May 16, 2023
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment is a fitting conclusion to both the previous Covid series and this the Great Reset series as it blends the two together to posit a decided change potentially emerging in Western society (a New Normal).
The segment’s introduction gives a blistering account of governance through the pandemic. It is followed by a summary of potential liberty losses incurred during the pandemic which the World Economic Forum and Global Predators are attempting to leverage with the Great Reset – the loss of freedoms, the loss of democracy, the loss of meritocracy all enabled by mandates. Mandates made when democracy was suspended via the enactment of “Emergency Measures,” by the Executive branch of the Federal Government. Some contend it is an illustration of what our government would be like if we didn’t have a) the checks and balances of the three branches of government and b) a two-party system.
The segment ends with some perspectives on democracy in the Western world e.g., a European Union type system. The question of the entire series: Is Democracy worldwide in Danger? Hopefully, the series and this segment have provided some grist to answer the question.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment is a fitting conclusion to both the previous Covid series and this the Great Reset series as it blends the two together to posit a decided change potentially emerging in Western society (a New Normal).
The segment’s introduction gives a blistering account of governance through the pandemic. It is followed by a summary of potential liberty losses incurred during the pandemic which the World Economic Forum and Global Predators are attempting to leverage with the Great Reset – the loss of freedoms, the loss of democracy, the loss of meritocracy all enabled by mandates. Mandates made when democracy was suspended via the enactment of “Emergency Measures,” by the Executive branch of the Federal Government. Some contend it is an illustration of what our government would be like if we didn’t have a) the checks and balances of the three branches of government and b) a two-party system.
The segment ends with some perspectives on democracy in the Western world e.g., a European Union type system. The question of the entire series: Is Democracy worldwide in Danger? Hopefully, the series and this segment have provided some grist to answer the question.
Happy Learning,
Harley
THE GREAT RESET: IS DEMOCRACY (worldwide) IN DANGER?
THE NEW NORMAL – EXCERPTS: SEGMENT 13
INTRODUCTION:
On February 14, 2022, as protesting Canadian truckers filled Parliament Square in Ottawa, giving joyous hope to all those worldwide who were done with pandemic totalitarianism, it was Chrystia Freeland, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Deputy Prime Minister, who gave the chilling proof of how far the global elites will go to enforce absolute compliance to their diktats by the citizenry. “As of today, a bank or other financial service provider will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account without a court order,” she announced. “In doing so, they will be protected against civil liability for actions taken in good faith … If your truck is being used in these illegal blockades, your corporate accounts will be frozen. The insurance on your vehicle will be suspended.” Police shattered truck windows, arrested a hundred protestors, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked an emergency order. For a time, representative government was suspended in the nation of Canada. Ms. Freeland was part of a small cadre of “influential” connected to the World Economic Forum (WEF); indeed, she is now on the WEF Board of Trustees.
In two years, the COVID-19 pandemic, which began unfolding with the unprecedented global “lockdown” in March 2020, has fundamentally remade human relations, capitalism, and culture in the West. No matter that in the past we had lived through far graver medical crises without even a passing thought to stopping all congregation, suspending the production of all culture, or compelling all healthy people to cover their faces and close their businesses and keep apart – this time, our elites used the “crisis” to shut down Western norms of liberty, the human-centered world, and civilization itself.
But what is our culture, which we once thought durable, to be replaced by? A world managed by machines and mediated via digital interfaces; a world predicated on cruelty, without human empathy as an organizing principle; a world in which national boundaries, cultures, and languages are drained of meaning, in which institutions embody only the goals of distant meta-national oligarchs; a world organized for the benefit of massive pharmaceutical companies, a few global tech giants and technocrats, and a tyrannical superpower that is our daily adversary. In short: a world redesigned to ensure the dominance forever of these distant elites. A meta-structure of unaccountable loosely aligned global nonprofits, Big Tech corporations, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
United in an alliance of convenience, these forces see human beings and the troublesome individualistic West, with its stubborn insistence on human rights, on joy, on spontaneity, on quirkiness, acceptance, and tolerance, as obstacles to be managed, drained or power and resources, and sidelined. Their goal is to subvert Western cultural norms and ultimately to alienate Western children from their families’ influence and from Western history and freedoms generally. The war against “the virus” has really been a war waged via technologies and their masters to dissolve human culture and disempower human beings. It is a war on free thought and free thought and free speech – a war against our most fundamental beliefs.
