In theory, a liberal democracy is a democratic form of government in which the people are the ultimate source of authority. Unlike straight democracy, the will of the people is limited by certain principles. The citizens have certain rights like freedom of speech and free association and the state has strict limits on its powers. It can enforce property rights and contracts, with the use of force, but must do so equally.
There are, of course, libraries full of books describing the intricacies of liberal democracy, but you can reduce it down to three simple rules. One rule is that individuals have immunity from the arbitrary exercise of authority. Unlike private government, the state cannot willy-nilly decide to take your stuff or throw you in prison. There are rules, and everyone, including the people in charge, must follow the rules.
Another rule is that authority is exercised through an open process. The rules of society are written down and available to everyone. The people in charge have to follow those rules when they are enforcing the rules on the people. On the other hand, the people have a set of rules for petitioning the government for grievances. In a liberal democracy, there may not be a rule for everything, but there is a process for everything.
“Liberal democracy cannot exist in the real world because it must rely upon men to judge other men fairly and without bias.” The final rule is that disputes are arbitrated by a neutral party. This is the most important rule of the system. No matter how clear the process, at some point there is someone making a decision. That person must be unbiased toward the parties to the dispute in order for the process to be fair. Whether it is a dispute in the market, a case in the courts, or a dispute in politics, there has to be a final neutral arbiter.
This is why markets are an essential element of liberal democracies. A market is where buyers and sellers interact within a set of rules. Those rules are enforced by the state and disputes within the rules are arbitrated by the state, which is not party to the transaction. What is called a free market is not free of rules, but free of arbitrary intervention by the state on behalf of favored parties.
The importance of the neutral arbiter can be seen today in how the managerial elite circumvents the liberal order. They are always looking to game the system by making sure the supposed neutral judge is not neutral at all. He may wear the trappings of neutrality and make appeals to the process, but he is in his position because he can be relied upon to favor the managerial class in all disputes.
An easy example is in the courts. The “judge” who signed off on the warrant to rummage through Trump’s villa was picked by the FBI because he was one of their guys who would play ball. Strictly speaking, he is not even a judge and may not even have authority to sign warrants. He is a magistrate judge, which means he is not actually a judge in the court of the United States.
A real judge, given the people involved, would have been more suspect of the FBI and their motives, which is why they found Bruce Reinhart. He is a highly partisan crank with a predictable history. He was also involved with Jeffrey Epstein. In other words, the process that relies on a neutral judge was short-circuited by finding a highly biased clerk who would favor the agents of the state.
Judge shopping, of course, is now standard practice with law enforcement. So much so that highly partisan judges are becoming household names. Judge Emmet Sullivan is famous for having persecuted General Flynn for years. Amy Berman Jackson is known for bias against white people. Television crime dramas celebrate this because the good guys have to break the rules to get the bad guys.
Read More It is not just in the law where we see the sidestepping of the neutral authority in order to rig the process in favor of the elites. Recently, the internet company Cloudflare shut off the site Kiwi Farms from its services. This essentially shut the site down, as without the Cloudflare’s services, the site would struggle to remain online. Cloudflare all but admits they were forced to suspend Kiwi farms from their platform.
This is not a new story. So-called deplatforming has become a standard tool of the managerial elite to get around your rights. The state does not take away your speech rights, they just have their friends in the private sector do it. Allegedly, Kiwi Farms has the same Section 230 rights as Facebook, a site popular with antiwhite spree killers, but those rights are contingent on who is judging them.
There are thousands of examples similar to the Kiwi Farms story where private enterprise violates the civil rights of citizens in order to serve the interests of the managerial class. When Google is made the judge of what can and cannot be said online and that power was granted to them by the managerial elite, it is not hard to see where they will come down in disputes between citizens and the elites.
Decades ago, Paul Gottfried published After Liberalism, in which he laid out the case that we are in a post-liberal order. He argued correctly that the rise of the managerial class had superseded the old liberal order. The new order was defined by the changing tastes of the elites who controlled the institutions of the managerial state. Those tastes run inevitably to the totalitarian.
The proof of his thesis is clear twenty years later. The people in charge no longer subscribe to those liberal principles. They exercise arbitrary power by undermining those old liberal processes. They do this by subverting the principle of a neutral arbiter to settle disputes. By extension, the managerial elite has obtained absolute rule by being the judge of who decides all disputes, large and small.
This explains the 2016 election. They claimed that Putin rigged the election, which actually makes some sense. They know who decides is what matters, so the negative result must have come from someone making decisions outside the system. After all, they control the election system. Having identified this flaw, they spent the next four years making sure they would decide the 2020 election.
In the end, however, what the current crisis tells us is that liberal democracy was always a figment of our imagination. It cannot exist in the real world because it must rely upon men to judge other men fairly and without bias. Men are not angels and therefore will always have some bias. More important, they will have self-interest, and that is always served by pleasing those above them in status.
The fact is, men can never be free of arbitrary power as to be human means participation in society. When one is part of a society, either by birth or by choice, he submits to some degree of arbitrary power. He agrees to be ruled by other men who will not always act in his narrow interests. At times, he will be forced to act in the interests of the whole or maybe even the arbitrary interests of his king.
The degree of arbitrariness, or the perception of the arbitrariness, does not lie in the process, but in who makes the final decisions. It is not how things are decided but who decides that matters. This is what our managerial elites understand, which is why they focus their attention on who decides. It turns out that Lenin was right. In the current crisis, “The whole question is—who will overtake whom?”