Deprogramming British Democracy
The British Liberal Tradition and Paleolibertarianism
Introduction
What is liberty? It is a simple enough question; however, short of simply quoting the dictionary, the answers you receive will be as diverse as the people you ask. Every ideology and politician will claim an ability to bring you freedom; the socialist will promise you freedom from poverty, the Neoconservative will promise you freedom through security, and the Evangelical Christian will promise you freedom under God. Liberty, then, is in the eye of the beholder; it is down to the contents of the individual mind and his ability to shape the world through his actions. I would contend that every man’s liberty is his own. To quote Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: “True self-government can only be the mastery man exercises over himself.” (von Kuehnelt-Leddihn 108)
So, the question we must ask ourselves is: “Do we feel free?” Can we exercise mastery over ourselves and our personal spaces unimpeded? They may be unable to fully articulate it, yet the British people live with a sense of great unease often medicalised and medicated away. The modernity in which we find ourselves is unsatisfactory. The education system teaches us that the conditions of the modern world should bring about a paradise of mass democracy, civil rights, social welfare, and public services. If you were a socialist of the late 19th century, British society as described in a GCSE textbook would sound like heaven on earth, but you would be hard pushed to find anyone in contemporary Britain who would describe it as a utopia.
Then why do we shackle the “liberal,” those who are supposed to be concerned with liberty, to the “democratic,” the belief in imposing the will of the majority on the minority? There is a large body of work concerning the inherent tension between true liberalism and democracy. I do not have the time to re-tread it all here, but what I hope to lay out is a skeleton of how we can rediscover our own specifically British ideas of freedom that predate the simple act of mass voting—a tradition that we all-but-abandoned in the 20th century and shamefully re-imported via our European and American cousins.
Blinkered Liberty
Within the narrow, prescribed debate of the post-war consensus, questioning the British state’s “march of progress” as personified by the welfare state is enough to have its evangelists calling for your head. The realms of “acceptable debate,” even on the supposed right, have an apoplectic fit should you question the very idea of mass democracy itself. Those who have read Gramsci should be able to identify the total hegemony formerly radical-leftist ideas now have in British society. For those who are “social democrats” the world we live in is very much the endpoint of their ideas.
We live, then, in this “neoliberal” twilight of managed decline, lacking a specifically British toolset with which to assail the centres of power. The closest contemporary writer is perhaps Peter Hitchens, writer of the excellent “Abolition of Britain,” but even he falls too often into the bloated paternal Toryism of the British establishment. In order to move forward, we must first look backwards to our own traditions: to the British liberal tradition, the roots of which inspire the libertarianism of today, and to the liberty-focused ideas which form the basis of our pre-war successes. To quote Ludwig von Mises, “History looks backward into the past, but the lesson it teaches concerns things to come. It does not teach indolent quietism; it rouses man to emulate the deeds of earlier generations.” (Mises 294)
In 1651, Thomas Hobbes wrote “Leviathan,” a book that shapes how we view ourselves and the world around us to this day. He wrote it during the English civil war; it serves as a reaction to the war, positing that nature is a perpetual state of “war of all against all” and the only way to avoid this is the rule of a sovereign entity with absolute power. Hobbes himself was a Royalist, fleeing at the end of the war fearing the wrath of parliamentarians after the defeat of the crown, but he had formulated ideas that would serve as the justification in one form or another for monopolistic “sovereign” nations, which would themselves bring about an end to the age of kings. “Leviathan” is one of the oldest examples of social contract theory, and it justifies absolute power with implicit permission of the ruled, via those ruled not overthrowing the sovereign. The sovereign is a vessel for their will, illustrated by the imagery of its cover—an imposing giant figure made up of the bodies of those he rules over.
The crown would return to England, but the basis of its power, predicated on the divine right of kings, was somewhat shaken. The Protestant Puritanism of Cromwell too would persist, seeking moral justification to impose itself on others who do not share its narrow school of thought. In the coming centuries, it was the collectivist ideas inherent in “Leviathan” that would lend itself to the Protestant do-gooders, and which would form the basis of early British socialistic and universalist thought.
