This is one of Richard's absolute worst takes I have read (and I have read his writing continuously for years and normally find his viewpoints to be well-argued). If we are to ban political candidates for their views (cordon sanitaires and coalition making are different because they typically reflect the popular majority's will), then who is to decide which candidates are objectionable, and from where does their legitimacy spring? This is akin to if sports coaches ciuld unilaterally disqualify players on the opposing team because they don't like their play style (or, more cynically and more realistically, because they believe they are talented and removing them makes victory easier). In "saving democracy" they destroy it, becoming scarcely better than the villains they are trying to keep at bay.
The fastest route to extremism and terroristic violence is to foreclose all possibility of those with unpopular or even odious views from getting political representation of their choice through legitimate democratic mechanisms (which is also an obvious form of "taxation without representation"). And if those politicians banned from running for office subsequently seize power (through revolution or coups), they will not abide or negotiate with the pseudo-democratic old guard who completely excluded them, but will instead crush them completely out of revenge, destroying the constitutional order altogether. It is much better to have 15-20% of a parliament composed of conspiratorial, raving cranks and lunatics with a loud microphone but little influence on policy than to have those cranks scheming coups or revolt in the shadow.
Exactly. MAGA is already in power and would relish the opportunity to ban opponents from running against them. If the government has the power to ban candidates for being low quality, the low quality politicians will ban the high quality ones once they get into power, which in this case, they already are. It’s almost like Richard is writing fan fiction where the 2024 election didn’t happen and society could operate via a Platonic technocracy.
It’s very rich coming from Richard. If it’s so easy for elites to identify these terrible candidates ahead of time why did he vote for Trump?
I just can’t understand if he’s actually this stupid and is a genuine believer or if these takes are serving a higher goal of ingratiating himself to the left.
I used to think he was intellectually honest. Now I just think he’s stupid - a contrarian for contrarian’s sake.
I pray he’s just being cynical and trying to expand his audience with the left.
It honestly seems on brand for him. His whole Elite Human Capital theory/schtick lends itself to this. I don’t think he’s really that far away from Yarvin, at least as it pertains to totalitarian tendencies. They both think educated elites should run society - neither really believes in democracy.
Agreed. Content-based exclusion of political actors can only be done by those currently in power and will inevitably be used to insulate themselves from criticism and ouster. Formal guardrails, such as the sort of constitutional limits on gov't power and officials we have in the U.S., are a much safer protection against populist craziness. They must be protected at all costs.
Is it really true that banning fascists from trying to take power will make it easier for them to take power, or make them more likely to commit terrorist attacks? It makes sense on the surface but I don't think it's true. There are fairly regular terror attacks carried out by white nationalists in the west, where they are on the whole allowed to participate politically. There are just as many in America as Germany. These groups feel just as cheated out of power whether they are allowed to run or not, because their ideas are utterly repulsive to the vast majority of people and thus they cannot possibly hope to win any election, under ordinary circumstances (It seems that they can win simply by telling egregious lies). Hitler was not elected to the position of Fuhrer, but he was voted into the Chancellorship, and this clearly contributed to his ability to later seize the reins of power. Revolutions and coups are very difficult to execute, in any case, and if the fascists have actually acquired this level of power, then no law was ever going to save you.
It is certainly "less democratic" to ban specific, clearly dangerous candidates, but why do we want "maximum democracy" anyway? Arguing that a policy is "less capitalist" would not move the needle for any but the most devoted libertarians, and despite their name, the primary interest of the DNC is not actually democracy per se. Singapore is not a tremendously democratic country, but it is a model of good nation-building.
Frankly, my contention is this: There is absolutely nothing that a nation can possibly gain by having raving lunatic cranks or foreign-backed Manchurian Candidates serving as government representatives.
You say that "less democracy" isn't necessarily bad, but who has the legitimate right to set the optimal threshold? If you don't have universal suffrage and viewpoint-neutral eligibility then you don't really have much of a democracy at all. You have an oligarchy using the "democracy" label for public relations. I think two cases we can point to of political suppression leading to horrible outcomes are apartheid in South Africa and the discrimination against Islamist candidates in Turkey. Since the ANC took power it has pursued its agenda out of revenge and hatred. This is made obvious by the slogan "K$%# the Boers". Likewise, Erdogan was once banned from running for his views and now in power has no qualms about crushing the secular opposition.
The hilarious thing is, the Dems and their media partners did everything in their power in 2016 to elevate and boost coverage of Trump, thinking he was a joke, a "microchips in soda" guy, that would be laughed at even by deplorable Republicans and Hillary would soon be wearing her pantsuits on Pennsylvania Ave again.
Now Hannania, having learned like his fellow travellers at the NYT, that SNL skits and mockery and dismissal by a unified and groupthinking "elite human Capital" is not enough to ensure the voters in a democracy vote the way they are supposed to. The only option is to take a few more bricks out of the Potemkin facades that we call democracy. Which the famously docile and trusting gentlefolk in the heartland and 2A enthusiasts in particular will surely go right along with.
In short, populism and stupidity do indeed go hand in hand. But attempts to suppress one or the other will lead to a situation where freedom seed dispensers are used to make sure the government still operates with the consent of the governed.