These oligarchical elites are supported by this vast project to remake humanity by massive, opaque nonprofits through which pour millions of dollars aimed at transformational social change. The pandemic gave them pretext and opportunity on an unprecedented scale, and they have taken full advantage. The faces of some of those who have visited this evil upon us are all-too-familiar – the power-besotted political figures, the domineering healthcare “experts,” the bought-off media talking heads, the titans of tech and social media, the unapologetically tyrannical leader of Communist-ruled China, Xi Jinping and the super-elites of the WEF. Collectively, during the pandemic, they have come to wield power over even the smallest particulars of human existence. And that is because this is a war aimed at undoing humanity itself. This claim is hard to process, but we need to do so.
Since the end of the Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance, and up until the near-present, we in the West have taken for granted that it is human perspectives that drive history. No more. Machines have, in the past served us, but we are at a point in history in which we are being oriented to serve machines and their masters. Some of the most powerful leaders arrayed against us do not even bother to obscure that this is their real goal. Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the WEF, could hardly have been more direct about his intent, invoking the need to provoke a worldwide “Great Reset” in the wake of the pandemic. On June 3, 2020, Schwab declared, “The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”
“Our old systems” – privacy, paper and metal money, the ability to drive a car without being tracked, the nation-state, human expression, human touch, cultural activities, churches, mosques, and synagogues, town halls, theaters and concert halls, democratic governance, a free press, schools and universities, books and libraries, and the right to decide what happens to one’s own body, property and family – none of these suit the WEF leadership and their tech-and pharmaceutical-industry and CCP allies. “The world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more,” declared Schwab. He irritably reiterated that the “good old world” of pre-2020 was never to return and that believing that it could, was fiction.
Davos 2022 shows clearly the intentions for humanity still ahead from this group of elites; from planning for endless pandemics and “variants” in the future, leading to endless social control; to the digitization of identities and currency; to the intervention in free markets by a “stakeholder capitalism” that chooses winners and losers in the world of commerce via the fig leaf of ideology; to “global cooperation” that seeks to dissolve nation states and national boundaries. But the people of the world did not vote to abandon “our old systems” and destroy our old ways.
The attacks on organized religion have been particularly telling; singled out for punishment for not following “official” COVID rules. The Supreme Court had to make an affirmative ruling against the governor of California to allow people to worship at church in person. Churches and synagogues by the thousands were forcibly closed. Policies that weakened the bonds between human beings and weakened the family were similarly introduced and policed. Shaming and ostracism, characteristic of CCP-style communism, replaced American-style civil debate and tolerance for different points of view. School boards with broad new powers and heavy-handed, seemingly centralized scripts and policies have bullied parents and tormented children, turning formerly safe and supportive schools into terrifying and hostile authoritarian battlegrounds. Concerned parents were even tagged as “domestic terrorists” by the FBI – just as dissident parents are targeted in Communist China or were in the former Soviet Union.
None of this is accidental. Nor does it have anything to do with “science.” The data were widely available, and even in 2020 studies showed the “lockdowns” and restrictions did not stop the disease and often made health outcomes far worse. But the draconian measures did not stop. By isolating us for more than a year and a half, leaving us terrified in our homes, and bombarding our minds with messages that activate the amygdala, where fear is processed and reason cannot enter – and then re-allowing humans only to reconnect to restricted, muffled, silenced and surveilled ways – our elites have stifled troublesome Western cultural norms and effectively made us far more manageable and more completely controlled within their own digital matrices.
Again, it was left to the WEF’s shameless Klaus Schwab to openly envisage the future. “The coming decade would be a battle between robots and humans, and to win that battle we would have to know what makes us human.” What did not have to be said was that the WEF and its Big Tech allies have indeed examined the question of what makes us human, only to use that analysis in alliance with the machines against the humans. And the obvious first step in that process is the obliteration of free assembly, of community.
