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.