I was born in the Soviet Union, which means I spent the first part of my life in a country that held elections nobody took seriously. Yes, there were ballots. Yes, there were polling stations. But there was one name on the paper.
Right up to 1989, official turnout routinely ran at around 99%, with roughly the same 99% voting for the Communist bloc.
So, naturally, the assumption I grew up with, and that everyone around me grew up with, was that this was the whole problem. Get real elections and the rest follows. Give people a genuine choice and they will choose well.
Well, in December 1991 the Soviet Union broke apart, and the republics, along with the satellite states, rejected the socialist system. Or so the story goes. In reality, the communist parties mostly just changed their coats.
In Lithuania, the old Communist Party renamed itself the Democratic Labour Party and took parliament in a landslide in 1992. Its leader, the last Party boss in the country, was president by 1993.
In Poland the post-communists took parliament in 1993 and the presidency in 1995, when a minister from the old regime beat Lech Wałęsa, the shipyard electrician who founded Solidarity and brought the whole thing down.
In Hungary the communists rebranded as socialists, won an outright majority in 1994, and had the prime minister by that summer.
My point is that while the system changed, and thank God it did, in many ways the same people were still running the show.
Belarus is probably the best example of that. Alexander Lukashenko, the man who runs the place to this day, also came to power democratically, back in the 90s. He never left, though. He has been in charge for three decades, and today they call him Europe’s last dictator.
Interestingly, Belarus is also the one country that never really bothered to change the furniture. The flag and the coat of arms are Soviet, brought back by referendum in 1995: the same wheat, globe and red star the Byelorussian SSR used, with the hammer and sickle swapped out for an outline of the country. The secret police is still called the KGB, and it still claims Felix Dzerzhinsky as its patron, the man who founded the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police and the outfit that ran the Red Terror.
Which is why the piece below, by my long-time buddy Joel Bowman, stopped me.
“Apologists for modern democracy are quick to denounce those who abuse it,” he writes, “but loathe to ask whence the rogue’s gallery of villains and tyrants drew their power.”
He then runs the list, and it’s longer and worse than you’d like. Not one of these men had to storm anything. They arrived through the ballot box, and nothing about the counting stopped what came next.
Joel writes Notes from the End of the World out of Buenos Aires, which is a useful desk to think about this from. Argentina was one of the richest countries on earth a century ago and voted its way to where it is now, one free and fair election at a time.
I’ve known Joel for years. We met around 2011 in that same Buenos Aires, and, funnily enough, he was one of the guys who first told me about Bitcoin. He’s also one of the few people I read with the rare knack of being funny about serious things without being unserious about them.
His column, which I decided to share with you today, is below. If you like what you read, I encourage you to go and subscribe to Notes from the End of the World. There’s plenty more where this came from.
Regards,
Lau Vegys
Mobjority Rule
By Joel Bowman, editor of Notes from the End of the World
“We are ruled by a King just as other absolute monarchies are. His name is The Majority.”
~ Mark Twain, from his notebooks, 1904
Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires...
What is the “post political era”... and are we on the cusp of a New Dawn?
We left you with this delectable morsel last week, dear reader, at the conclusion of our little Future Uncertain series. (Read Parts I, II and III.)
We’ll come back to that anon. But first, let us ponder for a moment the full and glowing present, pregnant as it is with tomorrow...
Perusing the papers of record, what do we find?
An on again/off again war with Iran... from a president who promised no more costly conflagrations in the Middle East...
A $40T Jenga tower of national debt... listing and leaning in the wind... (The government ran a $432.3 billion deficit in July, the single largest monthly shortfall since March, 2021.)
The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)... a rabble band of soap-dodging midwits who appear to be positively allergic to the lessons of history...
And that’s just in the American Empire... which is arguably fairing better than large swathes of the anglophone world...
All the King’s Mayhem
Take, for example, the (Dis)United Kingdom. Currently trialing its 6th Prime Minister this decade, the politically promiscuous kingdom is increasingly presenting itself as borderline ungovernable. (For comparison, the UK had only 16 PMs in the entire 20th century.)
Immigration... anemic wage growth... rising cost of living... the housing crisis... rampant crime... a dopey king who seems chosen by providence to test the ruin in a realm... many are the woes that plague Ol’ Albion.
