Why representative democracy is evil

Lord Sovereign

Well-known member
And one bad reign can lead to decades or centuries of chaos.

And those decades or centuries of chaos can then be patched up by one good reign (Edward I literally made good on the fuck ups of his father and grandfather, Henry III and bad King John himself respectively). Nobody's arguing that it's perfect, but you can't deny that decisions get made quicker. A King or an Emperor who wants to put in desperately needed reforms has far less red tape to stop him than many of our current democracies.
 

Abhishekm

Well-known member
Doesn't most of that apply to the justifications for the One Party System and the whole Supreme Leader thing too? Like the rebuttals of and proponents for Imperial rule isn't exactly new or rare or anything close to never been tried.
 

Aldarion

Neoreactionary Monarchist
Doesn't most of that apply to the justifications for the One Party System and the whole Supreme Leader thing too? Like the rebuttals of and proponents for Imperial rule isn't exactly new or rare or anything close to never been tried.

There is a massive difference between traditional and absulte monarchy, though, as well as between any kind of monarchy and a one party system.

In a traditional monarchy, you don't need much more than a monarch because most of the governance is carried out at local and regional level. As such, bureaucracy is very small (and usually, rather efficient), and people have major - if often extralegal - influence on politics and policies because decisions are made at very low level, where decision-makers are within arm's reach. Oftentimes, literally so - and they know it. For example, much is made today of corruption at local level. But this does not mean that local governments are more corrupt than central one - rather, they appear more corrupt because corruption is easier to notice, and in any case much of corruption in central government is given legal veneer.

In an absolute monarchy, state is literally personal property of the monarch. Monarch makes basically all decisions and bureocracy then implements them - in theory. In practice, monarch makes many decisions but many are also made by various interest groups. Difference, then, with traditional monarchy, is that absolute monarchy has a massive bureaucracy which allows utter centralization of the decision-making. This means that any bad decisions impact everyone, and are often long-lasting. Yet the fact that the state is property of a monarch means that monarch at least has personal interest in ensuring that state prospers. As a result, much depends on the personal competence of the monarch as well as his ethics and emotional maturity.

One party system is by far the worst because it has all disadvantages of an absolute monarchy combined with all disadvantages of a democracy, and advantages of neither. Much like absolute monarchy, it is difficult to impossible to get input of the people, much less to make government listen to it. Administrative apparatus is all-pervasive and enters all the pores of the society, yet it serves only interests of the central government. And central government often means a single person around whom the party has coalesced (e.g. Stalin, Tito), and said person tends to be emotionally immature, unable to recognize their own limitations yet drunk on worship. Much like democracy, one-party state has a massive and inert political system which is often focused inwards, caring more about internal competition and power struggles than about whatever problems are facing the society - yet unlike democracy, it has absolutely no need to care about the electorate, nor to even pretend to care. It has literally nothing good: neither the small central government of a traditional monarchy, nor the need to at least fake caring about popular opinion that democracy has. Thus it is free to bury its head in the sand, turn inwards and fossilize. There is also no sense that the state is a private property, which at least somewhat pushed absolute monarchs to care about it: in one-party systems, state is the property of the party, everybody is responsible for it - which in practice means that nobody is responsible for it, state is merely a money cow which members of the party milk until it collapses.

Modern civil democracy is also bad, because civic nationalism basically denies the state as a property of a certain group - it is the property of whoever happens to come live in it, with no obligations. Thus people have no incentive to protect it, yet every incentive to milk it until it dries up.
 

Free-Stater 101

Freedom Means Freedom!!!
Nuke Mod
Moderator
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And central government often means a single person around whom the party has coalesced (e.g. Stalin, Tito), and said person tends to be emotionally immature, unable to recognize their own limitations yet drunk on worship.
tenor.gif


GO TO THE GULAG!!!
 

Hlaalu Agent

Nerevar going to let you down
Founder
Alexis de Tocqueville in his "Democracy in America " said that democracy would end when politicians learn to buy voters with their own money - and that is what we are seeing now.
Only True Kings could save us ,but we must eliminate oligarchs first.

No, we don't need a king. We need a classical dictator, a virtuous one who will cede power and retire to his farm when he is finished. And watch the sun set on a grateful country.
 