As pandemic panic took hold, “restrictions” poured out in waves around the formerly free world, echoing one another, but continually shifting and changing their flavor, endlessly assaulting a disoriented, increasingly fragmented, and psychologically fragile set of formally free nations. It is no exaggeration to say that these coordinated offenses, orchestrated by government in lockstep alliance with tech and pharmaceutical companies and the dominant media, represent an evil we had never seen before in human history. Worldwide, as well as state by US state, we heard the same sound bites and the same charges aimed at those who dared speak up against these plans; we saw the same novel methods of bypassing legislatures and laws to empower boards of health to restrict rights and liberties. Later we saw the same vaccination goals in nation after nation, and the same abuse heaped upon the recalcitrant.
The end goal is something much darker than simply a dark-enough world in which everyone is coercively vaccinated, whether they are at risk or not, whether they have natural immunity or not, a world in which “boosters” for seven billion people are guaranteed forever. The end goal, rather, is to ensure that our pre-March 2020 world disappears forever. Irretrievable. The real goal had nothing to do with public health. The real goal is to dissolve and destroy Western and human culture, and to replace it with a techno-fascistic culture – a culture in which we have forgotten what free human beings can do. The crime that was perpetrated during the pandemic years of 2020—2022 was perhaps the greatest ever committed again humanity. And it is being perpetrated still.
THE NEW NORMAL:
The Elites: The truly powerful go to enormous lengths to control the narrative, and in general achieve great success. What the most powerful people want is certainty. Chance might allow the other side to win, and then the billions will flow to the other side. Chance allows populist movements to emerge that upend your best-laid plans. Crimes were committed in 2020—2022. They were committed against the entire human race, by small powerful groups of people to bring about outcomes which they saw as well worth the sacrifice – that is to say, the sacrifice of us.
Restrictions: The invitation was to fear, and to fear endlessly. This fear was followed by escalating “restrictions.” Restrictions in movement, assembly, and commerce. From March 2020 to 2022 and even afterward, these rights, so laboriously won through so much blood and treasure – these rights that formed the matrix of what is meant to be Western – were suspended, dissolved, ignored, trampled. In 2021, forty-seven states were under emergency law. It happened without any conventional army rolling into any European or North American street, and without a shot being fired. It was accomplished by stealth.
Loss of Freedom: “Restrictions” kill all forms of civil power. Restrictions in human history always preceded theft: theft of the lands, assets, and opportunities of the restricted.
In Europe, especially, under the European Union, people seemed blissfully unaware of what was at risk. Because of the horrors they’d endured during the cataclysmic wars of the 20th century, the European Union seemed a political Godsend; a modern idealistic invention to knit European countries so closely together there could never again be large-scale war on the Continent.
Yet it came at a huge cost: the surrender of individual nations’ sovereignty to Brussels. Indeed, behind the European Union’s public messaging, the people’s hands were being removed quietly from the actual machinery of both national and EU-level governance. And governance itself receded from actual transparency. This dismantling of access to the structures of national democracy in Europe was cloaked in jargon.
Loss of Democracy: Western Europeans thought of the European Union as a state above states, a democracy above democracies. But it simply wasn’t. It was something else; the powers of the European nation-states had been drained.
European nation-states had been made vulnerable, and people would be left unable to defend themselves in any real way. The edifice of the beautiful drama of “European democracy” and human rights could come crashing down at any time. In fact, having for so long lived under EU governance left continental Europeans easy prey for the COVID tyrants. Many of these formerly free peoples, most of whom had been born too late to experience totalitarianism firsthand, were quick to follow governmental directives, as in their lifetimes most governmental directives had been benign or at least not malevolent.
We were vulnerable, too, in the United States, and largely for the same reasons. Our legacy of freedom was still more accessible to us than was that of continental Europeans. But day after day, “in the midst of the pandemic,” our grasp of democracy grew fainter. We also had too readily forgotten our history that restrictions drain human capital and blunt human civilization.
Loss of Meritocracy: The defining of the social contract as if applies to education in the West is a promise of hard work and study in the present in exchange for better outcomes in the future. Indeed, this social contract is the great teacher of Western meritocracy. It establishes our system of education as the single most powerful ideological training ground we have for what it means to be Western and is charged with passing on to upcoming generations the vital lesson that our Western heritage is predicated on fairness, while stressing the inherent relationship between hard work and just reward.
