Democracy Has Come

 

Leonard Cohen died November 7, 2016, the day before Donald Trump was first elected. Cohen’s son Adam says his father predicted Trump would win. Everyone thought Clinton would. Why did he think so?

Like any great poet, Cohen was a prophet. He saw deeply into the zeitgeist; he could see which way things were heading. In 1992, he put out an explicitly prophetic album, “The Future.” In in he traced two possible paths: a dark one: “I’ve seen the future, baby. It is murder”; and a hopeful one: “Democracy is coming—to the USA.” It was, clearly, a warning.

It does seem America and the world has been going down the dark path traced in “The Future”:

Give me absolute control
Over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby
That's an order
Give me crack and anal sex…

This sounds like the obsession with power relationships and self-indulgence that underlies woke culture.

Destroy another fetus now
We don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby
It is murder

That hardly needs comment, does it?

On the other hand, surely Trump’s election was and is the second path, the path of light. Cohen saw that the US was, as of 1992, not truly democratic. That new truer democracy is the “populism” Trump and Elon Musk’s X represents.

It's coming from the silence
On the dock of the bay
From the brave, the bold, the battered
Heart of Chevrolet

This predicts a return from multicultural idolatries to traditional American culture. Make America great again!

It's coming from the sorrow in the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin'
That goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat.

The holy places—sounds like a predicted religious revival. The more so since he also says it comes “From the staggering account/In the Sermon on the Mount.” In “The Future,” he laments, “Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima!” 

And this stanza also sounds like a rejection of feminism and sexual politics, the great example of the woke power dynamics.

He also says true democracy is coming from “the ashes of the gay.” This might mean gay martyrdom. Or it might mean gay politics become a spent force.

Democracy is, Cohen says, coming to America first partly because of America’s cultural dominance, partly because the US system is flexible. It has “the machinery for change.” And partly because “It’s here the family’s broken.” This sounds like a need to return to “family values.”

I wonder if Cohen died in peace, seeing clearly that the US and the world was going to choose the better path after all.

Since When Is Donald Trump the Little Guy?

 

There is an obvious oxymoron in Donald Trump appearing as the “people’s champion,” defender of the little guy against the establishment. He is a famously rich man, the son of a rich man, a TV celebrity. Surely if anyone is part of the establishment, it is Donald Trump?

The anomaly is yet more dramatic in the case of Elon Musk: the world’s richest man has supposedly become our saviour against the forces of government and corporate censorship.

Or RFK Jr. Kennedy is a maverick bucking the establishment? He is, after all, the American equivalent of royalty.

Surely we are being played? Surely this is all a sham, controlled opposition? How can we trust these guys to go against their class interest?

No; there is reason here. These are the only people who can stand against the machine.

Jefferson, the inventor of American democracy, argued that it relied on the bulk of Americans being freeholders, “yeoman farmers.” That meant they were not too dependent on the system; they were relatively able to resist authority without losing their livelihood. They could bar their front gate and still feed and shelter their family.

Especially if armed. It has been cogently argued that democracy emerged first in England because of the invention of the English longbow. It meant every English yeoman had a weapon that could pierce a suit of armour. The local nobleman could not run roughshod over his hearth. He needed to negotiate consent.

It has been observed that nations generally become functioning democracies at about the point when the GDP per capita reaches 10,000 USD. At that level, a bourgeoisie has usually developed with enough independent resources to go to the mattresses against an authoritarian government, and stand a better than even chance of winning.

In present days we have an elite, an essentially fascist coalition of government and big business, trying to hold power and extent their control through the new technologies. They can and will destroy the career and livelihood of anyone who breaks ranks and opposes them. They can and will “deplatform,” revoke licenses, refuse to graduate, prosecute capriciously or selectively, get you fired, attack your marriage, seize your children, take your house, send for “reeducation,” seize or freeze your assets, for dissent. 

As Jefferson foresaw, but with raised stakes, the only people who can stand up against this are those so wealthy, so popular, or, in the case of women, so beautiful, that they can’t be crushed: the Joe Rogans, the Scott Adamses, the J.K. Rowlings, the Tulsi Gabbards, the Kennedys, the Trumps, the Musks.

Even they are taking a great risk. They may miscalculate. The powers were able to take out Conrad Black. They took out John McAfee. They may have taken out Alex Jones. They are trying to assassinate Donald Trump.

This shows how high the stakes are.

And this is a reason we must reject governments and political parties determined to go after “the rich”; just as we must fear governments and political parties that go after religion and the church. Whatever their faults, we actually need the richest among us to protect our freedoms. 

Post-Democratic Colorado

 

The Colorado Supreme Court’s new ruling striking Donald Trump from the ballot in that state makes it essential, if it weren’t already, to vote for Donald Trump in 2024 to preserve American democracy. 

If those in charge can get away with this, it will then be possible for the governor of a state to throw election opponents off the ballot to ensure his indefinite re-election. And whichever party holds states with a majority of electoral votes can ensure they remain permanently in power at the federal level.

Democracy is fragile.

This seems to me to be an argument for the monarchy. With a monarchy, if nonsense like this is tried, the king can step in and say, “now, wait a minute…” Monarchy is designed so that he or she in ultimate charge has an interest in preserving the stability of the system—it is a family inheritance they will want to pass on to the next generation.

Republics seem to segue into dictatorships more easily than constitutional monarchies.

In the US case, it seems to me inevitable that the Colorado ruling will be overturned by the US Supreme Court. But we are just lucky the court currently does not have a left-leaning majority.

The Eight Commandments of Democracy

 

Nigel Farage has been de-banked.

Democracy is fragile; it relies on a series of gentlemen’s agreements. This is why, for example, John Adams said that the US Constitution requires a moral people. Unfortunately, these gentlemen’s agreements, these moral principles, are being violated one after another by the left.

People in established democracies seem dangerously unaware of this fact. Such ignorance is why, for example, the US thought it would be a simple matter to go in to Iraq or Libya or Vietnam, overthrow the dictator, set up a thriving democracy, and withdraw in good order. Due to such ignorance, we are losing our own democracies.

1. Thou shalt not seek to silence or deplatform one’s opponent. Otherwise political discourse cannot occur, and the people cannot make informed decisions. This is why, in the Westminster system, the usual laws of libel do not apply within the chamber. This is why, intending to introduce democracy, Qatar first sank a good deal of money into promoting debating societies.

This principle is now being violated by the left, who openly call for “deplatforming” and shouting down opposing viewpoints.

2. Thou shalt not mess with the language, redefining words. This is what George Orwell warned about in 1984 and in “Politics and the English Language.” Language must remain politically neutral for honest discussion to take place. 

This principle is now being violated systematically by the left, who openly require others to use their preferred pronouns, while inventing or redefining terms like “Islamophobia,” “gynophobia,” “homophobia,” “equity,” “social justice,” “white supremacy,” “racism,” “sexism,” “gender-affirming care,” “reproductive health,” “genocide,” and so on.

