The word ‘democracy’ still enjoys considerable cachet. It is invoked with reverence by politicians as various as Nancy Pelosi and Nigel Farage. The difference is that while the populist Right lauds the democratic ideal as something from which we have strayed, Left-liberals yammer on about ‘our democracy’ in defence of an unpopular status quo, dominated by a nexus of like-minded political, media, and cultural elites. The urgency of guarding against ‘authoritarian strongmen’ is cited as the legitimising basis of this regime. Even if the people start clamouring for a stronger, more personally accountable executive, it falls to this mass of faceless mandarins to save them from their own misguided preferences.
In Auron MacIntyre’s new book, The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, the Right is given a lesson which, until recently, only the most callow, sentimental progressives needed to hear: it is a fatal error to worship warm-sounding ideals in abstraction from political reality. The left-wing rebranding of oligarchy as ‘our democracy’ is a cynical lie, but it is politically clever at a time when conservatives still lionise the democratic form of government while failing to take seriously its obvious breakdown in practice.
At a time when our elites continue to import new immigrant voters not only without the consent of existing voters, but in clear defiance of their wishes as expressed consistently at the ballot box, who can really argue that Europeans rule their own countries or that Americans are in charge of the United States? As I have written before, what we call ‘populism’ is best understood as an urge to set right the failures of democracy by voting the ideal back into reality. But if it has failed, what good is voting on its own?
This is not to say that we should overthrow what we have inherited. MacIntyre’s purpose is to expose the gulf between how advanced democracies look in theory and how they work in practice. Far from concluding with a cry for constitutional revolution, the practical point of MacIntyre’s insights is that they should enable us to operate more effectively within a form of government that we too often take for granted as effective by its very nature.
Except in rare cases where a political community is both small and like-minded enough to trust a hyper-active citizenry with powers of decision-making, even in democracies there is always going to be a ruling class. Since most people have neither the ability nor the inclination to be a part of it, this class will be as much a minority under democratic arrangements as under any dictatorship.
Having granted this obvious truth, the typical next move by advocates of democracy is to argue that this ruling class, while it cannot be the demos, must consist either primarily or exclusively of elected representatives. These individuals have only a conditional, temporary right to rule. And since this right is conferred by popular sovereignty, it is also cancellable (or indeed renewable, pending performance) on that same basis. So long as this mechanism remains sharp and the right of the people to use it is not obstructed, there need be no contradiction between enjoying a representative democracy and putting up with a ruling elite. This is because, at any one time, the ruling elite must either serve the people well or risk ejection from office. The electors are as sovereign as any king. For sheer convenience and efficiency, they do no more than lend their powers, for an allotted time, to an elite of their choosing. Once that time is up, these powers are returned in full, freshly lent again (often to different people), and so the cycle continues.
As MacIntyre points out, the problem with liberal democracies is that ‘the ruling elite’ is so much more than a set of elected representatives who agree to play a political version of musical chairs every four or five years. There is also the academy, the entertainment sphere, and the opinion-forming press, to say nothing of the donor class which pumps money into all three. Can the people really be said to rule when these unelected forms of elite influence dictate so much of day-to-day politics? What we have is popular sovereignty in name only. “If the will of the people is the key to legitimating the power of the ruling class,” writes MacIntyre, “then the ruling class must take an interest in controlling the will of the people. The good news for our elite is that mass media provides the perfect tool for doing this.”
MacIntyre’s more radical claim is that our ruling class not only includes forms of power beyond the reach of voters, but that the consolidation of such power is a feature—not a bug—of mass democracy itself:
With the introduction of mass democracy, every branch was now subject to the same selective force: public opinion. Control of information and manipulation of public perception were now the only necessary levers of power. Those best able to control the opinions and passions of the electorate would dominate all three branches of American government. … Oligarchs, with their financial ability to influence mass media, education, and marketing, quickly proved to be the social force most able to manipulate the public will. With all three branches now functionally subject to the same democratic selection pressures, it is no surprise an oligarchy came to achieve hegemonic social force in the United States.