"The fastest route to extremism and terroristic violence is to foreclose all possibility of those with unpopular or even odious views from getting political representation of their choice through legitimate democratic mechanisms (which is also an obvious form of "taxation without representation"). And if those politicians banned from running for office subsequently seize power (through revolution or coups)"
This is less of a concern when you have an ideology composed mostly* of people with traits that make them incapable of participating in revolution/coup/guerilla war. There was famous 4chan post about this: democracy is designed to avoid civil war, since any faction that couldn't win an election would also lose a civil war, so they won't bother launching one. Post said it breaks down when suffrage is extended to those incapable of fighting - referring to women. But it applies just as well to obese people, the elderly, the very poor, etc. As well as people who are pathologically unable to get along well with others. Conspiratorial groups are always exploding into infighting because of the low-trust nature of people attracted to such beliefs. They won't do well as revolutionaries!
"It is much better to have 15-20% of a parliament composed of conspiratorial, raving cranks and lunatics with a loud microphone but little influence on policy than to have those cranks scheming coups or revolt in the shadow."
Ok, now what about 50-60% cranks? Not such a simple question, isn't it?
If it gets to 50-60% then the voting public is sadly getting the government it desires and deserves. While very rare, sometimes the public chooses the Barabbas candidate and gets to deal with the consequences of that poor decision. But in the vast majority of cases the cranks get a large but non-majoritarian following.
In those rare cases they likely should have done a better job persuading their fellow citizens, or if they truly found the majority to be odious and intolerable then to move somewhere where a majority of voters share their views. But in a democracy sometimes the ball will take a "bad bounce". That is simply part of the package of having a democratic government. The alternatives are even riskier (authoritarianism and/or monarchy)
I can see your argument for banning stupid and unpleasant politicians, but it will always be abused. It regularly is abused in countries across the world to go after opposition leaders who call out elite corruption.
In Africa it is used in basically every election, it is a tactic Putin and the Thai military use to preserve their power and stop anyone who wants to stop power concentration.
Yes, but as we've seen in the US, no law will stop a sufficiently determined, sufficiently stupid, person. MAGA have yet to actually try to, for instance, ban the Democratic National Convention, but Putin began as a democratically elected president and slowly consolidated power, and over time rewrote the rules. So, it seems to me that there's little point for our angels to eschew powers that cannot be denied to devils. Perhaps if this becomes normalized, then the devils will have an easier time with their devilry, but on the whole, if principles didn't help the Democrats they won't help anyone else either.
I have no reason to think Angels would use it responsibly. In every circumstance involving warnings of danger people cry wolf, which destroys any ability to credibly signal.
I think that a better title for this essay would be "Richard Hanania Learns to Love Big Brother."
Personally, I don't think that electing Călin Georgescu (had such a thing been allowed to happen) would have solved Romania's problems. And yet (this is important!) there is no law that gives the Constitutional Court veto power over presidential elections! And Georgescu, despite his bad qualities, hasn't been convicted of any crime for which disqualification for office is a legal punishment!
The idea of "democracy needs limits" is reasonable, in theory. But it's one thing if you're talking about actual constitutional limits on executive power (i.e. the legislature can vote down presidential appointees, refuse to fund the president's projects, or even impeach the president, and if the president charges people with crimes then the charges can be dismissed by a judge, or a jury can vote to acquit). It's another thing when you say "Unlimited democracy is bad, so the democratic part of the government must be held in strict subjugation to the oligarchic part of the government, which is itself completely beyond checks and balances."
This is the situation in Iran - where the people get to regularly elect presidents and legislators, but where the Grand Ayatollah, and the clerics in the Guardian Council and Assembly of Experts, have unlimited power to disqualify candidates, and override the elected arm of government on any issues that they have a strong opinion about (such as how women should dress, or how Iran should conduct its proxy war with Israel). I wrote all about this in my December Twilight Patriot Post: "Romania and the Iranization of the West." https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/romania-and-the-iranization-of-the
Granted, the motives of the Romanian court are less sinister - I really do believe it's a bad idea to elect a president that's so full of conspiracy theories. But that doesn't change the fact that he hasn't actually done anything for which exclusion from the election is a legal penalty! All that the Constitutional Court has to go on is "It would be really bad if this guy won, and also the constitution means whatever we say it means, therefore we ought to say that the constitution bars him from running."
And if the rule of law doesn't protect bad people, then it doesn't protect anybody. If there is a body of men powerful enough to say "No, you don't get to elect the microchips guy," without anything in the written constitution to support their decision... then you've already lost. That body of men is your true ruler, for the same reason that Augustus and not the Senate was the true ruler of post-Actium Rome. And your democracy is a sham, and no matter how many creative ways you can find to say that Big Brother is doubleplusgood... your democracy will still be a sham.
The EU is doing its best with the tools available. It's wishful thinking on my part, but in the long term, I would prefer limiting the suffrage over limiting the candidates. There seems to be a connection between "meme candidates" and populism. Trump was the first meme candidate and the first breakthrough populist. The drivers of meme culture are those without skin in the game. If we instituted a literacy test, a lot of these problems would solve themselves. I would compare it to how we intervene in the market. It is better to have consistent principles, like a systematic tax code, rather than the government arbitrarily and randomly stealing large sums of money from companies on an ad hoc basis.
It’s an interesting question. I would love to say, bar the Trumps and Vances of the world from holding public office. But you should also consider historical precedent.