3. When the opposing side leaves office, thou shalt not throw them into prison, and must not pursue them through the legal system, unless their offense is obvious and egregious. This is necessary because it is a grave moral hazard: to eliminate opposition using the powers of the state. Moreover, if a politician knows that, once he leaves office, he risks prison time, this is an obvious reason to refuse to leave office: to instead declare oneself dictator. For this reason, no doubt, Donald Trump did not go after Hillary Clinton for her highly suspicious and certainly illegal treatment of emails as Secretary of State.

This principle is being violated by Biden, Attorney-General Garland, and other, local, prosecutors, in going after Trump on anything they can think of.

4. Thou shalt not seize one’s opponents’ assets or interfere with their livelihood. Jefferson held that democracy was only possible given a large body of freeholders, because their livelihoods could not be easily taken away by governments. Only then can opposition organize. This is why democracy almost never breaks out until the GDP per capita is around $10,000 in 2000 US dollars; and almost always does once this threshold is reached. At this point a significant middle class has probably formed, not dependent on some authority for their daily survival. They can afford to look up from the grindstone to organize in opposition to government power. We are no longer a society of freeholders; this foundation has become more fragile. It now requires the political neutrality of the banking system.

This principle is being violated now in the case of Nigel Farage. And he is not the first or only one. The UK banks have been doing this for some time, against Tommy Robinson, against other dissidents. It was violated wholesale by the Trudeau government in illegally shutting down the Freedom Convoy and its supporters. It is being regularly violated by Google YouTube, Patreon, and other high-tech platforms.

5. Thou shalt not subvert the voting process. The process of voting and counting the votes must be fully transparent. As Stalin said, “It does not matter who gets to vote. It only matters who gets to count the vote.” Without a secure and trustworthy voting system, democracy cannot exist. 

Again, the left is systematically subverting this, most systematically by moving to voting machines which are, to either other authorities or the general public, black boxes known to be open to abuse in a variety of ways. This lack of transparency and ballot security is fatal even if they are not actually falsifying the returns; although we must assume they are.

6. Thou shalt not, as a government, control the press. To do so is to prevent the public from getting the information they need to choose their governments. This is why freedom of the press is included in the First Amendment, in the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

In Canada, in violation of this, the government is heavily subsidizing much of the press, while suppressing the rest, through legislation like C-11 and C-18. In the US and other Western countries, there seems to be an informal collusion between press and government, and informal suppression of alternative sources of news. “Journalists” move in and out of government positions, getting their rewards for compliance. This is in violation of the old and honourable gentleman’s agreement that newspapermen would be in eternal dissent from the government in power.

7. The police and courts must remain politically neutral. The average citizen must feel he has the recourse of going to law, and will find there an honest referee. He must feel that, if assaulted, he can go to the cop on the corner, and be treated fairly. If not, all civil society collapses, and we are either in a police state or beyond Thunderdome. 

Trudeau subverted this in Canada by using the police to suppress the truckers’ Freedom protest. The Canadian courts have subverted this with the Gladue Rule, which ended equal treatment under the law. In Britain, the police are in the business now of arresting people for posting anything online that they decide might offend some preferred group. In the US, the left is putting pressure on police forces to become ideologically subservient, with threats to defund them and spurious charges of racism. Police are terrified of being accused of racism or homophobia, and do not apply laws equally as a result. Currently, as one example, the police will turn a blind eye to nudity during a Pride parade that would be prosecuted as public indecency in another venue.

8. Thou shalt not stand in actual opposition to the country itself and the culture and civilization it represents and exists to preserve. This is implicit in the Westminster term, “His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.” Opposition must be assumed to be loyal, and opposition must be, in the fundamental sense, loyal. All must ascribe to whatever shared values the country is founded upon: the Constitution, the doctrine of human rights, the welfare of the British nation, and so forth. Nobody must be actually trying to tear the system down; that is treason.

This too is violated by the modern left. They do indeed openly want to tear the system down: as “patriarchy,” or “white supremacy” or “colonialism.” They claim the US as we know it was created in 1619 to advance slavery. They claim Canada is built on “unceded” native land.

Is there a path back to liberal democracy, now that all the prerequisites are gone?

There has to be; for there was a way to form these gentlemen’s agreements and get to democracy in the first place. 

But with so few gentlemen in the audience, it is hard to see how the path back does not involve some great suffering and some violence. Or else divine intervention.

Hierarchies

 

When Jordan Peterson explains that even lobsters have hierarchies, this proves he is a fascist.

Friend Xerxes claims that the early Christian church had no leaders. He quotes as evidence Saint Paul saying “There is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” All was rainbows and unicorns until the “’Fathers of the Early Church’ did their best to re-establish a hierarchy with bishops and priests, all male, running the church.”

This is not a tenable reading of the Bible. Jesus had thousands of disciples; yet he designated only twelve, all male, as apostles. When one, Judas, defected and committed suicide, the rest saw the need to select a replacement. This was plainly an established hierarchy, and established by Jesus himself. He shared some things only with them, speaking to others in parables.

"To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but to others I speak in parables, so that 'looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand.'" – Luke 8:9-10.

He gave them specific commissions. Notably, what they bound or loosed on earth would be bound or loosed in heaven. That is a remarkable level of authority.

I recall giving a Bible course in Korea, and the students at first balking at my observation that there was a hierarchy in Heaven. Wouldn’t everyone being equal be an aspect of heaven? They resisted the idea, but then realized that it must be so, and that the Bible says it is so. There are ranks of angels e numerated in the Bible; there are elders sitting closer to the throne; Saint John is greatest of all on earth, but less than the least in heaven—so there is a “least” in heaven. And so on.

Life can’t be a pass-fail course. There must be some reward for heroic virtue.

Are you upset at the thought of a heaven where others would be greater than yourself? Then you are guilty of envy, and probably will not make it to heaven in the first place. This is the sin of Cain.

As to there being no Jew nor Greek in Christ, no male or female, this is the doctrine that all men are created equal, which is not the same as democracy, and democracy is not the same as having no hierarchy or leaders. It means we all have an equal chance at salvation, based on our own merits—“in Christ,” not necessarily in the secular world. No fellow Christian is to be judged by the colour of their skin, or their role in reproduction, or their parentage, but by their character and their own merit. It does not follow that each of us has an equal right to declare ourselves a doctor and practice medicine, say. There is indeed a difference in moral worth between, say, Charles Manson and Mahatma Gandhi. And it is right to make that distinction.

And there do indeed need to be leaders, just as there need to be doctors. Having no leaders is anarchy, not democracy. Democracy means we elect our leaders. Democracies have hierarchies: municipal, provincial, federal. Local member, cabinet minister, premier.

There is nothing immoral or inherently wrong about a hierarchy. 

Is Democracy Coming?

 

A ray of hope: there has been a spontaneous revival, if you haven’t heard, at Asbury University in Kentucky. An estimated 50,000, mostly young, have flocked here over two weeks, before the event was shut down by the college administration.

