Does Democracy have a future?

 In a year that sees so many democracies elect new governments from India to Great Britain, from Russia to the United States of America, we are seeing an increasing disillusionment with the democratic system global elites impose by the bomb.  Many have died at the hands of democracies so that they can benefit from this system and yet is it not a system that encourages short term thinking and detaches us from our ancestors and our traditions?

Aleksandr Dugin has criticised Russia's democratic system as a simulacrum of the Western liberal system, when through a more Russian approach the general will of the people can be expressed, rather than relying on a simple tally of ballot papers on a particular day.  Victorian mathematician and author of Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, demonstrated mathematically that it is not possible to aggregate voter preferences. In the one country founded as a democracy, the United States, the social capital of shared values has been drastically eroded by partisan politics.

G K Chesterton argued that tradition was democracy for the dead.  In other words,  what our ancestors bequeathed us and believed in must still shape our governmental decisions whatever the mood of the moment.  Too often the political parties posture as agents of change and try to achieve victory with manifestos containing lists of measures that will inevitably mean more legislation that changes the essence of the country.

The idea that a majority of votes or constituencies or Electoral College votes can determine the future course of a country, even if in violation of its past looks extremely reductive.  It is as though we are all regarded as rational actors with preferences for government in the same way as consumers choose between different goods or services.  It is surely rooted in a degraded understanding of a nation.

Democracy can only really be justified as a check upon excesses of power or corruption in power.  Voting is a means of accountability, recognising the frailty of human nature and how as Lord Acton put it, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  This though must be understood as a negative argument for democracy as a necessary safeguard, not as a commendation of the system as an ideal in itself.

And yet, in the revolutionary rhetoric of today, the "right" to vote is seen as a right to overthrow what came before and is closely allied to the rhetoric of feminism, sexual revolution, abortion rights and socialism.  Democracy once a mere necessary check, amongst others, is now an ideology in itself.  It has become such an ideological concept that neoconservatives can justify the invasion of sovereign nations and the killing of civilians to ensure this mere pragmatic safeguard, amongst other possible safeguards, can be imposed by military force.  When countries might benefit from the restoration of monarchy, as in Afghanistan, the globalist powers for ideological reasons alone impose democracy instead that deepens tribal divisions.

As right-wing Republicans are recognising, their system works when it does work, not because it is simply a democracy, but because there are other institutions that protect the constitution too.  They argue that the USA is a republic, not a democracy.  That is well and good, but the USA has been the chief advocate of radical change through imposed democracy in other countries in which it really should not have a say.   While on that side of the American political divide there is a healthy scepticism of foreign wars, that country has also produced an aggressively interventionist wing on the Right and Left - neoconservatives and liberal interventionists.

Perhaps the problem lies in America's abstract identity, where its rights do not rest so much in custom as in legal documents, primarily the constitution itself.  An abstract basis of national identity means the USA is a strange creature - a propositional nation.  This is what Revolutionary France aspired to be with its abstract "liberty, equality and fraternity".  This required it to create a new year zero and to exterminate those connected to the ancien regime, aristocrats, peasants and nuns.

Just as the French revolution was linked to secret societies, so many of the Founding Fathers of America had such connections.  And such secret societies were aiming at the destruction of the ancien regime - church and monarchy with their organic links to the peasantry.  This agenda was indeed the agenda of the oligarchs, many of whom were merchants or connected to banking.  And here is another fact about democracy, it fosters and empowers oligarchy, in particular the monied interest.   

Democracy as in voting the rascals out, has a pragmatic benefit, but only when other institutions also form part of the fabric of the constitution, such as the monarchy, the church, the courts.  If Russia had its absolute Orthodox Tsar, England had its King and the King's Peace that held the commonwealth together, was the common law - looking back to the past in terms of precedent and what came before and tempered by equity, protected by the Lord Chancellor.  

Democracy implies not only that it is the best system, but that unique nations, each made up of a particular ethnos, must be forced into the same system.  But each ethnos is unique, with its own solutions to the challenges of being a polis.  Full representative democracy goes hand-in-hand with secularism, which also reduces each nation to the same colourless people. It is those unique cultural values that make an ethnos what it is - the ethics (same etymological root) of a people.  Those ethics come from the spiritual life of each people.  

If democracy is a tool of the oligarchic globalist elites, then does populism via the ballot box represent a way to win back the values of the particular people?  To an extent yes.  Trump and Brexit were populist victories against the oligarchs, or the swamp as Trump would put it.  Nonetheless another election, especially if votes are tampered with, can lead to everything being reversed at the next election.  Trump was ousted.  Brexit was only reluctantly implemented by the Conservative Party in the UK and could be reversed by a Labour Government.

