This is an important question because it rests on a fallacy which haunts us in many aspects of life.
Correctly describing something doesn’t mean you hate what you describe. Identifying flaws in something, or somebody, doesn’t mean you hate them. My husband states correctly that my singing is atrocious. It’s truly very bad. But does his clear-eyed evaluation of my ridiculously poor singing skills mean he doesn’t love me? Of course not. He loves me profoundly. But it’s not an imaginary, perfect me that he loves. It’s the real me whose terrible singing is the least important of my very many flaws.
Often we hear honest descriptions of things or people being labeled as hate. As if love consisted in shrouding the object of this emotion in utterly unrealistic perfection. But love is the exact opposite. You don’t love your friends, your country, or your relatives because they are perfect. Love is patient and love is kind because it understands, accepts and tolerates the flaws.
Your love of democracy is not really love if you idealize it and don’t see its enormous flaws. Ask yourself if you can still love it if you fully accept what these flaws are. Some of these flaws are what I outlined yesterday:
- An unavoidable orientation towards the short-term and an impossibility of long-term goal-setting;
- A tendency towards humoring the lowest common denominator of voters.
If you can’t get excited about a system of government that accommodates millions of excitable, undisciplined, and low-intelligence Candace Owenses, if you can’t see the rightness and the beauty in such a system, guess what?
You don’t love democracy.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m glad that you are in favour of democracy, thank you for clearing that up! I really did not know!
I love democracy so much that I work at a school which is quite democratically organized; I even rent my flat from a organization which is non-profit and where we get to vote about changes to our rules and our common spaces. In both cases that means long, boring meetings; lots of frustrations because people have dumb opinions; a lot of blabla. I would not want it to be different.
I live in one of the most democratic countries on the planet where I actually inform myself about stuff like which military gear my country should buy, about intricate changes of our tax system, whether or not we should have fireworks on certain days of the year, whether hijabs should be allowed, whether a credit for a new school should might be too high etc. We get to vote about these kind of issues every few months and I always go and vote even if it is boring. We do not censor Candace-Owen-like crazy people here (I don’t think she asks her followers to commit crimes or does she?). But we don’t really have such super-popular but insane youtubers here because people generally feel like they get heard and they feel like they are governing this country themselves, so conspiracy theories are less interesting to us. This is a bit different in Germany which is less democratic, so maybe that is part of the reason some people vote AfD just to show that they are angry. But even if you are angry you should absolutely never support politicians that are against democracy, or deny the holocaust, in my opinion, there has to be limit somewhere. Even democracy should abide by certain rules that must stand above it, otherwise democratically deciding to kill all rich people and take their money would be fine.
You always say neoliberalism accepts no limits and no boundaries. Isn’t it a bit neoliberal of you to accept no limits to free speech?
What about a bit less free speech and a bit more direct democracy?
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We are laboring under a terminological confusion here. I support democracy as a system of government in a country. But I’m completely, totally and utterly opposed to democratically organized schools, work groups, college departments, families, etc.
Two weeks ago I was democratically scheduled to speak on a conference panel with two graduate students. It was terrible. A complete waste of time. I’m never going to that conference again.
Another example is the classroom. There’s no democracy there. I absolutely do not allow any freedom of speech or association in the classroom. I assign discussion groups and topics they discuss. We show up when I say, read the texts I assigned, and discuss the topics I chose in groups that I constituted. You know how people sometimes compare the national economy with a family budget and that’s nuts? It’s the same way in the opposite direction. A family is not a democracy. Neither is my department.
As for neoliberalism and free speech, again, great question. But think about it this way. Boundaries are very important. Borders of countries are a crucial. We should defend our borders. But should we go and force other people to redraw theirs? Of course not. It’s the same with speech.
Example. I have two transgender students. I refer to them with their chosen names and pronouns. I do it out of respect and kindness. Buy should I be forced to do it if I don’t want to? Should I be jailed like a teacher in Ireland is? Of course not. If you say that yes, somebody else should define my borders and my speech, then you agree that tomorrow somebody with more power than you will define yours.
