The #Resistance is Coming

Bureaucrats Fighting in Defense of "Our Democracy"

All over the world the proles are objecting to the policies imposed by their “betters”. They are voting for “populists” and “far right” politicians who say controversial things like “women do not have penises” and “immigration is out of control”.

The fact that these politicians are popular is a sign that “democracy has failed” and so something must be done to restore it and make sure that nothing like this happens again. Furthermore it is critical to maintain the current global peace and booming economy by making sure that no matter what happens these “far right” politicians cannot implement their intended policies, even if they win elections.

Fortunately there are brave public servants who are willing to sacrifice absolutely nothing to ensure that if, by some mischance, these demagogues are elected in sufficient numbers to form governments, they are unable to implement the dastardly policies they campaigned on.

The UK is leading the way and has been ever since the proles had the poor taste to vote for Brexit eight years ago today. Indeed as Matt Ridley explains in the Spectator (archive):

I have now seen how government works close up. Stealthily but steadily, almost all real political power has been stripped from elected councillors, MPs and even ministers over the past two decades by ‘officials’ and handed to ‘experts’ in quangos, nationalised industries, arms-length bodies and courts.

Watch a clip of Yes Minister and it’s like looking at something from the political Cretaceous period, because Humphrey and Hacker were on equal terms. Today, when Hacker suggests a policy, Humphrey reminds him that he has devolved responsibility to the National Paperclips Authority, or it’s not within his power, or judicial review will stop it, or it’s against human rights law, or he’s bullying Bernard by asking him to turn up to work.

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This growing democratic deficit is not only a slow-motion coup; it’s surely a big cause of our stagnation. More and more people are drawing salaries for interfering in more and more ways in small matters that affect the freedom of ordinary people. There are few quangos with a vested interest in change. The economy is increasingly run for producers, not consumers.

For example, the sloth-like speed of our planning system is a lucrative symbiosis that rewards local officials, consultants and their lobbyist chums while its barriers to entry suit the developers just fine. The planning system fattens inexorably, and is indifferent to criticism because who is in charge? Not the housing minister: he’s just there to take the blame, while being quietly thankful it stops any development in his own constituency.

The UK bureaucratic blob helped shaft Boris Johnson, absolutely shafted Liz Truss, and is almost certainly looking forward to welcoming new Labour ministers into its embrace because hardly any of them have any governing experience and so can be housetrained by their civil servants. Plus there are fewer rebels that object to bureaucratic overreach they way there were in the various Tory governments. One reason why the 15 years of Tory party rule in the UK produced very little was that the civil service blob obstructed their plans.

Ridley puts a lot of the blame for this on Tony Blair and his various governmental reforms but I think that is only partly the case. Blair certainly facilitated things but the fundamental problem is that Pournelle’s Law and Parkinson’s Law of Bureaucracy apply. Those laws mean that absent gross external pressure of a sort that does not exist within a stable democracy the bureaucracy will gradually expand and extend and take on more and more. Worse, and Blair probably did help this, bureaucracies will collaborate with each other to ensure that neither can be reduced or, worse, removed.

The UK has plenty of vestigial constitutional laws that mean that, in theory at least, the king and/or prime minister can remove most of the civil service but short of this kind of nuclear option restructuring the civil service and the “independent” Quangoes is next to impossible because it will potentially violate the EHCR or some other treaty (or both) and lawfare will mean it will be, at best delayed enormously (see Brexit) and quite possibly never achieved.

This doesn’t just apply to government either. As we are seeing in their attacks on Farage and Reform UK, the BBC and much of the rest of the “great and good” are desperate to put an end to this threat to the way the blob likes things. Hence the deliberate smearing of Farage regarding Russia¹ and the BBC dredging though social media posts of Reform UK candidates to find anything that might possibly cause offence. It is, IMHO, a sign of how well Reform UK has prepared for things that they only found eight allegedly problematic posts - and most of them, possibly all of them, appear to cause offence only when selectively quoted out of context.

It’s not just the UK

Then there’s France where, as Frank Furedi explains in his substack², the French establishment is plotting how to ignore the results of the election there in the event that the RN wins (as it almost certainly will).

Groups of civil servants have joined the campaign to undermine the RN should it be elected to form a government. ‘In conscience and responsibility, we will not obey’ the decision of an RN Government, stated a statement by a group of 200 civil servants in France’s education sector. The casual way they expressed their decision to ignore the legitimacy of an elected government highlights the contempt with which they regard the results of a democratic election not to their liking.