Classical Origins
The Scholastic school dominated philosophical thought in Europe throughout the Middle Ages; they saw themselves as the heirs to philosophical thought of antiquity. Aristotle, particularly in his defence of property rights, had a high degree of influence on the high- and late-medieval period, as did the laissez-faire economic policies of the late Roman Empire. The Scholastics were often concerned with posing thought-provoking questions rather than trying to reconcile the suffering and contradictions often found around them in the Middle Ages. To them, utopia is what happens when you die after leading a Christian life; the concept that it is Man’s place to create a paradise on earth would seem alien to them. Man suffers because of sin, because of the fall, and it is his place to suffer because of that. There is acceptance of the world as it is under the auspices of a divine power, rather than the distant carrot of the ideal society manifested by collective human will.
The ideas of classical liberalism have their roots in this earlier Catholic Scholastic school, notably the works of Thomas Aquinas, which, as discussed, draw on the thinkers of antiquity. Early liberalism inherited this religious metaphysics as its underpinning but was searching for its own identity in the Protestant lands of England and Scotland. The Dutch intellectual Hugo Grotius provides a direct link between the two, with his theories in natural law bridging the Scholastics with the Enlightenment-era liberals.
The late 17th century saw the work of Locke and his ideas of original appropriation by using natural law, which he sees as man’s best route to make use of the bounty of creation under God. In simple terms, he contended that those who originally make land productive or resources useful have a right to benefit from them. When combined with William Forster Lloyd’s ideas of “the tragedy of the commons,” a powerful ethical framework for property rights is built, not only as a means towards individual liberty, but also to avoid tyranny and disaster. Here we see a challenge to the Hobbesian view of natural law, giving us a framework outside of the rule of the sovereign for the freedom of the individual. The English liberal tradition is a result of the late-17th and 18th centuries. As such, it far predates many modes of modern political thought such as Marxism and the universalism of mass democracy. Its ideas are not merely concerned simply with the act of voting, but with the rights of the individual within society.
Locke formulated his ideas both inside and outside the confines of the existence of God, but keep in mind that until the mid-20th century the Christian faith was a present and real force in everyday life for the vast majority of people. The constitutional underpinning of the American republic, for example, takes for granted a large degree of familiarity with Biblical thought, and uses this commonality as the basis for many of its concepts of freedom. It is “One Nation, under God.” The nation is not sovereign, for God sits above it and apart from it. “Separation of church and state” serve as a protection for the church as much as a protection for the government, which was assumed to be run according to a Protestant Christian ethic. The founding fathers took a huge amount of inspiration from the British liberalism of the preceding period, along with a large dollop of continental Freemasonry, which guided the imagery and rhetoric of the Constitution that still holds some sway to this day. Britain, for its part, has less of these 18th century ideas present in our modern lives—but they nonetheless underpin much of our self-image as a nation of fairness, freedom, and individuality.
The Economic Achilles’ Heel
However, within the Liberal Tradition, the seeds of its own destruction were sown; economically, the towering myth of Adam Smith inventing capitalistic economic thought whole cloth is one of the worst examples of British Liberal arrogance. Indeed, when Richard Cantillon died in 1924, a man who deeply inspired Ludwig Von Mises and whose economic theories can explain much of the monetary ills of modern state capitalism, Adam Smith was only ten years old. The obsession with money as an instrument of government policy, rather than stemming from the double coincidence of wants, can be traced back to Smith and his many adherents. For a full refutation, please see Rothbard’s “Economic Thought Before Adam Smith.”
John Stuart Mill is often cited as the champion of modern-style liberalism, but his utilitarianism serves as one of the direct ancestors to socialism and is present in all ideologies that curtail the rights of the individual for the “greater good” of the collective. The utilitarianism of Mill is merely a refinement of his teacher Bentham, whose most infamous creation is the panopticon—a prison in which the subject can be observed without seeing his observer, effectively meaning he must always assume he is being observed. Bentham saw this as a model not just for prisons, but for “houses of industry, workhouses, poorhouses, manufactories, mad-houses, hospitals, and schools.” (Bentham 29) He himself was not religious but clothed his monstrous creation as the language of the divine, quoting psalms in rapture at his revocation of human privacy. Mill's utilitarian ideology is ultimately a blueprint for human suffering, presupposing some central force knows what is “the most good for the most people” in society at large.
