Vox Day had a post today on how "clown world" inverts and uses definitions of terms that are false and intentionally misleading. He included, as an example, a lengthy quote from a New York Times opinion piece entitled "Trump Has Broken the West in Two." The key part--and from where the title is taken--is this: "Now that idea of the West has been broken in two. One half belongs to Mr. Trump and other predatory populists. The other is composed of those who still believe in liberal democracy, respect for international agreements and the right of nations to self-determination."
The Op-Ed is primarily about whether the U.S. should continue to foot the bill for defending Europe, but portraying any waiver of support of Ukraine as a betrayal to all U.S. allies. So it is odd that the authors, Jaroslaw Kuisz and Karolina Wigura, proclaims the "right of nations to self-determination," while standing in opposition to the Russian majority provinces in Ukraine the right to be independent of the rest of Ukraine as they had previously voted. And if national self-determination "refers to the process where individuals within a political community determine their own political institutions based on shared identities, values, and common interests, aiming to establish a sense of autonomy and sovereignty within their own territory," then Zelenskyy's failure to hold elections means the Ukrainian people, themselves, have no right of self-determination.
Holding that there is an opposition between populism and democracy is odd, as well. At its most basic, democracy is "control of an organization or group by the majority of its members," so if the ordinary people elect someone to represent them, it cannot by definition be undemocratic. But the authors aren't actually arguing in favor of "democracy," but "liberal democracy."
So what is a "liberal democracy"? Wikipedia states that a "liberal democracy" is a representative democracy (what used to be called a republic) "with rule of law, protection for individual liberties and rights, and limitations on the power of the elected representatives." This seems to be further defined by placing it in opposition to an "illiberal democracy" which is "a representative democracy with weak or no limits on the power of the elected representatives to rule as they please." A cynic would say, then, that the difference between an ordinary democracy and a liberal democracy is that a democracy would governed by the will of the majority, while the liberal democracy is intended (at least to some extent) to thwart the will of the majority.
According to the definition above, the means by which the will of the majority might be thwarted is through "rule of law, protection for individual liberties and rights, and limitations on elected representatives." Rule of law is simply a short hand for a system that operates within known system of rules and procedures, rather than one that is arbitrary and capricious. For instance, courts that operate using publicized rules of procedure, open to the public, where a party is made aware of any claims or accusations against it comport with the idea of rule of law; whereas secret decisions made without knowledge of the affected party and according to unpublished and unknowable criteria are characteristic of being outside the rule of law.
Protection of individual liberties and rights sounds grand but had traditionally, in the United States at least, been interpreted as a negative right. That is, not the right to do as one pleases, but the right to be free from interference or coercion by others, including the government--that is, the right to be left alone. It is encapsulated in the phrase "don't tread on me". Of course, there is a give and take implicit in this. For instance, traditional common law recognized that one could build a wall or building on your property as tall as you want, so long as it didn't cast a shade across a neighbor's property.
And limitations on the power of the elected representatives to rule as they please generally come from counterbalances within the system. For instance, under our original Constitution, the House of Representatives (which represented the popular will) was limited or constrained by the Senate (whose members were chosen by the State legislatures and not by popular vote). The president could act as a further constraint through the use of the veto power. And, on an individual basis, a person could seek redress through the courts.
But the issue here is not that President Trump is working outside the law (the Constitution gives the President significant leeway on foreign policy, but very little authority is given to Congress in this regard, and none to the courts); and, of course, it has nothing to do with individual liberties or rights--at least not until the government starts to enslave draft citizens into the military.
Rather, the authors place in opposition to "liberal democracy" the term "predatory populists." According to a 2017 Standford University symposium on populism, the essence of populism is that it is:
1. Anti-elitist, condemning the corrupt dominance of established elites whose interests do not align with the majority of the people.
2. Anti-institutionalist, arguing that at least some established institutions (including potentially the party system) are perpetuating the unfairness that is being inflicted on the people, and must be abandoned or reformed.
3. Plebiscitary, favoring mass mobilization of the popular majority, and a direct relationship between the populist leader or movement and the people, rather than the indirect filters of public opinion through representative democracy that the American constitutional founders favored as a check on the potential for “tyranny of the majority.”
4. Therefore, majoritarian, in its desire to empower strong, energetic elected government that can overcome the establishment bias to perpetuate the status quo.
By this definition, we can see that the Ope-Ed authors do not consider a liberal democracy to be one that generally carries out the will of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority, but rather view it as a system that carries out the will of a minority elite in order to perpetuate the status quo even against the will of the majority. In this case, to continue funding a war that is unpopular with the majority of Americans, but seems inordinately important to a small clique of globalists.
No comments:
Post a Comment