THE PERENNIALIST THEORY OF DEMOCRACY

by James Lawrence

Since democracy's credibility is going to be a hot topic for the next few months, I think it would be worthwhile to go a bit deeper than the usual stuff about fake ballots.

 

According to Richard Spencer, the Alt-Right began to form when rightists became alienated from Bush-era neoconservatism. And in the present day, the same political grouping – now rebranded as the Dissident Right – is watching its one hope to recapture conservative politics crash down in flames. All told it has taken twenty years for the Dissident Right to disengage from democracy, form an anti-political movement, and finally plug that movement back into the Matrix.

And in all that time, we never came up with a coherent theory of democracy.

What we have produced, in lieu of such a theory, is a game of blind men's elephant. The players shut their eyes to the coherency of democracy as the ruling principle of the West, because opposition to it would conflict with their own plans to mobilise the people. Then they apprehend some part of the nameless regime that seems important, or objectionable, and argue with each other on the question of which part represents the whole.

Here's how it goes. The regime panders to the masses! No, it's run by an alienated elite! It's a brutal military empire! No, it's helpless before the Third World! It's an anarchy! No, it's a tyranny! It's ruled by the banks! No, by the bureaucrats! No, by the corporations! No, by the politicians! It's ruled by Soros! No, wait – it's ruled by the Jews!

The process of agreeing on an answer has more to do with emotional satisfaction than reasoning. It also involves a type of emotionally manipulative reasoning, because the best answer is defined as the one that mobilises the biggest and angriest crowd of people.

 

But this implies that when the big angry crowd is politically defeated, the question will be thrown right back up in the air. I sense that the present moment is one of those times. So before the squabbling begins all over again, let's try to come up with a theory of the democratic regime that can resolve its various parts into a whole.

We don't have to start from scratch. A complete theory of the American democratic regime was worked out more than a decade ago, by Mencius Moldbug. Until recently, it was scattered across several posts on his extravagantly longwinded blog. Well, now he has started writing under his real name, and distilled the whole thing into one extravagantly longwinded essay. It's worth your time, but in case you can't spare it, I'll summarise.

In Moldbug's analysis, the democratic regime is really a clerical oligarchy. It is ruled by what he calls the Cathedral, which is divided into two main parts: the Brain, i.e. academia, and the Voice, which includes all 'respectable' mass media. The Brain indoctrinates everyone through the school system, and dispenses the modern-day titles of nobility needed to hold official positions. The Voice sets the boundaries for public opinion, and conducts inquisitions against those who stray outside them. (Note: Jewish power doesn't feature in Moldbuggery, but to the extent that dissidents identify it accurately, it is concentrated in the Voice and subordinate to the overall agenda of the Cathedral.)

Below the Cathedral is the Bureau, centred on the civil service. This is the government proper. It defers to elected leaders in theory, but mostly obeys its own will in practice, because civil servants are all but impossible to fire. Its power to regulate society has also expanded across a vast sprawl of quangos, making it even more uncontrollable and irresponsible. (I would say that a lot of nominally private enterprise belongs to this sprawl in reality: banks that generate and distribute fiat money, 'green' companies whose business model is dependent on regulation, etc.)

Below the level of government, there are two subordinate organs of power: the Castle and the Factory. The Castle is divided into two parts, the military and the police, both of which are tightly controlled by Bureau administrators. The Factory includes all productive corporations, which compete against each other in an endless economic war – the rules of which, again, are set by the Bureau. 

 

(Note that the essence of the leftist bluepill is the dogma that the Castle and Factory hold power; and one telltale sign of Alt-Right purple-pilling is a failure to perceive their subordinate status. That is why the 'managerial elite theory' of James Burnham and Sam Francis does not surpass Moldbug's theory, although it surpasses everything else out there and ought to be carefully mined for its insights.)