Or how about Canada, a nation that almost reached economic parity with its brash southern neighbor back in the 2010s... the Dominion suffered a decade of wage and productivity stagnation, such that it now ranks somewhere between Oklahoma and Arkansas in terms of per capita GDP.
Or Australia, a land which so “abounds in nature’s gifts, of beauty, rich and rare,” that it takes a parliament of uncommon ignorance and ineptitude to ensure the relatively tiny population does not live in the lap of luxury.
Instead, the Lucky Country suffers one of the highest household debt-to-GDP loads in the world (114%) and one of the largest household debt to disposable income figures (195%), key contributing factors in its own, self-inflicted cost of living crisis.
Indeed, looking around him today, the honest voter might well be horrified... mortified... petrified… but should he really be mystefied?
After all, what has modern democracy delivered us, really? Herewith, a quick reminder…
The House that Democracy Built
In July of 1932, the National Socialists Party (aka, the Nazi party) was the largest democratically elected party in Germany. From its fetid depths emerged a man, the likes of whom the world had probably not seen for centuries. You know the guy. Toothbrush mustache. So-so artist. Not a big fan of the Jews.
The embers of that global conflict had barely cooled when, in 1946, Juan Perón won 52% of the popular vote here in Argentina. Upon taking office, the demagogue promptly seized control of the media, harassed, jailed and tortured his political opposition, spent down the country’s foreign-exchange reserves, and consolidated power unto the executive branch.
In 1951, modern democracy spoke in his favor, when a marching majority returned him to office with 62% of the vote.
Next, through the 1960s and ‘70s, the world’s largest democracy saw fit to elect Indira Gandhi, a beastly woman who instituted brutal authoritarian rule, oversaw mass political imprisonment and conducted a vast eugenics program of coercive sterilization for millions of her country’s poorest people.
It is sometimes considered a “triumph of democracy” that she was eventually voted out of office… which is a bit like feting one’s kidnapper for eventually being let out of the basement after 15 years solitary confinement and abuse. “But without my kidnapper, how would I ever be free?”
Call it “Political Stockholm Syndrome” at its most depraved.
Then, in the 1980s, modern democracy gifted Africa’s “bread basket” nation, Zimbabwe, the human parasite that was Robert Mugabe, a ghastly specimen who was elected on a familiar “land redistribution” platform, only to spend the better part of the next four decades compulsorily expropriating the ground beneath the farmer’s feet, then redistributing the nation’s riches unto himself and his gun-toting cronies... all while his people starved en masse in the streets.
Ah, but modern democracy was not done with the weary 20th Century just yet...
The 1990s saw the “free and fair” election of Hugo Chavez who, according to the international election watchdog The Carter Center, received 56% of the popular vote. As many as 2 million political refugees fled Venezuela during Chavez’s iron-fisted regime. He remained until 2013, when he passed into the shades not a moment too soon... reportedly with billions in ill-gotten loot to his name.
Apologists for modern democracy are quick to denounce those who abuse it... but loathe to ask whence the rogue’s gallery of villains and tyrants drew their power. Choose a side, they implore, and choose a bogeyman. Just don’t look under the covers.
Vladimir Putin... Recep Erdoğan... Daniel Ortega... Volodymyr Zelensky... all democratically elected.
Insanity Defined
In the Land of the Free, too, voters toss around such venomous pejoratives as would make most hiphop artists blush, accusing their political opponents of being the devil incarnate... and worse.
Bush... Obama... Trump... Biden... and Trump again... all were burned in effigy... denounced in public... cursed to Hades... and elected by earnest voters.
Disgusted with what they see from their leaders, good citizens weep for their nation, their future, their children’s future. And so, determined not to allow tomorrow to unfold in the image of yesterday, they take a good look in the mirror, roll up their sleeves, spit on their hands, and boldly declare:
“By Jove, next time I shall vote even harder!”
But after a quarter-millennium doing the same thing over and over... and expecting different results... surely there is a “less insane” way to achieve the desired outcome, no?
More on what comes “post politics” in your next Notes From the End of the World...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
Lau’s Note: Interested in more of Joel’s writing? Be sure to head over to Notes from the End of the World.
Joel B got at least one thing very wrong. Indira Gandhi was not voted out of office but assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards. The reasons for this are not all that complex, but her last living son immediately was elevated into her place. He, a former airline pilot, was deemed qualified by his heritage if not experience.