On the Transition from Democracy to Tyranny

“The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same disease magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy --the truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case not only in the seasons and in vegetable and animal life, but above all in forms of government.

True.
The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.”

-Plato (Republic: Book VIII—https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.9.viii.html

The analysis of Plato in Book VIII of “the Republic” outlining the final descent of democracy into tyranny could not be more prescient for this time: democracy lets freedom run amok and gives birth to a (rational) desire for tyranny. This is, for Plato, an unavoidable dialectic. And we should understand someone like Nick Fuentes within this dialectic. So, when I hear that he or other gen z males praise Hitler or Stalin, it’s most charitable to read their sentiment—which isn´t entirely earnest nor entirely in jest— not as an expression of hate, but as a rational reaction to the greater chaos and tyranny created by democratic freedom.

Plato says democracy will eventually make a strong-man populist type leader, who instantiates order through tyranny, preferable to the chaotic and levelling excesses of democratic freedom and equality. And if these excesses hit their peak at around 2017, it’s clear the generation that came of age at the time of peak negative liberty are going to swing the pendulum back towards valuing order, hierarchy, stability and wealth.

Rather than offering charity to the upcoming generation of conservatives, the tone deaf elder statesmen of the movement have tended to greet the newfound racial convictions and religious zeal of their gen z progeny with moralizing and scolding calls for “civility.” Forgetting their own history of opportunistic compromises on principle and “civility”, boomer conservatives took the occasion of Fuentes´ rise to sanctimoniously gesture towards the observance of sacred bourgeois proprieties and cherished democratic principles. Principles they never held consistently in the first place, as their severe treatment of gen z race-realists and generous treatment of zionist race-realists bears witness.

Yet, if the boomers miss the current moment entirely in this internecine conflict, both young and old seem to be driven by a disgust of their own feeble appearance in the mirror. Neither have organization, neither have a realistic plan to promote their own core interests. And if the younger group has more integrity, its only due to inexperience, and they pay for their purity dearly in terms of institutional irrelevance. Both are disgusted by and afraid to look at their own face in the mirror: the young fear the cowardice and hypocrisy they see in the compromised conservative establishment. And the establishment fears the irrelevance and rejection of civic decency in the “misled” conservative youth.

The core issue is this: a “sensate mentality,“ as Sorokin calls it, cannot be governed by principle. This is the existential source of conservative political powerlessness and despair. This mentality all but ensures both a rule of tyranny, hypocrisy, and the decay of civic propriety, and a mentality that is petrified of the threat of the same.

If they are blind to themselves, people living within this mentality still have a human conscience, and thereby need some plausible strategy for thinking well of themselves as conforming to a morally upstanding life, and also some ground for defending the societies to whom they owe allegiance. And, the less the goodness of one´s life can be defined by objective normative criteria like duty or natural law, the more simply belonging to the right group will takeover one´s ethical identity.1 Thus, due to sheer intellectual sloth or an absence of self control, a sensate mentality seeks its summum bonum, not in an intellectual common Good or conformity to a specific form of life, but in the only available alternative: right sentiment.

Here right sentiment is defined, as it always is, by the tribe. Sentiment always rests here because sentiment cannot be applied evenly or justly to all humans, as principles and laws or other intellectual things can. Sentiment runs quickly in short supply, so you simply have to pick what to get worked up about. Our political life is defined by various tribal confederacies who arbitrarily establish what one should get worked up about to convince oneself that one is good. This is the only way to explain the almost religious apotheosis of the virtue signal in our time. Performative morality depends on an audience and grows addicted to the levelling power of public opinion. And virtue signals then become more essential for social belonging, existential meaning, and for policing thought and behavior.

Media in general, and social media in particular, has become so powerful, not strictly due to its taking advantage of our political need to build coalitions by imparting a public morality through propaganda, but more so becuase of our existential need to publicly signal virtue to fill in for actually living a good life as a source of ethical satisfaction. So we rely on (social) media generated public opinion almost equally to direct our conscience as we rely on it to forge coalitions. Media direction has replaced the role of sound principle or intellectual virtue for the masses.2

Based on the observance of behavior, I cannot realistically expect anyone, and I mean anyone, who holds power in the church or politics to act in a principled way—i.e. as if their behavior was governed by a moral law or justice consistently applied. If anyone started to, it’s a near certainty they would be harangued by the tribe they represent. Justice is even and asks to be applied evenly. Justice will demand that any real intellectual bend too much in sympathy toward tribal enemies, and in severity towards his own tribe. And these demands conflict with our entire existential or moral project: to signal to the right people that one has the right sentiments for the right people, or, more often than not, against the right people. This is the game. We all play it in varying degrees. There is little demand to agree about what is the highest good, but there is always a demand to agree certain people are the greatest evil.

