A perfect storm of crises has been building. It comes from still bubbling rage with governments for their single-minded obsession with Covid and the lasting damage caused by lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates, with the media for amplifying government fear porn and social media platforms for collusion with innovative techniques of censorship, to the cost of living pressures, Ukraine war, and the crimes, housing crisis, cultural decay, and social dislocations of mass immigration. A survey earlier this year in France, Germany, Italy, and Poland found that 60 percent of voters lack trust in political institutions.
People have come to hold politicians to be dishonest, incompetent, and lacking courage and integrity. Being unheard and vilified has broken public trust in the underpinning institutions of democracy. In the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, less than half the people in high-income developed countries trust their government, media, business, and NGOs.
In Australia, governments earned scores of -21 for competence and -5 for ethics. Pew Research Center polls show trust in the US government falling from 77 percent in 1964 to 22 percent in 2024.
Headlines capture a growing crisis of free speech and civil liberties that are a threat to Western liberal democracy with a transfer of power and rights from citizens to the state as the latter attempts to impose its dogmas on people, sometimes in defiance of biological reality.
Online safety measures run the risk of turning into censors’ charters. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner wants to control what can be said online. In a strange legacy of our first female PM, a recent court judgment enshrined transgender rights at the cost of women’s rights, ruling that lesbians may not lawfully exclude biologically male but legally female persons from a women-only dating app. The case, believe it or not, is called Tickle v Giggle.
Europe and the UK
When the ruling elites talk about diversity, they mean state-enforced conformity. The sense that the established parties hold voters in contempt and treat them like mugs has produced election gains for so-called populist parties and movements from Italy to the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, France, the UK, and Germany. ‘Populist’ is commonly used pejoratively by mainstream political leaders and media. A woman in Europe who complains of being stalked by a ‘visible minority’ immigrant risks being scolded as a racist, victim-shamed, and told to be quiet. A politician who talks up her fears is sneered at as populist.
Yet the word populist comes from the notion of the popular will to describe policies that are popular with a large number of voters who have come to believe that their concerns are derided and disregarded by the governing, cultural, corporate, intellectual, and media elites. Hence the revolt of the masses against the homogeneous political establishment and the scolds and sneers in the commentariat. The people have had enough and are refusing to take it anymore. Even white upper-class liberals living in leafy suburbs who previously didn’t care awaken to the problems of the mass influx of migrants once the latter infiltrate their neighbourhood.
The threat from populists has provoked efforts by the establishment parties to nobble the upstart newcomers and the media to vilify them. This only creates a vicious cycle and generates more support for populists. In addition, as activist protestors and judges take to lawfare to frustrate governments’ ability to govern, the proliferating thickets of laws, checks, and balances have led to a condition of ‘legal impossibilism,’ in the words of Jaroslaw Kaczyński, the former prime minister of Poland.
France has arrested Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, because he refused to comply with authorities’ demands for greater restrictions on the popular app. Durov’s arrest is problematic because it is not possible to quarantine the extraordinary privacy-destroying surveillance powers of the state targeting criminals and terrorists from those engaged in peaceful protests and even humdrum everyday conversations. The crackdown by the Trudeau government on the truckers’ Freedom Convoy demonstrated this in vivid technicolour.
In Germany, a right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) politician has been fined for posting that Afghan immigrants are disproportionately likely to commit sexual violence against women and girls. She was convicted not of misinformation – she was citing official statistics – but for inciting hatred. In the two-weekend state elections that followed, the AfD won a plurality of votes (30-33 percent) in Thuringia and neighbouring Saxony. The party’s votes among the youth were particularly impressive: 38 percent of the 18–24 year-olds in Thuringia and 31 percent in Saxony.
The AfD and a new far-left party together polled almost half the votes in Thuringia and over 40 percent in Saxony. Many analysts interpreted the results as ‘less the rise of the far right than the collapse of Olaf Scholz’s ruling coalition.’ I believe however that the main story is that in country after country, instead of listening to and heeding their voters, the politicians are telling voters what they should believe, think, and say, and how they should vote. And then screaming ‘Far Right! Far Right!’ when voters look to alternatives to the mainstream parties.
