A reminder of Neema Parvini's 'The Populist Delusion' : "This is a book about the realities of power ... It has at its core a thesis, which absolutely contradicts the democratic or populist delusion, that the people are or ever could be sovereign. An organised minority always rules over the majority. Perhaps as a testament to that fact, a recent empirical study showed that public opinion has a near-zero impact on law-making in the USA across 1,779 policy issues. In fact, my thesis goes further than that to suggest that all social change at all times and in all places has been top-down and driven by elites rather than ‘the people’. Those movements which have the appearance of being organic and bottom-up protests—for example, the 1960s Civil Rights movement in the USA or the Russian Revolutions of 1917—were, in fact, tightly organised and funded by elites. Those attempts to drive change from the ‘bottom-up’, which is to say, in the absence of elite organisation—we might think of the events of 6th January 2020 in Washington DC or the recent Yellow Vest movement in France—will amount to little more than an inchoate rabble."
If Parvini is right then thesis 9 suggests we will not be seeing a solution as the balkanisation of society leads to competing 'inchoate rabbles'. The only option then, according to T E Utley, when a government's duty to maintain cultural and moral unity fails, is to rule by tyranny. Thus Starmer's continuation and intensification of the previous governments illiberal legislation over so called online harms. Regulation over 'disinformation' and the further limiting of free speech, of the ending of privacy (forcing back doors into software and the like), digital currencies that begin with alleged safeguards that you can guarantee will erode into control, are the early stages of political tyranny. George Osborne introduced bank account raids for large debtors to HMRC. Labour intend to extend it to any size of debtor. And so on and so on. The police have become servants of the state not the law as they raid grannies for confiscating their child's iPad or a journalist for a long ago tweet.
For your next pub quiz, ask for the name of a government that ever fully repealed legislation that infringed on civil liberties, other than exceptional war time legislation, or relinquished various controls on the population.
'Cultural and moral unity' may never have been 100% but it was a dominant culture, a definite sense of 'we', before rapid, mass immigration.
Domination by Islam is the likely resolution of thesis 7 unless we (who?) do something soon. Let's hope - inshallah - that we get a government committed to stopping this before it is too late (which it may already be).
The failings you write about are the result of the demise of top down government Yes, we are in a transitional stage and it is painful. No we have never had a people led society but we are going to. The internet has changed everything forever. Knowledge (power) will be available to everyone. Probably not in our lifetime, but we are setting the seeds.
Victoria , I like your optimism for a people led society but I am not convinced that the turmoil we see is because top down government is in demise.
Rather than the demise of top down government, I would characterise the current upheaval as top down government failing to act on their popular mandate.
In the past, governments might fail to deliver on their mandate, but that is very different to them acting in deliberate contradiction to their mandate.
Presupposing there must be some form of government; surely any government, even a top down government, that in good faith attempts to deliver on its mandate is, in effect, enacting a people led society?
They are failing because increasingly the wrong people go into politics. The system is outdated and broken. It is dictated to by far away unelected elites. All institutions are broken. Education has been deliberately sabotaged by the powerful few to keep the masses in ignorance. There are many instances of the move to the people. Reality shows, people turning to Dr Google, home education, the captured media is no longer our only source of information. We now wait and see what happens when it moves to law and order. I have not yet seen a mandate adhered to. Faith in anything is at an all time low. And I believe that to be the precursor of a seismic change in the way we organise ourselves.
Two major fears from this. A nation without a shared sense of purpose or vision or just basic membership rules cannot survive. Power is all that is left. Second, and in consequence, power has no legitimacy if it only rules through coercion. That is not the basis for a happy and cohesive social contract.
A reminder of Neema Parvini's 'The Populist Delusion' : "This is a book about the realities of power ... It has at its core a thesis, which absolutely contradicts the democratic or populist delusion, that the people are or ever could be sovereign. An organised minority always rules over the majority. Perhaps as a testament to that fact, a recent empirical study showed that public opinion has a near-zero impact on law-making in the USA across 1,779 policy issues. In fact, my thesis goes further than that to suggest that all social change at all times and in all places has been top-down and driven by elites rather than ‘the people’. Those movements which have the appearance of being organic and bottom-up protests—for example, the 1960s Civil Rights movement in the USA or the Russian Revolutions of 1917—were, in fact, tightly organised and funded by elites. Those attempts to drive change from the ‘bottom-up’, which is to say, in the absence of elite organisation—we might think of the events of 6th January 2020 in Washington DC or the recent Yellow Vest movement in France—will amount to little more than an inchoate rabble."
If Parvini is right then thesis 9 suggests we will not be seeing a solution as the balkanisation of society leads to competing 'inchoate rabbles'. The only option then, according to T E Utley, when a government's duty to maintain cultural and moral unity fails, is to rule by tyranny. Thus Starmer's continuation and intensification of the previous governments illiberal legislation over so called online harms. Regulation over 'disinformation' and the further limiting of free speech, of the ending of privacy (forcing back doors into software and the like), digital currencies that begin with alleged safeguards that you can guarantee will erode into control, are the early stages of political tyranny. George Osborne introduced bank account raids for large debtors to HMRC. Labour intend to extend it to any size of debtor. And so on and so on. The police have become servants of the state not the law as they raid grannies for confiscating their child's iPad or a journalist for a long ago tweet.
For your next pub quiz, ask for the name of a government that ever fully repealed legislation that infringed on civil liberties, other than exceptional war time legislation, or relinquished various controls on the population.
'Cultural and moral unity' may never have been 100% but it was a dominant culture, a definite sense of 'we', before rapid, mass immigration.
Domination by Islam is the likely resolution of thesis 7 unless we (who?) do something soon. Let's hope - inshallah - that we get a government committed to stopping this before it is too late (which it may already be).
The failings you write about are the result of the demise of top down government Yes, we are in a transitional stage and it is painful. No we have never had a people led society but we are going to. The internet has changed everything forever. Knowledge (power) will be available to everyone. Probably not in our lifetime, but we are setting the seeds.
Victoria , I like your optimism for a people led society but I am not convinced that the turmoil we see is because top down government is in demise.
Rather than the demise of top down government, I would characterise the current upheaval as top down government failing to act on their popular mandate.
In the past, governments might fail to deliver on their mandate, but that is very different to them acting in deliberate contradiction to their mandate.
Presupposing there must be some form of government; surely any government, even a top down government, that in good faith attempts to deliver on its mandate is, in effect, enacting a people led society?
They are failing because increasingly the wrong people go into politics. The system is outdated and broken. It is dictated to by far away unelected elites. All institutions are broken. Education has been deliberately sabotaged by the powerful few to keep the masses in ignorance. There are many instances of the move to the people. Reality shows, people turning to Dr Google, home education, the captured media is no longer our only source of information. We now wait and see what happens when it moves to law and order. I have not yet seen a mandate adhered to. Faith in anything is at an all time low. And I believe that to be the precursor of a seismic change in the way we organise ourselves.
I would like to see these theses resolved but it may be premature to do so. Are there any contradictions between any of them?
Two major fears from this. A nation without a shared sense of purpose or vision or just basic membership rules cannot survive. Power is all that is left. Second, and in consequence, power has no legitimacy if it only rules through coercion. That is not the basis for a happy and cohesive social contract.