For many years, Turkey’s military would micromanage the democracy to out communist or islamist parties. This worked out well for some time while Turkey remained liberal, but it came crashing down when Erdogan came into power, and you could argue that the repression Erdogan faced had radicalized him into becoming the dictator he is today. Suppression may weaken political factions, but it also pushes them towards extremism.
Erdoğan was always a radical, but he learned from Erbakan’s ousting that he had to play his cards carefully if he wanted the military to tolerate his party. Over the years, he gradually eroded the military’s power until he had full control. I think the real mistake was trying to enforce a radical version of laïcité in Turkey, which bred resentment among the more religious and conservative segments of the population.
Meanwhile Germany is gearing up to ban AfD completely, the most popular party in the country, because voters must never be allowed to vote for limits on mass migration.
Let me guess, "mass" migration is increasing the amount of new immigrants Germany accepts by a couple percentage points.
If voters don't want higher taxes or reduced benefits, the only option left is increasing the number of taxpayers. The problem is voters don't want to hear that.
Except that Germany's migration policies cause an additional strain on the welfare state rather than creating new wealth. This is what Richard appears to not understand. Germany is not getting an elite human capital - it is getting Afghans and Africans that can't even find a job in their respective homelands since they lack the skills.
If it is no big deal, why would the electorate be denied a say on the matter? Germans would never have voted to be a minority in their own country in the foreseeable future, but that is the track they are on. The developed countries of East Asia charted a very different course, so a different course was possible.
Ponzi schemes collapse sooner or later, and ponzi demography is no different.
"Elite Human Capital" rendered Europe ugly with their preferred policies. I've seen videos of areas of Paris, and my God were these ugly. It's a mixture of Morocco and the Congo. No way anyone can look at this and say, "This is great!" Montreal is increasingly looking like that as well.
But that's what policies espoused by "elite human capital" produce. That, and economic stagnation in the case of both Europe and Canada.
So, no, the consideration of an AfD ban is not a "blurry" case at all; it is downright outrageous. This isn't just tinkering with democracy, but sticking a dagger in it. It is a matter of the establishment telling its people: "You seem like you want fewer Kenyans and Afghans around? Na-uh, you ain't getting that! No tightening of law & order, either. And we'll continue impoverishing ourselves for the sake of climate change, and we're not going nuclear." The British deep state is doing the same, by the way.
These are all policies that only the AfD credibly opposes. All the other parties have shown an unwillingness to reverse course on them. So, basically, the public is threatened of having no option to reverse course on the major economic, security, and immigration policies of its own country. "We like Afghans, we like the climate, and we like slapping criminals on the wrist... and you going to like it, too!" If such a tyrannical attitude doesn't warrant a hefty dose of populism, then what does?
By the way, with regards to Trump, his dumb trade policy is not embraced by the public (it's the least popular policy item on his agenda), so it can't really be called "populist". It's one of those policies -- like abortion -- that neither public nor elites really like, but a conservative minority manages to wiggle its way into it anyway.
If all the other parties don't want to reverse course on those policies, and the only party that does talk and act like blatant villains, you should consider the possibility that there's a good reason for at least some version of those policies. Sometimes politicians have to choose between being popular and benefiting the country.
I live in one of those multicultural neighborhoods like the ones you see on modern TV commercials. The kind of people you say are making places look like Morocco, I call: "the guys who fixed my car for way cheaper than the dealership would have," "the guy who opened up an awesome new burger place," and "my daughter's speech therapist." People like the AFD like to pretend that societies like that dont work, because they don't want to admit that "reversing" those policies would destroy something of real value to people.
I live in the Netherlands, and I am unhappy with the transformation of my country. Half of the people in the streets don't speak Dutch, and women with head scarfs are everywhere, it has become rare to a Morroccan girl or women without a heascarf. To be sure, I never feel physically threatened or anything, but I don't feel at home in my city anymore. I probably will vote for an anti immigration party next time. The answer to populism of the regularvparties might be adopting some of standpoints that make people vote for them in the first place, instead of banning them.
I would care to know more about both the Georgescu and AfD cases from impartial people with knowledge of the relevant parts of their respective legal systems and electoral laws. I don’t think the internet media environment makes that feasible to do without a major time commitment. It’s hard to know who to trust.
In any event, I think Richard is defending a stronger claim than is necessary for these examples. Because I expect laws on the books authorized the actions taken in both cases, even if somewhat unprecedented and seemingly anti-democratic.
We probably need to disentangle the issues of (1) whether elites *should* possess legal means to kneecap the prospects of candidates who they believe would cause economic and political harm to a country, and (2) whether elites should *exercise extralegal* means of doing so. The first would have essentially unanimous support from the Framers. The second would not, I don’t think.
It's hard to know where to draw the line. While the US would have been better off convicting Trump or otherwise inundating him in lawfare post-2020 - all things that could have been done with perfect legitimacy in light of how corrupt he is - overly blatant and extra-legal suppression of apparently dangerous populists can also have the effect of broadly discrediting democratic institutions. In retrospect, the roots of Russia's authoritarian transition can be dated to 1996, when the Yeltsin regime made a similar kind of elite pact with the oligarchs to keep the Communists out of power. They subsequently engaged in their own carnival of looting and nominated Putin as the successor to stay out of prison after 2000, and the rest is history. In retrospect it would have been better for the Communists to win in 1996.
