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Our Democracy

“Those who want to avoid confusion, and insist on clarity in political thinking, by carefully trying to distinguish between liberalism and democracy and between democracy and republicanism, are probably fighting a losing battle. Most people are not usually aware of the fact that one of the most important differences between the Continental and the Anglo-Saxon tradition of representative government has to be found in the important alloy which has been, so far, the almost inseparable concomitant of the latter: whiggery, or liberalism in the classic sense. The names and works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers who have carefully distinguished between democracy and liberalism will be found in the next chapter (Note 58). But the vast majority of Americans and Englishmen talking about ‘democracy’ always include the liberal element in their concept of democracy — and this in spite of the fact that democracy and liberalism are concerned with two entirely different problems. The former is concerned with the question of who should be vested with ruling authority, while the latter deals with the freedom of the individual, regardless of who carries on the government. A democracy can be highly illiberal: the Volstead Act, quite democratically voted for, interfered with the dinner menus of millions of citizens. Fascism, National and international Socialism repeatedly insisted that they were in essence democratic — a claim which must be viewed in a strict philosophical and historical setting, and in this view becomes less hypocritical than observers in the Western hemisphere are wont to admit. The Soviet use of the ‘democratic’ label is by no means a shrewd political manoeuvre of recent years, but a terminology already adopted by Lenin and continued by Stalin throughout the nineteen-twenties. If we accept St. Thomas’ definition of democracy (De regimine principum, i. 1) we will find that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (provided the proletariat forms a majority) is more democratic than the American Constitution — in which, in contrast to the sacred books of communism, the word ‘democracy’ never figures.”

— Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, from Liberty or Equality (1952)

“Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.”

— Hans-Hermann Hoppe, from the essay Reflections on State and War (2006)

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Man’s Place Under Materialism

“Pedantic louts, hangmen, scribblers, legislators, tonsured scum, what are you going to do once we are here? What will happen to your laws, your morality, your religion, your powers, your paradise, your Gods, your hell, when it is demonstrated that such and such a flow of humours, a certain type of fibres, a specific degree of acidity in the blood…are sufficient to make of a man the object of your punishments or your rewards?”

— Marquis De Sade, as quoted by Paul Éluard in La revolution surréaliste (1925)

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The Power of Secularized Man

“The films which the Allies circulated in Germany and elsewhere after the war showed clearly that this atmosphere of insanity and unreality is not dispelled by pure reportage. To the unprejudiced observer these pictures are just about as convincing as snapshots of mysterious substances taken at spiritual séances. Common sense reacted to the horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz with the plausible argument: ‘What crimes must these people have committed that such things were done to them!’; or, in Germany and Austria, in the midst of starvation, overpopulation, and general hatred: ‘Too bad that they’ve stopped gassing the Jews’; and everywhere with the skeptical shrug that greets ineffectual propaganda.

“If the propaganda of truth fails to convince the average person because it is too monstrous, it is positively dangerous to those who know from their own imaginings what they themselves are capable of doing and who are therefore perfectly willing to believe in the reality of what they have seen. Suddenly it becomes evident that things which for thousands of years the human imagination had banished to a realm beyond human competence can be manufactured right here on earth, that Hell and Purgatory, and even a shadow of their perpetual duration, can be established by the most modern methods of destruction and therapy. To these people (and they are more numerous in any large city than we like to admit) the totalitarian hell proves only that the power of man is greater than they ever dared to think, and that man can realize hellish fantasies without making the sky fall or the earth open.

“These analogies, repeated in many reports from the world of the dying, seem to express more than a desperate attempt at saying what is outside the realm of human speech. Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgment: the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope. Unable as yet to live without fear and hope, these masses are attracted by every effort which seems to promise a man-made fabrication of the Paradise they had longed for and of the Hell they had feared. Just as the popularized features of Marx’s classless society have a queer resemblance to the Messianic, so the reality of the concentration camps resembles nothing so much as medieval pictures of Hell.

“The one thing that cannot be reproduced is what made the traditional conceptions of Hell tolerable to man: the Last Judgment, the idea of an absolute standard of justice combined with the infinite possibility of grace. For in the human estimation there is no crime and no sin commensurable with the everlasting torments of Hell. Hence the discomfiture of common sense, which asks: What crime must these people have committed in order to suffer so inhumanly? Hence also the absolute innocence of the victims: no man ever deserved this. Hence finally the grotesque haphazardness with which concentration-camp victims were chosen in the perfected terror state: such ‘punishment’ can, with equal justice and injustice, be inflicted on anyone.”

— Hannah Arendt, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1966)

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Hatred Of The Good

“Today, we live in the Age of Envy.

“‘Envy’ is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.

“Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semi-human cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves… That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.

“This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree… Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one’s own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.”

— Ayn Rand, from The Age of Envy (1975)

“The concept of envy — the hatred of the superior — has dropped out of our moral vocabulary. The idea that white Christian civilization is hated more for its virtues than its sins doesn’t occur to us, because it’s not a nice idea. Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself. Other races feel like subjects of western power long after colonialism, imperialism and slavery have disappeared. The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel not hostility, but only baffled good will, because they don’t grasp what it really means: humiliation. The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. Superiority excites envy. Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call ‘minorities.'”

— Joseph Sobran, from an April 1997 editorial