[Editor's Note: This article was originally published at The Warden Post on May 30, 2021].
As of the time I am putting these words to a Microsoft Word document, it has already been four months since Joe Biden has occupied the Oval Office.
Admittedly, the Biden presidency has not been as destructive as I had first imagined, and thankfully, as long as his body is still warm, the insipid carcass of Uncle Joe at least acts as something of a katechon preventing Kamala Harris’ eventual ascension to power. God help us then!
Regardless, even if the Biden presidency has been typical of those administrations serving at the behest of the neoliberal system, it certainly can’t be said to be legitimate in any meaningful sense. I don’t need to explain to you, the reader, how the election of 2020 was stolen from then President Donald Trump back on November 3rd.
If you’re a regular reader of our webzine, chances are you have likely done your own research when it came to this matter; perhaps you still have pro-Trump sympathies, perhaps you think Donald Trump was a deranged philo-semetic Baby Boomer who threw his base under the bus at every conceivable opportunity. Whatever your opinion of Trump the man, it’s still likely that don’t believe for a second that the outcome of the 2020 presidential election represented the actual projected outcome. According to the “official” results, Joe Biden beat out President Trump’s 74 million odd votes by whopping 81 million, making him the most popularly elected president in American presidential history.
Now, this alone is itself a dead giveaway that something was amiss, erratic voting patterns and the barring of Republican party official from facilities where votes were being counted notwithstanding. The fact of the matter is that anyone with a pair of eyes should be able to see that Joe Biden, a man with both the personality and complexion of a scoop of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, should not have been able to beat out one of the most charismatic political figures in contemporary political history, let alone have managed to garner 15 million more votes than his predecessor Barack Obama, who himself had no small cult of personality.
But please, don’t take my word for it. In fact, almost immediately after the election on November 4th, Time magazine put out an article effectively admitting that a secret “shadow campaign” composed of wealthy business tycoons and Left-wing activists had been working behind the scenes to ensure that Donald Trump would not have a chance to win reelection. From the article,
“The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors.”
The obscene alliance between Capital and the Radical Left should come as no surprise to any thinking person. I have said, numerous times to be sure, that the Left-wing boots on the ground that terrorize the intersections, alleyways and business districts of America’s inner cities only exist to be useful idiots for international finance. The American working classed loved Donald Trump, even after he betrayed his lumpenprole voting base time and time again. Even after making greater concessions to the Israel lobby and the plutocrats, many that formed his base still would have crawled through a mile of broken glass to cast their votes for him. It was the personal, almost cult-like devotion for Donald Trump that led thousands to rally for him outside the Capitol building on January 6th.
Donald Trump may have been a wealthy billionaire, but he campaigned and acted as a proletarian. It was for this reason that the business and cultural oligarchs despised him. Trump may have rubbed shoulders with the worlds rich and powerful, but inwardly he never belonged to them, or at least he never shared their disdain of normie America.
Trump may have been an offensive, self-centered blowhard, indeed, these were also many of the traits that made him so endearing and humorous, but conversely, back in the eighties Trump represented everything that a hot blooded American man aspired to be: a millionaire playboy who bangs supermodel—brash and larger than life. This is the image that regular America had of Donald Trump, and in it they saw they saw a power fantasy that represented the best of themselves, albeit with a touch of diabolism that comes with being nouveau riche, admittedly.
It’s no secret that the powers that be despise historic America. The inhabitants of the Southland and the “fly-over” States are regarded as nothing more than ignorant hicks whose adherence to traditional religion and close-knit sense of community is something that your average rootless urbanite sees with deep suspicion and loathing. These people, who paradoxically made up the majority of Trump’s voting base, could not be left alone to carry the Orange Man into a second term as president. In the minds of the cosmopolitans, something had to be done.
And sure enough, something was. Returning to the aforementioned Time article, we read that:
“Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”
Let’s zero-in on the words “proper outcome” for a moment. Can you imagine the sheer audacity of this Ian Bassin character and the level of condescension it would take to say something like this? Oh yes, the plebs don’t know what’s good for them, don’t you see? They just need a little push from our benevolent ruling class to help them make the right choices when it comes to voting for a political candidate! What absolute hogwash.
