‘Democracy’ is really code for Anglo culture. It’s a social way of life - a culture - developed in the main…
‘Democracy’ is really code for Anglo culture. It’s a social way of life - a culture - developed in the main Anglo countries, shown here in dark blue.
And it’s in decline even in these Anglo countries, and globally. It’s not even a century old.
/1 https://t.co/5qPJoGbQCI
It’s a fiction. The institutional checks and balances and ‘free and fair’ elections that define them don’t have their origins in any movement towards ‘self-governing’ popular sovereignty.
The idea of popular sovereignty is itself a logical impossibility.
/2
‘The people’ governing themselves can’t work. Not because it’s hard, but because it’s like a square circle.
The people - not actually a thing anyway - can’t govern itself, because it’s bootstrapping logical nonsense. Think it through for a moment.
/3
‘The people’ governs ‘the people’, meaning nobody is actually governing anybody. We’re giving ourselves directions?
In reality Anglo countries just took earlier monarchies, and replaced the tip of their hierarchies with elected folk. An entirely hierarchical process.
/4
The elected are a tiny number of people, who then govern the rest of us. That’s what governance has always meant, and can only mean.
We replaced monarchical succession with a popularity contest. Really they’re still monarchies, run by popularity.
/5
The ‘checks and balances’ of these Anglo democracies themselves derive not from ‘the people’ doing anything, nor for any concern for them at all.
They derive from things like the Magna Carta, an agreement between a King and his nobles for the distribution of status/power.
/6
Really the growth of what we call democracy, in the 20th century, is just the self-promotion of the world’s then most prominent empire. The Anglo empire.
Who took the fabulous wealth of empire, and used it to paint a picture of some great cultural break from human history.
/7
Studies of inequality will show you that high-status people in Anglo societies happily squirrel away the majority of that wealth, if left unchecked.
Just like every other society. The mythologies of democracy would have been exposed much earlier, if not for one thing.
/8
The catastrophic disruption to Anglo life in the first half of the 20th century. Two world wars, a pandemic and an economic collapse.
Catastrophes that force these societies onto a survival footing, to fight and then rebuild. That suppressed/destroyed status hierarchies.
/9
Leading to the birth and explosion of *public institutions*, from the mid-20th century, whose central role was to govern a new ‘public’ life, for the greater good of all members.
Not because humans suddenly became more noble. This was a battle for survival.
/10
Only that created a ‘we’. And from the 1970s onwards, that shift has been in constant reverse. The countercultural revolution laid siege to these institutions, which it called ‘the establishment’.
Right through to Trump today. His stated enemy is that establishment.
/11
Naked, hierarchical status games are back, flagrantly back. King Trump presides. The monarchies are coming back, together with their rivals, the churches. Fighting it out for status supremacy.
Just look at the US right now. These are the main players.
/12
The great Anglo sleight of hand is over. It lasted less than a century. It tried to hide its continuing monarchical/hierarchical social structure behind fantasies about ‘the people’ governing themselves.
It’s PR. Hot air.
/end https://t.co/wAWRA01VcP
