The Scaling Problem in Democracy

Article subtitle: 
Too big to NOT fail
Article author: 
Theophilus Chilton
Article publisher: 
The Neo-Ciceronian Times
Article date: 
13 November 2022
Article category: 
Our American Future
Medium
Article Body: 

... we don’t really have an American republic anymore and why we won’t be getting one back anytime soon. To do this, however, we’ll need to address the question of democracy, which as Hans-Hermann Hoppe noted is the god that failed. He calls it this because many in our modern world treat “democracy” as an idol which cannot be questioned... Now, I’m sure many normie conservatives are right now rolling out that trite old standby “We’re a republic not a democracy!” But…we’re really not, or at least not anymore. Indeed, we haven’t really been one since even before the Civil War...

The problem is that in a liberal republican form of government (which is what our Founders bequeathed, as opposed to the more reasonable form of aristocratic republic that was seen in ancient and medieval times), there is always going to be a drive towards greater and greater extension of mass participation. As such, the devolution of this type a republic into a democracy (which is really just an oligarchy that uses mass participation as a legitimising structure for elite goals), is almost inevitable...

But what people generally don’t realise is that this democracy has a practically insurmountable scale up problem. What works in a local school board or rural county’s school gymnasium seems to break down once you start getting too many people involved... it quickly degenerates into an oligarchy of the increasingly unfit....

Thus, mass democracy actively works to undermine asabiyya, a polity’s social cohesion....

It gets even worse because at some point, some enterprising politician or faction decides that the current electorate isn’t getting the job done for them. They figure out that by expanding the electorate, they can get votes from the newly-enfranchised (which, of course, synergistically exacerbates the scale up problem even further)....

This is what has driven, and continues to drive, the post-1965 push for open, expansive immigration.... It’s about importing new clients for progressives who will gradually but inexorably expand the electorate while voting for the people who will keep the gibmedats coming....

So the next time some politician talks about some “grave threat to democracy” emanating from the Right, you can be pretty sure this person is either a moron or a grifter. What they really mean is that someone was threatening to hinder or overturn some element of the progressive agenda. Of all the things they care about, actual democracy is not one of them...