The introduction of this “article” (lets call it what it is: an admission to commit conspiracy) ends with the following paragraph, which is more like a self-congratulatory mess of word vomit that reeks of the foulest stench of disdain towards the vast bulk of American voters. The following reads,
“That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.”
The article goes on to list the various testimonials given by several conspirators that were willing to come forward, most likely seeking the praise and approval of the limp-wristed soy drinkers who read Time magazine. I’m not going to quote selections from the piece itself, but the reader is more than welcome to peruse the article in question if they desire to understand in detail how American democracy was subverted on November 3rd, 2020.
Incidentally, it is the subject of democracy, specifically in its liberal variant, that is the topic of discussion I wish to turn to next. Throughout the selections that I posted from the above, it is clear that the saccharine, sentimentalist claims that the oligarchs and their co-conspirators used to justify their actions was that they were doing what they did to save the integrity of American “democracy.”
But democracy for whom? Certainly not the 74 million plus voters who cast their ballots for Donald Trump. The crisis of American liberal democracy that was revealed on November 3rd, 2020, represented a departure from how voters and the ruling class related to one another. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that this election, aside from the election of 2016, was really one of the only few elections that really mattered in a metapolitical sense.
I’m not being hyperbolic here. We need to understand that, through Trump, the populist impulse in the American working classes authentically had a chance to express itself, which it hadn’t been able to do so in living memory. The elections of the past, at least going back to Eisenhower, but really beginning with the early to mid-nineties, only represented a conversation between American liberalism with itself.
Populism of any color or stripe was out of the question, as the memory of the events Second World War had caused Americans to link any form of social nationalism, of the kind of Long and Coughlin, with the fascist creep. Socialism, too, was inconceivable, even in its more tame and democratic form, as the Soviet Union still waxed ascendant and it was up to Americans (God’s own people, after the Jews, of course) to handily defeat the Red menace.
From Nixon and Kennedy, to Bush and Gore, American democracy, if you can call it that, has been a monologue between the center-left and center-right aspects of liberalism. While nowhere as radical as his detractors (as well as some of his supporters) made it out to be, Trump’s populism was at least a breath of fresh air in a national conversation in which the majority of Americans weren’t allowed to participate in.
Looking ahead, we need to be careful about the word “democracy” and its relationship to liberalism. Again, we need to ask ourselves the question: democracy for whom? As clearly the powers that be have no intention of opening the conversation of who gets represented in this democracy to dissenting views that fall outside of liberalism.
And if we are to be serious about this idea, that democracy, as we understand it, only exists to perpetuate the dualistic binary of neoliberalism/neoconservatism, then we must ultimately arrive at the conclusion that democracy, in its liberal democratic form, can no longer be used as an arbiter for determining political legitimacy.
Political Sedevacantism
As you’re already aware, the title for this piece is “Political Sedevacantism.” Now, the term sedevacantism is something that a Roman Catholic reader of this diatribe might likely be familiar with. For non-Catholics such as myself who aren’t in the know, the term sedevacantism is taken from the Latin words sede vacante which roughly means “the chair [of Saint Peter] is vacant.”
This position is held by some Traditionalist Catholics as a reaction to the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, particularly regarding its having done away with the Latin Mass in favor of the vernacular. Overall, sedevacantists make up a small minority of practicing Catholics and their influence within the Roman Church is incredibly negligible. Still, in Radical Traditionalist circles, sedevacantists can be found in greater numbers than where they would otherwise have been underrepresented.
But the point of this article isn’t to dive into the labyrinthine (I would almost say Talmudic) theological dogmas and esoteric pronouncements of the Roman Church, but to get the heart of what essentially constitutes political legitimacy in the truest, most meaning and authentic way possible.
I have already stressed that, in my opinion, which should also be yours, the current administration—and I extend this anathema to any administration that comes after it—of the United States Federal Empire is illegitimate, and that any executive order that it issues, any bill that it signs into law, and any officials that it appoints are equally as illegitimate and therefore invalid.
Now, don’t think I’ve lost my marbles and become something like a sovereign citizen. I’m not encouraging anyone to stop paying their taxes, occupy Federal buildings or otherwise engage in openly seditious behavior. I’m not stupid. For one, the United States Federal government still commands the largest military and holds the second largest nuclear arsenal on earth. A band of wignats seeking to kick off “the Boogaloo” on a nationwide scale would get absolutely crushed into fine powder if they went up against the system guns blazing.