We don´t aim at the common good, because sentiment can´t see a transcendent, intellectual good to aim at. And if it could aim it lacks the patience and courage to pursue the courageous action reason demands. Instead sentimentalists will weep, scream over, or protest something awful like a genocide. They will go off on self righteous tirades when people refuse to ritually cleanse themselves by failing to make the requisite virtue signal. Yet, sentimental people wont act or make sacrifices on account of good reasons to actually help the victims of a genocide. They arent willing to put even a dent in the ugly, unpleasant surface of political life that transcends the spectacle of protest. Sentiment fails and virtue flourishes where people are asked to risk and sacrifice for the good of the polis.

We have tyranny today, because the only check against tyranny in a democracy is civic virtue. And virtue struggles to be dominant in the “immanent frame” or in a “sensate mentality.” Its like asking an anorexic to try out power-lifting. Reality is too heavy. We are not built for heavy lifting, i.e.—applying abstract thinking to life consistently, the fortitude required for rule following. We don’t have the muscle nor the diet to interact profitably with the weights.

Instead we can feel. We then have to build coalitions out of common sentiments, i.e. why Charlie Kirk’s death was so powerful: a sensate age will react well to the right ritual murder, if they can all see it live. And they´ll build a coalition out of their experience of it. Ideas do not have traction anymore. Aesthetics do, which is why racial politics is becoming increasingly important. The other option, as we have all seen and many of us have enjoyed, is a coalition based on consumption and entertainment. Trump became so powerful because he made himself the star of his own reality show. Before he did this politically!

Our current realpolitik is some combination of a victim-based and entertainment-based sovereignty. Trump was the reality TV show resentful right wingers wanted to watch and the dictatorial rape fantasy the progressive left wished to simulate and “protest.“ His ability to play both roles so well remade American politics. And the media discovered just how much demand there was for this product. A tactical, civil, professional Mitt Romney type centrist is no longer desired by anyone. All sides profit from transgression. American sovereignty is now founded on animus—i.e. either the schadenfreude of dominant party exacting reprisals on its ideological enemies or the narcissistic spectacle of resistance from the opposing side.

Trump´s immense power was garnered from his rediscovery of the anthropological origin of sovereignty itself. The primitive warrior-king establishes his sovereignty in his ability to suspend or stand outside of law. Primitive enthronement rituals would often ritualize trangression to demonstrate the new kings sovereign status. Trumps intentional trolling of oppressive PC culture, his rejection of democratic norms and civility, these all worked to his political advantage, as did the hysterics that followed. Here we see the resurgence of the pre-rational dynamics of the tribe. Nick Fuentes has capitalized on the exact same dynamic: the media and masses are hungry to create and amplify evil people that functionally work to let the sociality think well of itself. Those who can break the most taboo laws of public opinion and still triumph over opposition unleashed to cancel them are subsequently enthroned as tribal kings.

Rather than represent the general will, the sovereign in a therapeutic age plays this unique therapeutic role, where both approval of and opposition to him constitute a source of self-concieved ethical goodness for all. Tyranny becomes thereby a form of psychic survival in the spiritual swamp of liquid modernity. The manufacture of theatre, victims, crisis, protest, and controversy expand the power of the sovereign over the minds of the populace and provide a raison d´etre for the same. The current American sovereign now occupies more attention in the minds of those throughout the globe than ever before. And not because he presents a real threat to their livelihoods or safety—as might have been the case when the world was threatened by the prospect of nuclear annihilation at the hands of the American sovereign in the cold war—but because they desire an imagined threat of Evil to oppose. Tyranny, or the appearance thereof, has a broad therapeutic appeal that is almost entirely detached from reality.