A quick look at, say, Alice Weidel's WP page (and the WP is not exactly a machine for whitewashing RW extremists) should disabuse you of any comparison between the AfD and Calin Georgescu. And if the quotes that were presented as "evidence" of the AfD's violation of human dignity are anything like representative of the actual evidence collected by the BfV, then the whole process is a bigger farce than Georgescu's trees-and-bees manifesto.
No, you don't get to use the cringe coming out of Romania as a convenient motte to attack a legitimate (if wrong on various issues, including NATO/Ukraine) political party in Germany. Maybe this trick works on American readers that can't locate Germany on a map...
I share your fears, but not your diagnosis or solution. The problem is the voters’ stupidity, not democracy (although it highlights a weakness of democracy). The solution is convincing people not to vote for nutjobs. The issues that cross other people’s red lines about candidate eligibility might not seem like existential threats to you. You wouldn’t want democracy thwarted because of a candidate’s views on those things. This reminds me of the problem of free speech. If it doesn’t apply to “bad” cases, it doesn’t really exist. On a side note, the Romanian situation actually makes me happy for once to have a two-party system. Democracy is a huge safeguard against error and tyranny, but it is not a guarantee. With weaponized or rogue AI, information glut, inadequate attention spans, and special interest lobbies, I don’t know that democracy will remain adequate to the challenges. I don’t judge China and Russia for their undemocratic systems because even democracy is a gamble. I do think that democracy, at least as we know it, will have to be modified or more likely replaced by some novel system. I am a pessimist here and think the chances of civilization meeting the oncoming challenges are slim. I think we should study China and humbly recognize those areas in which their system is far more competent than ours. For now, I think democracies should double down on democracy, because I don’t see any viable alternatives, especially for us.
As someone who normally agrees with you and really likes your writing, I’m joining those who say that this is one of your worst takes. The whole point of the rule of law is that how you do things matters, you can’t just do what you want to get the desired result. Otherwise Trumpists can say they are fully justified in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia because he was likely deportable and the ends justify the means. If you think we should cut Medicare, would you have supported a president Romney just ordering the agency to stop sending out checks because he couldn’t get anything through congress ?
In the Romanian case you have a court annulling an election without any legal basis while in Germany you have a government agency going after a party for strictly ideological reasons (opposition to immigration being the main one). These are both really bad from a deontological point of view if you believe in the rule of law or any level of political pluralism but honestly I think the utilitarian argument is weak as well in each case.
Romania is a parliamentary system where the president has relatively little power if parliament is against him (which it is actually because the anti-Georgescu parties won a parliamentary election which was a week after the presidential election that was annulled). Georgescu being president would likely not have been that big a deal and he hadn’t even won yet ! The mainstream parties could have supported the other candidate in the second round, but instead they decided to do this extra-legal nonsense.
As for Germany at this point most European countries have had right-wing populists as part of governing coalitions without any catastrophe happening (currently the case in Italy and the Netherlands). What is going on is especially strange as the mainstream conservatives (CDU/CSU) seem to directionally agree with AfD on almost all issues (immigration, taxes, energy, crime) except for foreign policy. I really think you are over generalizing from Trump while the Germans are over generalizing from Hitler. The Nazis had a paramilitary force and participated in street violence before fully coming to power, while Trump committed actual crimes and tried to overturn an election. There were ways to draw the line in these cases without resorting to the kind of legally dubious nonsense we are seeing in Europe now.
Final point, one of the aspects that makes Trump so bad is that he actually manages to make his opponents crazier & worse, bringing them down closer to his level if not all the way down to it. We saw this in his first term with the Democrats becoming insanely woke and I’m afraid we’re seeing elements of this again (e.g. this article). If EHC wants to restrict democracy (I’m perfectly fine that) they have to do it in an EHC way: implementing checks & balances, limiting state power, electoral reform (Trump doesn’t happen without the primary system). Basically ex-ante restrictions based on clear rules instead of ex-post reactive measures based on “I don’t like this guy”. What they are doing in Europe is amateurish and desperate in addition to being potentially illegal, not very EHC at all.
The theory of democracy by authors such as Norberto Bobbio and others state that democracy primary aim is to provide a legitimate means to change the ruling elite without recurring to violence. This theory was successfully applied in Italy when, immediately after the war, a Fascist party was allowed to run in the elections and one of the strategy to fight far-left violence was "parliamentarizing the dissent", which proved effective isolating terrorist groups. As soon as you make a large party illegal, you basically re-legitimize a violent takeover of power, since you are excluding one voter out of five from the political game. So think again.
As other commenters have pointed out, having elites turn down candidates creates a huge "who will watch the watchmen" problem. On the other hand not watching anybody and not having any watchmen seems like an unsatisfactory solution to that problem.
The watchmen are the voters themselves. In a democracy the people get the government that they deserve in the long run. If they choose prejuduce and incompetence then they learn the hard way through economic suffering (or in the case of the Nazis humiliating defeat and subjugation in war). It is not the role of self-appointed elites to prevent the people from choosing for themselves. Usually they pick wisely, but sometimes they may sadly choose Barabbas.
This argument is stronger than needed. Excluding Georgescu is legit not because he's insane but because he's violating their campaign finance laws (probably in letter, certainly in spirit) and thus getting an unfair advantage.