This spirit of the imposition of “most good” on an unwilling mass is an outgrowth of the Protestant determinism Bentham hoped to appeal to, those who want to build a world that imposes their ideals on a selfish and corrupt populace. This is where the laughable rhetoric of “Jesus was a socialist” finds its root: be it the will of God, the voice of the proletariat or the “will of the people” as defined by modern democracy, “Liberal utilitarianism” allows for the redefinition of “the greater good” moment by moment depending on what force you consider “Sovereign”, and crucially elevates the rights of an amorphous Leviathan society above those of the individuals within it.
The London School of Economics takes great pains to use Mill as their prototypical “Classical Liberal,” using his utilitarianism as the basis for neoliberal progressivism, not libertarianism, being the heir to the liberal tradition. In doing so, they make a good argument for the incompatibility between that tradition and mass democracy, combining Mill’s Harm Principle with his universalism to talk about “redistributive…non-interference,” accidentally mirroring Hans-Herman Hoppe’s characterisation of the security state as an “an expropriating property protector.”
Blatant mental gymnastics of this kind abound in modern political theory, resulting from the hegemony leftist political thought is coddled in. Yet in a clumsy attempt to discredit the relationship, it makes a good case for the through-line between Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism. It is in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas that libertarian thinkers such as Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe also root their work, expanding upon the work of Locke in the realms of natural rights and natural law. There is a sense of “macro” and “micro” ethics once you reach 19th century liberalism, which reflect the flawed macro- and micro-economics of the Keynesian model. This model claims there are separate ethics of the individual and ethics of a society, and often they are incompatible; that is to say, you must temper the rights of the individual to prevent the “war of all against all”—that you must protect the Leviathan above all in order to preserve the people. These ideas fully took over the politics of the English Liberal Party in the 20th century, with the explicitly redistributive Liberal Reforms.
But what is the essence of individualist liberalism then? As stated in “Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School” by Ralph Raico, “Liberalism…is based on the conception of civil society, as by and large self-regulating when its members are free to act within the very wide bounds of their individual rights. Among these, the right to private property, including freedom of contract and exchange and the free disposition of one’s own labour, is given a high priority. Historically, liberalism has manifested a hostility to state action, which, it insists, should be reduced to a minimum.” (Raico, xiii)
The Burden of Modernity
Why then, you might ask, can we not just be classical liberals? The answer is simple: we live in 2021, not 1821. After the collectivist slide of the 19th century and the shattering destruction of the first half of the 20th century, liberalism as a political force ceased to be. Many of the seemingly well-intentioned ideas thinkers were toying with in the 1800s have now been seen to their logical conclusion. The consequences of mass suffrage and attempts to eradicate poverty have led to the totalitarian societies we now find ourselves bound up within. If you want a contemporary view of liberty outside of the confines of state action, then what you are looking at becomes libertarian. We too have seen the consequences of conservative movements, who have spent the majority of the last century in power both in the US and UK. Conservatives simply function as another set of managerialists. They put a boring face on the act of attempting to make the leviathan of state slightly more efficient rather than trying to dismantle it.
Earlier I drove home the religious underpinnings of both liberalism and the ideas it draws from because, once we strip the existence of God as a higher power out of it, many pillars of liberal thought—especially ideas of utilitarianism—become unmoored from their limits. The sovereign becomes the state, or the “will of the people,” whilst the retreat of the constant force of a Biblical ethic ceases to prevent the worst excesses of those who would work for “the greater good.” If you are to rely purely on classical liberal thought, then you must understand its ideas come from a deeply Christian society and fall apart outside of that without substantial additional theory. Mill, Hegel, and Bentham without God bring you directly to Marx. Classical liberalism consists of best guesses from an age of low population, limited technology, and Christian piety that predates modern mass society with its failed universalist experiments. Locke lived in a God-fearing Britain of five million people.