Finally, all of this is wrapped up in a symbolic ritual government, which Moldbug calls the Show. It encompasses all elected politicians and political appointees. The Show has an inner party, which acts as deputy to the Bureau and Cathedral, and an outer party that serves to contain any opposition from those outside the government: the Castle, the Factory, and the people. As regards the last of these, the Show plays a very important role: it allows them to enthrone a ceremonial monarch, and ritually depose him as a scapegoat, while the true power structure remains unaccountable.

 

We can make this theory more intuitive by using the traditional organic metaphor. Imagine the democratic Behemoth as a giant humanoid creature, composed of all the structures of power described by Moldbug. 

 

The head of this beast, the Cathedral, galvanises its whole nervous system by its religious authority. Its heart – the Bureau – controls the circulation of its blood, which is political power. Its protective skin, which it sheds like a serpent, is the Show. Its sword and shield – whittled from the bones of one of its victims, gripped firmly in appendages of its body – correspond to the subject warrior-elites in the Castle. Its gut, the Factory, is a well-contained ecosystem of non-democratic microorganisms. And its legs and feet correspond to the people – who, aptly enough, tend to think that the gut is in charge.

Something like our Behemoth.
The wings are strictly vestigial.

This, gentlemen, is our quarry. Any sane theory of it must begin with Moldbug's description. Any attempt to triangulate the elephant from the cacophony of the blind men will only end up in a mess.

However, this doesn't mean that we have to start and end with Moldbug. As it happens, three objections to his theory suggest themselves.

The first concerns the question of whether the Cathedral is truly in charge of the Bureau. Both names encompass an amorphous blob of institutions, populated by a homogeneous scholar-elite. Admittedly, it's not hard to see why Moldbug puts the Cathedral on top: it gets to instruct the bureaucrats, entitle them for their positions, and create consensus on government policies.

But when we look at the teachings of the Cathedral, a different story emerges. As Moldbug explained in an early series of blog essays, they evolved (or rather, regressed) from Christian Protestant origins as a direct result of corruption by state power. They are always changing, and when we consider a few extant articles of faith – climate shamanism, welfarism, and now corona-communism – we find no common denominator other than bureaucratic expansionism, patronage and hubris.

Having discarded all references to Christianity, the Cathedral cannot expect to compel the state by divine command. And unlike the core of the Bureau, i.e. the civil service, it enjoys no formal position in the power structure. Its 'social science' is essential to creating consensus on matters that traditionally required personal prudence (even though it's about as reliable as divination). But it would appear that the Cathedral directs the Bureau only by serving it, and would presumably forfeit this prerogative were it to start teaching the wu wei principle of government. Behemoth is a macrocosm of the modern Western individual, and its intellect is merely a guiding-light for its will. 

 

The second objection is as much aesthetic as theoretical. The sheer baroque complexity of Moldbug's theory produces a contrary yearning: to reduce it down to a hard minimalist kernel. It is all very well to show us the democratic regime in its present form. But what is the structure of its genome? How did it develop from embryo? In what respects does its present show continuity with its past?

 

This brings us to the third and most serious objection. Moldbug does not believe that the modern regime shows any essential continuity with its predecessor. He compares it to a hermit crab that has crawled into an empty snail shell. And what was the original inhabitant of the shell? Well, it was democracy – which Moldbug defines as "rule of a majority" in which "the people, through their elected representatives, are absolutely sovereign". But it didn't work very well, so America ended up with populist elective monarchy and eventually clerical oligarchy. 

 

Moldbug wants to believe in the official definition of democracy, while contesting the modern regime's official claim to it. This mismatch of credulity and scepticism produces a difficulty for his argument. 

 

His recommendation is to evict the hermit crab, and fill the shell with a new creature: a regime built 'nihistically', i.e. from scratch, and upheld by no pretence of continuity with the past. Presumably, to his computer-scientist mind, such a prospect is exciting and reasonable and beautiful. But to most people (including most elites), it is terrifying and illegitimate and horrible. So in the event that Moldbug's writings become a blueprint for regime change, the prevailing tendency will be to take his diagnosis and leave his prescription. That is to say: to destroy clerical oligarchy, and restore democracy.

And this is bound to fail. Leave the false god standing, even in the shadows of theory, and its priesthood and temple will soon coalesce around it again. 

