We can come here every day and wail into the abyss about the Covid debacle. The people who can change it…

We can come here every day and wail into the abyss about the Covid debacle. The people who can change it aren’t listening. Gotta understand that to change it. It’s not so much the death of democracy I think as revealing it never existed. /1 https://t.co/euu2c241nO

If you study the history of governance (a passion of mine), something that jumps out at you is that most of what we’re taught about it is a myth. The royal funeral this week was a perfect time to revisit this. The two main myths I think are crucial: /2 https://t.co/MFnhV3Kgas

1. that democracy is the transferring of sovereignty from the monarch to ‘the people’, and 2. that democracy emerged as a replacement of royal power. With 1, the idea that a group of people can have sovereignty is like a left-handed hammer. It’s an impossible object. /3 https://t.co/6eUL4BQKvG

To be sovereign is to have power or control over something. Vesting sovereignty in the same thing you want to have power and control over is bootstrapping, like trying to pick yourself up by your shoelaces. The history helps here. Parliaments were invented by kings. /4 https://t.co/uQqBtLmjTT

Parliaments are the evolution of the old councils kings set up, made up of the nobility and clergy, to advise them. Kings grudgingly did this to keep these powerful people happy, but also more cunningly to make it easier to levy taxes on the people. Once these councils…/5 https://t.co/fUaMNu2R4l

…grew into parliaments, it was parliaments who collected the taxes, for the king. It have legitimacy to the taxes. And this is where point 3 comes in, because it’s a myth the people invented parliaments to depose kings. Kings invented parliaments to extend their control…/6 https://t.co/32ncqr8KX6

…over people. Not just with taxes, but also legislation itself, which kings saw as a tremendous way to extend the scope and detail of their control. Rather than short royal edicts, now they could issue vast lists of detailed rules. /7 https://t.co/Z1t8AGUhiI

Notice even today legislation needs ‘royal assent’, a vestige of the origins of legislation. But to bring this back to the modern day and what it means for our Covid debacle. We can defeat Covid quite easily with public health methods. But I say a lot, public health can’t…/8 https://t.co/OU4jMWzGu5

…exist without a public. Kings and nobles had at least a sense of the need to protect their subjects because they worked their farms and fought their wars for them. Noblesse oblige was a concept that meant the nobility had a mutual obligation to these subjects. Downton Abbey…/9

…serialised the last remnants of that idea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The entire household, upstairs and downstairs, were the story. But that all changed with the birth of (you probably guessed it) - the ‘economy’. /10 https://t.co/3v0wGVZtId

Now the sovereign became a set of self-equilibrating equations. A ‘free market’, a society stripped of all structure and conceptualised as free-floating individuals. Of course in reality this was nonsense, hierarchies continued to exist and exercise sovereignty. /11

Now those who control the levers of this fictional economy not only get to be sovereign, they can say nobody is, it’s all an ‘objective economic law’. Brilliant spin, ultimate and total power, while pretending nobody is in charge. The important point is, there will *always*…/12

…be a sovereign. It may not be called a king or queen, but sovereignty will be there and cascade down in hierarchies. A republic just changes who sits at the top, and republican presidents end up as emperors, with even more power than kings could have dreamed of. /13

While in the past some sort of noblesse oblige might have given leaders some concern for our health, with the economy as cover they can just use us up and import cheap workers from overseas. As kings did with mercenary soldiers. What we need to fix this is to drop the…/14

…ridiculous idea that electing somebody else will do it. Elections derive from the fallacy of popular sovereignty. We need somebody to look at all this and who sees it as a debacle to take charge, and lead an alternative. With brutal determination, like Walsingham in…/15

…Elizabethan England. Conservatives have their Walsinghams, their play makers and tacticians, who don’t buy any of the power of the people rubbish. It’s why conservatives keep winning, even though they represent a tiny minority. We need to stop good people to stop believing…/16 https://t.co/CO15elS9U1

…all of the democratic myths. Like our current government, deer in the economic headlights, obsessed with showing how pro-business and pro-economy they can be. Doing the conservatives’ work for them, with a compassionate vibe. We need progressives to dump the wishy washy…/17

…group hugs of impossible ‘bottom up’ politics and just be bastards for the good causes. To act as what they are, sovereign powers. /end