To be a “classical liberal” is to want to turn the clock back to 1755, just like to be a reactionary Conservative is to want to turn the clock back to 1955. We must have political theory to deal with reality as it is, not as it was in some mythical ideal age.
Paleolibertarianism, in my mind, is the only set of ideas that deal with the contemporary nature of this, the post-Marxist and post-democracy world, without submitting to the same collectivism and utilitarianism that brought it about. We need ideas on how to dismantle the modern total state, not simply squabble about who should be in charge and how efficient it should be. We must fight the idea that we are merely cells in the body of some great leviathan if we are ever to be free. As it is so eloquently put in the book, Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Time: “It is, after all, man with all his glories and shortcomings, all his desires, longings, and emotions, his reason, his faith and his despair, who faces history and politics—and not some imaginary polycephalic centipede.”(von Kuehnelt-Leddihn 107) The nature of man as a sovereign unto himself, first and foremost, must underpin our thinking.
The Realities of Mass Democracy
No concept has become so entwined with modern “liberalism” as “democracy”; the term “liberal democracy” is ubiquitous to western culture and thought. It is the essence of neoliberalism, the pretender to the inheritance of the liberal tradition, and the will of the majority in many aspects of life is extolled as sacred. A democratic society in of itself is seen as a virtuous state of being devoid of any context; “it is good because it is democratic” is the logic of the modern state—when it suits it. This is the great myth that has been sold to those who buy into the collectivist liberalism of the likes of Mill: that the ability to vote itself will bring about greater freedom.
I will defer to Hans-Herman Hoppe, one of the finest contemporary Paleolibertarian thinkers, in illustrating the absurdity that more people voting brings you greater freedom:
“Imagine a world government, democratically elected according to the principle of one-man-one-vote on a worldwide scale. What would the probable outcome of an election be? Most likely, we would get a Chinese-Indian coalition government. And what would this government most likely decide to do in order to satisfy its supporters and be re-elected? The government would probably find that the so-called Western world had far too much wealth and the rest of the world, in particular China and India, far too little, and that a systematic wealth and income redistribution would be necessary. Or imagine that in your own country the right to vote was expanded to seven year olds. While the government would not likely be staffed of children, its policies would most definitely reflect the "legitimate concerns" of children to have "adequate” and "equal" access to "free" French fries, lemonade, and videos.”
Hoppe is quite rightly pointing out that the wider the franchise, the less control individuals have, and the more exposed they are to special interest groups that may have contrary ideas of what you consider “most good,” or as Frédéric Bastiat put it so succinctly: “The state is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”
Post-French Revolution continental thinkers such as Frédéric Bastiat also draw on elements of the British liberal canon as the basis for their ideas on what is just. In “The Law,” he quite rightly points out that if we establish a set of minimal laws that we view as just, then why must we constantly vote on expanding or amending them?
If you don’t think China should be able to vote on your freedom, then what gives people in London the right to vote to take money away from people in Manchester? What gives one group the right to vote to enrich themselves at the expense of another? The arguments against global democracy in terms of personal freedom are the same arguments against democracy in general. Democracy ultimately boils down to two people voting to rob the third. In modern discourse, these arguments are simply not being made outside of Paleolibertarianism. A communist will try and sell you a red boot to be crushed under, a fascist a blue boot; only the likes of Rothbard or Hoppe would posit that maybe there shouldn’t be a giant crushing boot on your face at all. Arguments to the contrary generally boil down to “The boot is the price we pay to avoid the war of all against all,” ignoring that tens of thousands of years of human cooperation predate any notions of modern democratic statehood.