No, we don't need a king. We need a classical dictator, a virtuous one who will cede power and retire to his farm when he is finished. And watch the sun set on a grateful country.

thing is those are about as common as a legit bridge to Brooklyn seller. Those types of people don't tend to become dictators and when they do it is literally forced by natural circumstances. and even then it's more dictator in name only as they are designed more to be a figurehead to boost moral, give wisdom and teaching, and handle major disputes while the people are expected to be able to rule themselves for the most part and are expected to handle most disputes amongst themselves. A couple of good example of this is are the judges of old Israel and the council of elders that would oversee their individual congregations during the 1st century church both of which are about as close to a God ordained/endorsed government as you are likely to get.

the thing is, and this goes for most if not all systems of government. People don't want a humble person that will lead in the shadows and will leave the people to rule themselves for the most part. they want a haughty iron booted brute that they can vicariously bully and loot their enemies through, the problem is humans are very stupid, arrogant, and/or short sided and tend to forget that said boot will eventually turn on them and meet their neck.
 

Battlegrinder

Someday we will win, no matter what it takes.
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Obozny
Nobody's arguing that it's perfect, but you can't deny that decisions get made quicker. A King or an Emperor who wants to put in desperately needed reforms has far less red tape to stop him than many of our current democracies.

I'm not sure how many people would argue that the core issue with modern governance is that on the whole, the government is too slow to take needed action. Many would argue its take to long to do what they want but wants and needs are very different things.

to the contrary, I'd wager most people would say government is at its worst when it does act quickly. The patriot act, the endless wars in the middle east, Libyian intervention, the lockdowns, etc, all those things were done very quickly.
 

*THASF*

The Halo and Sonic Fan
Obozny
Representative democracy has never existed. All democracies have, covertly or overtly, been captured by moneyed interests and become plutocracies in practice almost immediately.

In America, special interests write the laws that politicians rubber-stamp, regulators become embedded with and controlled by the firms they are meant to regulate, and the National Security apparatus and its secret alliance with business decides the general course of American foreign policy. Your vote is fundamentally useless. Your chosen candidate, no matter who it is, isn’t even at the wheel and never really was. The common people are, in modern times, opposed by a vast international aristocracy of business and finance that seeks to award themselves and their shareholders the largest possible share of our economic gains while leaving ordinary people to languish in debt servitude. If we had a democracy that represents us in the first place, then these upper-class parasites would be chastised for looting our countries and leaving working-class people with nothing. However, our leaders do not work for us. Every candidate is hand-picked by the Elite.
 

Morphic Tide

Well-known member
All democracies have, covertly or overtly, been captured by moneyed interests and become plutocracies in practice almost immediately.
Eh, you have to go with a uselessly-broad definition of "plutocrat" to get that to happen, given the demagogue phenomenon. The entire concept of demagogues being bad stems from pure socialites managing to charm their way into power in Athens, not a matter of raw wealth.

See also the history of Socialist power-grabs, which have long been nightmare fuel for the moneyed interests owing to their habit of rampant looting. Very big difference between the "intellectual" ivory tower that churns out Socialists and people who actually have money.

Edit: This isn't to say that I think democracy properly solves the issues of defined elites, it's that there's always been several different kinds of elites. We did away with birthright executive authority, but the career politicians who've replaced the nobility are a notably different circle from the functional descendants of the prior merchant class, and we've ended up with another entirely separate group of elites in the form of the divorced-from-religion philosophical "gatekeepers" of academia.

The modern world has a lot more competing interests, and none of them seem to actually be able to rule on their own because their interests alone don't contain the breadth of what society needs to work on a basic level. The giant corporations alone are split several ways based on what their bottom line is, the varyingly-petty philosophers of academia straight-up don't know how to manage resources, the politicians actually pay some attention to the realities of public approval because one can only do so much with cooking the books, and the remaining dregs of religious authority want to drag social norms back a half-century and have for the last two hundred years or so without caring about why things have changed.
 
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Aldarion

Neoreactionary Monarchist
See also the history of Socialist power-grabs, which have long been nightmare fuel for the moneyed interests owing to their habit of rampant looting. Very big difference between the "intellectual" ivory tower that churns out Socialists and people who actually have money.

Actually, socialist power grab is an excellent thing for big corporations, as they can easily achieve dominance and turn government to their favour by supporting the politicians. It is medium and small businesses, which actually rely on market, that suffer.
 

DocSolarisReich

Esoteric Spaceman
Actually, socialist power grab is an excellent thing for big corporations, as they can easily achieve dominance and turn government to their favour by supporting the politicians. It is medium and small businesses, which actually rely on market, that suffer.

If American big corporations were against communism, they had a strange way of showing it; like when they took the gold stripped from Russia’s dead Christians to build electrification and factory projects and transferring technology and grain starting right after the revolution and going through the so called ‘Cold War’.
 

