What They Mean When They Say "A Threat To Democracy"
This Week In Media | 9th - 15th September 2024
In this week’s episode of Tomlinson Talks, I explained the paradox of how nominally democratic politicians can denounce their populist political opposition as “A threat to democracy,” while acting in the least liberal ways imaginable.
The liberal state's conundrum is that it can only exist in a homogeneous society where individual freedoms are regulated internally, yet it struggles to ensure this homogeneity without compromising liberalism. It cannot recognise any one conception of the good as better than all others, because it sees itself as the parameters in which all competing cultures can be made to play nice.
However, it only does this because it believes all these cultures, in the final analysis, as cosmetic differences — and will wither away when our true egalitarian human nature is remembered.
Drawing on Emily B. Finley’s book, The Ideology of Democratism, I explain how the foundational thinkers of Classical Liberalism — Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau — established a false anthropology of fundamental human sameness with the Blank Slate and State of Nature, which corrupts politics today.
Hobbes believed that an all-encompassing Leviathan state, with an absolute sovereign monarch at its head, was the only means by which all conflicts could be mediated, averting the bellum omnium contra omnes — war off all against all, that is man's State of Nature. Hobbes’ anthropology was that man is driven by libido dominandi — a desire for conquest, and avoidance of death.
Locke and Rousseau held more optimistic views of human nature. Locke's philosophy emphasizes individual self-ownership and the state's role in ensuring freedom and equality, which can lead to legitimising state intervention in private institutions (such as the family) if it can be seen to be illiberally limiting the autonomous rights of its members. This logic has played out in America, with the Biden Administration's hostile stance on parental involvement in education, and the trans lobby's approach to gender identity.
Rousseau was a proto-Marxist: believing in an egalitarian state of nature corrupted by the establishment of civilization, after one human being claimed ownership over the commons and introduced the notion of material inequality. (I explain how this violates all the laws of economics in a previous video on Marxism, here.)
Rousseau's 'general will' is the collective rational self-interest of all individuals, which is always right and tends towards the public utility. It is the mechanism by which humans can be returned to their natural state of equality and freedom. The 'general will' is seen as infallible when proper procedures are followed — meaning whoever enacts it is himself infallible.
Due to this belief in an egalitarian nature, which we have been pried away from by economic iniquities and parochial cultures, “democracy,” as defined by the Enlightenment and liberalism, is about revealing and expressing man's free and equal nature, which is threatened by those who don't believe in this uniform nature.
Hence Keir Starmer’s claims that “the Far Right” are the real problem: if people stopped pointing out cultural differences between peoples, everyone would surely (eventually) behave exactly the same, under the state's stewardship.
It is purely the fault of we divisive populists that we don’t already live in a utopian, egalitarian society. We are apparently responsible for creating a false consciousness that disrupts the uniformity of decision-making that should occur in a true democracy, where all individuals are believed to have identical interests and nature.
A threat to democracy, in this view, is a threat to the belief in an egalitarian nature that should lead to uniform choices and behaviours, which is a core tenet of both Enlightenment liberalism and Marxism.
This is why America is both subsumed by Woke ideology; and why those same architects of the omni-incompetent liberal state hate the Constitution for limiting their enumerated powers.
In the age of technology and scientific knowledge, enabled by the Enlightenment, the purpose of the managerial state is to manufacture consent for its own expansion, control more aspects of society, and prolong crises as a pretext for increased intervention into citizens' lives. This is at odds with the traditions of the Founding Fathers, who saw themselves as entitled to the rights of Christian Englishmen.
Hence why the Godless liberals of the New York Times opinion pages find the various Amendments protecting freedom of speech, religion (namely, Christian denomination), and one’s right to defend oneself with lethal force so anathema to their project of establishing a multicultural utopia.
Progressives see the purpose of statecraft as not to create the right checks and balances on human fallibility, but to give rise to man's egalitarian nature, tragically rendered away from us by the civilization's very creation.
To watch the full episode of Tomlinson Talks, please become a monthly subscriber to LotusEaters.com — or purchase permanent access to the video for only £1.00.
On the Podcast of the Lotus Eaters, I applied this philosophy to practical examples of how “Equalities” law in the UK is applied desperately: in favour of “protected characteristics” held by ethnic, religious, racial, and sexual-preference minority groups, against the heterosexual, native host population.