This is what we need. This is what we needed in the Sixties and Seventies, but it was cruelly shut down then by a moral panic about “cults.” This, spiritual revival, is now the only alternative to societal collapse, and probably the US is the only place capable of it. Everywhere else has actually gone further down the postmodern rabbit hole, except perhaps for Eastern Europe, the Philippines, or Subsaharan Africa.

Let’s see if it spreads now, and hope against hope that it does. It has happened before in America, in the First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, in Azusa in 1906, in Duquesne in 1966. One sensed it in the Freedom Convoy to Ottawa a year go.

Leonard Cohen predicted this.

It's coming from the sorrow in the street

The holy places where the races meet

From the homicidal bitchin'

That goes down in every kitchen

To determine who will serve and who will eat

From the wells of disappointment

Where the women kneel to pray

For the grace of God in the desert here

And the desert far away

Democracy is coming to the USA

It's coming to America first

The cradle of the best and of the worst

It's here they got the range

And the machinery for change

And it's here they got the spiritual thirst

It's here the family's broken

And it's here the lonely say

That the heart has got to open

In a fundamental way

Democracy is coming to the USA

 

How to Make Canada Better

 

Taking the Confucian civil service exam

I find myself growing impatient that the governments of Iran, Russia, and China have not yet fallen. But this is naïve. Even if they do, in all likelihood, we are not going to get much better government soon. There is an inevitable limiting factor.

It is that the average person is average. The social world, all government, is built by and for average people. 

In a democracy, the government is not going to be any smarter, on average of the population. Nor has anyone come up with a better system. As Churchill observed, democracy is the worst possible form of government—until you consider all the others. 

It is not just that no other system has reliably produced leaders smarter than the average. We are not democracies because we believe the average person is always right. We are democracies because each individual is sovereign, and has the right and duty to decide, as much as possible, for himself. Human dignity demands that he have some input.

China for millennia did rather well on something like the Platonic system: government was in the hands of those who could pass a comprehensive examination. It was in the hands, in theory, of the intelligentsia. That ought to lead to government by the more intelligent, and for many centuries it did seem to. But that began to falter about five hundred years ago. This system could not compete with the Europeans, either in terms of organization, economic prosperity, or military power. 

We are seeing the same collapse in the modern Western academy. The system is producing dumber and dumber results. It depends, after all, on those already there setting the tests and choosing who joins the cabal. There is nothing to ensure that those already there know what they are doing.

When Europe pulled ahead of China, it was snot because of democracy. Europe was not yet democratic. It was aristocratic. The old European upper class was based on the idea that people could be educated from birth for government. That worked well for a time, driven, I would argue, by a strong and consistent Christian ideology of service, the chivalric ideal. But this system too could not successfully compete with democracy. Rulers would still be of only average intelligence, and with a failure of faith, class interest could easily come to supersede the general good.

Modern dictatorships are worst of all: those who rise to the top are those most driven by an urge for power and prepared to be most ruthless.

One solution that could be better than democracy, in producing good government, might be to appoint to office based on IQ. Unlike the old Confucian tests, IQ tests are objective and have the benefit of the scientific method of data collection. Contrary to much uninformed and envious opinion, IQ is the most reliable data point we have in all of the social sciences. It correlates well up to a fairly high level, well above average, with such other checks as academic and business success.

But could a subset of the highly intelligent be relied on to govern in the general interest, instead of for their own interests as a group? Perhaps not. And we still have the issue of human dignity, the right and duty of the individual to choose for himself.

Perhaps the best solution of all is available to a country like Canada, because of our high levels of immigration. Retain democracy, but accept immigrants based on IQ.

Currently, Canada chooses based on income and education. This means Canada is skimming off the upper classes of the Third World. But the Third World is poor because it has a corrupt upper class. The best do not rise to the top, and those who do will probably be corrupt.

IQ would be better, fairer, and would, over time, ensure that Canada is more prosperous, better governed, and a centre for world culture.

Nobody has the never to suggest this, even though it would be in everyone’s best interest.

Why? I credit envy of the more intelligent. Everyone resents anyone smarter than themself.

The Sins of Pierre Poilievre

 

Watching CBC’s “At Issue” panel and Eric Gernier’s “The Writ” podcast, I learn that the heckling at Pierre Poilievre’s first press conference was actually all Poilievre’s fault. He should somehow mysteriously not have reacted, or something. He somehow invisibly lost his composure and showed aggression and weakness. He is also at fault for MP Alain Rayes leaving caucus just days after Poilievre was elected leader. Although both of these look like attacks on Poilievre, they are actually attacks on Rayes and David Aiken, the journalist, by Poilievre, who is intolerant and violent.

This is what cognitive dissonance, or narcissistic rage, looks like.

The argument in either case is the same: “I know Rayes/Aiken personally. We all do. Everyone does. He is a decent guy. He should be given the benefit of the doubt. Any criticism of Rayes/Aiken is illegitimate.”

The talking heads are here simply confirming the perception that there is a “Laurentian elite,” a Family Compact, running the country. They all know one other, speak only to one another, never to the general public. They live by different rules, and will close ranks, like the Freemasons, against outsiders. They are a ruling class.

One of Grenier’s panelists actually said, of Poilievre calling Rayes a “Liberal heckler,” “It shows you’re losing when you criticize the referee.” This means she thinks the established media are the proper government, as referees are in a sports competition, and ought to be immune from criticism.

Not how democracy is supposed to work.

The Rayes case is a bit complicated. Rayes announced he was leaving the Conservative caucus to sit as an independent, because he could not accept Poilievre as leader. Conservative HQ then sent a text message to party members in his riding suggesting that they contact his office and urge him to resign his seat. Rayes went to the media and complained that his constituency office was being flooded by calls. He called this “intimidation.” The Conservative Party then quickly issued a terse apology: “The Conservative Party of Canada apologizes for an automated text message sent out earlier today to party members in the riding of Richmond-Arthabaska.”

It is generally considered an act of disloyalty for a party member to refuse to back the new leader of their party immediately after a leadership contest. It is also true that voters generally vote primarily for the party, not the local candidate, when they go to the polls in a general election. It is therefore more honourable, although not required, when a member voluntarily leaves their party, to resign the seat and run again to take it in their own name. All the more so in this case, since the majority of Conservative members in Rayes’s own constituency backed Poilievre in the recent leadership vote. So Rayes was acting dishonourably, and the Conservative HQ was acting honourably. Calling on him to resign, now that he had declared himself an opponent, should be no more controversial than calling on Trudeau and the Liberal government to resign.

Moreover, there is something obviously wrong with objecting to a call for a popular vote. There is something obviously wrong with calling the expressed opinions of his constituents “intimidation.” Rayes does not hold his seat by divine right. 

The only problem was that the party quickly apologized. That, too, was an honourable thing to do, if done to soothe any hurt feelings. It was a peace offering. But, predictably, the Laurentian elite simply exploited this as proof that the party was in the wrong. After all, they admitted it!