The manufacture of theatre on the peripheries of politics and in culture wars gives the electorate the false conviction there is something at stake in their vote. This theatre also distracts them from engaging strategically in the political realm to promote their own rational interests, while permitting the oligarchical corporate class to hold the reigns of real political, military, and economic decision without contest. There is next to no deliberation or dispute between the two parties over the core aspects of good governance—currency, law, social welfare, military. These issues are not decided democratically. Instead, elections comprise media generated theatre contesting cultural matters on the periphery.

Since this lack of real political freedom and integrity is endemic on both sides of the political aisle, most politicians divert attention away from their own incapacity, corruption, and failure by accusing their opponents of the same. Bi-partisain legislation is increasingly difficult—e.g. if the republicans weren´t actually so evil after all and worthy of cooperating with, then the democrats would have to take responsibility for their tendency to produce bad legislation, also for their willingness to cave to oligarchic interests. The inverse is equally true. Rather than holding government accountable in serving the interests of the populace, partisan politics has obviously become a pathological distraction from accountability altogether.

Democratic intellectual life has grown to become dominated by psychological projection (two sides who accuse each other of the type of behavior they themselves are demonstrating) Why does this occur? Projection is the only form of intersubjective intellectual activity possible in souls where reason obeys sense and where reason cannot transcend sense and appetite. The task of the intellectual here is to police the friend\enemy distinction. And the less the two opposing tribes distinguish themselves from one another in reality, the more puritanical and litigious the intellectual policing of this boundary has to be in order to allow the tribe to think well of itself. This is the role of intellectuals in contemporary society: to explain to a tribe that cannot substantially distinguish itself from its enemy why it is good and the enemy is evil. Our intellectuals are soothsayers of the virtue signal, and adorn psychological projections mapped onto their enemies with the appearance of academic rigor and intellectual depth.

The clearest sign of this sort of behavior is when enemies are seen as pure evil as in this case with Nick Fuentes. The temptation for the likes of Trump and Fuentes is that they don´t have to actually be good to garner the aura of kings in this environment. Only break a sacred taboo and harness the force of the subsequent negative reaction to increase their power. That Fuentes was able to ride a wave that crushed basically everyone before him is more a sign that he must be getting a few things crucially right than anything else—e.g. the return of explicitly Christian Nationalist politics. Our political class will overlook the worst of sins, but an actual threat to power will not be forgiven—i.e. Breitbart, Kirk, et al. To establish sovereignty by demonstrating ones superiority over unjust laws, rather than ones performance of just ones—i.e. by signalling one is not Evil to ones tribe rather than by being good and just to all, this is the temptation for both woke and reactionary kings alike. To the extent they fall for it and rely on the spectacle of transgression to maintain clout3, they only mirror their liberal or woke tribal enemies.

The path forward is for individual souls to seek to inhabit the pattern of the just. In Theaetetus, Socrates remarks,

“My friend, there are two patterns set up in reality. One is divine and supremely happy; the other has nothing of God in it, and is the pattern of the deepest unhappiness. This truth the evildoer does not see; blinded by folly and utter lack of understanding, he fails to perceive that the effect of his unjust practices is to make him grow more and more like the one and less and less like the other. For this he pays the penalty of living the life that corresponds to the pattern he is coming to resemble.”4

The Republic envisioned a society where such divine and happy and excellently (i.e. the golden) souled persons would perpetually rule as philosopher-kings. Our society appears to be, by and large, the opposite—where the decrepit, perverse souls are more likely to ascend to the reigns of power and never relenquish them. The Republic reminds us, and can also console us with the fact that there were always periods of disintergration and degeneracy. The case can be made, however, that the purely negative, free-market, democratic sort of liberty which developed over the course of the last century to commodify all facets of life—ethnicity, family, gender, religion—is unique to our time.

As we transition from democracy, the emerging forms of tyranny are at once both particular to our unique time and also entirely unoriginal and predictable. Once negative freedom emptied life of its contents in the name of free expression and self-discovery, life itself returned as a torrent to torment feeble, formless selves who were no longer free for charity and responsibility. The weight of life and liberty now leaves therapeutic selves longing for distraction and tyrannical control, longing for relief from the dignifying burden of choice.

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I go into much more detail about a sensate mentality and what it entails in the post above.