“Things Can Only Get Better”
Whatever the rhetoric adopted by the elite, reality in Britain as we now find it is a function of one hundred years of mass democracy. Universal suffrage was extended in 1920, and various reforms have lowered voting ages and increased the size of the British electorate. Unless you believe modern Britain is a utopia, it has not brought us total freedom or happiness. If mass democracy is supposed to self-refine into an ever-more-splendid system through the collective will of the people, in the way it was sold to us in the twenties and thirties, then why hasn’t it? The socialist view is that the evils of capitalism corrupt the pure will of the people; the reactionary conservative view is that it did work at some point in the past and you simply have to regain that lost nirvana; the neoliberal view is that everything will be fine after the next budget and you just need to take your SSRIs. Everyone has an excuse but no one has an answer as to why Democracy has seen a hundred years of failure, no one can explain why after twenty-eight general elections and the surrendering of swathes of freedoms, universal suffrage hasn’t made us collectively happy. The recent lockdowns, rape gangs, mass surveillance, forever wars, mass immigration, and erosion of free expression have all happened under what is supposedly a miracle system of governance. We march inexorably towards a societal-level panopticon and magic voting paper put in a magic ballot box seems powerless to prevent it.
Perhaps then, we might begin to entertain the idea that—causality being what it is—the shortcomings of one hundred years of democracy might have something to do with democracy itself. Britain is not alone in being a “modern liberal democracy;” the entire Western world follows close variations on this model and none of their societies have become utopias either. They face most if not all the structural problems Britain does, not least the march of global democracy creating uniformity to the issues we experience. Voting merely serves as means to burn up political energy en-masse: we endlessly vote on what should be done rather than just doing it ourselves.
The great achievements of Liberal Britain predate mass democracy. The finest hours of a more Lockean Britain, the age of industry, discovery, and free market enterprise, have been revised as Dickensian squalor and given a coat of Marxist class-war sheen for good measure. Pushed into our collective consciousness instead is the glorification of mass slaughter in the pursuit of world democracy during the two world wars. History as told to us through post-war revisionism presents the “finest hour” of the democratic west as the deaths of 75 million people, in which those who oppose the forces of “democracy” are cartoonish villains —conveniently skimming over the fact one of the “good guys” who “saved democracy” was Joseph Stalin.
Since the end of World War 2, Britain and the western world at large has existed in a state of managed decline, a stasis of ideas where the fundamental parameters of what is or is not “acceptable mainstream politics” drift ever towards a hollow, global socialism of mass subsistence. The compromises of millions of individual voices filtered through a largely static elite class has maintained a hegemony that sees the “peaceful handover of power” from one group of interchangeable faceless middle managers to another as the pinnacle of human achievement.
Democratic Amnesia
We need a historical narrative that reflects the strident power of the individual rather than the glorification of mass struggle and sacrifice in service to the state. We need to draw on the traditions of our heritage whilst constructing ideas and contemporary narratives that resonate amongst our communities and families. The British liberal tradition is part of this, as is modern Paleolibertarianism which allows us the tools to strip back the layers of modern propaganda—but it requires adaptation from its Austrian and American roots. We need a specifically British version of the Rothbardian historiography that deals specifically with our own unique culture. This isn’t an impossible feat, as we would merely be re-importing ideas that themselves draw huge influence from our own tradition of liberty. Leftists have been highly successful in pushing their own revisionism into Britain, it dominates the public education system and teaches children that Britain is building towards a multicultural bastion of tolerance and that the ideas of the past are inherently racist and should be discarded. It serves the needs of the current elites wonderfully and bends history itself to their will.
The liberalism of the 18th century was concerned with the power of Kings as justified by God; the British libertarian narrative of the future must be concerned with the power of the current ruling class, the managerialists. More than anything else, the British managerial class uses the will of the people, as expressed through democracy, to justify its power and sovereignty. As previously said, whereas God and scripture is largely fixed and static, and is often bound kings to work within the confines of a higher system of belief, democracy is by contrast limitless in its scope and amorphous in its goals. A belief in democracy as a guiding principle is ultimately belief in nothing; it allows the current system to justify serving itself and those at its head by whatever means it sees fit. Its narrative is the pragmatic narrative of what “the people” as represented by their politicians wants. British democracy proclaims MPs as the literal embodiment of the will of the voters, they are organs of the leviathan that make up the whole and their decisions collectively are by extension the collective will of the entire population. To believe in a functioning British democracy is to surrender not only to the idea that the current elites are legitimate, but also to the idea that questioning them undermines the free will of everyone in Britain. This is their narrative, and one we must counter if we are ever to effect meaningful change.