It is a testament to the resilience of the people, both in Europe and the United States, that they are not universally fooled. There is a wave of populist energy across the West that has declared war on this very hegemony. However, part of the genius of our oligarchic system—what the blogging social critic Curtis Yarvin, an acknowledged influence on MacIntyre, fittingly calls “the cathedral,” given how its wide range of features and elements adds up to a synoptic unity—is that its powers are dispersed in such a way that it is near-impossible to fight.
Having a lot of energy does not change this. This is because the source of power, as MacIntyre puts it, is “obfuscated away from a definable sovereign to a nameless, faceless, ever-shifting process that can never be held accountable.” Moreover, the private-public distinction no longer holds under this total state: “we are ruled by an elite that uses control of information to govern both private and public institutions, ruthlessly vets bureaucrats for ideological conformity, and selectively enforces laws depending on political agendas.”
The so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’ also breaks down. Inviting us to consider what this arena would look like in practice if it actually existed, MacIntyre points out that “Harvard … should be competing with Yale and the [New York] Times with the [Washington] Post. They should be locked in an ongoing and brutal war for intellectual supremacy—but how often do they actually disagree? The answer is almost never.” Again, sentimental talk is no servant of ours. Waxing lyrical about some imaginary ‘marketplace of ideas’ distracts from the fact that there is a clear institutional stranglehold, most of it the work of non-state actors, over the dissemination of news and the range of permissible opinion. Those who idly trust that the amoral process of political liberalism, so vital to a functioning democracy, is working as well as ever will lose out to those intent on weaponizing it for their own ends.
If democracy sets the people free, the price of this freedom is vigilance. But while the people, particularly today, are no doubt wiser than their elites, they tend to be poor guardians of the power that democracy theoretically confers on them. They are easily dispossessed by better organised minorities, however fanatical. In the absence of an elite which shares their values and interests, the people will be overpowered and remoulded by one that does not.
Then we have the rule of law—an achievement of European civilisation that, at best, now hangs by the meagrest of threads. Yet conservatives continue to whine about the Left’s disregard for the rule of law as if they share a moral language. In truth, the Right’s impotent accusations of ‘hypocrisy’ miss the fact that the rule of law is a social convention, not a force of nature that sustains itself by sheer virtue of its own righteousness. If one side of the political aisle ceases to care about the convention, it ceases to exist as one.
Ambition can only check ambition, as James Madison puts it in Federalist 51, if the logic of mutually assured destruction applies in the field of politics: subject us to some X (say, blatant ideological lawfare) and we will respond in kind. This habit of hypocrisy-highlighting among conservatives is well-intentioned, but it ignores the fact—understood by the American founding fathers themselves—that the resort to extra-legal forms of ambition in the event that one’s political adversaries succumb to the temptation is in fact required to keep a society law-governed and free.
Tit for tat is more effective than appealing to standards of public morality to which one side no longer feels bound. Otherwise, the most shameless ambition on the part of fanatics will go unchecked. We can reinstate those lost standards once we win. For the time being, high-minded disapproval is a waste of time, as MacIntyre explains:
For shame to be effective, the target must have some understanding that what they’re doing is wrong and be surrounded by others who apply social pressure until the behavior is corrected. Progressives do not share the same value system as conservatives beyond some vague overlap in terminology. They believe America is a place of deep inequality, that it has reached its position of privilege due to the immoral exploitation of that inequality, and that any action taken in the pursuit of rectifying that inequality is not just permissible but morally necessary.
There are two virtues to the American spirit that become pathologies under the total state that MacIntyre dissects. One is the American trust in the goods produced by independent institutions, the other a kind of self-abnegation that allows rule-governed processes to take their proper course. Taking his cues from the German political theorist Carl Schmitt, MacIntyre is right to say that institutions are “run by men, not pieces of paper, and men always have interests, groups, and moral visions to which they are loyal.” MacIntyre’s conclusion is equally crisp: “It is not a question of whether someone’s priorities will guide the function of the organization; it is only a question of whose priorities will reign supreme.”