The only real solution is a transformation at a spiritual level.  This is where monarchy, linked to the church is so important.  As we have seen in England institutions can be subverted by liberals.  Nonetheless, if institutions can be spiritually revived and connected again to higher meaning, the hierarchy of society will be back in its cosmological position.  Then whether absolute monarchy or democracy the common weal will be in restored health.  The real battle then is against the revolution in high places with its Luciferian agenda.  This is what lies behind the globalist agenda and the way that democracies no longer respect their dead or the values that they have inherited.  

The forthcoming British General Election and the Tory Party

 On 22nd May 2024 the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told the country he had asked the King to dissolve Parliament.  He made his announcement soaked in the rain let down upon him by the British weather and to the racket of New Labour's so-called election anthem in 1997, a pop song called "It can only get better".  The announcement seemed to symbolise the disarray of the last Parliament in which the Conservatives threw away the potential opportunity of a large majority in the House of Commons.

How did it go so wrong?  There is something about bad faith with the Conservative Party in that it is largely made up of liberals pretending to be conservative in the ordinary dictionary-definition meaning of the word.  On the so-called Right of the party, there is an ideological zeal about neoliberal economics.  They were determined Brexit should be an opportunity for global capital rather than a reassertion of national identity and protection.  On the left of the party there are the so-called "One Nation" Conservatives whose liberal policies and desire to surrender the nation to the globalist EU belie their chosen name.

We have a party of liberals masquerading as conservatives.  There are some honourable exceptions of course, but there is a mismatch between the conservatism of many shire voters and the liberalism of the parliamentary party, be it neoliberal economics or on the other wing an acceptance of the woke social agenda,

The British establishment is essentially liberal.  Brexit presented an opportunity for a new approach, a genuine and traditionalist conservatism, emphasising tradition, patriotism and conservative social values.  A coalition of voters arose of working-class former labour voters and traditionalist shire voters that supported the Conservative Party led by arch-liberal Boris Johnson and put them into government.  This was an opportunity for a genuine conservative alliance.  The parliamentary party though could not bring itself to adopt what it sneeringly regarded as a "populist" approach.  Boris Johnson had successfully persuaded the voters he was a conservative and a patriot, but he was really a globalist liberal.  He reversed some restrictions on mass migration introduced by his predecessor Mrs Theresa May.  He also jumped on board the anti-human net zero agenda, which plans to destroy livestock farming and cover our green and pleasant land into pastures of metal in the form of wind farms and solar panels.  

The respect for the freedom of ordinary Britons was disregarded in favour of the Fabian agenda of control during the Covid lockdown and the propaganda about an untested vaccine.    The short-lived premiership of Liz Truss, ideologically liberal in economic terms is well recited.  Probably the Indian Rishi Sunak was the most conservative of Britain's three nominally conservative prime ministers.   

Eagerly looking at the possibility of power arch globalist and establishment figure Sir Kier Starmer, leader of the Labour Party is an uncharismatic manifestation of globalist ideology - he even claims not to know the definition of a woman . . .

The trouble is in fighting any battle on conservative lines, the Conservative Party has an adulterated and compromised record.  It really seems its default position is to be on the liberal side of the culture war and only reluctantly fights for conservative values because politically it would be insane not to.  And so we have a party that calls itself conservative, but does not really believe in conservatism, fighting what is really the most culturally-revolutionary and globalist Labour Party since Blair. 

The Government's position on Russia is telling.  In a sense the Donbas is the sharp end of the culture war.  As Patriarch Kirill has stated, there is a spiritual and value element to the conflict.  President Putin has been enshrining in law conservative family values.  The Conservative Party as part of the liberal British establishment feels more naturally allied to the Ukrainian regime - supported by a strange coalition of arch Nazis and arch liberals determined to attack the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

A "right-wing" alternative has emerged by the name of Reform.  A reformed Brexit Party.  It is committed to a radical constitutional agenda of reform that seems to be based upon Jacobin ideology.

What all this seems to tell us is that despite the courageous Brexit vote, as long as politics through parliamentary democracy remains in the hands of the British elite the voter will only be offered different shades of liberalism.  The Conservative Party has the merit of slowing down the globalist agenda for its own electoral advantage (seemingly not out of conviction).  Nonetheless, the trajectory of the United Kingdom will remain globalist for as long as the current establishment remains in power.  From the Conservative Party to the Church of England the progressive liberal ideology permeates, with no alternative on offer.  Our traditions, our institutions might appear ancien regime, but as Bagehot put it we are a "veiled republic" and the underlying ideology is progressive and Fabian.   

