Well, things have really heated up in the good ole US of A, haven't they?
It would seem as if progressives are pretty mad–rightfully so–as it would appear Trump's regime isn't as impotent as expected. Not to say it isn't deranged, incompetent, or hypocritical. But it definitely isn't impotent, and in many ways that's a lot worse.
Most progressives claim that Trump is rapidly unraveling democracy, and replacing it with his personal autocratic regime subject to the whims of him and his administration. They also say that if this happens America will devolve into a backwards, borderline Neo-feudal regime–one that's ran by a gang of reactionaries and money men for the sake of their own benefit at the expense of the average person, and the only way to stop this is to act against Trump and protect democracy.
I disagree.
Not because I like Trump, or his administration, but because Trump is what democracy creates.
Democracy doesn't create peace or prosperity. Democracy creates war, tyrants, and chaos. Democracy creates unaccountable regimes based on who is the best at gas-lighting the masses into supporting their preposterous policy. All democracy offers us today is cultural rot, geopolitical embarrassment, and failing institutions.
Trump is in power BECAUSE of democracy, he is a symptom not an anomaly.
Democracy doesn't keep us safe from tyrants, it opens the door for them.
What we need isn't a tyranny of the emotionally unstable masses. What we need is competent and proven leadership–government based on reason not emotion. You can scare a democracy into tyranny. You cannot scare a leviathan into tyranny.
Democracy isn't liberty.
Liberty is safety. Liberty is stability.
Liberty is Leviathan.
A Leviathan at the gates is not a beast thirsting for blood armed with a club. It is a wise keeper of order, with a rifle and the maturity and intelligence to know when and when not to take aim, and sometimes taking aim is met with cries from those behind the gate. But the sovereign isn't your friend. They aren't there to smile for cameras. They're here to keep the order on which your freedom depends on.
The recent failures of this administration have cemented the need for a new regime. A regime built on the consent of the wise minority not the unwise majority.
A regime that works.
Here is what that regime could look like, not for the masses but the few who dare look out of the cave.
It's tough becoming a surgeon.
Like, thirteen-years-of-Medical-School tough.
You need rigorous training, education, and qualifications before they even consider putting you in front of a man who needs a heart transplant. The reason why is simple: lives are at stake, one wrong move and your patient is dead. Where you slice at could mean the difference between a removed tumor and the operation room floor getting a shiny red coat of paint. Don't mind the copper smell.
So imagine if our surgeons were elected from democratic consensus?
Imagine if people became surgeons not by education, but by popularity? Imagine if your child needed to undergo an operation to remove a tumor in their body and you find out that their surgeon never spent a day in medical school. He was just really charming and called himself "the people's surgeon" and got elected to the position of surgeon. How confident would you be in that man's ability to remove his tumor?
When lives are at stake, popularity doesn't matter; competence does. Sure it would be pretty cool to board an airplane piloted by Weird Al. But how much would coolness matter as your plane is hurling into the center of New York City because Weird Al only bothered to read chapter five of "Piloting for Dummies"?
In government, you have far more lives at stake than any other profession and more ways to mess up and end those lives. So why on earth are we choosing who holds these jobs based on popularity?
Easy. Multinational corporations, media institutions, and academics have constructed a spectacle, one built on mass moral purity, humanistic outrage, and manufactured dissent. The masses on their part, embraced this spectacle with open arms because it affirms their every urge. The spectacle makes them feel important, powerful, and moral kind of like how crack rock makes us feel energetic and confident.
So if you're asking no, we can't just save democracy with education. We live in a world where all worldly information is readily available with just a search; if that isn't one hell of a tool to save democracy, I don't know what else is. But we know well this won't change anything. The crowd is a reactive animal. It doesn't want truth; it wants outrage.
If your reasoning for why we should keep democracy is "I don't want to be powerless," I'm sorry, but the government is here to keep order and ensure prosperity for those in its borders, not feed your ego. We have confused making the populace feel good with doing good by the populace. Eating candy all the time feels good, but it rots your teeth and makes you fat. Democracy makes you feel important, but it erodes institutions and creates incompetent leaders.
Democracy is candy.
If you want meat and vegetables–if you want to live–choose the proven answer: Aristocracy.
Here in the west it is especially easy to dismiss security as necessary.
Here in America we have a saying:
"Anyone who trades freedom for security deserves neither".
Security-focused regimes are touted as backwards, cruel, or nanny states. But look at what happens when security dies: you don't get total freedom–you get disorganized oppression.
How free is Somalia? Sure the government of Somalia is non-existent but you don't see the Somalians building gardens, making art, or governing themselves. They forge for scrap metal to barter for food so their local warlord doesn't blow their kneecaps off. When security dies, so does freedom.
Without security the writer isn't free from government oversight. They are cannibalized by roaming bandits.
The football player isn't suddenly free from exploitation. He's fighting in some warlord's army for a bowl of rice a day.
The anarchist zine maker isn't organizing communes. They're a sex slave for a particularly sadistic knife hobo.
If you want freedom, true freedom, the freedom to pursue your dreams, you need security.
Security is making sure the institutions that allow your dreams to be possible don't crumble.
I don't want a world without art, free expression, or free thought. The techno-aristocracy is a tool to cultivate art by giving it an environment to grow in. As such, constitutional rights should and will protect freedom of speech.
This is why any good aristocratic regime will be nominally security focused, to protect liberty not to stifle it. To ensure this liberty does not conflict with a stable society, the regime must undergo a campaign of what I will dub "cultural anti-revolution".
The goal of this policy should to make the masses think of politics like they think of heart surgery or car mechanics, complicated matters best suited for a class of people instead of an aspect of your personal life. State promotion of independent artists guilds, development of recreational spaces like parks and leisure spots, cultivation of artistic endeavors and personal developments. Mind you this is by very definition manipulation. The state must manipulate the masses away from politics to less problematic rituals that they can actually be of value in. Because the masses at the very least can create beautiful art, even if it isn't particularly deep it would still be of value.
The masses cannot, by their very existence create valuable politics.
The ultimate goal of aristocracy will be to cultivate human greatness. The regime will be a secure one, focused on results not popularity and as such it won't have a reason to censor the speech of the masses, it can influence them into the right direction so they don't hurt themselves.
We are in a fundamentally new era, one I will dub the era of populism. This era will not be remembered fondly because it isn't based in reason, competence, or even a desire for good government. It is simply moral masturbation for the mob, like the Fascist regimes Populism will burn bright but then be eaten by it's own flames.
When it burns down, Democracy will be burned too. There isn't a stopping this, but what we can do is create an exit for when it all crashes.
The modern Noocrat must be totally removed from the entire spectacle, not give up mind you but to simply not give it the legitimacy of fighting it.
So what to do then? Write, make art, gather, establish independent institutions to replace the old ones when the time comes. Build something the spectacle cannot integrate or demonize because its too deep to do either. The spectacle thrives off impotent resistance because it can incorporate it.
So don't fight it.
Simply don't give it the legitimacy it craves.