This is in turn a dishonourable response to an apology. 

Those in power are without honour and without ethics. The only possible justification for a ruling class is a higher code of ethics. With this ruling group, we have the opposite. They must fall.

The media are demanding right out of the gate that Poilievre show proper deference to them, show he is going to play by their rules, or they will go all out to destroy him. 

The problem is, however, that if he plays the game by their rules, those rules dictate that he must always lose. He must surrender his principles, betray his voters, and still lose the election. Witness O’Toole, Romney, McCain—or Boris Johnson in the end. 

One hopes Poilievre is smart enough to see this, to battle the establishment media and rely on the new media to get his message out. It will take nerves of steel. It will take a true leader.

Looking forward, one of Grenier’s panelists saw the future as being “simply bad.” Unnamed parties lacking maturity—they keep talking about maturity, the subtext being that most people other than themselves are and should be treated like children--working in tandem with the Conservative Party, would now be spreading irresponsible falsehoods (or did she say “misinformation”) that the public should not be allowed to hear.

In a democracy, of course, there is nothing the public should not be allowed to hear. It is up to them to decide what is false.

These talking heads so casually say outrageous things, and then all nod their heads in agreement. They are never challenged, in their small bubble.

That bubble must be popped. It will be, sooner or later.

Night Raid on Mar-a-Lago

 

Julius makes his move.

Democracies are not easy to build, because they depend on a series of gentlemen’s agreement. Should anyone violate the terms, things can collapse.

That has now clearly happened in the US, as it happened in Canada in March. Former presidents are not to be prosecuted. Their homes are not to be raided. This looks like political intimidation, even if there is good cause. Nixon was preemptively pardoned. Nobody has gone after Hillary or Bill Clinton, despite much evidence. Even Ferdinand Marcos was allowed to die in peace. Harass opponents, and they have every reason to refuse to leave power once they get it. Your next election may be your last. Or maybe the previous election.

Some online pundits have referred to this as the Democrats “crossing the Rubicon.” 

Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon led to civil war. 

Perhaps there is some really compelling explanation for the recent raid on Mar-a-Lago. I cannot conceive of one. Especially when you compare inaction on Hunter Biden, for example. Add to this the recent ruinous judgement against Alex Jones for, in effect, expressing an unpopular opinion. Compared to inaction on the “Russia hoax.” Add to this the recent passage of a bill doubling the size of the IRS, as if in preparation for using that agency to go after political opposition. 

As the Canadian government has already been doing, suppressing non-violent protests and freezing assets.

So much for vain hopes of Canada’s salvation coming from south of the border. Maybe after the revolution is over…

For it looks to me more like a pre-revolutionary situation than a civil war. I think people are soon simply going to stop obeying authority. Once this happens, a government may resort to violence, but if a significant proportion of the population refuse to buckle, they must collapse. In China, we see people in large numbers refusing to pay their mortgages. In Sri Lanka, they stormed the presidential palace. Canadians have begun to refuse to use the ArriveCan app or answer questions at the border from the health authorities. Dutch farmers are slow-rolling the roads. 

If and when any one of these resistances succeeds, the revolutionary fever spreads; as we saw in the Arab Spring, or in the fall of the Berlin Wall, or in the revolutions of 1848. The kindling is everywhere, and the authorities everywhere are playing with matches.

We live in interesting times.

Bastille Day

 

Xerxes, famed anonymous left-wing columnist, appears to believe democracy is doomed. He foresees only two possibilities: either sudden collapse, or slow decline. His evidence is the January 6 trespass in the US Capitol, and the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa last February.

I think instead the arc of history favours the growth of democracy. It has to do with the advance of communications technology. Before the invention of movable type, and in general poverty, the scarcity of information demanded government by the few who were educated and therefore in a position to understand the issues and options. There were small democracies long ago, in Greece, Mesopotamia, and the Nordic countries, but these tended to depend on the institution of slavery. Free voting men were an elite minority of the overall population.

With printing, information became more plentiful, and representative democracy become more plausible. The common man was now informed enough at least to be capable of selecting his preferred more learned experts. This took centuries to develop, because it took the printing press centuries to spread and generate a large enough corpus of cheap information. And printing technology improved; benefitting like other tasks from the mechanization of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Industrial Revolution also, in increasing wealth, gave more people the leisure to read. So things really took off then.

With the Internet, in principle, information is now again becoming exponentially more available. This time it will not take centuries; only years.

The inevitable upshot will be something closer to direct democracy. Experts will be largely replaced by expert systems, available to everyone.

We are commonly told that automation will make the lower classes unemployable. But the opposite is more likely to happen, and is happening. It is making the ruling classes redundant.

Brexit, the election of Trump, the Ottawa Freedom convoy, the January 6th trespass in the US Capitol building, and the current Dutch farmer protests, are, I think, early eruptions of this new and probably unstoppable trend to direct popular government. The emperor is being revealed in his nakedness, and the peasants are gathering their pitchforks. 

It is not as peaceful as it should be, because of the resistance of the privileged to losing their power. The natural reaction is to double down. We saw the same after the invention of printing. First, the aristocrats countered with a new ideology of the “divine right of kings,” and grew more, not less, autocratic. Kings tried to strip powers from the nobles, once the nobles were proven useless, rather than passing it to the people. But over time this was unsustainable in competition with those nations that bent early to the winds of democracy.

We are similarly seeing many governments around the world suddenly become more autocratic; sadly including Canada. But this will be similarly unsustainable.

We live in interesting times.

The League of Democracies

 

I have long advocated the formation of a League of Democracies, to do what the United Nations is not capable of doing. So who would be a member? I had a look at the latest Economist Intelligence Unit ranking of democracies. 

Interestingly, the United States would not qualify. It is listed as a “flawed democracy.”

The criteria The Economist uses are relatively opaque, but The Economist is no partisan rag; I broadly share its liberal bias; and those who have witnessed the recent US election are likely to agree. Yet this ranking was assigned before that election. The Economist faults the US primarily on government dysfunction and growing partisanship. The current tumult over passing a COVID relief bill is an indication. The bill passes at the last possible moment to prevent a government shutdown, and nobody gets to read it before they must vote on it.

Knowing how flawed Canada’s democracy is, by a lack of proper Parliamentary debate, a lack of free speech, and a lack of diversity in the media, I am hesitant to extend membership in a League of Democracies to any nation that cannot meet at least this meagre standard; yet Canada is solidly in the top rank. So I’d indeed exclude the US for now. Let them hold a couple of elections under League supervision first. Perhaps (being cheeky) they would do better to shift to a Westminster parliamentary system, in which more diverse opinions could be represented, and legislature and executive are never long at loggerheads.

Member states by this metric, then, are the CANZUK nations, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom; the Nordic countries, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland; Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Mauritius.

It is noticeable than most on the list do have a parliamentary system, rather than the American presidential system. And a surprising number of them are monarchies. Is this a British bias, the EIU being headquartered in London? If so, I suppose I share it.