What I am saying is that while the Federal law of the United States might still be both, de facto and de jure, the law of the land, it has ceased to be so sacramentally. Just as the rites and sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church might be invalid to the mind of a self-professed sedevacantist, he may still participate within the religious life of the Church because various dioceses and ministries offer access to them. In the same way, whatever protection, both legal and material, that participating within the civic life of the Federal Empire may offer the dissident, we should never lose site of the fact that we are an occupied people.
Recently, as of May 2021, tensions between the State of Israel and Hamas have escalated following the long-running disputes of the land of Sheik Jarrah, a predominately Palestinian neighborhood which has succumbed to both gentrification and displacement of the Palestinian Arabs on the part of the Israelis, as the Israeli legal system continues to allow ethnic Jews to settle and take up residence there. Predictably, this led to violence between both sides and rocket volleys were exchanged between both the IDF and Hamas.
The reason why I bring up this anecdote from current events is to stress the point that, just like the Palestinian people, if you belong to or identify with the historic American nation and its history, then the system that is in power does not represent you, your family, or your people. Just like the people of Gaza and the West Bank, you are the subject of an occupying power and the laws that are on the books, the high courts of the land, and the public officials and civil authorities of the ruling regime exist to continue to displace, humiliate and neuter you.
Political Sedevacantism isn’t about going “innawoods” and living in a log cabin with your trad wife and collection of semi-automatic rifles. The events at Ruby Ridge and Waco back in the nineties have already put a damper on any idea of living any kind of eco-fascist wet dream.
Rather, what I am trying to stress is that the point of political sedevacantism is about instilling a new kind of political consciousness; a new form consciousness that leads us to see the unjust, lawless nature of the system of Federal tyranny that we are currently living under. Such a mindset, I would hope, would allow for free-thinking people, individuals who desire to pursue alternate lifestyles or seek to form intentional communities both separate and parallel to life in Federal America, as well as all manner of political dissidents who want to see the end of systematic oppression for all the tribes and peoples living with the Empire, which might pave the way for a liberation, one that is first an inward liberation, eventually leading toward an outward liberation in which authentic communities, organized by organic unity, might find a way to genuinely express themselves.
I think it is fair that it bears repeating that this particular subject has been, more or less, a topic I have visited in the last several articles that I have written. At this point I probably sound like something of a broken record for those who frequently read what I have published. This is because I am adamant about paving the way for a future that is post-collapse, post-American and post-Postmodern. It is in this hypothetical future that I have set my sites on that I believe true freedom lies: a freedom for every tribe, people and kindred to be able to pursue their own destiny, free from the race-hatred and ethnic conflicts that arise from the forced diversity of having to live cheek and jowl next to racial (or even ideological) aliens whom you have nothing in common with.
In this article, however, I want to take this oft covered subject towards a reasonable conclusion—until such a time that it seems reasonable to revisit it. To do this, I am going to have go back to the question political legitimacy, and even if liberal democratic regimes can be considered at all legitimate in the first place, as well as put forward a few preliminary ideas of what I believe a post-American, post-Postmodern nation-state might indeed look after the convergence of catastrophes looming over our heads has finally come to pass.
Aristocracy, Democracy, Representationalism
I want to begin this section by stating outright where my biases lie. I want to say definitively and emphatically that I am not, nor have I ever been, a believer in democracy, and that I have been something of a monarchist for the entirety of my adult life.
In my opinion, monarchy specifically, but aristocracy more generally, represents the best possible system for social stability, cultural advancement and for the maintaining of a civilized society, and that this is well attested to by the historical record given the centuries long periods of stability enjoyed by various kingdoms throughout history. Democracy, on the other hand, represents the worst possible political system that appeals to the worst possible impulses and inclinations of human beings outside of Communism itself.
In an aristocracy, there are persons whose titles, positions, property, or lack thereof, are respected and confer a degree of dignity upon the human being given his or her place in an organic hierarchy. In a democracy, there are only individuals or worse, an amorphous mass of human resources whose desires, dispositions, irrational impulses, and appetites are appealed to by sycophant politicians and predatory capitalists to be used as voting blocs, labor and consumer capital and exploited for material gain.
