who thrived in Apartheid South Africa but became a victim as soon as the tables have turned.

Populism, strictly speaking, is a reactionary phenomenon. It’s a reaction to Globalist ideology, and in many aspects it is no more than that, reflexively inverting the Globalist discourse and, in typical ideological fashion, putting bad ideas before reality. This is why American populism repeats the discourse of European populism verbatim, without realizing that Catholic and Muslim immigrants are respectively food and poison for their societies. Modern ideology, of which Globalism is but one version, prevents them from perceiving the importance of culture and religion or the differences that spring from each civilizational basis.

No one can deny the cultural strength or the richness of Chinese, Persian, or European civilizations. Only a fool, however, would believe that planting a vast group of people from one into another of these civilizational spaces could fail to become an isolated ghetto, completely out of touch and inimical to the surrounding culture. The main competitor and enemy of European civilization, for the last 1400 years, has been Islam. It’s a rival civilization, whose culture on many points was formed as a denial of European culture. Importing millions of Muslims, who obviously would not leave their culture outside and instantly become Western Europeans, could never work out well. It’s not that Muslims would be somehow “bad”; it’s just that the cultures are too different, too inimical and opposite. If Iran imported a few million Frenchmen, the result would be basically the same: French ghettoes that the police could not enter peacefully, etc.

Within the same civilizational space, mass migration may enrich the receiving society, as migrants are by definition people who can think on their feet and act accordingly. It happened in Western Europe when the European Union made it possible for the brightest young people from Eastern Europe to escape their homelands, impoverished by decades of Communism, and move West. The same thing happens when Latin Americans move to North America.

The co-existence of different civilizational models in the same territory, however, is a recipe for disaster. That’s what happens in China and India, where Muslim minorities are always at odds with the surrounding majority. That’s what happens in South Africa, where the co-existence of originally European and African groups seems to be possible only by one group violently oppressing the other. That’s what recently turned into an international spat in Canada when intra-cultural struggles imported from India became a domestic police problem.

Civilizational borders have always been war zones because they are places where very different conceptions of right and wrong, good and bad, heavenly and hellish are forced to coexist. Artificially creating civilizational borders within a city by mass immigration is sheer madness. That is why American police could not even see their Triad problem until people of Chinese descent joined their forces, for instance. This is a real problem, and that is what Europe is dealing with, thus creating, as a reaction, European Populism.

But we have seen that decadent Aristocracies, degenerated into a single international Oligarchy, still rule on both sides of the Atlantic. Their judicial systems are the ones preventing Populist candidacies. But what are those candidacies, and why do they need (at least in the view of the ruling oligarchs) to be prevented from running?

That’s the funny part. On both sides of the Atlantic, Aristocratic systems pretended to be democracies. The pretense worked because they had in place nifty systems that guaranteed that only Aristocrats would ever be elected. In France, for instance, the political class is essentially composed of Enarchs (alumni of the École Nationale d’Administration). In the US, the bi-partisan system and the insider control of each party’s nomination system, together with the election financing system, prevents the hoi polloi from trying their luck at the elections. On both sides of the Great Sea, a few “radical” elements — Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, or Eurocommunists, for instance — played the part of an authorized opposition, while being prevented from making any serious waves.

As the globalized oligarchy distanced itself from the real needs of its populations, however, something strange started to happen, and the electoral façade of democracy started to become something completely unexpected: a real democratic occasion, if not a democratic system. Here and there, anti-globalist candidates, later to become known as Populists, managed to present themselves to the electorates, slowly gaining ground with the election here and there of small fish. Mayors and lowly powerless congressmen prepared a path for larger candidacies, sometimes turning small radical parties into almost mainstream big parties. That’s what happened to Le Pen père’s Front National, which became in the hands of his daughter and political heir the very important and almost mainstream Rassemblement National (National Rally), or when Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), initially an economically liberal “professors’ party”, became a right-wing juggernaut in Germany politics. That’s what led from Tea Parties to MAGA Republicanism.

The entrance of outsiders, non-oligarchic candidates as real contenders — in other words, the beginning of really democratic political disputes —scared the bejeezus out of the oligarchic political class, whose members are more akin to middle-level managers working on behalf of their masters than real rulers. However, to make the most out of their chances, the newly arrived and newly-named Populists could not risk being Democrats themselves. After all, the system was never and is still not a true democracy. The Populists are taking advantage of a flaw in the system, a loophole, in a way. If they embraced Democracy while their opponents kept the levers of power firmly clutched, they would be tying their hands at the beginning of a boxing match against a much more powerful opponent. They need to fight dirty, at least as dirty as those they are trying to dethrone.