The League of Democracies

An earlier failed experiment,

The current problems with the US election are disturbing. What happens if elections can no longer be trusted even in the world’s leading democracy? Could the US now descend into anarchy or dictatorship? Where would that leave the rest of us?

This brings to mind something I suggested here some time ago: a League of Democratic Nations. One important function of such an international group would be to ensure the legitimacy of one another’s elections.

We cannot rely on the UN for this: the UN includes nations that are not themselves democratic. Just as we cannot rely on the UN to protect human rights.

If, however, we had a consortium of democratic nations, teams of observers could be sent whenever a member was holding elections, and they could certify that the process did or did not meet established standards. As foreigners, they would not have any vested interest, as everybody charged with managing and with counting votes in the US currently does. Or even if the observer from New Zealand did have some partisan interest, in seeing one party and not another winning an American election, said partisan interest would be unlikely to also align with the interests of the observer from Norway.

If the election was declared fraudulent, and the host country did not invalidate it, the obvious sanction would be to eject that nation from the alliance, presumably losing some important advantages.

Among said important advantages might be this: should any member government be overthrown by undemocratic processes, a coup, say, or a revolution, the other member states would be bound to intervene jointly to re-establish the lawful government.

As an additional incentive, other members of the alliance could be bound to grant sanctuary for any electorally-defeated leader who seeks it, without possibility of extradition. This makes it personally worthwhile for leaders to sign on, and guarantees continuing democracy at the same time. Too many fledgling democracies fall into the folly of prosecuting former leaders for crimes while in office. Doing so gives leaders a powerful incentive to refuse to hand over power. Their punishment, at worst, becomes exile.

To join the alliance might require one’s elections to be observed and certified legitimate a set number of times—perhaps three election cycles. A certain standard of human rights should also be required.

The alliance should also be a military one: member states come to one another’s aid in case of attack from any outside power.

If such an association were set up, I suspect it would go a long way towards expanding democracy around the world.

Classism in Canada

Members of the English upper classes throng around Harrod's, early 20th century.

Canada has never had a formal ruling class. Actually, “never” is not right. New France had a ruling class under the seigneurial system. But since the British Conquest, it hasn’t. Everyone was a freeholder.

We North Americans tend not to realize how unique this is. It is foundational. Everywhere in the Old World, class something you were born into, it was unambiguous, and it was enforced by law.

Although that system has been abolished, profound effect linger. At my college in Saudi Arabia, I was the sole North American for some years, and hung out with Brits and Irish. They would dismiss someone, for example, as a “peasant”; as though that were saying something to the latter’s discredit. You don’t hear “peasant” as a common insult in Canada. Or they would refer to tradesmen disparagingly as “cowboys.” As if there were something wrong with being a tradesman or a cowboy.

Same in China. My students were acutely aware of one another’s background. One doctoral student, his fellows warned me, was “just a peasant.” Not to be taken seriously.

While there, as is traditional, I took a Chinese name. I chose “Shi Jiang.” Literally, “Stone River”; the image appealed to me. It meant roughly what the name of my home town, Gananoque, means in Iroquoian.

My students were most concerned. They felt it undignified for a college professor. “You shouldn’t take that name! That’s a working class name!”

Because “Shi Jiang” is also the Chinese term for a stonecutter or stonemason.

Compare Canada: Alexander Mackenzie, our second Prime Minister after Confederation, was a stonemason.

Even  other parts of the Americans had established upper classes. Here, Mexican aristocrats.

And don’t get started on India and the remaining influence of the caste system.

We in Canada lack this influence, like the US and Australia. This is what it means when the Declaration of Independence declares that all men are created equal, and are entitled to equal protection from the law.

We no longer understand how revolutionary that was. Revolutionary to none so much as my Irish ancestors, Catholic and Protestant, who formed the bulk of the population of English Canada in the 19th century. It instilled in them a fierce loyalty to this land, which immediately could not be swayed by any American or Fenian invasion, or any tragic events back in Ireland. Here, everyone pulled together.

But perhaps all this is changing.

Because we have never known class, perhaps we no longer understand the danger.

Alexander Mackenzie.

We are admitting immigration now at unprecedented levels. These newcomers are liable, indeed likely, to retain their notions of class, and bring them with them. In smaller numbers, they might soon see differently; this is less likely when the numbers are so large.

Worse, for decades, our Canadian immigration system has been favouring the well educated and well heeled, on the premise that these will most likely soon be net contributors, instead of net drags, on the economy and the tax rolls. A reasonable assumption—but since we are drawing newcomers largely from the Third Word, this means we are importing the resident ruling classes.

They, of anyone, will be disinclined to shed their classist attitudes.

Has anyone else considered the probable result?

All this is amplified by another factor: ironically enough, our democratic system.

Some years ago, I got involved in local politics. I learned from a local alderman that the only way to achieve office was to have some organized group behind you. More than money, you needed volunteers, to knock on doors, put up posters, and get out to vote for you because you were one of them.

This means that, despite the theories, local democracies can be controlled by small groups—cliques.

In Canada, because of the Westminster system, all politics is to some degree local—office is achieved riding by riding. Such tight-knit, organized groups can easily take over nomination meetings, then significantly advantage their chosen candidate in the election.

This explains why identity politics is so powerful: organized minorities with strong self-identities thus magnify their power far beyond their numbers.

And, in effect, they can become a de facto ruling class; even a legally enforced ruling class.

We see this power being exercised by the teachers’ unions; by CUPE; by the feminist lobby, the gay lobby, and the professions. The farmers, the farm lobby. Regardless of what the majority of the population wants, or what is in their interests, the various parties tend to bow to their agendas and interests.

Tammany Hall devouring democracy--19th century cartoon by Thomas Nast.

And the same principle works well for tribal groups of immigrants, who will come out for one of their own. The alderman who explained the system to me back in Kingston was Greek; his machine was the Greek community. In the old days in Toronto, it was always the Orange Lodge. In the big city machines in the US, it tended to be the Irish Catholics. When I ran for school board in Toronto once, I found myself caught in the crossfire between the Italian candidate and the Portuguese candidate.

All this is bad enough. But our new ethnic tribes are not just close-knit, enabling them to take power; they are also largely composed of people who view themselves as upper class, with upper class attitudes and with upper class expectations or privilege and advantage.

And official multiculturalism is actually encouraging and underwriting this process. In fact, the sacred cow status of multiculturalism is perhaps itself an example of a ruling class carving out for itself special and separate privileges.

Besides killing off multiculturalism, and changing our immigration system, we should introduce some counterbalance to local control of all offices. Such as an elected senate, elected proportionally from national lists.

The London Riots

Yesterday there were “rowdy demonstrations” in London, protesting the Conservative election victory.

I, for one, find this deeply sinister.

Public protests are not a good thing, and should be done only with serious justification. They inevitably harm innocent parties: shopkeepers, taxpayers, passersby trying to get somewhere. They easily spiral into violence and destruction of property. They are inherently an offense against public order.