Indeed, the iconoclasm may never get started, because the temple has a pretty strong claim to the blessing of its god. From the official perspective, America is much more democratic in the present day than at its founding, when most classes of human beings were disqualified from involvement in politics. 

 

And from the dissident perspective? Moldbug might say that Rome and France were no longer republican under Augustus and Napoleon, or that modern China has not been communist since Deng Xiaoping. But does the analogy really apply to democracy in America and its satellites? In Rome, France, and China, order was restored by autocrats who kept up a pretence of continuity. But the Western democratic revolution is still ongoing. How else could it delude such vast masses of people? Why else should it make such efforts to do so? Its ideology is not what it claims to be, but nor is it an illusion of movement on an object that has come to a stop.

 

So this is how we should proceed from Moldbug. Having accepted the thrust of his descriptive argument, we must protect its flanks by expanding into stronger theoretical ground. We're going to begin with a sacrificial move. We're going to yield the name of democracy to this eldritch monstrosity – this Behemoth with its clerical head and bureaucratic heart and scrofulous electoral serpent-skin.

In time, this move will redound to our advantage, because it clears the way for an assault upon the progressivist theory of democracy. 

As Eric Voegelin observed, modern revolutionary movements depend on a religious cult of time. He referred to this as gnosticism, but it is better described by the common term progressivism. Progressivism takes transcendent concepts, like truth, salvation, etc., and maps them onto the temporal world via crackpot theories about New Eras and Third Ages. It teaches us to reject what we know of the past and present, and make leaps of faith into dreamlike visions of the future. Here, in the bad, old, backward world, rule is based on superior force and not everyone can be a ruler; but in the new world, the progressivist one, rule will be based on popular consent and everyone will be sovereign.

The opposite of progressivism is not conservatism, but perennialism. Perennialism, in a political context, is the conviction that there is essentially nothing new under the sun. The aim of the perennialist is to penetrate the veil of dreams, and reveal that all the perpetual-motion machines of progressivist theory run on the same blood and iron as the old ones. Tax must flow upwards; power must flow downwards; the apex of society must stand on a wider base; not everyone can rule; and any attempt to warp these realities will not only fail but will also damage the workings of society.

The perpetual-motion society, in
which all are on the same level.

Perennialists are disadvantaged in the modern era, because technology has created enough superficial novelty to obscure essential continuities. We no longer seem to live in the world of our ancestors, and the perpetual-motion society can pass itself off as yet another manifestation of this. But progressivism has an Achilles' Heel: it must make constant reference to the bad old world, so that its oppressions and inequities can be contrasted with the positive action and social justice of the new one.

So one quick and arresting way for the perennialist to make his point is to repurpose this discourse, and rectify the names by matching premodern words to analogous modern objects. Moldbug, as usual, has blazed the path: in his parlance the modern scholar-elites become brahmins, their academic-media complex becomes a Cathedral, their alliance with black ghetto-dwellers against ordinary whites becomes yi yi zhi yi, and so on. You can question the analogies – I prefer to use the term mamluk for the ghetto-dwellers – but if basic social relations are truly perennial, then there is no questioning the principle.

 

When we approach the political arrangement known as democracy, this parlour trick becomes easier and yet harder. On the one hand, there is no question on where to draw the line of analogy, because democracy is one thing that progressivists are happy to claim from the bad old world. On the other hand, the analogy loses its force, failing to puncture the dream-veil. The line has already been drawn; the path between the old and new worlds is well-trodden and signposted by progressivist concepts. 

 

We must make a conscious effort to ignore these signposts, and travel only by the straight route of simplicity. It will help us to remember that democracy simply means 'power of the people'; that it connotes the dominance of the many over the few, the poor over the rich, the mob over the leaders, etc.; and that it originally denoted nothing other than what we would call direct democracy.

Let's begin with ancient Athens.