In the UK, the Starmer government wants to ban hateful beliefs and speech and is also considering tackling extreme misogyny (what is moderate misogyny?) under anti-terrorism laws. On another culture wars front, police are recording more non-crime hate incidents (you know, the Orwellian category of lawful but harmful words and acts) than ever before, despite the previous Tory government having supposedly curtailed the practice. Pride in British history plummeted from 86 percent in 1995 to 64 percent last year. This will only worsen if teachers are to be trained to challenge ‘whiteness’ in schools.
People are being sentenced to one to three years in prison for posting and reposting comments on social media, yet actual physical assaults on women for wearing Western dress and makeup and for sexual assault and penetration as part of a grooming gang, earn suspended sentences. There’s also speculation that the government might criminalise Islamophobia, further entrenching the division between protected groups and, shall we say, Britain’s indigenous peoples. Deepening perceptions of two-tier laws, policing, and justice will continue to erode the legitimacy of the state.
Meanwhile, carmakers are rationing deliveries of petrol and hybrid vehicles to dealers/customers in order to avoid fines for failing to meet EV targets set by the government as a percentage of total sales. Once this used to be a hallmark of communist regimes organised around the command model of the economy. Hence the contention that EV mandates for manufacturers prove that Britain is no longer a free country. Dr David McGrogan of Northumbria Law School is full of dark forebodings that the growing hostility between the increasingly sullen people and the bossy Starmer government will not end well for Britain.
Last month Thierry Breton, an EU commissioner, wrote to Elon Musk with a regulatory warning over potentially harmful comments in the scheduled Musk-Donald Trump interview on X. Because the audience would include EU viewers, Breton asserted a right to limit what Americans can hear from one of the two major presidential candidates. Brazil has moved to an outright ban of X and will fine anyone who accesses it through a virtual private network (VPN).
Canada and the US
In Canada, regulators have been given carte blanche by the courts to subject professionals like Jordan Petersen to Maoist ‘reeducation’ courses for commenting on social and political issues, in their own time and on their own platforms outside their professional consulting rooms and roles. To make it even more like Alice in Wonderland, in Petersen’s case he apparently needs lessons in the use of social media.
The US weight in the democratic world is such that what happens in America doesn’t stay in America. Of course, I’m not a US citizen or resident, have neither vote nor voice in US elections, and have no party affiliation or allegiance. As such I have no partisan dog in the fight, so to say. My interest in this particular election is mainly what it implies for the health of democratic practices and freedoms. The rest of the world also has a stake in the outcome in terms of what it could mean for us, including prospects for war and nuclear war.
President Joe Biden’s growing physical frailty and cognitive deterioration were evident well before the start of the year. Consistent with existing norms and practices, Democratic Party elders could have tried to persuade Biden not to seek a second term. If he’d refused, they could have organised an open 2024 presidential primary and publicly encouraged other candidates to enter the fray. Had Kamala Harris emerged triumphant, dispelling doubts left over from 2020 about her electability, the outcome would have reaffirmed the democratic process for choosing the party nominee.
Instead, Democratic powerbrokers chose to act on a timeline that subverted internal party democracy. The exceptionally early Biden-Trump debate in June, which cruelled Biden’s ambition for a second term, led to a stage-managed process to crown Kamala Harris without a high-risk primary. Maureen Dowd argued in the New York Times that the party had engineered a ‘a jaw-dropping putsch’ to oust Biden and install Harris.
Victor Davis Hanson argued in the New York Post that in fact the Democrats were guilty of three successive coups. In 2020, the party elders ‘ossified’ the primary races to weed out other challengers; they conferred the nomination on a cognitively challenged Biden; and this year they defenestrated him despite his incumbency and a 14-million-vote decisive primary victory. ‘In the name of saving democracy,’ said Robert F Kennedy, Jr, the Democratic Party ‘set itself to dismantling it’ by silencing opposition, disenfranchising primary voters, and resorting to censorship, media control, and the weaponisation of federal agencies.
The strategy owes much to Harris’s flawed candidacy as an electoral liability with a record of failing upwards. Megyn Kelly explained on 24 July how a young Harris slept her way into politics and into power in California in the mid-1990s on the back of an affair with Democratic powerbroker Willie Brown. Harris was elected Attorney General of California, a deep blue state, in 2010 with less than one percent margin when other Democrats won landslide victories. Her 2020 primary run collapsed with spectacular swiftness.
She didn’t contest this year’s primary. ‘How did the Democratic party choose a candidate that has never done an interview or debate during the entire election cycle?’ Kennedy asked. Zero votes, zero press conferences or interviews (until the CNN love-in with Dana Bash), zero town hall meetings with questions from a live and unvetted audience.
