Living argument against democracy

Comrade Corbyn is just five points below Mrs May in the latest polls. That means he could realistically become PM on 8 June, which would be the greatest electoral catastrophe this country has ever suffered.

That’s the beauty of one-man-one-vote franchise: vital political decisions are made by people least qualified to make them.

The polls effectively show that almost 40 per cent of Her Majesty’s subjects don’t feel like remaining Her Majesty’s subjects. They’d rather live in a communist republic, if preferably without the concentration camps.

They must believe that the government should be the country’s only economically active body. The rest of the economy must be either nationalised or put under tight state control.

They must feel that our public spending must be increased in line with taxation becoming well-nigh confiscatory.

They must be convinced that, rather than having some people who are better off than others, all must be equally poor – except for the government functionaries.

They must yearn nostalgically for the time Britain was more or less run by the unions: grease monkeys acting as éminences grises.

They must feel that we need more of the same policies that have destroyed our education and healthcare.

They must believe that, rather than admitting too many immigrants, we’re admitting too few – especially those who detest everything that makes Britain British.

They must share Corbyn’s love for the IRA and Hezbollah, along with his hatred for the Jews.

They must wish to get rid of our nuclear deterrent, leaving us at the mercy of any foreign aggressor, especially one that has nuclear weapons.

A third of the electorate must hope that jihadists will have a free hand – that’s the percentage of those who trust Corbyn to make the right decisions to keep Britain safe from terrorism. This, although he has consistently voted against every anti-terrorist measure to come up for vote, 59 of them.

They must crave to be governed by a man who proudly cites Marx and Trotsky as his inspirations – and acts accordingly.

Then again, they may not think any of those things. They very well may be too stupid or too thoroughly corrupted to be capable of any thought worthy of the name. It’s entirely possible that their swing in the polls was caused by a kneejerk reaction to something in the Tory manifesto.

Please realise the enormity of the situation: if their knee jerks in the same direction again, we may have a vicious, degenerate communist at 10 Downing Street, working studiously to destroy the country as best he can.

Whoever has decided that important decisions should be arrived at by a simple show of hands has a lot to answer for. If you take two statements, majority is always right, and majority is never right, then the second is much closer to the truth.

Surely everyone must see that there’s something wrong with a political system that unfailingly throws up vacuous nonentities at best and the likes of Corbyn at worst? Have we been so thoroughly brainwashed that we get up and salute whenever Democracy (always implicitly capitalised) is run up the pole?

The average Intelligence Quotient in Britain is under 100 and, if they measured the quotient of political knowledge and understanding, it would be way below that – all the way down to the level of mental retardation. And yet we trust the average voter to determine our present, our future, our life.

If we must, by all means do let’s have a democratic element in the government mix. But making this element predominant or, even worse, exclusive is sheer madness.

No business of more than three employees will ever establish major policies by majority decision. Yet we somehow think that a method that would fail in running a car-repair shop could succeed in running a country of 60-odd million. This isn’t just counterintuitive. It’s mad – demonstrably so.

This line of thought often runs into an ignorant and vulgar objection, along the lines of there being no reasonable alternative to this democracy run riot. Inevitably the Churchill quip is cited: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

This one-liner from the master of the genre is widely quoted not so much for its wit as for its intrinsic truth. Alas, wit can often obscure truth. Churchill came closer to the truth when suggesting that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

Though both a staunch monarchist and a committed parliamentarian, Churchill clearly didn’t believe he was living a double life. To him there was no contradiction in a strong monarchy being balanced by an elected lower house, with the hereditary upper chamber making sure the balance didn’t tip too much to either side.

This is what Churchill meant by democracy – not the present free-for-all Walpurgisnacht, with the bland electing the bland. Hence it’s disingenuous to use his quote when defending a system that may well raise Corbyn to the top.

Shall we still praise democracy if people vote themselves into slavery? This is unlikely to happen on 8 June. But the very fact that it may happen is the strongest argument against what Tocqueville called ‘the tyranny of the majority”.

3 thoughts on “Living argument against democracy”

  1. “That’s the beauty of one-man-one-vote franchise: vital political decisions are made by people least qualified to make them.”

    Think the American electoral system and the Electoral College method of selecting a President. that method is there for a reason.

    And what will the letter as written by Comrade Corbyn to the commander of a British Trident submarine say?

  2. Britain possibly has more democratic deficit than the EU. If Corbyn is handed the levers of power he will find that nothing much happens when he pulls or pushes them.

  3. It only appears to be fair to grant all adults voting rights; however, when one considers the Kennedy verses Nixon debate, the radio listeners gave the vote to Nixon while the T.V. viewers gave it to Kennedy. (Nowadays Nixon could have won the visuals too if he had a nose surgeon.) And in all schools I have witnessed with voting in captains, if students vote in anyone teaches know will bring standards down they quickly overrule or manipulate results.
    So in the so called democratic countries how could the vote of the farmer, storekeeper, craftsman and businessman carry proper weight for their particular concerns?

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