Athenian democracy knew nothing of 'representation', 'separation of powers', 'protection of civil rights', etc. It was ruled directly by its people – more accurately, its citizens – and they guarded their powers against all possible usurpation. The demos (i.e. people) were conceived not as a mass of individuals or interest groups, but as a united entity holding absolute power. This understanding is reflected in portrayals of 'Demos' as a sort of abstract demigod or mythological ruler.

 

Important decisions in Athens were made by the popular Assembly, which could be attended by any Athenian citizen. The city had a smaller day-to-day government called the Council, and other officials such as military commanders, but these power-holders were either chosen by lot or elected by the Assembly. A third channel of popular power was opened up by the jury-courts (one of which sentenced Socrates to death for impiety). Any citizen could initiate a case against any other, and judgements were made by juries composed of the citizenry. 

Further details need not detain us. What I will say is that the descriptive Athenian Constitution, written by one of Aristotle's students, gives the impression of a constant struggle to avoid the natural consolidation of power. The original tribes of citizens were mixed up, to dissipate clan relations; ingenious contraptions were devised for secret voting; the citizens could banish anyone from the city by ritual ostracism; and so on. It is in this light that we should see the role of the archons – ceremonial rulers holding a degenerated form of kingship. Even the ancients knew that the apex of a political structure will be straddled by a ruler unless it is sat upon by a placeholder.

A similar effect was achieved in the taxation and distribution of wealth. The brunt of requisition fell upon the richest citizens, who had the obligatory honour of spending their own wealth to finance the city's expenses. This, of course, was consistent with the overall project of cutting these potential oligarchs down to size. As for the ordinary citizens, they got payments for attending the Assembly and jury-courts and stipends for holding official positions, although the poorer ones still had to work for a living. It should go without saying that none of this wealth distribution had to pass through a 'welfare state' – but let's not skip ahead of our argument.

At this point, it looks as though the Athenians managed to invert the perennial social pyramid. But this illusion vanishes when we turn to the question of who was and was not an Athenian citizen. Power goes hand-in-hand with freedom, and the Athenians could not have enjoyed the freedom to devote themselves to governance without a huge population of slaves. These constituted the majority of resident non-citizens, who in turn made up the majority of the people in Athens. Citizens were a large minority, and this holds true even when we abandon the modern fallacy of discounting their womenfolk:

Source: A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

I won't dispute these estimates outright, but I would guess that they err on the side of numerical equality. If there are uncounted non-citizens, one would expect them to be in the Attic surroundings of the city, where citizens were more thinly distributed. We must also factor in the populations of other Greek cities controlled by Athens, which paid tribute to the Athenian citizenry and occasionally received brutal treatment at its hands. This control was not understood as empire, but simply as 'rule' (arche), and it is telling that Athenian democracy did not live long after it was broken. 

 

Bang go Moldbug's standard definitions of democracy ("rule of a majority") and oligarchy ("rule of a minority"). These definitions would force us to equate (for instance) rule by a small cabal of nobles with rule by four-tenths of the people in a city, which is the height of obscurantism. A better definition of democracy would be rule by a people – note the indefinite article – achieved by the enforcement of basic equality among them, and the suppression of all attempts to consolidate power.

We've arrived at a fork in the path, so let's start paying some attention to those progressivist signposts. They all point towards the more precarious route: a makeshift bridge stretched over an otherwise impassable chasm. The edges of this chasm are hewn from nothing so soft as the difference in culture between ancient and modern people. They represent the hard, perennial difference between a city state and a territorial state – between a concentrated people and a fluid sphere of rule on the one hand, and a distributed population within a fixed border on the other. 

And the chasm itself is the question of how democracy can be transposed from one to the other. How can the ruling people hold onto power, when only a few of them can physically meet at the political centre? And if power is not concentrated at the centre, how can the people deliberate and make political decisions without dragging the state into anarchy? The rickety structure of progressivist answers can bear only the lightest step. And yet there is an alternative route, over firm historical ground, albeit one strangely ill-travelled – by which I mean, of course, little discussed in conventional narratives.

So let's take that route, and look at the early modern Polish Commonwealth.