Harris remains potentially vulnerable in the home stretch as a double diversity candidate who wasn’t chosen by party voters but anointed by the DC elite backed by the Democratic-adjacent media, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy donors. She is an empty signifier who means whatever her interpreter-voter wants her to mean. She’s a black woman of Jamaican heritage to one audience and an Asian of Indian heritage to another. Has anyone asked her for her views on the Supreme Court ruling that struck down Harvard’s race-based affirmative action admission policies that had discriminated in favour of blacks to the detriment of Asian-Americans in particular? I’d love to hear the answer, assuming it is intelligible.
Harris is the archetypical progressive California Democrat for whom the solution to every problem is more government. At various times she has supported slavery reparations, racial and gender identity, elimination of private health insurance, cuts to police budgets, BLM rioters, decriminalisation of illegal immigration, and health insurance coverage for the border crossers (two powerful ‘root causes’ of the problem), sweeping state diktats on what to drive and eat in pursuit of net zero, and federally legislated abortion almost to full term. She holds joint ownership of the administration’s policy failures, from the porous southern border to inflation, student debt cancellation, and the shambolic Afghanistan withdrawal. What did Harris know about Biden’s failing health and when did she know he was no longer fit to serve?
Harris is addicted to babbling word salads, prudently resists being separated from the teleprompter, delivers set-piece remarks to friendly audiences, and suffered high staff turnovers in the 2020 primary run and again in the Office of the VP. The few policy details she has outlined raise questions about her grasp of economic policy.
The pre-Democratic nominee Harris is on record for clearly believing that social media platforms should not be able to communicate information to the people directly without government oversight and regulation.
According to Michael Shellenberger, Harris and Tim Walz would implement Brazil-style three-pronged censorship to fight ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate speech:’ ‘censorship of election “misinformation,” deplatforming political opponents, and cross-platform bans, which ban a person not just from one social media platform but from many or even all of them.’
Today ‘liberal’ means anything but. Consider. They claim to be compassionate, kind, inclusive, anti-racist, anti-sexist, committed to social justice for all. In reality, they are merciless, hateful, intolerant, racist towards whites, anti-male (except for trans males claiming the right to invade women’s spaces and sports), and destructive of the foundational pillars of the justice system.
Asked separately for reasons to vote for Trump and Harris, Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa replied to the first (Trump) ‘I cannot provide content that promotes a specific political party or a specific candidate’. But it answered the second (Harris) sometimes by giving reasons like ‘a proven track record of accomplishment,’ ‘commitment to progressive ideals and a focus on helping disenfranchised communities,’ and breaking the gender barrier. But Amazon rejects suggestions of political bias. Of course it does.
Should Harris win despite her public record, it would be the triumph of a party elite ruthless enough to bribe, manipulate, censor, and intimidate its way into staying in power. It may be impossible to fool all the people all the time. But that’s not necessary. All that’s needed is to dupe a plurality of voters once every four years to maintain the shell but subvert the substance of democracy. Australians believe that the mob always works politicians out. A Harris victory will prove instead that the blob has worked out American voters.
Of course Trump could also pose a threat to US democracy. However, a reelected Trump will face serious pushback from the public institutions and media. By contrast, a Harris administration would have the full support of the Washington, corporate, and media elites. In that case, the systemwide threat to democracy, embedded in the surveillance state, would be further consolidated and entrenched.
Imperil Democracy in Haste, Regret the Loss in Leisure
Born in India a year after independence, I grew up taking for granted the reality of multiparty democracy that draws legitimacy from the people through competitive elections and constitutionally protected liberties and freedoms. I left India in 1971 to pursue graduate studies in Canada and returned to India for doctoral research in 1975, based in New Delhi. In June of that year, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a national emergency and ruled for two years as a dictator, jailing political opponents and critics, imposing wide-ranging media censorship, and curtailing civil liberties.
My first academic article was a lament for the loss of democratic freedoms in India.
My overall lessons from that ‘lived’ experience? First, we tend not to really appreciate the rarity and value of a free society until we lose it. Second, democracy rests ultimately in a belief in the good sense of the people. I fear that in two months, should American voters elect Kamala Harris as the next president, they will discover the truth of the first and invalidate the second lesson.
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