It is not impossible that part of Macron’s calculation about the likely results of the election is that he expects the RN to fail in government. Unfortunately he, and the brave public servants who will be doing their best to resist Le Pen & co, may end up providing the RN with more support as it becomes clear that the establishment refuses to work with the democratically elected RN government.

source - Le Monde

Assuming the election produces results not too dissimilar to the European elections, most of the second round elections will be between the RN candidate for the area and someone else. Outside Paris and a few other major cities, it seems likely that the RN candidate will then win in the second round and lead to an RN landslide. It is worth remembering that France has had persistent levels of dissatisfaction for a decade or more now. The Gilets Jaunes protests petered out eventually but while a few of the more outrageous policies were changed, the overall thrust of wokeness, greenery and self-abasement to Islam has not really changed and none of the other political parties even acknowledge the issues let alone propose solutions to it. If RN wins as much as I expect it to then I predict that there will be mass pushback by the state. The traditional time for protests is September and I predict that this September/October they will be more sporty than for a few years now as various lefty groups start to protest and discover that a lot of the security services are sympathetic to RN and not at all sympathetic to the likely objectors.

Then there’s the similar ongoing fight against AfD in Germany as documented periodically at Eugyppius’ substack³. So far AfD are not close to gaining power on their own, but a coalition between them and some part of the CDU/CSU could well do so. The political map of Germany shows that the combination of AfD and CDU/CSU is as dominant as the RN & allies are in France.

source

The mainstream CDU is, I suspect, still scared of being tarnished by associating with AfD, but the CSU (which is in Bavaria only) may not be. An AfD/CSU combination would have a lot of strengths and cause major major conniptions in the German blob of government.

Across the Atlantic

In the US, a similar collaboration is out to hobble the next Trump presidency. They aren’t making any attempt to hide their plans either, instead they talked about them to the NY Slimes (archive):

The group leaders say they learned a lot from 2017 to 2021 about how to run an effective resistance campaign. At the same time, their understanding of what Mr. Trump is capable of expanded after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. They believe that the orbit around Mr. Trump has grown more sophisticated and that a second Trump White House would be both more radical and more effective, especially on core issues like immigration.

“What Trump and his acolytes are running on is an authoritarian playbook,” said Patrick Gaspard, the chief executive of the CAP Action Fund, the political arm of the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress. He added, “So now we have to democracy-proof our actual institutions and the values that we share.”

The Biden administration pushed through a flurry of regulations in the spring, meeting a deadline to ensure that those rules could not be summarily overturned next year under a 1996 law if Mr. Trump wins the election and Republicans take total control of Congress. But administration officials have generally been reluctant to engage in contingency planning, insisting they are confident Mr. Biden will win a second term.

Worse of course is California where the people in charge are making sure that troublesome concepts like direct democracy are stopped⁴:

So a Progressive reform, the great 20th-century transition to direct democracy, is running into a progressive wall of resistance in the 21st century. California Democrats are fighting to limit the likelihood that voters will interfere with their agenda.

People outside California often shrug at the decline of the state, because Californians are just getting what they voted for. But that view misses a bunch of strangeness and ambiguity in a place that has tended to put Democrats in office, then limit their efforts with an ideologically inconsistent hodgepodge of conservative and libertarian ballot measures. The governor and the state legislature just sued to prevent their own voters, the people who sent them to public office, from voting on the new taxes they create. Democrats against direct democracy — a governing class that wants you to give them power, then shut up and go away.

If it succeeds in California (and it looks like it will) then you can assume the elites in other parts of the US will do their best to copy those ideas.

The Solution

There is a solution of course… the Milei chainsaw

Unfortunately the only place in recent years where such a solution has been implemented is Argentina and as I said in a previous post⁵:

However in order to get someone like Milei elected with a clear enough mandate that he can remove most of the bureaucracy you need to be circling the drain in failed state territory. That’s not a place we want the country to be in.

The problem for the Western world is that our rulers seem to be mismanaging things so much that we seem to be heading fast in the direction of collapse. The fact that the rulers object strenuously to democratic norms for changing policies is just one factor that makes collapse more likely than less. I can think of half a dozen ways things could start going horribly wrong in the next few years beginning with Winnie the Flu deciding to try and invade Taiwan [note: it doesn’t matter whether he succeeds or not, the disruption to trade from the war will trash the global economy because despite the wuflu demonstrations, global supply chains are still horribly dependent on Taiwan and West Taiwan for any number of fundamental components].

If and when we get significant collapse, the survivors are likely to have very little patience with the bureaucratic blob that sleep-walked us into it. One suspects that for the short while that they have before being executed, the bureaucrats are going to regret that they were so ruthless in shutting down the opposition

1. I disagree with Farage here a fair bit, but he’s not wrong that the “west” contributed to the problem. In part because they did absolutely nothing in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea and the Donbas. Moreover whether or not he’s right, closing down debate and forbidding alternative points of view is not a sign of rhetorical strength.

2. Civil War In France?

3. EU Parliamentary Elections: Belgian Prime Minister Resigns, Emanuel Macron Dissolves the National Assembly in France and Germany Inches Further Towards Political Crisis

4. Protecting Democracy by Ending It

5.