You can say that people shouldn’t support politicians who deny the Holocaust. But the question is how far you are ready to go to stop them. An even more important question is what foundational principle would prevent such people from forcing you to deny the Holocaust when they come to power. How do we decide which ideas are beyond the pale? Who gets to make that decision? And how do you know that tomorrow this power will not be deployed against you? If the guiding principle is “the ideas that should be allowed are the ones that I like”, do you see the inherent danger here? My guiding principle guarantees that your good, important speech will never be outlawed and persecuted. Your guiding principle puts you in complete dependence on whether the person currently democratically elected happens to share your opinions. If we remember that both Putin and Hitler were democratically elected, this does not seem like a great idea.
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What do admire about Curtis Yarvin, then?
From what I have read, he moves from observing that a lot of people are dumb and want dumb things to concluding it would be better to replace democracy with putting the right person in charge instead.
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Is it possible to be completely wrong on 10 things and completely right on 10 other things?
I absolutely don’t agree with Yarvin’s idea that we need a monarchy, for example. But I do find the concept of the Cathedral that he introduced 20 years ago to be revolutionary and extremely important. Today everybody agrees with the idea (if not the term) but back then it was a huge breakthrough. The only, I must remind everybody, interesting, big idea to come from the English-speaking world in a very long time. His description of conservatism as conserving yesterday’s achievements of liberalism is also spot-on. His analysis of the 300-year trajectory of liberalism is excellent. There’s a lot of excellent stuff he has written and I promise to write more about it when I have a moment but yes, the idea of a monarchy is dumb, I hate it.
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“the idea of a monarchy is dumb, I hate it.”
Yeah, it’s just a competing cathedral.
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Have not heard about the concept of the Cathedral. Would love to read more when you have time to post.
In other news, was shocked to read that
Turns out several European broadcasters will boycott the contest because of our participation.
Did not know things were that bad against us in Europe.
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If you watched news from Spain, you’d have a coronary. It’s all about Gaza, all day long. Obviously, in order to distract attention from the severe economic problems at home. But it’s working because people are morons.
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Nobody comes out unscathed after sniping children in the head.
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Why such hatred and concentration on my country?
Every news item is twisted in the worst possible way.
As if American or Ukrainian soldiers do not exoerience PTSD, especially after long periods of fighting.
I notice you do not mention India’s problems much, to say the least.
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Ukrainian soldiers don’t fight on the territory of Russia. There are no reports of Russian kids being hit by a Ukrainian bullet. Let’s just keep our perspective here.
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My point was that fighting in a just war does not prevent PTSD, and that mental harm to soldiers is not a symptom of committing war crimes.
As for “Ukrainian soldiers don’t fight on the territory of Russia,” it is because they cannot, though there were attempts to do so, as you must remember. It is also partly why Putin is in no hurry to end this war.
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Actually, Ukraine had and continues to have every opportunity to massacre Russian civilians. If Ukraine is hitting Russian oil tankers off the coast of Senegal, how hard would it be to hit a maternity ward in Belgorod? Like Russia hit a maternity ward in Ukraine today.
It’s absolutely and totally untrue that Ukraine can’t deliver air strikes on Russian civilians. It’s been a conscious and extremely costly choice not to.
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” totally untrue that Ukraine can’t deliver air strikes on Russian civilians”
Especially since the russian government doesn’t care at all about civilians. It might have some defenses for military infrastructure or revenue producing sites but civilians?
They might scream bloody murder for the press but I’ve never seen any evidence that any russian government gives a rat’s ass for anything that happens to russian citizens.
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Truly a people incapable of being parodied LOL.
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Bipartisan asshatery…
https://x.com/EYakoby/status/1996940091277664497
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lol crank article from a crank magazine. “The European Conservative” and all they care about is israel. Sounds about right. It’s the same over here.
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The BBC is worse than Soviet-era TASS.
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