Majority Rules?

Posted by Guest Blogger on Sunday, 26 June 2005 23:31.

Opinion polls usually show that most people oppose high levels of foreign immigration. Yet John Ray frequently claims that it has popular consent. I presume that his logic runs as follows: such immigration is a public policy, we live in democracies in which the majority rules, therefore such immigration must have majority support.

I think John’s fault is to accept the second part of this argument: that in a democracy there is majority rule. I used to accept this idea too, but I came to realise that this is not really a feature of modern democracy. In modern Western democracies the majority is allowed to determine every few years which party of an established political class will rule. And that is where majority rule stops.

Now, before John replies that I cut a lonely figure in making such an argument, let me quote some support for this view. In the June Spectator there’s a review by Jonathan Sumption of a book Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy by John Dunn.

It is Jonathan Sumption’s view that “modern democracies might be described as oligarchies tempered by elections” in which a barrier to popular power is created “by vesting the power of decision in an elected political class united by a body of shared values often at odds with popular sentiment.”

Mr Sumption writes that democracy “confers no rights on the electorate apart from the right to dismiss the oligarchy of the moment every few years, and replace it by another, generally of much the same kind.”

These claims, I think, are not far off the mark. They explain why a liberal political class has been able to advance its agenda despite the presence of a largely conservative electorate.

Tags: Political Philosophy

Comments:

Posted by Amon on Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:39 | #

The vast majority of people don’t care about issues that don’t directly effect their day-to-day life. They care about gun laws, immigration, healthcare, tax cuts, and a few other issues. But when it comes to issues like the U.N. or the Iraq War, most people are completely ignorant, and believe what ever they hear repeated the most often, or what their party says is the right position.

So following majority opinion on issues people deal with in their every day life is a good idea, but with other issues, it’s foolish, since the majority will always agree with the opinion that has the most commercials promoting it.

But the way Western oligarchies…err, democracies…are now, the majority has NO say in anything important. Nowadays, “democracy” is just deciding between two near-identical far-left political parties. Anyone who thinks the majority has a say in any policies is delusional.

“Democracy”—that is, majority rule—will probably never happen, because highest IQ segment of society is overwhelmingly leftist and overwhelmingly supportive of totalitarianism.

Posted by Svigor on Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:44 | #

God I hope not.

I think his argument goes more like “yeah most constituencies oppose mass immigration but not limited immigration of qualified darkies.”

I just read the piece someone linked in another thread about Swiss democracy.

Legislators hash out a law, vote it in, then hand it back to the people via referendum.

That’s democracy. Wtf is so hard about that? Can someone explain to me how our founding fathers weren’t a bunch of sorry bastards for not putting this (along with real decentralization) into the American Constitution?

Personally I think the founders did a deliberately sloppy job of it. Yes, I know that laws don’t make society, but rather the other way around.

Posted by Svigor on Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:48 | #

Amon, read this:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=4123

The way I see it, if legislators want a law passed, it’s their job to explain it to the citizenry.

Posted by jonjayray on Mon, 27 Jun 2005 01:58 | #

Mark is quite right that popular opinion does not always translate into national policy. The death penalty is the best known example of that. Most populations support it even if it is outlawed in their country.

But the fact remains that representative democracy is all we’ve got and all the alternatives to it are even more problematical. So it is a majority of the Legislators that one has to persuade. There is no sign of that.

Posted by jonjayray on Mon, 27 Jun 2005 02:01 | #

I myself adore the Swiss system but it has no major imitators not is there any move towards it anywhere

Posted by Drew Fraser on Mon, 27 Jun 2005 02:44 | #

The problem with the “reality” of democratic politics is not that it is undemocratic or oligarchical but that it really creates a sort of “Claytons oligarchy” ie the oligarchy you have when you’re not supposed to be having an oligarchy. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe points out the mere fact that the oligarchy du jour can be turfed out by the electorate means that it must make hay while the sun shines. A monarchy or a genuine aristocracy, by contrast, has a real incentive to maintain or enhance the capital value of its realm. In the area of immigration, this implies a preference for either no or only a few high-value, easily assimilable migrants eg the Hugenots invited into Prussia and England. Monarchs and aristocrats also have an incentive to discourage the emigration of skilled workers and otherwise talented subjects.

In a “democratic” polity, by contrast, the rulers have an incentive to import as many new social problems as possible for which the state can claim to be the only solution. Conversely, the emigration of intelligent, potentially critical people is not really a problem-indeed a consummation devoutly to be sought, it seems!

John Ray is wrong to think that there is no alternative to this regime. Precisely because the system rests, at every level from the macro to the micro, upon the foundation of an ever more tangled web of deceit and fraud, it is fundamentally fragile. Like the Soviet Union it will probably collapse in a heap the moment people generally begin to see that, like themselves, everyone else has been only pretending to believe the lies which permeate the very fabric of everyday life.

That does not, of course, mean that the new order (disorder?) that arises out of the rubble will necessarily represent much of an improvement.

Posted by Geoff Beck on Mon, 27 Jun 2005 04:26 | #

In modern Western democracies the majority is allowed to determine every few years which party of an established political class will rule

Well said, Mark.