I’m not speaking from the position of a mere reactionary, a romantic or a sentimentalist who merely wants to “return to tradition.” Especially since what constitutes authentic Tradition is completely lost even on most self-professed traditionalist conservatives, who themselves seem to be mere nostalgists longing for a return to a Norman Rockwell picturesque 1950s America which, far from being an example of a society animated by a living Tradition, represents a single moment in time where being able to live a petit-bourgeoise lifestyle was openly accessible to the vast majority of Americans before neoliberal capitalism assumed its more insidious international and “woke” aspects.
Nearly everyone on the Dissident Right understands what I am getting at. My aim, however in this case, is directed towards making an appeal towards our Metamodern and Integral theorist friends who can be found sitting comfortably in the lower quadrants in the political compass, both in the Libertarian Left and Right, respectably.
Dissident Rightists and Radical Traditionalists are probably confused why I am making such an appeal towards those whom, for starters, they themselves have likely never heard of or would even identify with their ideas, and why it wouldn’t just be easier to make an out an out case for either monarchy, one the one hand, or perhaps for fascism on the other.
We need to begin with the realization that the majority of people living under a system liberal or social democracy take it for granted that such a system has only existed for roughly three-hundred years, and that it is unimaginable for the majority of these people that anybody living within a democratic republic would even make a case for returning to a system of monarchism. To such people, I must sound like I’m making a case for rain dances or the ritual sacrifice of virgins. After all, isn’t having a monarch indistinguishable from a dictatorship? To which, my answer is an emphatic: No!
Democracy and dictatorship have more in common with one another than either of them does with aristocratic forms of government. The reason why is both democracy and dictatorships are mass systems; namely, they both rely on popular sentiment to exist, a kind will of the people or national spirit that gives rise to forms of collectivism and leads to the worst excesses of State-centralization. In both systems, everyone is conceived as an individual who himself is part of a greater collective: the nation, the proletariat, the people.
This is because ideologies such as liberal democracy, Marxian and democratic socialism, and every expression of anarchism are fundamentally demotic ways of thinking, which is to say they appeal to the demos, the “people” as it is conceived in an abstract, plebian and communalistic sense which, in extreme examples, tends to resemble a kind of political totemism.
It is from this environment which dictatorship arises. Democracy, or rather demotic systems, whether they be liberal, socialist or anarchistic, create tension within the various nation-states where these tendencies and ideological doctrines tend to flourish by undermining the unity of those societies through political agitation, class warfare, bourgeoise party politics—which themselves take the form of ideological civil wars—and other various forms of subversion. A dictator only arises only when the tension between the human mass has become irreconcilable, which was exactly what happened leading up to the social nationalist and Bolshevik revolutions during the inter-war period.
For example, those fascist dictatorships that did not align with the Axis powers but remained neutral, such as Salazar’s Portugal and Franco’s Spain, only remained dictatorships for the duration of their founder’s lives, once the threat of Bolshevik subversion had been dealt with, both of those state’s transitioned back into either republicanism or constitutional monarchy, respectively, after their dictators' deaths. Incidentally, it is for this reason why I reject fascism as a long-term solution to our problems, as it represents a mere reaction against the worst excesses of subversion, not a permanent solution to it.
Dictatorships, historically, represent a temporary and limited response to times of political crisis, but this can vary depending on whether the society itself exists in a state of perpetual political turmoil, like many of the states of Sub-Saharan Africa. But in every case, an all-pervading atmosphere of demoticism must already be present. Let us recall that no tyranny in the ancient Greek Cities could exist without first the growth of democracy and the decline of the aristocratic sentiment in the Greek world.
What then is the solution? Is it merely to go back to a system of monarchism complete with it with titles, fiefs, noble lineages, and ceremonies? In my mind, such an option is no longer possible. I know certainly well that a true “reaction” or counter-revolution against the myriad forms of global subversion which had their genesis, in ovo, of Protomodernity is outside the realm of possibility, at least in this stage of the game.
The last true Christian monarchies died in the ruinous fires of the World War I. Since then, it is incredibly naïve to assume that any true monarchy such as Tsarist Russia, the Kaiserreich or the Austro-Hungarian Empire will ever experience a kind of political revival. To be honest, the future of toothless monarchies where the sovereigns in question exist as mere head figures, like those Windsor England or the rest of northwestern Europe, I believe is itself in question.