But in 2020-2022 that, too, came to an end. In fact, after March 2020, the effort to destroy this social contract was conscious and systematic, and the time-tested model was replaced throughout the West generally, and in America specifically, with schools, administrators, and teachers willing, and often compelled, to bully, torment, and even physically abuse children. The message of respect and support for parents and kids was everywhere replaced with messaging to parents that they had no say in their children’s education or bodily autonomy, and with dicta promoted from on high that appeared intentionally aimed at dissolving the promise of educational meritocracy and making a mockery of fairness.
Mandates: On September 9, 2021, President Biden gave a rage-filled speech railing against the unvaccinated. “Our patience is wearing thin.” In my life, I had never heard an American president speak to his constituents in that bullying, aggressive manner. That was not how leaders spoke to citizens in functioning democracies. He announced new vaccine “mandates,” as CNN put it, that would compel a hundred million American workers to submit to receiving an mRNA vaccine, whether they wanted on or not. The news outlets did not seem to bother any longer reminding American readers that a “mandate” – a word that had been everywhere, suddenly, since 2020 – was not a thing in our democracy; it was now a law. No one could “mandate” something like this without the consent of Congress.
When you are living under emergency measures, by definition you no longer have a functioning democracy. I say these days, “the coup has already taken place.” What is stunning is how few people even now recognize the degree to which the country was living under dictatorial measures. A West that had forfeited its historical competitive advantage over the CCP – its individualism, its human rights, its egalitarianism, its freedom.
Source: The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians COVID-19 and The War Against the Human by Naomi Wolf (2022)
DEMOCRACY: It is a story that is in no way over, a force still gathering strength. When people are deprived of the material for stable lives, they take refuge in traditional privileges – tribal identities, and fantasies of glorious futures enabled by reclaiming what they view as theirs. They become susceptible to simplistic explanations peddled by demagogues who weaponize democracy itself. The result is chaos, anger, and instability. No one wins except the people who have already won.
Democracy has been warped by the billionaire class, its workings tilted toward private islands, offshore bank accounts, and secret meetings in Davos convened to plot the next insider deal. Reclaiming power from Davos Man requires no insurrection or revolution of ideas. It demands the thoughtful use of a tool that has been there all along: democracy.
Source: Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World by Peter S. Goodman (2022).
How do we manage the tension between national democracy and global markets? We have three options. We can restrict democracy in the interest of minimizing international transaction costs. We can limit globalization, in the hope of building democratic legitimacy at home. Or we can globalize democracy, at the cost of reconstructing the world economy.
The menu captures the fundamental political trilemma of the world economy: we cannot have hyper-globalization and democracy, and national self-determination all at once. We can have at most two out of the three. If we want hyper-globalization and democracy, we need to give up on the nation state. If we must keep the nation state and want hyper-globalization too, then we must forget about democracy. And if we want to combine democracy with the nation state, then it is bye-bye deep globalization.
Why these stark trade-offs? Consider a hypothetically fully globalized world economy in which all transaction costs have been eliminated and national borders do not interfere with the exchange of goods, services, or capital. Can nation states exist in such a world?
Source: The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik (2011)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THE NEW NORMAL – EXCERPTS: SEGMENT 13
INTRODUCTION:
On February 14, 2022, as protesting Canadian truckers filled Parliament Square in Ottawa, giving joyous hope to all those worldwide who were done with pandemic totalitarianism, it was Chrystia Freeland, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Deputy Prime Minister, who gave the chilling proof of how far the global elites will go to enforce absolute compliance to their diktats by the citizenry. “As of today, a bank or other financial service provider will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account without a court order,” she announced. “In doing so, they will be protected against civil liability for actions taken in good faith … If your truck is being used in these illegal blockades, your corporate accounts will be frozen. The insurance on your vehicle will be suspended.” Police shattered truck windows, arrested a hundred protestors, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked an emergency order. For a time, representative government was suspended in the nation of Canada. Ms. Freeland was part of a small cadre of “influential” connected to the World Economic Forum (WEF); indeed, she is now on the WEF Board of Trustees.
In two years, the COVID-19 pandemic, which began unfolding with the unprecedented global “lockdown” in March 2020, has fundamentally remade human relations, capitalism, and culture in the West. No matter that in the past we had lived through far graver medical crises without even a passing thought to stopping all congregation, suspending the production of all culture, or compelling all healthy people to cover their faces and close their businesses and keep apart – this time, our elites used the “crisis” to shut down Western norms of liberty, the human-centered world, and civilization itself.