However, for as long as a powerful sense of collective identity and an unchallenged moral consensus prevailed among the people of the United States, nothing darkly Machiavellian followed from this. For an institution to be ‘independent’ implied no fictional ‘neutrality’; it simply meant that it served this identity and abided by this consensus without veering off course or falling into private corruption. While nothing under heaven is impregnable to vice, the same was expected to hold with legal and other important processes.
In MacIntyre’s view, we are living through the consequences of these virtues having been exploited by bad faith actors. This is what happens when we mistake conserving the virtues which make institutions work for conserving the institutions themselves, even in their most captured, zombified form. A very dangerous complacency is fostered by belief in some inherited set of mechanical procedures. This applies most of all to the U.S. Constitution itself, which MacIntyre, with the help of the great counter-revolutionary Joseph de Maistre, describes with wistful regret:
When Americans started treating the Constitution as the soul of our nation, they naturally fell into a hollow proceduralism. With the metaphysical underpinnings of the nation now dependent on a dry and dusty document instead of a living and vibrant tradition, a new animating spirit rushed in and filled the void. This was the progressive spirit many call “wokeness.” It’s what happens when you pretend the responsibility to pass down a people’s values and culture can be delegated to a system. The animating spirit of the nation must be actively renewed by each generation. If those who interpret and apply the Constitution do not believe in and live out the values it embodies, the paper itself has no hope of stopping the total state.
The values of elite America are very different to those of founding fathers such as John Adams and James Madison. MacIntyre dubs the total state a “decentralized atheistic theocracy.” He then adds, quite correctly, that “the founding fathers never envisioned a secular society where the entire ruling class received moral instruction exclusively from progressive universities before taking jobs that allowed them to deliver a narrative to a small box in every American’s pocket 24/7, but this is the world we live in.” Indeed, the driving force of bureaucracies is not accountability to the people, from whom state and non-state bureaucrats are exceedingly remote, but the prevailing ethos of the bureaucrats themselves.
MacIntyre signs off with some potentially white-pilling observations. The good news is that today’s elites are mightily unimpressive individuals, however effectively they might perform as a mass block. This is perfectly obvious to anyone who has got a close look at them—and even more so when one considers the younger generations entering the ranks. Nevertheless, it goes against the view taken by Yarvin, who argues that our elite is cognitively high-flying enough to warrant seduction, not replacement. As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time sniffing around elite universities, I can testify that by far the most impressive students are the ones who smell rot emanating from the New York Times, university administrations, and the opinion-forming parts of the ‘cathedral’ more broadly.
MacIntyre understands that our elite is increasingly composed of mediocrities and chancers. “When elites close themselves off to the natural circulation of new talent,” he writes, “they grow soft, and those denied access can suddenly disrupt the status quo.” This process is already under way and MacIntyre finds cause for optimism in what it might hail for the future: “A dedicated counter-elite will grow in institutions that become societal pressure points, seeking to leverage the increasingly alienated masses against the sclerotic and indifferent ruling class.” The genuine high-flyers are either plotting such a strike or keeping their heads down in the private sector, caring little for politics until and unless it directly affects them.
MacIntyre’s final hope is that self-sorting and a gradual consolidation of local and regional power as the total state decays will come to play a redemptive role. Apart from anything else, this will take no more than forms of loyalty that come naturally to man. “Individuals,” he notes, “are more likely to make sacrifices on behalf of a community that is culturally and morally theirs, and protects them from a centralized power that does not share their values or have their wellbeing at heart.”
The total state’s faith in artifice over these humbler natural bonds will seal its eventual downfall:
The tower of Babel is not an engineering problem. It is a pattern repeating itself across human history: the hubris of a power centralizing in the hopes of reaching heaven only to collapse under its own weight and, perhaps, a nudge from the divine.
When we are not plotting, it falls to us to cherish our own families, transmit the fruits of Western civilisation, and invoke the help of God. This will minimise the damage that the total state is able to inflict before its date with destiny.