Nabil Arif received a 12-week sentence for a direct death threat to burn the skin off Labour MP Jess Philips; but Julie Sweeney, a 53-year-old carer with no prior convictions, was jailed for fifteen months for an incendiary Facebook post during the Southport riot.
The Guardian mentions Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, and uses Hamas’ casualty numbers, to provide context for the abusive messages sent by Nabil Arif. Curiously, such a generous and sympathetic contextualization of his statements was not extended to Sweeney — with the Judge saying her harsh sentence was designed to ensure “so-called keyboard warriors […] have to learn to take responsibility for their language – particularly in the context of the disorder that was going on around the country”.
A new Policy Exchange report argues against this exact two-tier application of the law: advising the Crown Prosecution Service to
amend its Legal Guidance on ‘Offences during Protests, Demonstrations or Campaigns’ to reduce the likelihood of suspects not being prosecuted for ‘Public Interest’ reasons.’
It then naively asks the government to establish a 'Protest Commission for London',
established with independent Commissioners, appointed by the Home Secretary following consultation with the Mayor of London.’
So, another quango staffed with partisan Labour actors and liberal ideologues, which I’m sure will duly apply the law in an impartial fashion…
Speaking of the impartial application of the law: we interviewed Harry Miller, former Humberside Police Officer and co-founder of Fair Cop UK on Deprogrammed this week.
Harry was harassed by police after retweeting a gender-critical lyric, and visited by an officer who instructed him he needed to “check your thinking.”
He took the College of Policing to court and won on appeal. The High Court found the College of Policing had acted unlawfully in recording 250,000 non-crime hate incidents since the Hate Crime Operational Guidance was instituted in 2014. The judge said their actions were “Orwellian,” and compared them to the Stasi and the Gestapo. (I covered his case, and the origin of non-crime hate incidents, in a recent episode of Tomlinson Talks.)
To bring the liberal false anthropology to fruition, the Police are trying to psychologically recondition the public by using non-crime hate incidents against the native population. They hope this chilling effect will end discrimination of all kinds — with racism redefined to encompass “noticing cultural differences”, and transphobia meaning a belief in the ineradicable constraints of biological sex.
Now, despite Harry’s legal victory, and Suella Braverman’s attempt to change police protocol in the Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Bill (2022) more non-crime hate incidents are being recorded every year; and Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is encouraging police to ignore the law and record even more.
Harry plans to challenge the Home Secretary and College of Policing’s blatant disregard of the law. But, as Thomas Hobbes wrote: autoritas, non veritas, facit legem — authority, not truth, makes law.
Those applying the law matter more than its letter, and it seems they are all under the spell of the Blank Slate.
As for other ways the British native population are exploited to accommodate infinite numbers of new arrivals, on behalf of the delusional dreams of liberal politicians and public sector employees:
The Labour government cut pensioners’ Winter Fuel Allowance, winning a vote in Parliament by 120 votes. Every Labour MP bar one voted for the cut; whereas all other MPs from every other party voted against it.
The £1.4 billion spending cut is part of a broader effort to cut a £22 billion deficit — but the evidence for this “black hole” in the budget, oft-repeated Chancellor Rachel Reeves as the reason for the cut, has been blocked from disclosure by the Treasury.
Those questioning why the government decided to cut this provision, rather than Foreign Aid, climate change commitments, or subsidies transferred to illegal migrants: all of those measures would require an Act of Parliament, which takes two years, whereas the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecasts and the Chancellor’s Budget are done annually. This means no long-term economic planning is possible, so long as government policy is made according to an “independent”, ideologically-corrupt body like the OBR or Bank of England.
However, the OBR has increased the minimum expected number of net migration from 245,000 to 315,000 to maintain (flatlining) economic growth. This is despite the OBR revealing that low-wage migrant workers cost the UK £151,000 EACH by the time they reach pension age (66) — and only modelled from if they enter at 25 years old. This also only models working legal migrants, and not their associated dependents or illegal counterparts.
We have estimates of the total asylum budget — £14.4 billion for 2022-2023 — but figures for this year, such as spending on renovating their accommodation to install satellite TV, have been hidden from the public for the “health and safety” of the illegal migrants.
To add insult to injury, London Mayor and former lawyer to Islamic terrorists, Sadiq Khan, has insisted violent offenders released early from prison by Keir Starmer be given a “jump in the queue” for subsidised housing in the capital.
Britain exists as an economic extraction zone for criminal delinquents and foreign dependents. And complaining about this state of affairs is enough to censor you, and declare you “A threat to democracy.”