So, if modern liberal democracy isn’t the answer and neither is monarchy, what then is?
First, we need to once again ask the all-important question that underlies the failings of both liberal, conservative, and socialist democracy: democracy for whom? This whom is precisely what we need to focus on, as the question of “whom” implies a limited number of people who are actually, ipso facto, allowed to participate fully within the civic life of the State and enjoy the rights, honors and privileges that belong to those who are involved in the political decision-making process.
I may have been critical of democracy for the entirety of this piece, but in all actuality, my criticisms have only really been leveled against democracy as it appears in its liberal and socialist forms. Going back to the example of ancient Greece, we see in Athens, the birthplace of Western democracy, a very different kind of democracy being practiced.
It’s no secret that in Athens, women, slaves, freedmen and foreigners were forbidden to participate in the democratic process and political representation was only limited to adult male citizens who had completed their term of military training. Despite being the literal birthplace of democracy, can such a system of exclusionism really be considered a true expression of “democracy” to the mind of a postmodern observer? The answer, if we’re being completely honest, is no.
Although not the original founders of demokratia, the Athenians were the first to famously institute the system of democracy on such a sophisticated and comprehensive scale. And indeed, the Athenian constitution went through numerous revisions during the development of the democratic process in Athens.
Regardless, even the Athenians knew where to draw the line when it came to exactly who could participate in the political process. This is why political participation was not extended to anyone outside of the hoplite class of citizen-soldiers; women, slaves, bondsmen and metics were simply not eligible to own property or required to serve in this civil militias of the city of Athens. To the mind of an Athenian, and to a greater extent all Hellenes, to be a citizen meant that one needed to be a property owner and to be able serve one’s polis during times of war, something that none of the aforementioned classes of non-citizens were required, or even expected to do.
Historically, property ownership and military service are the two pillars on which one’s basis as a citizen rested upon. While not nearly as analogous as those examples taken from antiquity, this is more or less the same reason why access to private property and military service was the unique prerogative of the nobility and aristocratic classes of feudal Europe. No serf or peasant was eligible or required to serve as a knight, because one’s position within the feudal system conferred what degree of responsibility one was expected to possess. The higher you were in the hierarchy, the greater your privileges mirrored your duties and your expectations to your liege lord.
The same can be said about democracy in ancient Athens. In this case, the demos did not refer to inchoate mass of bodies who were merely private individuals, producers, consumers, but an order of men who were expected to participate in the body politic of the city of Athens as well as serve her during times of war. In fact, great contempt was directed towards the idiotes, the private citizens who refused to participate in political life, and to this day the word “idiot” has passed into our vernacular from our ancient past.
But wait, a discerning reader might object, isn’t limiting people's voices by drawing a line on who gets a bigger say in the political process exactly what we have now? “After all, Lukas,” says the objecting reader. “You yourself frequently describe the liberal democracy we have in the United States as being a corporate oligarchy.”
And you would be correct, my good reader. Indeed, I do. But for entirely different reasons.
If you’ve went through a social studies class in the American public-school system, you probably remember your teacher contrasting “democratic” Athens with “oligarchic” Sparta. I’m not sure if this is still the case, I haven’t been in a classroom setting for years now, but I think this comparison doesn’t do Sparta any justice whatsoever.
After all, was Sparta any less “democratic” than its contemporary Athens? Both systems used by each of these city-states was exclusive to property owning men (although in Sparta, property was collectively owned) and barred women, slaves, and outsiders from participation within the political life of the State. Perhaps our prejudice towards Sparta is that they practiced an early form of National Socialism which stressed a eugenic component towards its own unique form of statism. That, and that the oppression of the helots, who existed as hereditary thralls, was far more brutal and systematic than any other contemporary form of slavery in ancient Greece.
In both instances, citizenship was uniquely held by adult men who were eligible for military service, as was the norm for Greek cities that practiced a Hellenic form of democracy. In Sparta, there was a diarchy of two kings who existed to serve as a kind executive “check and balance” system supported by a council of elders (the Gerousia) and a popularly elected assembly. Aside from the aspect of dual kingship, Spartan “democracy” seems little to no different than the other forms of democracy practiced throughout ancient Greece.