But what is our culture, which we once thought durable, to be replaced by? A world managed by machines and mediated via digital interfaces; a world predicated on cruelty, without human empathy as an organizing principle; a world in which national boundaries, cultures, and languages are drained of meaning, in which institutions embody only the goals of distant meta-national oligarchs; a world organized for the benefit of massive pharmaceutical companies, a few global tech giants and technocrats, and a tyrannical superpower that is our daily adversary. In short: a world redesigned to ensure the dominance forever of these distant elites. A meta-structure of unaccountable loosely aligned global nonprofits, Big Tech corporations, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
United in an alliance of convenience, these forces see human beings and the troublesome individualistic West, with its stubborn insistence on human rights, on joy, on spontaneity, on quirkiness, acceptance, and tolerance, as obstacles to be managed, drained or power and resources, and sidelined. Their goal is to subvert Western cultural norms and ultimately to alienate Western children from their families’ influence and from Western history and freedoms generally. The war against “the virus” has really been a war waged via technologies and their masters to dissolve human culture and disempower human beings. It is a war on free thought and free thought and free speech – a war against our most fundamental beliefs.
These oligarchical elites are supported by this vast project to remake humanity by massive, opaque nonprofits through which pour millions of dollars aimed at transformational social change. The pandemic gave them pretext and opportunity on an unprecedented scale, and they have taken full advantage. The faces of some of those who have visited this evil upon us are all-too-familiar – the power-besotted political figures, the domineering healthcare “experts,” the bought-off media talking heads, the titans of tech and social media, the unapologetically tyrannical leader of Communist-ruled China, Xi Jinping and the super-elites of the WEF. Collectively, during the pandemic, they have come to wield power over even the smallest particulars of human existence. And that is because this is a war aimed at undoing humanity itself. This claim is hard to process, but we need to do so.
Since the end of the Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance, and up until the near-present, we in the West have taken for granted that it is human perspectives that drive history. No more. Machines have, in the past served us, but we are at a point in history in which we are being oriented to serve machines and their masters. Some of the most powerful leaders arrayed against us do not even bother to obscure that this is their real goal. Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the WEF, could hardly have been more direct about his intent, invoking the need to provoke a worldwide “Great Reset” in the wake of the pandemic. On June 3, 2020, Schwab declared, “The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”
“Our old systems” – privacy, paper and metal money, the ability to drive a car without being tracked, the nation-state, human expression, human touch, cultural activities, churches, mosques, and synagogues, town halls, theaters and concert halls, democratic governance, a free press, schools and universities, books and libraries, and the right to decide what happens to one’s own body, property and family – none of these suit the WEF leadership and their tech-and pharmaceutical-industry and CCP allies. “The world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more,” declared Schwab. He irritably reiterated that the “good old world” of pre-2020 was never to return and that believing that it could, was fiction.
Davos 2022 shows clearly the intentions for humanity still ahead from this group of elites; from planning for endless pandemics and “variants” in the future, leading to endless social control; to the digitization of identities and currency; to the intervention in free markets by a “stakeholder capitalism” that chooses winners and losers in the world of commerce via the fig leaf of ideology; to “global cooperation” that seeks to dissolve nation states and national boundaries. But the people of the world did not vote to abandon “our old systems” and destroy our old ways.
The attacks on organized religion have been particularly telling; singled out for punishment for not following “official” COVID rules. The Supreme Court had to make an affirmative ruling against the governor of California to allow people to worship at church in person. Churches and synagogues by the thousands were forcibly closed. Policies that weakened the bonds between human beings and weakened the family were similarly introduced and policed. Shaming and ostracism, characteristic of CCP-style communism, replaced American-style civil debate and tolerance for different points of view. School boards with broad new powers and heavy-handed, seemingly centralized scripts and policies have bullied parents and tormented children, turning formerly safe and supportive schools into terrifying and hostile authoritarian battlegrounds. Concerned parents were even tagged as “domestic terrorists” by the FBI – just as dissident parents are targeted in Communist China or were in the former Soviet Union.