This is one of Richard's absolute worst takes I have read (and I have read his writing continuously for years and normally find his viewpoints to be well-argued). If we are to ban political candidates for their views (cordon sanitaires and coalition making are different because they typically reflect the popular majority's will), then who is to decide which candidates are objectionable, and from where does their legitimacy spring? This is akin to if sports coaches ciuld unilaterally disqualify players on the opposing team because they don't like their play style (or, more cynically and more realistically, because they believe they are talented and removing them makes victory easier). In "saving democracy" they destroy it, becoming scarcely better than the villains they are trying to keep at bay.
The fastest route to extremism and terroristic violence is to foreclose all possibility of those with unpopular or even odious views from getting political representation of their choice through legitimate democratic mechanisms (which is also an obvious form of "taxation without representation"). And if those politicians banned from running for office subsequently seize power (through revolution or coups), they will not abide or negotiate with the pseudo-democratic old guard who completely excluded them, but will instead crush them completely out of revenge, destroying the constitutional order altogether. It is much better to have 15-20% of a parliament composed of conspiratorial, raving cranks and lunatics with a loud microphone but little influence on policy than to have those cranks scheming coups or revolt in the shadow.
It is truly amazing watching him transform into Thomas Friedman
Hanania isn't saying stupid crap like "the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to desalinate water and use it for irrigation."
Exactly. MAGA is already in power and would relish the opportunity to ban opponents from running against them. If the government has the power to ban candidates for being low quality, the low quality politicians will ban the high quality ones once they get into power, which in this case, they already are. It’s almost like Richard is writing fan fiction where the 2024 election didn’t happen and society could operate via a Platonic technocracy.
It’s very rich coming from Richard. If it’s so easy for elites to identify these terrible candidates ahead of time why did he vote for Trump?
I just can’t understand if he’s actually this stupid and is a genuine believer or if these takes are serving a higher goal of ingratiating himself to the left.
I used to think he was intellectually honest. Now I just think he’s stupid - a contrarian for contrarian’s sake.
I pray he’s just being cynical and trying to expand his audience with the left.
It honestly seems on brand for him. His whole Elite Human Capital theory/schtick lends itself to this. I don’t think he’s really that far away from Yarvin, at least as it pertains to totalitarian tendencies. They both think educated elites should run society - neither really believes in democracy.
Agreed. Content-based exclusion of political actors can only be done by those currently in power and will inevitably be used to insulate themselves from criticism and ouster. Formal guardrails, such as the sort of constitutional limits on gov't power and officials we have in the U.S., are a much safer protection against populist craziness. They must be protected at all costs.
Is it really true that banning fascists from trying to take power will make it easier for them to take power, or make them more likely to commit terrorist attacks? It makes sense on the surface but I don't think it's true. There are fairly regular terror attacks carried out by white nationalists in the west, where they are on the whole allowed to participate politically. There are just as many in America as Germany. These groups feel just as cheated out of power whether they are allowed to run or not, because their ideas are utterly repulsive to the vast majority of people and thus they cannot possibly hope to win any election, under ordinary circumstances (It seems that they can win simply by telling egregious lies). Hitler was not elected to the position of Fuhrer, but he was voted into the Chancellorship, and this clearly contributed to his ability to later seize the reins of power. Revolutions and coups are very difficult to execute, in any case, and if the fascists have actually acquired this level of power, then no law was ever going to save you.
It is certainly "less democratic" to ban specific, clearly dangerous candidates, but why do we want "maximum democracy" anyway? Arguing that a policy is "less capitalist" would not move the needle for any but the most devoted libertarians, and despite their name, the primary interest of the DNC is not actually democracy per se. Singapore is not a tremendously democratic country, but it is a model of good nation-building.
Frankly, my contention is this: There is absolutely nothing that a nation can possibly gain by having raving lunatic cranks or foreign-backed Manchurian Candidates serving as government representatives.
You say that "less democracy" isn't necessarily bad, but who has the legitimate right to set the optimal threshold? If you don't have universal suffrage and viewpoint-neutral eligibility then you don't really have much of a democracy at all. You have an oligarchy using the "democracy" label for public relations. I think two cases we can point to of political suppression leading to horrible outcomes are apartheid in South Africa and the discrimination against Islamist candidates in Turkey. Since the ANC took power it has pursued its agenda out of revenge and hatred. This is made obvious by the slogan "K$%# the Boers". Likewise, Erdogan was once banned from running for his views and now in power has no qualms about crushing the secular opposition.
The hilarious thing is, the Dems and their media partners did everything in their power in 2016 to elevate and boost coverage of Trump, thinking he was a joke, a "microchips in soda" guy, that would be laughed at even by deplorable Republicans and Hillary would soon be wearing her pantsuits on Pennsylvania Ave again.
Now Hannania, having learned like his fellow travellers at the NYT, that SNL skits and mockery and dismissal by a unified and groupthinking "elite human Capital" is not enough to ensure the voters in a democracy vote the way they are supposed to. The only option is to take a few more bricks out of the Potemkin facades that we call democracy. Which the famously docile and trusting gentlefolk in the heartland and 2A enthusiasts in particular will surely go right along with.
In short, populism and stupidity do indeed go hand in hand. But attempts to suppress one or the other will lead to a situation where freedom seed dispensers are used to make sure the government still operates with the consent of the governed.