We must forge a new tradition of British liberty, one that can deal with the ugly realities of power and reject the compromise reformism that leaves us squabbling over two percent increases or decreases in tax rates, immigration of—God forbid—carbon emissions. It must speak to the soul, and to the real heart of what makes us free. It cannot simply be material; it cannot be marred in statistics or studies or graphs. We must dispel the limited pragmatism of the post-war era and speak to an ideal of Britain that predates the nationalism of the early 20th century and reaches into the intangible, the metaphysical, and yes, the spiritual. Those who now rule over us acquired their positions through instilling misery and war in the name of a grand utopia where there is no material scarcity or need; yet they don’t even pretend to be able to speak to your inner or higher self. All they can offer are various levels of subsistence.
Towards a British Narrative of Liberty
There is a great fear that if we simply smash what order we have now, no matter how crushing to the human spirit, that the natural state of man is miserable chaos—that “the war of all against all” will reassert itself without the sovereign at the head of Leviathan and we will live in a fleeting, terrifying freedom not worth the price we paid. A narrative that says man does not ever need to be controlled to have virtues, says we don’t kill each other because we don’t want to—not because there’s a CCTV camera at the end of every street. Ultimately those who don’t believe an entity with monopolistic control of money, justice, and violence is needed to stop the British people from degrading into bestial form have a much better view of humanity than people who do.
Selling the public the idea they should be free shouldn’t be difficult, but there’s been a hundred years of British politics—in which freedom and wellbeing are portrayed as something the government takes from you, then gives back to you via the ballot box in ever smaller pieces, for your own protection. Not relying on mass democracy is so important because the elites that are currently in change are the ones who hold all the power. That allows them to utilise the massive amounts of self-reinforcing propaganda pushed on the British people since before World War One. No matter how eloquent your argument, no matter airtight your logic, those who feel attached to the current system will recoil at any attempt to replace it.
Instilling a grand narrative is necessary to any movement; a mythos and a degree of simplification is needed also. We cannot simply say we are too virtuous to engage in deliberate narrative building; a vision for British Liberty isn’t about specific policy or empiricism—it's about making people believe in an idea strongly enough to act on it in a way that works towards retaking property rights, eliminating positive rights whilst limiting and ultimately removing monopoly areas of government. To put it bluntly: go big or go home.
The reality of power is this: in order to hold a national election, be trusted to count the votes, and then have the results recognised and respected, you must already be completely in charge of a country. Therefore, any group of elites who have personal interests in retaining power cannot functionally be voted out of power using purely democratic means. Our narrative cannot defer to the logic of democracy merely because not doing so is seen as politically unpalatable.
Man in the Pub Politics
One heartening factor is that, in my experience, there is a dormant desire for ideas precisely of this type with the British public. There is a constant thread of “man in the pub politics” which runs counter to the prevailing narrative. The elite strata may control mass media, but they have never convinced the man in the pub. He is committed to his family and his community before any layer of state ideology. It is often said that the average British man is more nationalistic than his current rulers, but this is a misreading—his instinct is far more localistic. Millwall localism supersedes working class nationalism. This commitment to town as tribe is a source of great derision within the managerial strata of society; it is seen as the apex of vulgar “gammon” behaviour. MPs talk about being football fans like aliens studying human behaviour, the ties that go past a surface level simply are not there. Football rivalries themselves serve as a form of surrogate activity to channel this intense localism into, but it does demonstrate that the instinct still exists.