Straightaway we run into the thickets of controversy. The word commonwealth is equivalent to republic (rzeczpospolita in Polish), not democracy; and conventional wisdom will tell you that Poland in the 16th-18th centuries was an elective monarchy ruled by its nobles, the szlachta. So, an oligarchy, right? Wrong. The szlachta were, proportionally, a smaller ruling people than the Athenian citizenry. But to reduce them to an oligarchy would be to ignore the way in which they functioned as a nation in their own right, and bequeathed us an example of democracy in a territorial state.

The szlachta were around one-tenth of the Polish population, which made them a teeming mob by the standards of early modern Europe. While other nobilities were ranked by by titles, the szlachta were formally equal; and although there was a minority of rich szlachta magnates, and a multitude of poorer szlachta who had to work for a living, the latter managed to avoid falling under an oligarchy of the former. They held their lands allodially, not feudally, which meant that they answered to no superiors. They elected the Polish king, whose title became void if he violated any of their privileges, and any one member of the Sejm (nobles' parliament) could veto all decisions made at a given session.

The Poles called their state a republic because they were obsessed with the Roman model, much like everyone else in Europe. But while the Roman Republic was a balance of oligarchy and democracy – and arguably also monarchy, as dictators could assume absolute power in emergencies – the Polish Commonwealth developed into the purest possible democracy of the szlachta. Yet progressivists would rather trace the democratic tradition back to Athens and Rome – across more than two millennia – than make more than passing reference to a state that died at the end of the 18th century, and whose people went on to fight in later progressivist causes like the French revolutionary wars. 

 

Don't tell me it's just because no-one living west of the Oder wants to try pronouncing rzeczpospolita. There are, I think, two reasons why Poland cannot into conventional accounts of democratic history.

The first is the tragic end to which the country came as a result of its szlachta-democracy. Unlike Athens, Britain and America, Poland was not a thalassocracy (sea power). It was not even nestled in the mountains like the Swiss republican cantons. It was open to attack by other states, such as Sweden, Russia and Prussia, all of which were developing absolutist governments at a time when Poland's szlachta were seizing more and more liberties. In the 17th century, these enemies started to inflict serious damage, and the weak central state was not up to the task of self-defence. At first, the neighbouring powers protected the szlachta's rights, in order to keep Poland in a state of anarchy. Then they simply divvied up its territories and wiped it off the map.

Athens also lost its struggle with Sparta, partly as a result of erratic governance by the Assembly, which would literally give orders one day and countermand them the next. But that's all ancient history. Poland, on the other hand, struggled to recover its independence for centuries and was still being brutalised by Russians and Germans in the 20th century. Is it any wonder that progressivists would rather just forget about modern Europe's first democratic experiment? The path is rarely trodden, and never signposted, because there are a suspicious number of bones strewn along it.

The second reason for forgetfulness is the fact that the culprit went naked and undisguised. The Polish Commonwealth shows the clear continuity of two Athenian realities: direct democracy and the citizen-subject distinction. Direct democracy (a pleonasm if ever there was one) is the reason why the szlachta showed the 'complacency' attributed to them by Adam Zamoyski in his history of Poland. They were complacent on the need to build a functioning state; but they were vigilant against anything that might infringe their liberties or pry away their grip on power. Such is the case in all democracies. The citizens, whoever they are, know that they cannot relinquish control and hope to get it back in the future. 

 

As for the distinction between citizens and subjects, it went even further in Poland than in Athens. The szlachta believed in a genealogical theory called Sarmatism, which held that they were racially distinct from the plebians around them. Szlachta were the true Poles, descended from Sarmatian horselords, who had reduced the Slavic peasantry to their rightful state of servitude. An alternative Biblical tradition traced the descent of the szlachta to Noah's son Japheth, and tarred the peasantry with the curse of Ham, which would later be attributed to negro slaves in European colonies. In any case, absolute control over the peasants was one of the core liberties of the szlachta.

Here we see the reality of territorial-state democracy, without the set of progressivist concepts that trace a more theoretical link with ancient Athens. Having circumvented the chasm of democracy's transposition through the Polish example, we should now be in a safe position to stand on the far bank and test the strength of this conceptual bridge.