None of this is accidental. Nor does it have anything to do with “science.” The data were widely available, and even in 2020 studies showed the “lockdowns” and restrictions did not stop the disease and often made health outcomes far worse. But the draconian measures did not stop. By isolating us for more than a year and a half, leaving us terrified in our homes, and bombarding our minds with messages that activate the amygdala, where fear is processed and reason cannot enter – and then re-allowing humans only to reconnect to restricted, muffled, silenced and surveilled ways – our elites have stifled troublesome Western cultural norms and effectively made us far more manageable and more completely controlled within their own digital matrices.
Again, it was left to the WEF’s shameless Klaus Schwab to openly envisage the future. “The coming decade would be a battle between robots and humans, and to win that battle we would have to know what makes us human.” What did not have to be said was that the WEF and its Big Tech allies have indeed examined the question of what makes us human, only to use that analysis in alliance with the machines against the humans. And the obvious first step in that process is the obliteration of free assembly, of community.
As pandemic panic took hold, “restrictions” poured out in waves around the formerly free world, echoing one another, but continually shifting and changing their flavor, endlessly assaulting a disoriented, increasingly fragmented, and psychologically fragile set of formally free nations. It is no exaggeration to say that these coordinated offenses, orchestrated by government in lockstep alliance with tech and pharmaceutical companies and the dominant media, represent an evil we had never seen before in human history. Worldwide, as well as state by US state, we heard the same sound bites and the same charges aimed at those who dared speak up against these plans; we saw the same novel methods of bypassing legislatures and laws to empower boards of health to restrict rights and liberties. Later we saw the same vaccination goals in nation after nation, and the same abuse heaped upon the recalcitrant.
The end goal is something much darker than simply a dark-enough world in which everyone is coercively vaccinated, whether they are at risk or not, whether they have natural immunity or not, a world in which “boosters” for seven billion people are guaranteed forever. The end goal, rather, is to ensure that our pre-March 2020 world disappears forever. Irretrievable. The real goal had nothing to do with public health. The real goal is to dissolve and destroy Western and human culture, and to replace it with a techno-fascistic culture – a culture in which we have forgotten what free human beings can do. The crime that was perpetrated during the pandemic years of 2020—2022 was perhaps the greatest ever committed again humanity. And it is being perpetrated still.
THE NEW NORMAL:
The Elites: The truly powerful go to enormous lengths to control the narrative, and in general achieve great success. What the most powerful people want is certainty. Chance might allow the other side to win, and then the billions will flow to the other side. Chance allows populist movements to emerge that upend your best-laid plans. Crimes were committed in 2020—2022. They were committed against the entire human race, by small powerful groups of people to bring about outcomes which they saw as well worth the sacrifice – that is to say, the sacrifice of us.
Restrictions: The invitation was to fear, and to fear endlessly. This fear was followed by escalating “restrictions.” Restrictions in movement, assembly, and commerce. From March 2020 to 2022 and even afterward, these rights, so laboriously won through so much blood and treasure – these rights that formed the matrix of what is meant to be Western – were suspended, dissolved, ignored, trampled. In 2021, forty-seven states were under emergency law. It happened without any conventional army rolling into any European or North American street, and without a shot being fired. It was accomplished by stealth.
Loss of Freedom: “Restrictions” kill all forms of civil power. Restrictions in human history always preceded theft: theft of the lands, assets, and opportunities of the restricted.
In Europe, especially, under the European Union, people seemed blissfully unaware of what was at risk. Because of the horrors they’d endured during the cataclysmic wars of the 20th century, the European Union seemed a political Godsend; a modern idealistic invention to knit European countries so closely together there could never again be large-scale war on the Continent.
Yet it came at a huge cost: the surrender of individual nations’ sovereignty to Brussels. Indeed, behind the European Union’s public messaging, the people’s hands were being removed quietly from the actual machinery of both national and EU-level governance. And governance itself receded from actual transparency. This dismantling of access to the structures of national democracy in Europe was cloaked in jargon.
Loss of Democracy: Western Europeans thought of the European Union as a state above states, a democracy above democracies. But it simply wasn’t. It was something else; the powers of the European nation-states had been drained.
