Democracy Is Not Real: On the zealot class
This article reinforces my theory on the zealot class (which they refer to as an “activist class”):
Why is Everything Liberal?
Cardinal Preferences Explain Why All Institutions are Woke
In a democracy, every vote is supposed to be equal. If about half the country supports one side and half the country supports another, you may expect major institutions to either be equally divided, or to try to stay politically neutral.
This is not what we find. If it takes a position on the hot button social issues around which our politics revolve, almost every major institution in America that is not explicitly conservative leans left. In a country where Republicans get around half the votes or something close to that in every election, why should this be the case?
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There’s a way to interpret the data discussed above that is more flattering to conservatives than presenting them as the ideology of people who don’t care. Those who identify on the right are happier, less mentally ill, and more likely to start families. Perhaps political activism is often a sign of a less well-adjusted mind or the result of seeking to fill an empty void in one’s personal life. Conservatives may tell themselves that they are the normal people party, too satisfied and content to expend much time or energy on changing the world. But in the end, the world they live in will ultimately reflect the preferences and values of their enemies.
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To put it in a different way, to steelman the populist position, democracy does not reflect the will of the citizenry, it reflects the will of an activist class, which is not representative of the general population. Populists, in order to bring institutions more in line with what the majority of the people want, need to rely on a more centralized and heavy-handed government. The strongman is liberation from elites, who aren’t the best citizens, but those with the most desire to control people’s lives, often to enforce their idiosyncratic belief system on the rest of the public, and also a liberation from having to become like elites in order to fight them, so conservatives don’t have to give up on things like hobbies and starting families and devote their lives to activism.
I’m not suggesting this is the path conservatives should take; they might feel that a stronger, more centralized and powerful government is too contrary to their own ideals. In that case, however, they’ll have to reconcile themselves to continue to lose the culture into the foreseeable future, at least until they are able to inspire a critical mass to do more than just vote its preferences.
Democracy has never been an equal institution. In liberal democracies, the power merely shifts to a zealot class (referred to above as an “activist class”).
To make matters even more complicated, this zealot class is never truly independent. It is run and directed almost entirely by centralizers. The centralizers fund, infiltrate, and instigate the actions of the zealot class.
In many ways, this is mob rule. Democracy always declines from a “majority” rule to a mob rule. Where the majority does not matter, but the zealot class does. Yet, the zealot class becomes controlled by a few: The centralizers.
It is the cycle of collapse in a nutshell.
The only way to stop it within the current frameworks is exactly what this author prescribed: a strongman. Which is also a less than ideal scenario. Perhaps better than the current degeneration, but still not desirable. This is precisely why we are developing an alternative here through Enclavism. Because there does not seem to be any other option. Either we endure a continuation of the cycle through a strongman (rule by one) or through developing something new to break it (Enclavism).
It’s an interesting piece. I recommend a full read.
Read Next:
Cicero On Anacyclosis And The Cycle Of Collapse
Eric Hoffer: On The Nature Of Mass Movements
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