They can at times be justified. The justification is to present an important or urgent issue not otherwise acknowledged.

Given a functioning democracy, a free press, and freedom of speech, such situations should be rare.

It is possible even with a free press for all parties to hold the same position on some issue, and all major media outlets, preventing a full debate. In Canada, a current example that immediately comes to mind is abortion. Another was the Charlottetown Accord, which promised to radically change the constitution without public debate.

Immediately protesting the results of a free election obviously does not meet these criteria. It is the perfect counter-example. It seeks to shut down debate.

And it was an election in which the views protested for seemed fully represented: those opposed to Brexit had a clear choice with the Liberal Democrats. Those who wanted to move to nationalization and to the left had Labour, with an unusually radical platform. Yet, obviously from the signage, it was those who backed Labour and opposed Brexit who were protesting.

To be fair, this cannot be liad at the feet of the Labour Party or the LibDems, or their typical supporters. The signage identified instead Antifa and the Socialist Workers' Party.

They were protesting, then, against democracy. They were agitating for dictatorship. This is where the alt-left has gotten to.

Which raises an eternal problem: how much accommodation must a liberal democracy give to movements that seek to subvert liberal democracy and human rights?

A Real People's Party

For a Canadian, it is truly a revelation to see videos of what is going on in Westminster over the Brexit negotiations. It is spellbinding. This is how parliamentary democracy is supposed to work, and it does not work in Canada at all.

In Westminster, we see a genuine debate. Speakers keep raising new and important points. Everyone listens. What they say is instructive. The mood of the chamber alters as a result. They may or may not support a given position of their own party in the debate. At the same time, they tend to be courteous to one another. While sometimes meant ironically, they generally make a point of saying something nice about an opponent before disagreeing. By and large, motives are not questioned and insults not flung; debate sticks to the issues.

Compare any videoed exchange from Canada’s federal parliament. Hoots and cheers in chorus, as if either side is trying to drown out the other. You give everyone else on your side a standing ovation. Seats near the speaker are jammed with the faces the party wants the cameras to see, generally expressing party diversity; and preventing any view of empty seats. Everybody who speaks speaks for their party, and sounds completely scripted, not saying anything they have themselves thought. This means the gist of what they are about to say is predictable before they open their mouths, and nobody learns anything. No opinions are changed. It is only a matter of trying to think up some choice insult that could make a “sound bite” or a campaign slogan. The party opposite is always accused of criminal behavior.

In sum, no debate actually takes place; the Commons simply does not function. You might as well just have lists of numbers instead of real people: 157 votes for any Tory proposition, 165 for any Liberal one. The decisions are all taken elsewhere, out of public sight, and only brought there for a vote. The result of any such vote is foreordained. The general public need never know the reasons or the reasoning.

This is not a democracy at all. Canada today is an elected dictatorship.

Some of this is no doubt due to the Canadian education system, that criminally does not teach debate nor parliamentary procedure. Much of it is due, I suspect, to the fact that in Canada, the party leader must sign the nomination papers for all local candidates, so that all are bought and paid for in advance. And all Canadian parties have a strong and growing reputation for dealing severely with any internal divergence from the party line.

How about a real People’s Party, that, as a matter of the party constitution, will never interfere with whatever candidate is thrown up by their local riding associations, beyond ensuring that a properly democratic election was held? In these days of popular revolt, it could be a decisive winning issue. Yes, some candidates might well be nominated whose views make head office’s hair curl. But so long as they take no initial responsibility, how does this reflect on them? Democracy is supposed to come from the bottom up, not the top down.

Democracy Is Coming

A few days go, I looked at Leonard Cohen’s prediction of civilizational disaster, “The Future.”

I should say that I don’t share his pessimism.

Perhaps he doesn’t either. He includes as second, more hopeful vision, “Democracy,” on that album. But he says he considers this happy future less likely.

It's coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of decay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.


It's coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don't pretend to understand at all.
It's coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the women and the men.
O baby, we'll be making love again.
We'll be going down so deep
the river's going to weep,
and the mountain's going to shout Amen!
It's coming like the tidal flood
beneath the lunar sway,
imperial, mysterious,
in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't take the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

The most striking claim here, of course, is that America is not a democracy; no country is, yet. This may be a prediction of Trump, an uprising by the grassroots.

Again, when Cohen refers to the Sermon on the Mount, and to “the brave, the bold, the battered heart of Chevrolet,” he seems to be referring to the “deplorable” Trump crowd. “Heart of Chevrolet” seems to juxtapose the phrase “heartland” with an image of the common man. The Sermon on the Mount spoke of the “little people,” the salt of the earth, and predicted that they would inherit: the poor, those who mourn, the despised. These Cohen would seem to identify with the traditional Chevrolet owner, the American common man, the working class guys who voted for Trump.

The left, of course, would disagree. While they too speak of the poor, they usually mean the folks on welfare, not the working poor. But this is a category that did not exist in Jesus’s time. Kathy Shaidle likes to say that the modern poor in this sense “are the rich Jesus warned you about.” In a sense, they are privileged. They get stuff free and do not have to work. And they have bought into the system, or been bought into it.

Where does Cohen say democracy is coming from?

Here, from the Sermon on the Mount. That is apparently his vision of true democracy. The poor shall inherit the Earth.

But this also implies, from the spiritual realm, and from religion.

It's coming through a hole in the air

It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.

It's coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;

It's coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,

Does that pinpoint it?

What might it mean to come from a hole in the air? Surely, this means it comes from the immaterial realm. A place that we, as materialists, think “ain’t exactly real,” and which, having no location in space, “ain’t there.” The image of a “crack in the wall” also seems apt for the material world: a physical wall beyond which is eternity. It comes from vision, from the mental or spiritual realm.

More specifically: what is the silence on the dock of the bay? “Dock of the Bay” is a famous song by Otis Redding released after his death. To put that another way, it comes from heaven.

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;

What are the holy places where the races meet? Church is the obvious place. For most of us, it is, definitively, the holy place.

One might argue, “But Cohen is a Jew. Why would he be referring to churches as the holy place? And, most definitely, the races do not meet in a synagogue; Judaism, is a race-based religion.”

Just so—so he cannot be referring to a synagogue. But the traditional term for non-Jews among Jews is “the nations”—gentiles. The term could equally be translated into English as “the races.” So Cohen may, as a Jew, be referring to Christian churches—“the holy places where the non-Jews meet.” And remember, he did just say democracy was coming from Jesus’s teachings.

Many think that religion is a partisan thing. But it is not, to the religious. Cohen is Jewish. He feels obliged to be; he has a special covenant, as a Jew, with God, and as a Cohen, he bears an even greater responsibility. He is a hereditary priest.

But this is not incompatible with Christianity. Christianity too holds that the covenant with Moses is still in effect, for Jews. And the Jews are called upon to be a leaven to the nations.