 An artificial platform for democracy's public legitimacy.

Just like a bridge, the progressivist theory of democracy has two main components. Its horizontal plank is popular sovereignty, which claims to bridge the gap – in power, in liberty, in everything – between ancient and modern 'citizens'. Its vertical support is political representation, which closes the distance between the 'citizens' who actually govern the West and the 'citizens' who merely vote.

 

Popular sovereignty depends on a theory of Jean Bodin: that the sovereign, i.e. the ultimate locus of authority in a state, can be separated from the government of that state. One application of this idea would be to a king who goes to sleep and leaves the government to others, or who delegates political functions to ministers while retaining full authority in his own person. A second application – which steadily displaced the first in European political theory – would be to a citizen-body that assembles at a designated time, elects a set of ministers and votes on constitutional changes, and then goes back to normal life for a few years until it is time to assemble again.

 

Quite clearly, there is a huge practical gulf between these two applications of theory. Yes, it is possible to separate sovereignty from government. It is also possible to pull apart the ends of two magnets, dam up a river to prevent its reaching the sea, and segregate the male sex from the female. But unless the separation is constantly and carefully maintained, all these things will tend to reunite with each other.

So a king may be able to delegate government while holding onto sovereignty, as long as he is sharp enough to keep his subordinates loyal and prevent them from accruing too much power. But a multitude of people –  and I'm talking crowd psychology here, not class snobbery – is more like a king who is asleep, retarded, occupied with hobbies and pleasures, and also five years old. Only by keeping an iron grip on power can this multitude expect to hold onto its sovereignty. But if it gives up its power, it will soon see its sovereignty diminished to a pure theory that has no real effect on government.

And that's where political representation comes into play.

In truth, when this doctrine emerged in the West, there was no citizenry or szlachta that could be persuaded to adopt it in lieu of direct democracy. It emerged as propaganda for the English parliamentary oligarchy during the civil war period. And it stood on a set of legal fictions that make the modern-day form of the theory look immensely strong by comparison. To give you a taste of this bilge, here's the parliamentarian apologist Henry Parker (quoted in Richard Bourke et al., Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective):

"Tis true, in my understanding, the Parliament differs many ways from the rude bulk of the universality, but in power, in honour, in majestie, in commission, it ought not at all to be divided, or accounted different as to any legall purpose. ... And hereupon the supreme reason or Judicature of this State, from whence no appeale lies, is placed in that representative convention, which either can have no interests different from the people represented, or at least very few, and those not considerable."

Did you catch that? Parliament must be equated with the people, even though nine-tenths of those people did not elect members to it. Parliament's will cannot conflict with that of the people, even in an era when huge numbers of those people were fighting a civil war against it. Parliament is the people; the people have absolute sovereignty; ergo Parliament should have total power.

 

In both Athens and Poland, the ruling and subject peoples were clearly distinguished: there were citizens and slaves, szlachta and plebians. Here, the ruling oligarcgy simply effaces the identity of the subject people by absorbing it into their own. This type of propaganda owes more to monarchy than to oligarchy or democracy; however, having been usurped by an oligarchy, there is no reason why it could not be usurped again by a genuine ruling people. (But let's not skip ahead.)

These two theories – popular sovereignty and political representation – produced a long-term effect that could not have been foreseen by those who wielded them in the thick of argument. Before there was a theory of sovereignty as separate from government, there was a deeper and more perennial separation: between religious authority and political power. For democracy to become an article of religious authority, it initially had to be disconnected from political power – not least so as to avoid tarnishment by its unfortunate tendency to bring states into ruin. 

 

This disconnection was achieved by the political representation of the sovereign people. Rule could be exercised by oligarchies, or monarchies, elected first by the upper social strata and later by the wider populace. Democracy could act as an essentially religious principle, buttressing the legitimacy of the state – despite the fact that any attempt to realise it in practice quickly ended up in Polish-style anarchy.