Phrases like “an Englishman's home is his castle” exist within public consciousness but no longer hold true within the law. A topic you will find consensus on within any proper British pub is the frustration felt that a man can no longer defend his family and his community. Here the overbearing total state is felt with raw immediacy, as what he feels is his God-given right presents the possibility of grave reprisals from the power structure. The disincentive towards self-defence violates what he considers his natural rights under natural law. He may not articulate it in that exact phrasing, but that is in essence what is happening to him. The advanced logical structures of Praxeology and Catallactics can seem to many people as simply over-explained common sense; they experience reality outside of the over-socialisation rampant those who consider themselves the intelligentsia. “Working Class Britain” is itself a powerful myth; but it is one ripe for plain language, grass roots Paleolibertarian thought. The rights of the Englishman to build his shelter, till the earth, raise a family as he sees fit, defend his property, praise his God, and be unmolested by those who would consider themselves his betters goes back before Locke’s homesteading principle and into the mists of Albion.
But now for the ultimate question:
Where do we go From Here?
First and foremost, we need to be present and vocal within our families and communities and focus on those we can reach within our own lives. Small, resilient groups with a belief in liberty beyond the confines of the state is something hard to combat and stamp out. Having local support networks too is essential; we are years past the point where people can be arrested on a whim for speech unpalatable to those within the power structure.
We need to produce high quality academic and cultural material that reflects the liberty-focused narrative we wish to instil in contemporary Britain, both in terms of grand ideas and ground-level folksy wisdom.
There needs to be an uncompromising vison and purpose that doesn’t simply become the concession, compromise, and stagnation of reformism within the current political system. Those who wish to create meaningful change need to acknowledge they can only do so with their own power, not merely by deferring to a political party to do so for them. Being subsumed into the existing political class and power structure is not only undesirable but is suicidal for any movement hoping for any level of change.
Tactically there needs to be fearlessness and lack of compromise. We cannot shy away from what Carl Schmitt defined as the “Friend-enemy distinction” as a governing factor in politics. Simply by entertaining ideas outside of the political mainstream you are already marked out by vast swathes of the British establishment, including law enforcement and the legal system, as an enemy to be eliminated. We must not be afraid to disregard the rights of those who would deny us ours; we cannot simply allow our enemies to define the rules of a game they themselves break. Furthermore, we cannot be afraid to identify certain groups and ideas as the enemy of the British people and their freedoms.
During what became known as “The Traitors Parliament", one of the most masterful pieces of tactical rhetoric was framing those who were attempting to reverse the Brexit decision as enemies of the British people. Ultimately Brexit on its own was never going to bring about meaningful change; we have seen it superseded by the dominant force of biological collectivism, but it carries some useful tactical lessons.
The idea that there can be victory by strength of argument alone is beyond naivety, there is no perfect combination of clever words that will make those who are in power and those who benefit from the power structure admit defeat and walk away. We can’t simply “be the better people,” wag our fingers, and tut disapprovingly when those in power arrest dissidents, disappear whistle-blowers, lock people in their homes, and send young men to die on foreign soil over ever-more-grandiose lies.
Democracy itself is security blanket we must stop clinging to as a nicety; rejection of it should be fervent and brazen in the face of what continues to be done in its name. I could point to the wholesale farce of the 2020 U.S. election or the EU telling countries to “vote again” when they returned the wrong result on the Lisbon treaty, but democracy as a concept serves as a mind virus for human thought about freedom. If we are ever to halt the march towards a global underclass governed by a thin stratum of global elite, we must stop seeking permission from our fellow man before we do so—especially when the process by which we do so is controlled by those who openly say they want our removal from society.
Humanity existed and thrived before mass democracy and will continue to do so in a post-mass-democracy age. What comes next, we cannot fully know—but it can’t simply be a tweaked version of the current system if we expect different results.
Works Cited
Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Erik. Liberty Or Equality: The Challenge of our Time. The Caxton Printers, 1952, pp. 107-108.
Mises, Ludwig von. Theory and History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957, p. 294.
Raico, Ralph. Preface. Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School, by Gordon, David. Mises Institute, 2012, pp. xiii-xiv.
Bentham, Jeremy. The Panopticon Writings, edited by Miran Bozovic, Verso, 1995. p.29.