Unequal Fraternity

 In some fundamental sense equality matters.  Equality matters in what makes us the same - our human nature.  What though makes us unique is our human energy, our hypostasis, our personality.  And this is where equality runs against what it means to be human.  For equality, as New Right pagan thinker Alain de Benoist, has powerfully argued, leads to the crushing of uniqueness.  

We find also in the work of Aleksandr Dugin's murdered daughter, Darya Dugina, an argument against equality and for hierarchy.  Hierarchy, literally meaning the rule of the sacred, for Dugina, is the key principle of her metaphysics, allowing an ascent to the divine.  Darya Dugina was a Christian Neoplatonist.

From the perspective of a totally orthodox Orthodox Christian, Christos Yannaras, pointing to the distinction between energy and essence in the writings of the Palamite, emphasises the irreplaceable and unrepeatable energy of the person as opposed to the "individual" - the individual being the human being reduced to his nature and the need to survive in a fallen world of death.  The person, through the transfiguration resulting from the Incarnation, transcends the death-determined existence of the individual and lives a life of communion through Christ within the church.

French-Canadian Orthodox iconographer and writer Jonathan Pageau has done a great deal to bring the idea of the sacred and the hierarchical to a much wider audience.  He points to the inversions and subversions taking place in post-modern society and how any drive for equality really leads to a subversion and an inverted hierarchy.

These different angles all point to the necessity of hierarchy to give meaning as opposed to the flattening effect of equality.  Equality turns us all into replaceable and repeatable individuals.  From feminism making men and women interchangeable to the destruction of cultures that are considered illiberal and traditional - the drive for equality creates uniformity in a flat world where ascent becomes impossible.

Various movements on the "right" promoting capitalism and meritocracy do a disservice to the idea of hierarchy.  Any idea of hierarchy based on destabilising competition in the pursuit of material betterment, really just treats us all the same.  It reduces us all to mere materialistic individuals without the possibility of transfiguration through the spiritual life.  

There is of course some value to bettering yourself in this material and temporal world, but it ranks far lower in a hierarchy of meaning than achieving any level of transcendence and transfiguration.

The unequal disparities in wealth as a result of economic competition that helps the ruthless and brutal to triumph is not a hierarchy.  It is certainly unequal, but it is a subverted hierarchy of the mercantile class.  It is not a hierarchy because the social links are broken and every man becomes an individual pursuing his own survival and "the Devil take the hindmost".

The liberal ideology that lies behind capitalism is just as much a creature of the Enlightenment, if not more so, as Marxism.  There is an ontological equality that reduces every unique person to a replaceable individual. 

Hierarchy is not simply inequality.  No it literally means rule of the sacred and therefore we must enter into ideas of participation in higher meaning and ascent to higher levels of spiritual being to truly understand the word.  This is achieved not through reducing people to competing individuals pursuing their self interest.  It is rather human beings entering into communion vertically with God and horizontally with their neighbour in love.  And love is the underlying power of true hierarchy, it is what sustains and powers hierarchy.  The bishop cares for his laity, the laity honour their bishop.  The Christian monarch is linked to his subjects through his noblesse oblige and the people out of loyalty to him symbolically linking us to the King of Heaven.

The early communists strove for a loving and neighbourly society without the vertical aspect.  This was bound to turn everyone into replaceable and repeatable individuals.  They hubristically and rebelliously rejected God.  The capitalists wanted to form a new vertical structure based not on sanctity but upon an individualistic restructuring through the force of competition, not love - all again became replaceable individuals and love was a fool's game.

Only if we rediscover a society based upon love and hierarchy can we hope for people to be again understood as uniquely precious personalities linked to one another in communion and through a unique place in the society through their particular and unique networks of relationships and their personal creativity.  And all this is only possible in the context of a spiritual hierarchy giving secular life meaning.

In the globalist world such a return seems unlikely.  Countries, cultures and people are becoming ever-more replaceable and the same in the global economy.  Only in the Church can this affirmation of the person necessarily within a hierarchy earthly and celestial be firm and sure.  As the world around us turns into a very equal, but very dehumanising and reductive place, insofar as the Church resists secularising forces and ideologies then it alone will remain a place of hierarchy that affirms and sanctifies the human person.