BTW, I’ve always liked your Australian flag. I especially ponder its beauty after finishing a few Foster’s Lager.

Posted by Pericles on Mon, 27 Jun 2005 07:00 | #

Here is a report that has merit. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4125566.stm

Italy’s far-right Northern League has presented a bill to castrate convicted rapists, after a series of rapes in Italy by suspected illegal immigrants.

The bill says chemical or surgical castration of offenders is necessary to remove a social disease which is a threat to life and public safety.

But Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu has said crimes by immigrants should not influence policies on immigration.

The bill has been heavily criticised and is unlikely to be passed.

The anti-immigration Northern League is one of four parties in the centre-right coalition government.

Laws ‘effective’

“The comparison between illegal immigration and criminality is groundless and should not have an audience in a civil nation like ours,” Mr Pisanu told parliament.

He said that the current laws are effective and therefore did not need changing.

Recent rapes in Bologna and Milan by suspected immigrants have led to anti-immigration rallies.

Some 53% of Italians think that the increase in the number of immigrants has increased the threat to citizens’ safety while 45% said immigrants posed little or no threat to safety in the country, according to a poll commissioned by L’Espresso magazine this week.

It isn’t the death penalty, but it would do at a pinch.

Pericles

Posted by Pericles on Mon, 27 Jun 2005 08:05 | #

“The comparison between illegal immigration and criminality is groundless and should not have an audience in a civil nation like ours,” Mr Pisanu told parliament.

Pisanu, don’t piss on us!

Pericles

Posted by friedrich braun on Mon, 27 Jun 2005 12:39 | #

The system will do anything and everything to perpetuate itself, even going as far as outlawing the most popular political parties (cf. Vlaams Bloc) in the name of…democracy, should they show themselves to be too much of a threat to the status quo.

Here’s a hilarious satirical piece of what “democracy” actually means in the Orwellian West.

http://www.cwporter.com/prdemoc.htm

Posted by john fitzgerald on Mon, 27 Jun 2005 13:05 | #

Carlos Porter:
Since the victory of the dictatorship of the liberals [or the Bushniks and his hen-house of Jewish neo-cons, for that matter] means the destruction of all values, not to mention civilization, culture, and the white race, I prefer a nationalist dictatorship of my values to a liberal [or neo-con] dictatorship of theirs.
Now there’s a man who knows what he’s talking about.

Posted by ben tillman on Mon, 27 Jun 2005 15:43 | #

“Democracy”—that is, majority rule—will probably never happen….

Democracy has nothing to do with majority rule. Democracy has to do with consensual (i.e., unanimous) decisionmaking. It is rule by the people (demos) singular, not the people plural.

Of course, at the level of constitutional choice, the people may decide that a majority vote (or a majority vote of one or two houses of representatives) to balance the costs of achieving unanimity against the costs of externalities imposed on non-censenting individuals. But that is only at the proximate level. And there is nothing fundamentally or measurably preferable about majority rule versus supermajority or unanimous rule, even at the proximate level. Buchanan & Tullock’s “Calculus of Consent” covers this territory.

Posted by ben tillman on Mon, 27 Jun 2005 16:13 | #

But the fact remains that representative democracy is all we’ve got and all the alternatives to it are even more problematical.

Drew Fraser’s reference to Hoppe’s critique makes many valuable points. It could be argued that the current “social democracy” is the worst of all worlds because it is uniquely insidious. The legitimacy of the State rests on a carefully cultivated illusion: that we the people are the rulers. We are blinded to the fact that we are not running the show in a way that we cannot be when a king or a dictator is in power, and the “polite totalitarianism” (to borrow from the fellows at The Last Ditch) is so much less noticeable than the heavy hand of the Bolsheviks.

The rulers in a “social democracy” will necessarily be those who shape public opinion. This fact was stated explicitly by Bernays and Lippmann, in their how-to guides. Benjamin Ginsberg (in his book “The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State”, University of Chicago Press, 1993) explains that “the distinctive contribution of Jews to the construction of autocratic states lay in the realm of finance” (p. 19), “the special contribution of the Jews to the Bolshevik state involved the organization of coercion” (p. 30), and “their characteristic role in the development of liberal regimes was in the domain of political mobilization and opinion formation” (p. 19).

But shaping public opinion is not always enough, as we see in the case of immigration policy. Try as they might, the mass media cannot convince a majority that their genocide is a desideratum. For this reason, the elite must be insulated from the public’s opinion (and be subjected to a propaganda campaign stressing the lack of commonality of interests between the elite and the commoners), lest the elite heed the public’s hue and cry. This is one purpose of centralization of power—to break the bonds of bidirectional control that are necessary to a healthy stratified society.

Posted by Keith on Mon, 27 Jun 2005 20:52 | #

“In modern Western democracies the majority is allowed to determine every few years which party of an established political class will rule “
Says it all, really.

Posted by Matt on Fri, 23 Dec 2005 06:56 | #

BTW, I’ve always liked your Australian flag. I especially ponder its beauty after finishing a few Foster’s Lager.

NO SELF RESPECTING AUSSIE WOULD EVER DRINK FOSTERS!!!
Thats why we only sell it overseas….poms and yanks have no taste…they are the bottom end of the white gene pool.