Support for democracy is falling.

In practice, “democracy” has always been rule by the left. They fix the electorate as needed, by expanding it, “educating” it, applying political repression, or bringing in a new people to replace the old people, so as to ensure a vote for current leftism. Which gets ever lefter. And current leftism has been getting crazier and crazier, faster and faster. Which requires ever more drastic measures to massage the electorate to obtain an acceptable result.

Lockean doctrine implied a democracy of property holders – since the only legitimate activities of the state were to defend the realm and uphold property rights, and allowing non property holders to vote would obviously undermine property rights. In Whig history, the restriction to property holders and the importance of securing property rights gets forgotten.

In Whig history Lockeanism was triumphant in the Glorious revolution, which supposedly established the supremacy of parliament. Perhaps it did, but Lock and his patrons were exiled. If those in power were Lockeans they were forced to remain mighty quiet about it until the early 1800s in order to avoid the wrath of the divine right monarch.

Divine right was still live when George proclaimed that God had appointed him regent. This resulted in Trump/Bush levels of derangement on the left, and the entire Victorian era and the resulting emancipation of women and destruction of marriage can in large part be understood as an effort to retroactively destroy George the Fourth. His filthy slut wife is still today written up as a long suffering saint, and hence all women are saints, and only wives are ever wronged, never husbands. We are still today suffering under a propaganda offensive created to delegitimize George the fourth. The left is still today half cracked on anything King George related. Anything your read in official history related to King George the fourth is half lies and half butthurt madness.

Whigs got the decisive upper hand when King George’s reign ended – and two years after his death instituted lockean democracy limited to property holders. Which property restriction was progressively diluted resulting in the election of lefter and lefter governments, until in 1918 they gave large numbers of non property holders the vote, who promptly proceeded to vote against property rights. So the period where Lock’s doctrines were actually in effect was about fifty two years, from 1832 to 1884. Britain went from kingly and aristocratic rule to democracy of the propertyless with an intervening period of rule by the property owning classes of about fifty to ninety years, from 1832 to 1884, or from 1832 to 1918.

This was classical liberalism, libertarianism, which is a reasonable and sane form of leftism. But it did not come to power by itself, could not come to power by itself. It came to power in coalition with two evil and crazy forms of leftism, hatred of colonialism and the doctrine that women are angels, which doctrine of women as angels was used as a bludgeon against King George and the Aristocracy, and continues to be used as a bludgeon against King George and the Aristocracy, even today.

Pretty soon the evil and crazy left devoured the sane left. Since women are angels there is supposedly no need to coercively enforce chastity on them, and the marital contract only needs to be enforced on men, not women, Enforcing it on women is supposedly just misogyny. The result was what you would expect, a massive wave of female promiscuity and adultery, for example the whore Florence Nightingale and the slut Queen Caroline, and a vast horde of illegitimate children.

A lot of libertarians believe that if we refrain from subsidizing fatherless children, we will not have fatherless children. Victorianism proved this false, with far too many women giving birth in dark alleys in the rain. If you don’t have a welfare state to support fatherless children, you have to do what the Victorians failed to do, forcefully coerce women to behave chastely, subjecting them to the authority of responsible male adults with authority to use corporal punishment. We wound up with a welfare state in large part because the Victorian failure to police female chastity with male authority and physical coercion resulted in an intolerable torrent of bastards.

The United States is a more complicated story, because, until the war of Northern Aggression, things happened state by state. Whigs generally came to power in the American Revolution, but not always and everywhere, so came to power somewhat earlier in America than in Britain. In America, Lockeanism, democracy restricted to property owners, generally had a short life. To get acceptably leftist governments elected, had to enfranchise the masses. And then had to enfranchise even more of the masses. And then enfranchise women. And then had to bring in the third world to replace legacy Americans.

Religions are synthetic tribes. So we are always ruled by a theocracy, defining religions broadly to include quasi religious doctrines like communism and proggism. But proggism, the religion descended from whiggery, itself descended from puritanism, has become ever more evil, ever more insane, and is getting crazier faster and faster. This is inevitable in a state religion that lacks an archbishop and a grand inquisitor to prevent holiness spirals. If adherents of a belief system took power, the way for the next guy to take power is to adhere to that belief system only even more so and with knobs on top.

So the day inexorably comes when proggism shall fall, and with it democracy.

Lockeanism was a pretty good idea – but ultimately it was a mere tool to power, and rapidly got left behind in the holiness spiral. The good ideas got used up, and the ideas remaining are demolition of Chesterton’s fence. When your ideology takes power, it becomes a state religion, and you are going to need an archbishop and a grand inquisitor to prevent your ideology from being devoured by those holier than you are.

You have to have someone whose job it is to stop holiness spirals, to officially discredit those who preach more than the required level of holiness, to ensure that those possessing state power are sufficiently holy but not holier than the King, the Archbishop, and the Grand Inquisitor.