This arrangement basically worked. Its only danger was that some political faction would find a viable way to put democratic principles into practice. What has happened in late modernity, I would say, represents precisely this actualisation of democracy. It just hasn't worked out according to the progressivist theory – so instead of bringing an angel of righteousness down to earth, we have dredged up our brutish Behemoth. 

Kick down the progressivist bridge, and as it shatters to pieces, we glimpse the true land-ridge on which that Behemoth stalked into the West. It is not composed of those artifices, popular sovereignty and political representation. It is shaped by two perennial structures of power: direct democracy and noble patronage.

Even the Buddhist god of the
underworld is a bureaucrat.

We've seen that democracy was more stable in Athens than in Poland, because the Athenians were a compact urban citizenry and the szlachta were a decentralised landed nobility. But it is, of course, possible to rule a territorial state in a highly centralised way. The natural locus of power in such a system is bureaucracy – which has modern connotations in the West, but is actually a perennial form of governance, long attested in ancient territorial-state civilisations like China. 

Decentralised landowning is the preserve of noblemen, i.e. aristocratic-military types. But bureaucracy selects for scholarly or priestly types. They spend much of their lives in the world of letters, which circumvents the need to assemble in person. And if they are subject to higher authority in neither their intellectual nor bureaucratic roles, then they can become a direct democratic citizenry in their own right. 

As I've said, this single scholar-nobility inhabits both the Cathedral and the Bureau, and commands the heights of every other structure of power that it suffers to exist. 'Cathedral' is simply a word for the institutions through which it exercises religious authority, and 'Bureau' serves likewise for the institutional base of its political power. As perennialists, we can place religious authority above political power, on the grounds that it commands positive actions as opposed to negative ones. But, again as I've said, the religion of the Cathedral is not distinct from the power interests of the Bureau. It has only a weak, vestigial attachment to notions of absolute truth and universal morality.

This means that we must part ways with Moldbug when he applies Bodinian sovereignty to Harvard, and turns the modern regime into a clerical oligarchy. This is like picking out the leading demagogues at the Athenian Assembly, and calling them the sovereign oligarchs of Athens. Contra Moldbug, an ultimate centre of sovereignty is not conserved in democracy; what is conserved are the perennial laws of power. The people rule, and are sovereign – but you and I, dear reader, are not numbered among the ruling people.

Armed with this understanding, we can approach our Behemoth without regard for its organs and limbs, and simply bifurcate it across the midsection. The academics and journalists in the Cathedral, the officials in the Bureau, the political classes in the Show, and the scholar-nobles commanding the heights of armament and industry can be resolved into a single ruling people: the Demos. Everyone and everything else belongs to the subject category, i.e. the people. (This opposition of two words with identical meanings may seem bizarre; but it follows the usage of Cathedral propagandists, who apply the same distinction to those other two identical words, democracy and populism.)

This great severance, between Demos and people, cuts through all the mental landscape of Western culture. Do you work and pay tax? Ok, scratch that question – all able comrades work and pay tax in the Democratic Western Commonwealth. But is your work more akin to the duties of a peasant than those of a classical citizen? And does your paying tax involve giving to the state that which you have not received directly from its own hand? Do you identify with the great heroic myth of Western democracy: the humanist dream of a literary orator exhorting a mass of citizens to action? And if you do, does your forum look like mainstream society, or does it look more like an impotent underground cargo-cult composed of political outcasts on the internet?

If your answers are the same as mine, then you are not a member of the Demos. So if you habitually adopt its folkways – its rhapsodies about freedom, its politically-correct diglossia, its cosmopolitan neo-Sarmatism, and above all its hysterics about the ever-present threat of tyranny – then you are either toadying or, more likely, you've been had. You are like an Athenian slave or Polish peasant enthusing about the powers of your masters. You don't have to welcome tyranny, but you could at least manage something like studied indifference. A tyrant would mainly brutalise the Demos, which would at least make a change from the sort of anarcho-tyranny that exclusively torments the people.

