The best posts of the week of June 26, 2022
Saturday, July 2, 2022
Illiberal Democracy. A Manifesto?
There's something really scary going on in American politics.
The left doesn't seem to grasp it, and most of the rank and file on the populist right that are advancing it are only dimply aware of it.
Relatively recently, we ran an item on illiberal democracy. Illiberal democracy is something that most Americans have never heard of, including those who are supporting it right now. But it's not only being advanced, it's coalescing into a defined movement, and it seems clear that there's plenty of people in it who aren't worried about democracy at all, as they look at democracy as liberal democracy and regard it as illegitimate.
And just recently, some of those backing this view, issued a manifesto.
It states:
Okay, first we'll note, what the heck are we doing linking this entire thing in this way and quoting it. Shouldn't we just link this in.
Well, we intend to comment on this at length, quite frankly. This is important in the context of our times.
Let's start first with the back end, who the singers are. I don't know most of them, rude peasant than I am, but I do some. Here's the complete list:
Now, if you are like me, most of those names you don't recognize, but some you probably do, if you are follower politics, in any event.
And that's interesting in and of itself.
Note some of the names.
Mark Meadows, the former advisor to Trump whom we now know, unless you refuse to believe the testimony of his aid, sat largely on his hands during the recent coup attempt, and who at first cooperated, and then ceased cooperating, with the January 6 Committee. According to at least one report, his aid was the recipient of one of the "you know what to do" texts, and that Meadows was the source of the instruction, received second hand.
And then there's Rod Dreher, crabby columnist and author of The Benedict Option, who at one time was regarding Western Society as basically a nearly lost cause, and therefore advocating for the aforementioned option. He's known to be fascinated with Illiberal Democracy, and featured prominently in the attention conservatives are now giving to Viktor Orbán.
And we have Victor Davis Hanson, the historian, farmer, and conservative columnist. I love his historical works, but as a columnist he's been hardcore in the Trump camp in an unyielding fashion.
And there's also R. R. Reno, the editor of the excellent journal First Things, but who recently gave an interview that was mildly sympathetic with the views of Patrick Dineen, who regards Liberal Democracy as a failure.
Now, not all of these people are ones that I'd put in this interesting group. A lot of them are just conservatives. But that some are in this group, and are prominent in it, is interesting, and telling.
Let's switch to another name for a second, that of Lauren Boebert
Now, nobody is going to believe that Boebert is an intellectual heavyweight. Far from it. But she is a well known populist figure right now, and she accordingly shows up in populist shows, like the recent Hageman rally in Casper, Wyoming. Boebert recently stated:
The reason we had so many overreaching regulations in our nation is because the church complied. The Church is supposed to direct the government, the government is not supposed to direct the church.That is not how our Founding Fathers intended it. And I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk. That’s not in the Constitution, it was in a stinking letter, and it means nothing like what they say it does.
Boebert, because she's in the news, got a lot of attention for saying this, but she's not unique in having said something like this recently. A Southern women candidate recently declared that in her state, the church was the state, which is quite a bit more radical than what Boebert stated.
How does this related to "National Conservatism"?
Well, maybe it doesn't.
But maybe it does.
What can be said is this. For the first time since the 1850s we've reached a point in our political discourse where there's one, maybe two, political views that regard the other as wholly illegitimate. Those espousing illiberal democracy hold that view. All democracy, they argue, must take place within a set of shared, and dictated, beliefs and philosophies. The drafters of the statement on "National Conservatism" come close to saying that. Some of them pretty clearly believe that. Only in that context can you admire Viktor Orbán (or Putin) and only in that context does an effort to overturn a legitimate election make sense.
In that context, we'd note, at the rank and file level, much less justification of the underlying tenants is even necessary. The political opposition simply became the enemy, whose views are not to be taken seriously, and whose votes don't really count.
Lots of current underlying politics, moreover, makes more sense in this context. The loss of jobs and the constant ongoing influx of immigrants, for example, takes on another aspect if jobs have been exported to nations that don't share our culture and if the incoming immigrants, in at least some cases, do not share that culture either. The danger of a reaction to immigration was always present in the post Ted Kennedy immigration regime, as prior to that nearly all immigrants in fact did share the same European based culture. "Diversity is our strength" has been stated a zillion times, but there's really no evidence whatsoever that this is true and to a large degree average people never believed it. As the blue collar world has undergone massive change, that was bound to develop into a crisis point.
So too are all of the recent left-wing assaults on ancient institutions. Radically changed official views on gender, very little of which is based on science, was bound to upset at a street level, and people who have a fundamentally much more traditional view cannot help but react to it.
All of this is consistent with traditional conservatism, we'd note. But one thing that conservatives in office were always prone to do was compromise, which the populist feel is betrayal. Compromise does mean that things have continued to move, and largely leftward, up until very recently.
So now we have not only a split in the Republican Party, but there's something deeper going on. Part of the party does not so much believe that Trump won the election as it does that Democratic votes, coming from the left, were illegitimate by their very nature. They're looking for a different kind of country.
When Robyn Belinsky stated, in the recent Wyoming Congressional debate, in a muddled babbling way, that "we're not a democracy we're a republic", and then went on to some nonsensical statement about the states, she was trying to seemingly articulate, at the street level, this view. The states, some now hold, can overrule a national election in the ultimate example of state nullification, in those instances in which an election isn't true to an overarching set of agreed cultural principles.
No doubt, not all of the signators to the document trying to usher in a National Conservative movement hold this view. Many are probably just deeply conservative, and most conservatives would agree with most of the principals.
But underlying the times there's something else going on.
Related Threads:
Illiberal Democracy.
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