In my last essay I offered my commentary, for what the commentary of a royalist, Tory, Canadian is worth, on what has been happening in the republic on our southern border in the ongoing electoral extravaganza that is this year's presidential election. I opened with a paragraph, explaining, as I usually do when putting my two cents in about such matters, that I have no dog in this race and pointing out why the whole affair confirms my belief in our own institutions. Specifically, I meant the monarchy, obviously. When you fill the office of head-of-state, the person who represents the country as a whole, by popular election, you run the risk of a scenario where factionalism has gotten so extreme that whoever wins, approximately half the country will resent the outcome and refuse to accept it. That is what happened in the last American presidential election, 2016, leading to this year's fiasco. That is one of many reasons to prefer a hereditary head-of-state.
Today I offer something of an addendum to the previous essay. I have often stated in the past that I believe in and support Parliament the institution rather than democracy the ideal. Parliament is a democratic institution, of course, but it is not merely democratic. It is very old, if we include the history of the Westminster Parliament on which ours is modelled. Its antecedents go back at least to the Great Council of the Norman kings and arguably to the Witenagemot of Alfred the Great. These are the ancestors of both Parliament and the Privy Council and the former became recognizable as such shortly after the Magna Carta Libertatum. It became more democratic over time, of course, but its authority, like that of the monarchy in whose name it legislates, is derived from ancient, established, and proven usage, or, to use Edmund Burke's word meaning the same, prescription. I stress this, even though (or especially because) it places me at odds with most of our "Conservative" politicians, and more so the liberals and socialists, all of whom prattle on forever about our "democracy", because prescription confers a stable, secure, authority on a governing institution. Democracy the ideal, can only confer power on a government, and a volatile, unstable, form of power at that. Remember the distinction between authority and power. Authority is the respected right to lead, power is the feared ability to coerce. Authority needs a certain amount of power to back it up at times, but woe to those whose governors have only power and no real authority.
Democracy is specifically the power of numbers. That the power conferred by having numbers behind you does not automatically translate into the just use of that power is an observation that was central to all of Plato and Aristotle's writings about governance. More recently, although it was a couple of centuries back, Alexis de Tocqueville in his commentary on democracy as he had observed it in the American republic, coined the expression the "tyranny of the majority" to warn about the danger of the misuse of democratic power. Those who put together the constitution of the American republic were aware of this problem, which is why they put in features such as the Electoral College, rather than adopting a more simple democracy. In the twentieth century there were those who tried to re-think democratic theory so as to eliminate the problem. One proposal was to replace "majority rules" with "what everyone agrees on rules." How such people failed to see that the potential for totalitarianism, already present in the older Modern ideal of democracy (there is a reason Jean-Jacques Rousseau is called both "the father of modern democracy" and "the father of totalitarianism"), is magnified, not lessened, by this substitution, is beyond me. If democratic legitimacy is conferred by getting everybody to agree rather than a majority vote then those would claim democratic legitimacy for their agendas can tolerate no dissent. Everybody must be forced to agree. Is it not obvious how that has become the attitude of the present, "woke", Left?
Now, let us think about the last American presidential election and the current one.
In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency in the Electoral College. His opponent, Hilary Clinton, had been expected to win. A sizable percentage of those who voted for Donald Trump that year did so, not because they wanted Trump per se, but because they couldn't stand the thought of Hilary Clinton as president. Or, as some wags put it, they figured she had had her two terms as president already and didn't need a third one.
The "woke" Left refused to accept this outcome. Donald Trump, who before running for president was a television celebrity, became first an object of ridicule for progressives in the media, then an object of hatred. Note, incidentally, how the behaviour of the media over the past four years clearly proves what liberals have, until fairly recently, tried to deny - that the mainstream media is overwhelming slanted to the Left. Well over 90 percent of television newsreporting, somewhat less for the print media but still well over fifty percent, dedicated themselves to the destruction and demonization of Donald Trump, his positions, and his supporters. Day in and day out, for four years, there was a constant bombardment from the newsmedia, and not just the American newsmedia, about what a horrible, racist, neo-nazi, bigot and white supremacist Donald Trump was. The violent wing of the Left mobilized and took to rioting, vandalism, and outright assault on Trump supporters, and the media winked at it, if it did not expressly state its approval.
The media has now declared Biden the winner of this year's election. In my opinion they have acted prematurely. Biden's win has not been certified and is being challenged in the courts. Even as the media was declaring for him, the Supreme Court of the United States ordered all of the late Pennsylvania ballots, that is, those received after the cutoff, separated from the others. However, the point I am making does not depend upon who is ultimately and legally declared the winner,
More people turned out this year to vote for Donald Trump than in 2016. More, not less. In 2016 a sizeable section of Trump's votes were really votes against Clinton rather than votes for Trump. That is not the case here. Biden is not the kind of person to inspire either enthusiasm or hatred. Those who came out to support Donald Trump this year - approximately half of the voters, whoever legitimately has the slight marginal lead - did so, because they love their president, in spite of the way he has been demonized for four years. Interestingly, and this is something I will probably have more to say about at a future date, that includes record numbers of black, Hispanic, and Jewish voters. (1) Conversely, apart from his own vote, assuming he remembered to cast one, and those of his immediate family, very few of the votes cast for Biden were cast for Biden per se. I am not referring to all those who rose from the dead to vote, voted twice or more and in states other than their own, or those whose Trump votes may have been switched to Biden votes through some high-tech gizmo. The legitimate votes for Biden were votes against Trump, by people who hate him.
"Love trumps hate", Hilary Clinton said in 2016. The "woke" Left latched on to this as a slogan and have used it ever since, oblivious to the fact that hate better describes the vicious rage that energizes and motivates everything they do than it does the words and behaviour of Trump and his supporters. Does "love", in the ordinary sense of the word, trump "hate" in the ordinary sense of the word? If so, then Donald Trump, who has endured four years of bitter hatred directed against him, only to have a record number of people turn out and vote their love for him, is the moral victor, the person who deserves the victory, even if the number of those voting their hatred of him is slightly higher.
Which is yet another reason for preferring the authority which prescription vests in ancient institutions, whether our own monarchy and Parliament, or those of the 244 year old American republic, over the power of democratic numbers.
(1) This is something the pre-Trump Republicans were trying to achieve for about three decades. Their method involved trying to divest themselves of their image as a "white" party by adopting a moderate version of the "rainbow coalition" policies of the progressive Democrats. It failed. Trump, by contrast, did pretty much the opposite of that. He ran on a platform of stopping the export of jobs, controlling immigration, securing the borders, and supporting law and order, which obviously had a strong appeal to middle and working class, white Americans and which explicitly opposed the anti-white hostility that the Democrats' "rainbow coalition" had evolved into under Obama's presidency, but was not racialist in the way his demonizers absurdly claimed. Lo and behold, it accomplished what the Bushes and Dole and Romney and McCain all failed to do.
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