 

Of course, the Demos is not entirely closed to the people. But if you ever manage to join it with a view to representing their interests, you will take your place on its lowest and shakiest rung: the conservative outer party of the Show, representing the last remnants of the old elective oligarchy. This outer party is disempowered, all but incapable of positive action, and reduced to clinging onto its position by garnering votes for a fraudulent protection racket. Rest assured that if you try to climb higher, without dropping your populist sympathies, the rest of the Demos will piss on you in unison until you slip and fall. Just ask Donald Trump, who jumped onto the ladder with more resources and advantages than the rest of us outcasts put together. 

Far better, I think, to recognise the power disparity and turn your back on the Demos. Stop voting for it, stop supporting populists who promise to beat it by joining it, and put up with its misrule in the same way as your ancestors put up with smallpox and syphilis. Render unto Behemoth what is Behemoth's, at least until some Caesar comes to slay it and take back the throne. Embrace the blackpill, the reality of your subjection, which floods in on all sides as the progressivist dreamworld collapses and dissolves around you. 

And as you wake up outside the temple, and start wondering how to detach your fellows from the feet of its idol, be sure to call to mind the structure of nerves and sinews that connects the ruling people with its subjects. The voting franchise, the welfare state, the rivalry of populist ideologues and the spectacle of mass politics are not theatres of political representation, but puppet-strings of noble patronage. 

 

In the present day, the Demos appears to have rigged an election against a populist politician, after spending the last four years in open rebellion against him. This shows a lack of regard for the dogma of popular sovereignty and the ritual of political representation. But it does not constitute any great break with precedent. Elections have existed for the sake of the Demos ever since it came to power. 

 

The Show represents a ritual civil war, by which the Demos conducts a sort of deliberative assembly. The main item on the agenda is self-regulation: should the Demos expand itself, by creating more government offices, or should it remain at its present size? The voters do not make choices; rather, they enroll in vast political armies led by politicians, according to whether they can hope to receive more patronage or be squeezed a little less by taxation. In any case, there is no effective option to reduce the existing size of government, much less vote against the Demos.

 

Patronage, of course, is a perennial aspect of governance. The houses of leading Roman citizens were perpetually besieged by clients. The problem in Western democracy is that the Demos is a fluid, informal category, lacking a fixed register of citizens and a formal structure of power-sharing. Stability exists in the Cathedral, the Bureau and the upper echelons of the Show, but the lower democrats on the political ladders must scrabble upon popular client-bases for security and advancement. The result is a race to the bottom in clientage, which constantly upends the rest of society by empowering its most dysfunctional and worthless people.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here goes:

What I've done here, for the most part, is to break down the Bodinian sovereignty and hierarchicalism in Moldbug's theory and map his institutions onto the perennial three-caste society. I won't explain the whole thing, because it speaks for itself, but obviously up is the direction of power and down is the direction of subjugation (and to a more limited extent, left and right work in the same way). Note that there are three distinct categories, corresponding to the three basic castes of priest, warrior and commoner; and it should go without saying that there is relatively fluid movement between the different institutions and classes in a single category. 

 

The Demos is glossed as a scholar-nobility; but it is actually defined by direct participation in power, so its core extends into a lower and more precarious fringe of political classes. The burgess class running the Factory is contiguous with the people, because businessmen, company owners, investors etc. are plebians regardless of wealth. And note that the mamluk category embraces all client-classes empowered by the Demos against the people. What I envisage here is a hard core of criminal aliens and welfare-dependents, constantly being replenished by defectors from other classes – among them sexual degenerates, divorced wives living on child-ransom, 'integrated' dalits, etc.

Perhaps someone will be so kind as to fill in specific lines of power and patronage on this picture. Or maybe readers will tell me that I've got most of it wrong, and that Moldbug or someone else got things right. All very well – let a hundred variations bloom – as long as we dissidents take such theories seriously and do not discount their importance. If we storm ahead blindfolded, in our impatience to grapple with the elephant, then we will repeat the mistakes of the Alt-Right. We will continue straining against the false door of electoral politics, and thereby buttress the one wall of the democratic citadel that we can knock down simply by walking away.