I guess what you could say is that I am advocating for is a kind of limited democracy, or put more succinctly, a return to the classical ideals associated with pre-modern, aristocratic republicanism.
Such forms of republicanism were not entirely unknown in the ancient world and the republican virtues of the old Roman Republic, and the Lycian federation would go onto to have a profound impact on the political thought of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Indeed, the Framers of the United States constitution were insistent that the new State they were seeking to establish would henceforth be a republic, not a democracy, which to them they equated with little more than mob rule.
And mob rule this country has certainly descended into. While political suffrage has been granted to more ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic groups than ever before in this nation’s history, can we say that the outcome of our elections, or the quality of our elected officials is better in any meaningful sense? The honest answer, to any thinking person, is absolutely not.
In fact, we need to ask ourselves why it is even desirable in the first place to extend voting rights to as many groups and individuals as possible. Why is this a good thing? How is this not anything else than a recipe for disaster? Because it means more “marginalized” groups and communities can “have their voices heard?” Oh please, spare me.
The more people you invite to participate in the political process, the worse the quality of your pool of participants in your democracy (or republic) becomes. Just as an example, a 2017 study found that nearly ten percent of American adults believed that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. That number represents millions of people; people whose vote counts the same as any well-educated, informed tax-paying citizen.
Obviously, I would say that something is amiss here, but this represents the end goal of both liberal and socialist representative democracy—reduce every election to a show a of hands. And indeed, it doesn’t matter whether those hands belong to a small business owner, a salaryman, a construction worker, or a teal-haired, non-binary software programmer or childless couple in their early thirties acting as surrogate parents to their “fur babies.” To a democrat, the only thing that matters is appealing to the lowest common denominator, the very antithesis to an aristocratic way of thinking.
Here is what I am saying: that we at least be honest that a government by the aristos is always better than one by the demos, and that any true representative system should at least be serious enough to insist upon its own existence by ensuring the worst possible of all human material is excluded from the parking of its ass on the judgement-seat of political life.
However, I am not as optimistic to believe that a true aristocracy, enlightened or otherwise, has any real chance on being able to assert itself and manage to stand apart from the throngs of human bodies and cacophony of voices which continue to march, in tandem, like some kind of distorted phalanx, advocating, as one hive-mind, for all manner of subversion. At this stage of modernity, we must admit the rot is just too deep.
However, this doesn’t mean that things as they are will always remain the same, even now the seeds of a true restoration, not merely a “reaction” or a counter-revolution against global subversion, are germinating in the blood-drenched, spiritually fertile soil of the lands of West. Across the Western world, we are beginning to see an open and hostile contempt for liberal democracy, and a readiness for a new future of modernity that is no longer bound by the rationalistic materialism of the Enlightenment and its successor projects.
For what it is worth, it is my opinion that what is required is a new understanding of the science of the State, not a state merely as policeman or nightwatchman, as a regulator of the market or a micromanager of a country, but an understanding of the State as the vehicle for the manifestation of power on the part of a people in charge of its own destiny.
Here, once again, we return to the problematic word demos and everything that it implies. A people must fundamentally be able to assert itself as political force, those that do not are destined for vassalage, suzerainty, and every form of servitude conceivable. This presupposes the existence of hierarchy, social stratification, the distinction between leaders and led.
Even in democratic republics there exist the need for hierarchies. I am saying nothing radical in the admission of this. But by hierarchy we do not mean, as Hanzi Freinacht has suggested, a new kind of urbanite class of cosmopolitans made up of “hippies, hackers and hipsters,” leading the way in promoting a Metamodern form of social consciousness, but an order of men and women whose word and deeds command authority.
We must return to the old adage which says that: “When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you’re using force […] The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.” Just as in our own democracies we give up part of our authority as civilians and entrust our peace officers and armed forces to execute violence on our behalf, we must insist that it is not within the purview of every member of a civil society to execute political force (through vote casting) in order to maintain the res publica of the State.
We must be bold enough to imagine a future of democracy without liberalism, and new kind of State that embodies the Greek concept of politeia for our post-Postmodern times. In addition to moving towards a new science of the State, this also requires us to conceive of a new understanding of the citizen and his or her role within the State. By citizen, I do not mean the citoyen of the liberal or civic nationalist variety of Jacobin France, but of the polites of Classical antiquity.