European nation-states had been made vulnerable, and people would be left unable to defend themselves in any real way. The edifice of the beautiful drama of “European democracy” and human rights could come crashing down at any time. In fact, having for so long lived under EU governance left continental Europeans easy prey for the COVID tyrants. Many of these formerly free peoples, most of whom had been born too late to experience totalitarianism firsthand, were quick to follow governmental directives, as in their lifetimes most governmental directives had been benign or at least not malevolent.
We were vulnerable, too, in the United States, and largely for the same reasons. Our legacy of freedom was still more accessible to us than was that of continental Europeans. But day after day, “in the midst of the pandemic,” our grasp of democracy grew fainter. We also had too readily forgotten our history that restrictions drain human capital and blunt human civilization.
Loss of Meritocracy: The defining of the social contract as if applies to education in the West is a promise of hard work and study in the present in exchange for better outcomes in the future. Indeed, this social contract is the great teacher of Western meritocracy. It establishes our system of education as the single most powerful ideological training ground we have for what it means to be Western and is charged with passing on to upcoming generations the vital lesson that our Western heritage is predicated on fairness, while stressing the inherent relationship between hard work and just reward.
But in 2020-2022 that, too, came to an end. In fact, after March 2020, the effort to destroy this social contract was conscious and systematic, and the time-tested model was replaced throughout the West generally, and in America specifically, with schools, administrators, and teachers willing, and often compelled, to bully, torment, and even physically abuse children. The message of respect and support for parents and kids was everywhere replaced with messaging to parents that they had no say in their children’s education or bodily autonomy, and with dicta promoted from on high that appeared intentionally aimed at dissolving the promise of educational meritocracy and making a mockery of fairness.
Mandates: On September 9, 2021, President Biden gave a rage-filled speech railing against the unvaccinated. “Our patience is wearing thin.” In my life, I had never heard an American president speak to his constituents in that bullying, aggressive manner. That was not how leaders spoke to citizens in functioning democracies. He announced new vaccine “mandates,” as CNN put it, that would compel a hundred million American workers to submit to receiving an mRNA vaccine, whether they wanted on or not. The news outlets did not seem to bother any longer reminding American readers that a “mandate” – a word that had been everywhere, suddenly, since 2020 – was not a thing in our democracy; it was now a law. No one could “mandate” something like this without the consent of Congress.
When you are living under emergency measures, by definition you no longer have a functioning democracy. I say these days, “the coup has already taken place.” What is stunning is how few people even now recognize the degree to which the country was living under dictatorial measures. A West that had forfeited its historical competitive advantage over the CCP – its individualism, its human rights, its egalitarianism, its freedom.
Source: The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians COVID-19 and The War Against the Human by Naomi Wolf (2022)
DEMOCRACY: It is a story that is in no way over, a force still gathering strength. When people are deprived of the material for stable lives, they take refuge in traditional privileges – tribal identities, and fantasies of glorious futures enabled by reclaiming what they view as theirs. They become susceptible to simplistic explanations peddled by demagogues who weaponize democracy itself. The result is chaos, anger, and instability. No one wins except the people who have already won.
Democracy has been warped by the billionaire class, its workings tilted toward private islands, offshore bank accounts, and secret meetings in Davos convened to plot the next insider deal. Reclaiming power from Davos Man requires no insurrection or revolution of ideas. It demands the thoughtful use of a tool that has been there all along: democracy.
Source: Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World by Peter S. Goodman (2022).
How do we manage the tension between national democracy and global markets? We have three options. We can restrict democracy in the interest of minimizing international transaction costs. We can limit globalization, in the hope of building democratic legitimacy at home. Or we can globalize democracy, at the cost of reconstructing the world economy.
The menu captures the fundamental political trilemma of the world economy: we cannot have hyper-globalization and democracy, and national self-determination all at once. We can have at most two out of the three. If we want hyper-globalization and democracy, we need to give up on the nation state. If we must keep the nation state and want hyper-globalization too, then we must forget about democracy. And if we want to combine democracy with the nation state, then it is bye-bye deep globalization.
Why these stark trade-offs? Consider a hypothetically fully globalized world economy in which all transaction costs have been eliminated and national borders do not interfere with the exchange of goods, services, or capital. Can nation states exist in such a world?
Source: The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik (2011)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| democracy_13l_new_normal_--_segment_13.pdf |