That is what Christianity is, Judaism offered to the nations. As a priest of Yahweh, Cohen has responsibility to support and encourage it; it is his prime responsibility. The nations are not expected to convert to Judaism proper, because Judaism proper has to do with a specific ancestry. So a non-Jew becomes a good Jew by becoming a good Christian.

For my part, I believe in something like the pendulum theory: when something has gone too far, it begins to swing back in the other direction. The way I think it works here is this: once something is pursued to the point of absurdity, people gradually begin to see this. At first, they are afraid to say anything, thinking everyone else agrees with the dominant “narrative,” and it is just them. Until a critical moment is reached, when someone says the truth everyone is thinking. And then they all turn, and everything collapses suddenly.

We saw something like this dynamic, I think, in the fall of the Eastern Bloc. We see something of this dynamic in the rise of Trump, who refused to measure his words for political correctness.

In a similar way, when a person or a society is guilty of some definite evil, for a long time they will go to crazy lengths to deny it, but their conscience eats away at them until they do something almost suicidal to force their exposure. You often see this with serial killers, who tend to keep getting more and more reckless until they are caught, as if they ultimately want to be caught. Like Jack the Ripper or Son of Sam writing their taunting notes to the police.

I feel we are near this point with the political correctness crowd. The election of Trump may have been the turning point, and their reaction to the election of Trump underlines the fact that they are up there somewhere without a parachute.

Examples of terminal overreach by the left:

• The insistence on allowing men to use women’s public bathrooms. Great way to alienate your largest body of supporters, feminist women.
• The insistence that gender is a free choice—but sexual orientation is not.
• The insistence that there are an indefinite number of possible genders; which all must be accommodated in common speech. That’s a good way to convince people that its all just too much trouble, and, what the heck, screw you.
• The embrace of radical Islam, together with an embrace of feminism and gay rights, incompatible and mutually hostile interests. Somebody is going to wake up to this.
• Open opposition to the police—Black Lives Matter. Idiotic move, if you take to the streets and expect that approach to succeed.
• Refusal to accept or appear to try to be working with the newly-elected president—taking to the streets right after a democratic election. This almost forces anyone who cares about peace and good order, or the US, to fight them.
• Insistence that gay marriage not only be legal, but recognized as a human right, and anyone who disagrees be charged with discrimination. This gratuitously takes on all religion and anyone who believes in traditional freedoms; for no apparent benefit to any interest group. It seems like a paranoid move, a suspicion that they are all against you, and you must hit them first. It implies a consciousness of guilt.
• Trying to shut down any disagreement, with “hate laws,” speech codes, “microaggressions” and “safe spaces.” This is like an admission that you know you are in the wrong, and your position is rationally indefensible.

I am usually too optimistic about these things, but I expect it all to collapse soon, and suddenly.

You Can Fool All of the People Some of the Time

Vote for me! Presents for everyone!

Politicians are prone to solemnly intone, especially after an election loss, that “the people are always right.”

This is of course a humbug. Unfortunately, some people believe it. It is the ad populam fallacy. The people possess no special wisdom; you should not ask someone standing on a street corner how to balance the federal budget, or which doctoral program to take. Taken together, all men are, on average, only of average intelligence.

Keeping it strictly with politics: Adolf Hitler was popularly elected. So were all those Jim Crow governors of the pre-civil rights US South.

This is not why we have democracy. It is for two reasons: first, because, smart or stupid, every man has the God-given right to manage his own affairs. When this is not directly possible, when there must be a government, it is only decent to regularly seek his consent. Second, democracy is an objective check on a government deciding for itself how good it is, and how long it ought to stay in power. The government itself has an obvious conflict of interest.

But there is no magic to it. One can often see electorates making bad mistakes. Their worst tendency is to look for a man on a white horse, who will solve all their problems.

I think, for example, of Jimmy Carter. Granted that, after Watergate, it was a good idea to remove the Republicans from the presidency. Still, there were probably a half-dozen candidates on the Democratic side who had a better claim to be on the ticket: Scoop Jackson, Lloyd Bentsen, Jerry Brown, Frank Church, Birch Bayh, Terry Sanford. Jimmy Carter, a virtual unknown, won on a cloying smile and a pledge that “I will never lie to you.” There were posters saying “J.C. will save America.”

The antichrist.

Barack Obama was another “fairy tale,” in the words of Bill Clinton. We even know the name of the fairy tale: it is “the magic negro.” A lot of people got caught up in the fantasy of rainbows and unicorns, seeing Obama as a “lightworker” who would “heal the nation.” “Hope and change.” “This was the moment the oceans stopped rising.” What a waste—we could have had John McCain or Mitt Romney.

Sadly, I fear Donald Trump falls into the same category. He’s a travelling salesman. It will all be “huge” and “fantastic.” You won’t believe how good it’s going to be.

Don’t do it, America. Two in a row may be the end of you.

On the Right to Move

My son is studying Ancient Greece; we are homeschooling, which means I get to read some things right along with him. An essay by Edith Hamilton claims that the concept of human freedom and human rights emerged in Greece. A bit debatable, but a common and defensible claim. It immediately occurred to me—though Hamilton not say it—that the reason it arose in Greece and not in Egypt, Persia, China, the Indus, or elsewhere was that the ancient Greeks were, uniquely, organized into small city states, and were mobile sea traders. I grasp what this means in a visceral way, because I have experienced the life of city states in the Persian/Arabian Gulf.

When you have a collection of small states, all close by and all sharing the same language and culture, with a mobile population, you automatically have both freedom and democracy. There is no way to avoid it. This is because, if a government becomes oppressive, each citizen has the simple option of moving to the next city.

That's a pretty strong guarantee of one's rights—the worst the government can ever do to you is exile, and exile to a place that looks and feels a lot like home. Yes, Athens executed Socrates: but the philosopher could have saved himself by simply moving to Thebes. He refused for philosophical reasons. You wouldn't have that option in Persia or Egypt.

No matter what the official form of government, therefore, this made all Greek states, for the wealthier classes, democracies, and purer democracies than we have now. In fact, even better if there were a variety of forms of government on offer—if democracy did not work for you, you could personally opt for an oligarchy or a monarchy.

In effect, this was a free market in government. Each polis had to compete with the others for citizens.

This seems to have produced not just democracy and human rights, but the explosion of art, ideas, and science—of culture—that made Greece the foundation civilization for all of Europe, the Antipodes, and the Americas. It gave Greece a massive advantage in human development, which in turn allowed it to race ahead of all rival cultures, including in a military sense. This was put to the test and proven by Alexander the Great.

I would posit that this was because the brightest and most creative are among those most likely to be oppressed by government. They are most likely, like Socrates, to appear to be a challenge or a danger to the authorities, and so to be put down. Only a free market in government protects them from this, and leaves them able to do their best work undisturbed. For this reason, creative types seem very much inclined when able to live much of their lives in exile: Picassos, Hemingways, Joyces, Einsteins, Hesses, Hitchcocks, Teslas, Kubricks, and so on.