We must acknowledge that the foundations on which the presupposition of our concept of the State rests upon is the existence of the political impulse itself. This is a fact of human activity that cannot be escaped from, try as we might to run away from it into the comforting lies of a paleolibertarian vision of the world made up of “a thousand Lichtensteins” or the Metamodern fantasy of an eco-anarchist confederation founded on social psychology. It is politics, which is to say, activity in relationship to power, upon which the reality of human society is grounded upon. Anything else is a deviation from this truth, the lingering ghosts of Enlightenment era individualism and the myth of the social contract.
This is not an advocation for the enthronement of some despotic Hobbean leviathan, lording over hapless subjects to prevent them from falling into degeneracy and vice. In fact, what I am getting at is nothing novel, but merely a revisitation of our Classical past and the genius of our Hellenic forebears. In modern times, I find a forerunner in Friedrich Nietzsche, that hater of Plato and lover of the pre-Socratics, whose “aristocratic radicalism” was itself testified to in the myriad of lectures given by his correspondent, the Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes.
Potential detractors of what I am proposing will doubtlessly say that the model I am putting forward is authoritarian, oligarchical, “collectivist,” and quasi-fascistic. They might very well be right, but I am not concerned with meaningless labels; what I am concerned with is a potential form of illiberal democracy that can respond to the challenges we in the 21st century will be facing. Concepts such as “good and bad” are ethical judgements, not political ones. Likewise, notions of whether the State I have in mind will seek to promote “the beautiful” or groom a person to be an outstanding member of civilized society belong to the aesthetic and the psycho-sociological domains. Neither of them has anything to do with politics or political organization.
If I am being too “sociological” in my assumptions, and not inclined enough towards ethics, aesthetics, psychology or the market, it is because the situation of our times is pressing enough to where I personally do not feel like I can entertain such lackadaisical notions about other spheres of thought and human activity which lie outside the political realm and, as such, have little to no place in a discussion about political science.
In conclusion, the political sedevacatism that I am proposing invites us to develop new forms of political consciousness. I intentionally say consciousness and not activism. Truthfully, we have had enough activism in our times, both from the Left and what from little defenses the Right has been able to muster against it. It is no longer a matter of “standing against” this or that issue, the time has come to stand apart from contemporary political life altogether.
Rallies, marches, and demonstrations will do us no good if the human material we must work with is less than able to establish a firm foundation on which a new vision of political life can begin to be erected. Afterall, no one decides to build a tower without first having counted the cost. Likewise, we cannot lay the potential groundwork for a new vision of the State without first having measured the human component on which it will be established.
Property ownership, duty, obedience to righteous authority and the cultivation of inner virtue—these are the characteristics which will be found in the new citizen class of the Metapoliteiakón—the nation-state of the Metamodern era. Before the laws of a city, a province, or of an entire government are laid down, those who make them must have within themselves an inner law which is more unshakeable and enduring than the laws of Draco, Solon, Lycurgus or the Framers of the Constitution.
The success or failure of any commonwealth and rests solely upon the quality of its citizens. Any State founded upon the principles of representative government will eventually have to come to terms with the fact that unity can only exist within hierarchy, or else be doomed to degenerate into either a state of anarchism or tyranny. Education alone is not enough to ensure a well-informed electorate of citizens. You can put a child through the public-school system, but you cannot teach him to think for himself. Something else must be required.
This something is the restoration of aristocracy as a bulwark against the worst excesses and extremes which bubble up from the mob mentality and the demotic impulse. We must brazenly and unashamedly state that some voices matter more than others, and that any representative system that allows for the voting rights of millions of unthinking majoritarians, fed on a diet of corn syrup and carcinogenic cow meat, deserves the uncaring overlords that such a system inevitably produces.
An apocryphal story from colonial America tells of how Benjamin Franklin, after leaving the Constitutional Convention, was approached by a crowd who asked him what sort of government the delegates had established. Franklin’s response, according to the story, was “A republic, if you can keep it.” Indeed. What is needed is a true return the origins of classical republicanism and the civic virtues that citizenship conveys. A republic of made up of citizens, not taxpayers, must be the starting of any new post-Postmodern science of the State.