Aldarion

Neoreactionary Monarchist
If American big corporations were against communism, they had a strange way of showing it; like when they took the gold stripped from Russia’s dead Christians to build electrification and factory projects and transferring technology and grain starting right after the revolution and going through the so called ‘Cold War’.

I think this is one of the most dangerous myths on the American Right: that corporations are against socialism and governmental regulation, and thus an "ally". Neoconservatives and neoliberals are busy empowering the very people killing them. They are basically useful idiots, or in modern parlance, tools.
 

BlackDragon98

Freikorps Kommandant
Banned - Politics
Alexis de Tocqueville in his "Democracy in America " said that democracy would end when politicians learn to buy voters with their own money - and that is what we are seeing now.
Only True Kings could save us ,but we must eliminate oligarchs first.
Wasn't he also the guy who warned us about something about women?
 

*THASF*

The Halo and Sonic Fan
Obozny
I think this is one of the most dangerous myths on the American Right: that corporations are against socialism and governmental regulation, and thus an "ally". Neoconservatives and neoliberals are busy empowering the very people killing them. They are basically useful idiots, or in modern parlance, tools.

Indeed, it's quite the opposite. Corporations are in favor of whatever makes them the most money. Tax breaks that deplete funding for our public infrastructure. Outsourcing and the use of immigrant labor. Driving down all our wages as much as possible. Corporations love the idea of an UBI or "soft socialism" because it means the government is paying a portion of the wages that the corporations would otherwise be obliged to pay to their workers. They support it because it's a subsidy.
 

ATP

Well-known member
Representative democracy has never existed. All democracies have, covertly or overtly, been captured by moneyed interests and become plutocracies in practice almost immediately.

In America, special interests write the laws that politicians rubber-stamp, regulators become embedded with and controlled by the firms they are meant to regulate, and the National Security apparatus and its secret alliance with business decides the general course of American foreign policy. Your vote is fundamentally useless. Your chosen candidate, no matter who it is, isn’t even at the wheel and never really was. The common people are, in modern times, opposed by a vast international aristocracy of business and finance that seeks to award themselves and their shareholders the largest possible share of our economic gains while leaving ordinary people to languish in debt servitude. If we had a democracy that represents us in the first place, then these upper-class parasites would be chastised for looting our countries and leaving working-class people with nothing. However, our leaders do not work for us. Every candidate is hand-picked by the Elite.

Well,Switzerland in the baginning was democracy,when all able men voted using their spears.Not on other swiss,only where asked them question they lift them or not.
But bankers relatively quickly take over there.

Nuers in Sudan are other case,becouse they really do not have chieftains.And,unless other african tribes which have them,they always beat arab slavers attacking them.With spearheads made from cow bones.Brits need planes to subdue them.
But they were strange people,becouse,when usually all villages was all for themselves,they always united to fight any invader.

So, democracy is possible - in villages.But you need to be Nuer to prevent invaders from taking over.Which mean,that every democratic village in practice must be conqered by some state.
 
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Morphic Tide

Well-known member
Actually, socialist power grab is an excellent thing for big corporations, as they can easily achieve dominance and turn government to their favour by supporting the politicians. It is medium and small businesses, which actually rely on market, that suffer.
This is reliant on what are actually fairly specific events to occur, as displayed well by the vast majority of socialist power grabs just imploding the economy altogether instead of granting an existing corporation a monopoly via nationalization. As Reveille implied, the sort of "socialist" that big corporations get behind tends to lead to a failed state and them out of money in the end because the infrastructure and labor market turn to shit, whereas the kind of socialist that lasts with a chance to evolve into a mixed market like China tends to brutally destroy the existing big corporations to make new ones beholden to them.

Just because billionaire corporations are backing a power grab doesn't mean the natural progressions of dictatorship stop applying. The moment it descends to blatant cheating or physical violence, it stops being about money and starts being about naked force, which big corporations actually tend to be quite poor at. Once you start backing the socialist revolt, the determinant of who's in charge becomes a matter of who's best at courting and managing socialist revolutionaries, who are markedly opposed to corporate profits making keeping them in line considerably more difficult.

There is, after all, a reason every major media group suddenly stopped talking about economic class after Occupy Wall Street and started talking about unequal outcomes based on ethnicity and ultra-minority identity groups. Because socialism's been proven a terrible mechanism because the socialists you're trying to appease actively hate you and the desired policy direction is known by precedent to be terrible for lasting profits so your stock market cap will drop out from under you.
 

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