"The fastest route to extremism and terroristic violence is to foreclose all possibility of those with unpopular or even odious views from getting political representation of their choice through legitimate democratic mechanisms (which is also an obvious form of "taxation without representation"). And if those politicians banned from running for office subsequently seize power (through revolution or coups)"
This is less of a concern when you have an ideology composed mostly* of people with traits that make them incapable of participating in revolution/coup/guerilla war. There was famous 4chan post about this: democracy is designed to avoid civil war, since any faction that couldn't win an election would also lose a civil war, so they won't bother launching one. Post said it breaks down when suffrage is extended to those incapable of fighting - referring to women. But it applies just as well to obese people, the elderly, the very poor, etc. As well as people who are pathologically unable to get along well with others. Conspiratorial groups are always exploding into infighting because of the low-trust nature of people attracted to such beliefs. They won't do well as revolutionaries!
*See, I'm being fair here
"It is much better to have 15-20% of a parliament composed of conspiratorial, raving cranks and lunatics with a loud microphone but little influence on policy than to have those cranks scheming coups or revolt in the shadow."
Ok, now what about 50-60% cranks? Not such a simple question, isn't it?
If it gets to 50-60% then the voting public is sadly getting the government it desires and deserves. While very rare, sometimes the public chooses the Barabbas candidate and gets to deal with the consequences of that poor decision. But in the vast majority of cases the cranks get a large but non-majoritarian following.
What about the 40-50% who didn't vote for the cranks? I don't think they deserve it.
In those rare cases they likely should have done a better job persuading their fellow citizens, or if they truly found the majority to be odious and intolerable then to move somewhere where a majority of voters share their views. But in a democracy sometimes the ball will take a "bad bounce". That is simply part of the package of having a democratic government. The alternatives are even riskier (authoritarianism and/or monarchy)
I can see your argument for banning stupid and unpleasant politicians, but it will always be abused. It regularly is abused in countries across the world to go after opposition leaders who call out elite corruption.
In Africa it is used in basically every election, it is a tactic Putin and the Thai military use to preserve their power and stop anyone who wants to stop power concentration.
Yes, but as we've seen in the US, no law will stop a sufficiently determined, sufficiently stupid, person. MAGA have yet to actually try to, for instance, ban the Democratic National Convention, but Putin began as a democratically elected president and slowly consolidated power, and over time rewrote the rules. So, it seems to me that there's little point for our angels to eschew powers that cannot be denied to devils. Perhaps if this becomes normalized, then the devils will have an easier time with their devilry, but on the whole, if principles didn't help the Democrats they won't help anyone else either.
I have no reason to think Angels would use it responsibly. In every circumstance involving warnings of danger people cry wolf, which destroys any ability to credibly signal.
I think that a better title for this essay would be "Richard Hanania Learns to Love Big Brother."
Personally, I don't think that electing Călin Georgescu (had such a thing been allowed to happen) would have solved Romania's problems. And yet (this is important!) there is no law that gives the Constitutional Court veto power over presidential elections! And Georgescu, despite his bad qualities, hasn't been convicted of any crime for which disqualification for office is a legal punishment!
The idea of "democracy needs limits" is reasonable, in theory. But it's one thing if you're talking about actual constitutional limits on executive power (i.e. the legislature can vote down presidential appointees, refuse to fund the president's projects, or even impeach the president, and if the president charges people with crimes then the charges can be dismissed by a judge, or a jury can vote to acquit). It's another thing when you say "Unlimited democracy is bad, so the democratic part of the government must be held in strict subjugation to the oligarchic part of the government, which is itself completely beyond checks and balances."
This is the situation in Iran - where the people get to regularly elect presidents and legislators, but where the Grand Ayatollah, and the clerics in the Guardian Council and Assembly of Experts, have unlimited power to disqualify candidates, and override the elected arm of government on any issues that they have a strong opinion about (such as how women should dress, or how Iran should conduct its proxy war with Israel). I wrote all about this in my December Twilight Patriot Post: "Romania and the Iranization of the West." https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/romania-and-the-iranization-of-the
Granted, the motives of the Romanian court are less sinister - I really do believe it's a bad idea to elect a president that's so full of conspiracy theories. But that doesn't change the fact that he hasn't actually done anything for which exclusion from the election is a legal penalty! All that the Constitutional Court has to go on is "It would be really bad if this guy won, and also the constitution means whatever we say it means, therefore we ought to say that the constitution bars him from running."
And if the rule of law doesn't protect bad people, then it doesn't protect anybody. If there is a body of men powerful enough to say "No, you don't get to elect the microchips guy," without anything in the written constitution to support their decision... then you've already lost. That body of men is your true ruler, for the same reason that Augustus and not the Senate was the true ruler of post-Actium Rome. And your democracy is a sham, and no matter how many creative ways you can find to say that Big Brother is doubleplusgood... your democracy will still be a sham.
The EU is doing its best with the tools available. It's wishful thinking on my part, but in the long term, I would prefer limiting the suffrage over limiting the candidates. There seems to be a connection between "meme candidates" and populism. Trump was the first meme candidate and the first breakthrough populist. The drivers of meme culture are those without skin in the game. If we instituted a literacy test, a lot of these problems would solve themselves. I would compare it to how we intervene in the market. It is better to have consistent principles, like a systematic tax code, rather than the government arbitrarily and randomly stealing large sums of money from companies on an ad hoc basis.
It’s an interesting question. I would love to say, bar the Trumps and Vances of the world from holding public office. But you should also consider historical precedent.