And that is why, in a movement akin to the utterance often attributed to Lévy-Strauss, according to which “America is the one nation that leaped from barbarism to decadence without knowing civilization”, the democratic loophole in the Globalist system was exploited by Populism by embracing not Democracy, but its degenerated counterpart, demagoguery. Trump is a demagogue, as are Bolsonaro, Le Pen, Orbán, and all the others. Post-War Western politics leaped from Aristocracy to Demagoguery without knowing Democracy.

After all, Populists are not suddenly-arrived demagogues intent on spoiling the fine waters of Democracy, as their counterparts in power try to paint them. They are slowly-ascending demagogues who fight an international oligarchy’s demagogical embrace of make-believe democracy. It’s a case of demagoguery against demagoguery (and as far as I am myself concerned, a pox on both their houses!). That’s why they cannot be smirched as demagogues by those whose hold on power they jeopardize; the risk of having the imputation rebound on the accusers’ faces is too great. They must be something else. Autocrats, maybe. Or authoritarian. Or, even, Hitler Redivivus, in various incarnations, from Orange Boogeyman to several other supposed Putin wannabees like Le Pen fille.

But are they really that autocratical? Do they dream of making any political opponent glow in the dark or fly from a very high window as Putin is prone to? I don’t think so.

What Trump, for instance, is doing is both a series of acts of personal vengeance against those who tried to make him a Bolsonaro or a Le Pen, forced out of the political game and always fearing the knock on the door that will lead them to jail, and a systematic dismantling of the governmental machine that perpetuated in power the oligarchy he fully intends to destroy.

For instance, when he ordered the official records on the JFK assassination released, it was not only a crowd-pleasing act of demagoguery but also an intentional act of war against the CIA, just like the destruction of their most known fronts (USAid, Voice of America, etc.). He knew the documents he released would show the CIA doing nasty stuff all over the world. He knew it would make it much easier for him to deal with that nest of vipers later on, just like the crazy-looking guy he managed to place as head of the FBI intends to do to his new subordinates. It’s a wrecking ball or a chainsaw, not the replacement of democratic institutions by a new Gestapo or SS, as his opponents depict it. If anything, he is dismantling the Gestapo that went after him.

It doesn’t mean he is building Democracy, though. Far from it. There was never any democracy in place, and no savvy political actor could really believe it possible to establish one at the eleventh hour. After the four years Trump spent learning about how the system really works, after having spent four years trying to make it work according to the rules its propaganda had for public consumption, he eventually became as shrewd a political operator as his shadowy nemesis Obama. Even if he prefers the chainsaw to the scalpel or deranged Twitter posts to off-the-record leaks to the NYT.

His trajectory during the last eight years has been educational for all other Populist contenders, too. Both for those who, like Bolsonaro, did a Trump and spent a whole mandate trying to effect change, only to be thwarted at every step by people who theoretically worked for them, only to be prosecuted after a very strange election expelled them from the supposed seat of power, and for those, like Marine Le Pen, who have been slowly walking up towards electoral victory and are maddeningly close to grabbing it.

If they are allowed to sit on the Seat, wear the Sash, or however goes the particular symbolism of their respective political institutions, they will do the same as Trump 2.0 is now doing. They will systematically dismantle the oligarchical institutions, gladly helped by the same oligarchs who helped their predecessors go after them. Bezos and Zuckerberg, for instance, have already kissed the hand of their new master, for rats are the first to leave a sinking ship.

That is why the “intellectual” oligarchs — those in charge of ideology, not only money — are scared to death, and that’s why they are doing their damnedest to prevent the leading Populist candidates from appearing on the ballots. That is why they say that mere demagogues like Le Pen are new Hitlers, new Putins, or whatever they believe will scare out the electorate. That’s why they punish rank-and-file followers of the AfD or Bolsonaro’s: pour encourager les autres, to make it clear that supporting The Monster will have dire consequences.

In other words, Democracy is a meaningless buzzword for one side, and a loophole for the other. The side that vehemently accuses the other of being authoritarian and Hitler-like is the one that truly acts in an authoritarian manner, out of fear. And, finally, no one can know, not even the Populists themselves, what will come out of their successful efforts. It will certainly not be the Utopic return of some demagogical “greatness” they sell the electorate, but what it will turn out to be in practical terms we cannot know.

All that, if we take the longer view, is only another step in the final decadent of Modernity, just as each small crisis in the last days of Ancient Rome was a small step into its final decadence, but all its contemporaries could see was the present crisis, then the next, and so on. Just as St. Augustine in all his brilliance could not foresee the Middle Ages, we cannot foresee what is to come in a few generations. Right now, though, if we take the longer view we can at least see that it is not at all as it seems to the pundits of all sides.