To test the hypothesis, we can perhaps look for situations similar to Ancient Greece elsewhere, and see if they seem to be associated with the same effects.

I have already mentioned the Arabian or Persian Gulf. Observe the booming city states of Dubai, Qatar, and Bahrain to see something similar. It's all because of oil, you argue? Consider this: Bahrain and Dubia have next to no oil. Iraq and Iran are swimming in it. So why are the boom cities not Tehran and Baghdad?

Answer: Dubai, Qatasr, and Bahrain are small city states competing with each other and their neghbours for the allegience of their citizens. Iraq and Iran are large nations.

Compare, again, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—small city states; mostly sharing a culture. And still doing better than the mainland monolith.

Let us turn now, if we may, to other historical examples. Consider the Jews. Their wandering has been traditionally considered a hardship; but it can also be seen as their greatest good fortune. Jewish culture is international and not tied to any one land. Being traders, not farmers, Jews were the folks who could quickly pick up stakes and move if a government became oppressive. The visible result: almost everywhere they have lived, despite official restrictions and sometimes outright repression, the Jews have had greater wealth, greater learning, and greater personal accomplishment than the surrounding population. One might almost call them a light unto the nations.

Now consider the Renaissance. Long and various have been the arguments about what exactly triggered it. The most common idea is that it was caused by the fall of Constantinople, and the dispersion of Greek learning to the rest of Europe.

By itself, a non sequitor; if so, why did we not have the Renaissance in Constantinople?

What we do know is that it appeared first in Italy, at a time when it was broken up into small city states, and made its living primarily by sea trading. Sound familiar?

And we know that it spread next to the lowlands noth of Germany—again, small city states that made their living primarily by sea trading.

It later spread to larger nations—Spain, France, and England. But only after, and more or less immediately after, the colonization of the New World.

The New World had the same significance as small neighbouring city states, in terms of mobility rights. But in one sense, even more so. Because the New World colonies offered new land, mobility now extended to farmers as well as bourgeoisie. Serfdom, more or less immediately, was dead.

More broadly, the fact that it was broken down into relatively small independent jurisdictions with similar cultures probably gave Europe the vitality to race ahead of China and the Arab world over the past millenium, to the extent that these tiny, divided states rose to become the world's masters.

Even within modern Europe, isn't it interesting that the relatively small, and culturally almost identical, states of Scandinavia tend to do better economically, in terms of general human development, and in terms of order and good government, than the larger and more monolithic states to their South?

Imperial England, in its heyday, worked in about the same way, because those feeling constrained had the option to head off to the colonies for a freer life. British ascendancy within Europe was aided, quite likely, by a British tendency to allow colonies much more self-government than did, say, Spain or France. The Thirteen Colonies were run as separate entities; whereas France unified hers as “New France,” and Spain and Portugal always tried to do the same.

America's dynamism has been a continuation of this principle. It has been fed, on the one hand, by the existence of the frontier, of the eternal option of pulling up stakes and heading west to be free of local restrictions; and on the other by the federal system, devolving power as much as possible down to the state level. As a result, when racial segregation began to bite across the South, blacks had the option of jumping the next bus and heading for the Northeast. When high taxes and restrictions on the right to work began to bite in the Northeast, workers and merchants had the option of jumping the next bus South. This gives America a creativity and a resilience which has served it well.

Unfortunately, of all the established human rights, mobility rights are probably the most neglected and least understood. Moreover, unlike almost all the others, it has been in steady decline. Check the Magna Carta—citizens were allowed much more mobility back then. Restrictions on merchants crossing borders to trade were unheard of, and constitutionally prohibited except in times of war.

I am not talking so much about free and unrestricted immigration. That may or may not be valuable, but it is not really the same thing, because it involves a change of culture. This creates other issues. Real mobility rights exist when those of a given culture and ethnicity have a clear range of jurisdictions to choose from, while keeping their personal wealth and more or less the same culture they grew up in.

If the English-speaking world, for example, wants to preserve its present dominance, as well as its personal freedoms, it has a great opportunity. The best thing it could do is to open up completely unrestricted immigration between the English-speaking countries. There ought to be no fuss or paperwork for anyone wishing to move between England, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Anglophone islands of the Caribbean.

Internally, the US has been moving away from States' rights since the Civil War. This is a mistake especially combined with the loss of the frontier. The value of federations is in providing for mutual defense, and in ensuring mobility rights. Anything beyond this is probably harmful.

For other nations, contrary to popular opinion, their best hope of development and competition, Perheven military, is probably to subdivide into smaller units, rather than to unite. Instead of seeking reunification, China should be grateful for the independent existence of Taiwan, along with Singapore, Hong Kong, and Macau. They are probably the secret of its present success, such as it is.

And the Arab world should forget about unifying. The division into separate states is not a weakness. Although it has yet to produce an Arab or a Muslim Renaissance, it is also a very new circumstance. The Turkish Caliphate was shattered less than a century ago. The ferment of independent states pursuing different models is their best hope for the future.

Democracy and Culture

Especially since Vietnam, many believe that democracy may not work in non-European cultures. A friend recently even limited that to Northern European cultures. His thought was that other parts of the world were too “tribal.” This is very much the rap against America’s plans in Iraq.

I strongly disagree. Democracy already works pretty well in a lot of nations outside Northern Europe: India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan; not to mention Italy, Spain, Greece, and so forth. The advantages of democracy are pretty obvious, to people in the Third World as much as in the First. Polls show the average Arab in the street, for example, certainly wants it.

The great advantage of democracy is not that the people get to choose their own government. Who cares? The point is to get the best government, and there is no reason to suppose the popular majority have any special insight in that regard.

No; the great advantage of democracy is that it offers a peaceful way to change governments when one is plainly not working. An undemocratic society must either struggle indefinitely under an incompetent, corrupt, or oppressive government, or accept the chaos of civil war. Indeed, it must often accept the periodic chaos of civil war anyway, as autocratic leaders die without clear successors. The advantage of a hereditary monarchy, the best government system other than democracy, is that it at least ensures at most times a peaceful succession. Nevertheless, unlike democracy, it does not allow a bad ruler to be replaced.

Even for the rulers, democracy is the best deal. Yes, it might be good to be king. Yes, democracy unpleasantly allows them to be replaced. But it also allows them to die in their beds, a luxury autocratic rulers cannot anticipate. The attraction of this does not depend on culture.

But, regardless of culture, it is very difficult to establish a democracy. It requires a responsible and moral ruling class; and one that is responsible and moral almost to a woman and a man. For democracy requires a gentleman's agreement in which those in power do not crush opposition when they have a chance, but allow themselves to be peacefully replaced, in confidence that the next group will behave the same way and will not crush them. It's very tough to build up that trust. It's very easy to lose it.

The most important thing George Washington ever did for the United States was to serve two terms as president, and then voluntarily leave power, even though he could have been re-elected--or probably, could even have had himself named king. That is the entire difference between the American Revolution, and the French, or English, or Russian one.

And that is the miracle America needs in Iraq.