For many years, Turkey’s military would micromanage the democracy to out communist or islamist parties. This worked out well for some time while Turkey remained liberal, but it came crashing down when Erdogan came into power, and you could argue that the repression Erdogan faced had radicalized him into becoming the dictator he is today. Suppression may weaken political factions, but it also pushes them towards extremism.
Erdoğan was always a radical, but he learned from Erbakan’s ousting that he had to play his cards carefully if he wanted the military to tolerate his party. Over the years, he gradually eroded the military’s power until he had full control. I think the real mistake was trying to enforce a radical version of laïcité in Turkey, which bred resentment among the more religious and conservative segments of the population.
I used to think the constitution was hogwash.
After looking at Trump and this guy.
I worship the founders almost daily for their foresight.
Meanwhile Germany is gearing up to ban AfD completely, the most popular party in the country, because voters must never be allowed to vote for limits on mass migration.
Let me guess, "mass" migration is increasing the amount of new immigrants Germany accepts by a couple percentage points.
If voters don't want higher taxes or reduced benefits, the only option left is increasing the number of taxpayers. The problem is voters don't want to hear that.
Except that Germany's migration policies cause an additional strain on the welfare state rather than creating new wealth. This is what Richard appears to not understand. Germany is not getting an elite human capital - it is getting Afghans and Africans that can't even find a job in their respective homelands since they lack the skills.
If it is no big deal, why would the electorate be denied a say on the matter? Germans would never have voted to be a minority in their own country in the foreseeable future, but that is the track they are on. The developed countries of East Asia charted a very different course, so a different course was possible.
Ponzi schemes collapse sooner or later, and ponzi demography is no different.
"Elite Human Capital" rendered Europe ugly with their preferred policies. I've seen videos of areas of Paris, and my God were these ugly. It's a mixture of Morocco and the Congo. No way anyone can look at this and say, "This is great!" Montreal is increasingly looking like that as well.
But that's what policies espoused by "elite human capital" produce. That, and economic stagnation in the case of both Europe and Canada.
So, no, the consideration of an AfD ban is not a "blurry" case at all; it is downright outrageous. This isn't just tinkering with democracy, but sticking a dagger in it. It is a matter of the establishment telling its people: "You seem like you want fewer Kenyans and Afghans around? Na-uh, you ain't getting that! No tightening of law & order, either. And we'll continue impoverishing ourselves for the sake of climate change, and we're not going nuclear." The British deep state is doing the same, by the way.
These are all policies that only the AfD credibly opposes. All the other parties have shown an unwillingness to reverse course on them. So, basically, the public is threatened of having no option to reverse course on the major economic, security, and immigration policies of its own country. "We like Afghans, we like the climate, and we like slapping criminals on the wrist... and you going to like it, too!" If such a tyrannical attitude doesn't warrant a hefty dose of populism, then what does?
By the way, with regards to Trump, his dumb trade policy is not embraced by the public (it's the least popular policy item on his agenda), so it can't really be called "populist". It's one of those policies -- like abortion -- that neither public nor elites really like, but a conservative minority manages to wiggle its way into it anyway.
If all the other parties don't want to reverse course on those policies, and the only party that does talk and act like blatant villains, you should consider the possibility that there's a good reason for at least some version of those policies. Sometimes politicians have to choose between being popular and benefiting the country.
I live in one of those multicultural neighborhoods like the ones you see on modern TV commercials. The kind of people you say are making places look like Morocco, I call: "the guys who fixed my car for way cheaper than the dealership would have," "the guy who opened up an awesome new burger place," and "my daughter's speech therapist." People like the AFD like to pretend that societies like that dont work, because they don't want to admit that "reversing" those policies would destroy something of real value to people.
I live in the Netherlands, and I am unhappy with the transformation of my country. Half of the people in the streets don't speak Dutch, and women with head scarfs are everywhere, it has become rare to a Morroccan girl or women without a heascarf. To be sure, I never feel physically threatened or anything, but I don't feel at home in my city anymore. I probably will vote for an anti immigration party next time. The answer to populism of the regularvparties might be adopting some of standpoints that make people vote for them in the first place, instead of banning them.
Dutch here as well and I fully agree.
I would care to know more about both the Georgescu and AfD cases from impartial people with knowledge of the relevant parts of their respective legal systems and electoral laws. I don’t think the internet media environment makes that feasible to do without a major time commitment. It’s hard to know who to trust.
In any event, I think Richard is defending a stronger claim than is necessary for these examples. Because I expect laws on the books authorized the actions taken in both cases, even if somewhat unprecedented and seemingly anti-democratic.
We probably need to disentangle the issues of (1) whether elites *should* possess legal means to kneecap the prospects of candidates who they believe would cause economic and political harm to a country, and (2) whether elites should *exercise extralegal* means of doing so. The first would have essentially unanimous support from the Framers. The second would not, I don’t think.
It's hard to know where to draw the line. While the US would have been better off convicting Trump or otherwise inundating him in lawfare post-2020 - all things that could have been done with perfect legitimacy in light of how corrupt he is - overly blatant and extra-legal suppression of apparently dangerous populists can also have the effect of broadly discrediting democratic institutions. In retrospect, the roots of Russia's authoritarian transition can be dated to 1996, when the Yeltsin regime made a similar kind of elite pact with the oligarchs to keep the Communists out of power. They subsequently engaged in their own carnival of looting and nominated Putin as the successor to stay out of prison after 2000, and the rest is history. In retrospect it would have been better for the Communists to win in 1996.
A quick look at, say, Alice Weidel's WP page (and the WP is not exactly a machine for whitewashing RW extremists) should disabuse you of any comparison between the AfD and Calin Georgescu. And if the quotes that were presented as "evidence" of the AfD's violation of human dignity are anything like representative of the actual evidence collected by the BfV, then the whole process is a bigger farce than Georgescu's trees-and-bees manifesto.
No, you don't get to use the cringe coming out of Romania as a convenient motte to attack a legitimate (if wrong on various issues, including NATO/Ukraine) political party in Germany. Maybe this trick works on American readers that can't locate Germany on a map...
I share your fears, but not your diagnosis or solution. The problem is the voters’ stupidity, not democracy (although it highlights a weakness of democracy). The solution is convincing people not to vote for nutjobs. The issues that cross other people’s red lines about candidate eligibility might not seem like existential threats to you. You wouldn’t want democracy thwarted because of a candidate’s views on those things. This reminds me of the problem of free speech. If it doesn’t apply to “bad” cases, it doesn’t really exist. On a side note, the Romanian situation actually makes me happy for once to have a two-party system. Democracy is a huge safeguard against error and tyranny, but it is not a guarantee. With weaponized or rogue AI, information glut, inadequate attention spans, and special interest lobbies, I don’t know that democracy will remain adequate to the challenges. I don’t judge China and Russia for their undemocratic systems because even democracy is a gamble. I do think that democracy, at least as we know it, will have to be modified or more likely replaced by some novel system. I am a pessimist here and think the chances of civilization meeting the oncoming challenges are slim. I think we should study China and humbly recognize those areas in which their system is far more competent than ours. For now, I think democracies should double down on democracy, because I don’t see any viable alternatives, especially for us.
As someone who normally agrees with you and really likes your writing, I’m joining those who say that this is one of your worst takes. The whole point of the rule of law is that how you do things matters, you can’t just do what you want to get the desired result. Otherwise Trumpists can say they are fully justified in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia because he was likely deportable and the ends justify the means. If you think we should cut Medicare, would you have supported a president Romney just ordering the agency to stop sending out checks because he couldn’t get anything through congress ?
In the Romanian case you have a court annulling an election without any legal basis while in Germany you have a government agency going after a party for strictly ideological reasons (opposition to immigration being the main one). These are both really bad from a deontological point of view if you believe in the rule of law or any level of political pluralism but honestly I think the utilitarian argument is weak as well in each case.
Romania is a parliamentary system where the president has relatively little power if parliament is against him (which it is actually because the anti-Georgescu parties won a parliamentary election which was a week after the presidential election that was annulled). Georgescu being president would likely not have been that big a deal and he hadn’t even won yet ! The mainstream parties could have supported the other candidate in the second round, but instead they decided to do this extra-legal nonsense.
As for Germany at this point most European countries have had right-wing populists as part of governing coalitions without any catastrophe happening (currently the case in Italy and the Netherlands). What is going on is especially strange as the mainstream conservatives (CDU/CSU) seem to directionally agree with AfD on almost all issues (immigration, taxes, energy, crime) except for foreign policy. I really think you are over generalizing from Trump while the Germans are over generalizing from Hitler. The Nazis had a paramilitary force and participated in street violence before fully coming to power, while Trump committed actual crimes and tried to overturn an election. There were ways to draw the line in these cases without resorting to the kind of legally dubious nonsense we are seeing in Europe now.
Final point, one of the aspects that makes Trump so bad is that he actually manages to make his opponents crazier & worse, bringing them down closer to his level if not all the way down to it. We saw this in his first term with the Democrats becoming insanely woke and I’m afraid we’re seeing elements of this again (e.g. this article). If EHC wants to restrict democracy (I’m perfectly fine that) they have to do it in an EHC way: implementing checks & balances, limiting state power, electoral reform (Trump doesn’t happen without the primary system). Basically ex-ante restrictions based on clear rules instead of ex-post reactive measures based on “I don’t like this guy”. What they are doing in Europe is amateurish and desperate in addition to being potentially illegal, not very EHC at all.
The theory of democracy by authors such as Norberto Bobbio and others state that democracy primary aim is to provide a legitimate means to change the ruling elite without recurring to violence. This theory was successfully applied in Italy when, immediately after the war, a Fascist party was allowed to run in the elections and one of the strategy to fight far-left violence was "parliamentarizing the dissent", which proved effective isolating terrorist groups. As soon as you make a large party illegal, you basically re-legitimize a violent takeover of power, since you are excluding one voter out of five from the political game. So think again.
As other commenters have pointed out, having elites turn down candidates creates a huge "who will watch the watchmen" problem. On the other hand not watching anybody and not having any watchmen seems like an unsatisfactory solution to that problem.
The watchmen are the voters themselves. In a democracy the people get the government that they deserve in the long run. If they choose prejuduce and incompetence then they learn the hard way through economic suffering (or in the case of the Nazis humiliating defeat and subjugation in war). It is not the role of self-appointed elites to prevent the people from choosing for themselves. Usually they pick wisely, but sometimes they may sadly choose Barabbas.
This argument is stronger than needed. Excluding Georgescu is legit not because he's insane but because he's violating their campaign finance laws (probably in letter, certainly in spirit) and thus getting an unfair advantage.
Then (by your logic) if Kamala Harris violated campaign finance laws she should have been excluded from the presidential election?