Posted on by Bonald

Each election we are told (from both sides) is the most important ever, the one that will place the nation irrevocably on one path or another. It is a priori unlikely that this should turn out to be actually true this time. Allowing oneself to be convinced of it leads one into an error much worse than just, say, misgauging when the USA did or will cross the demographic tipping point beyond which whites have no recourse from expropriation by the new vindictive majority. One might say that the reactionary web is haunted by a specter–the specter of Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton is said to be a fanatical Leftist who will carry hostility toward Christians and whites far beyond what Mr. Obama has done. Some of the same people who say this will also say, without noticing the contradiction, that she is an infirm old woman who only seems competent to lead the nation because of relentless media duplicity. The trouble with both of these ideas is that they imagine that Mrs. Clinton would actually be leading us, rather than being a figurehead for the permanent government. This would be to imagine that the things conservatives don’t like about liberal governance–the promotion of sexual degeneracy and family dissolution, the demoralization of men, the hostility toward whites, the intrusions against paternal authority, the anticlericalism–are just a matter of policy from the person at top, that the bureaucratic machine itself is a neutral mechanism that can be turned toward any end.

As I wrote at the Orthosphere,

Recall the three categories: correct/incorrect, moral/immoral, friend/enemy. Both nationalist and internationalist liberalism are false. Trump may well be more personally immoral–I don’t know either of them personally well enough to tell. Clinton, though, is a member of the Left-anticlerical party and is therefore an enemy in a way that the candidate of the other, unprincipled party isn’t. Recognizing this carries no personal enmity. No doubt Mrs. Clinton simply accepts the same principles taught in all our schools and newsrooms as self-evident truth, and she acts for what everyone she knows would say is the good. She is being chosen to preside over a system whose character is already fixed, one that can operate without her input by a thousand zealots and career civil servants, that will giver her orders rather than vice versa. If Mrs. Clinton were to die tomorrow and continue to be carried around by her handlers, “Weekend at Bernie’s” style, she would be the perfect liberal president. The nationalists, on the other hand, have put there hopes on Trump actually ruling and not only presiding, ruling against the wishes of the state’s current agents, as if such a thing were done any more, as if any mortal could possibly be up to such a task.

So, yes, Mrs. Clinton is full of evil beliefs, but she’s no extremist, because these evil beliefs are what our ruling class deem common sense.

The United States is ruled from the New York Times, which dictates what belief is acceptable and what belief results in unemployment and ostracism, not the White House. The White House is an intermediary for passing orders from the New York Times to the federal civil service; the figurehead at its top can be bypassed easily if needed. An uncooperative president would likely not win a fight with his indoctrinated servants, who only need hold off till the next election to get a new nominal head. In any case, the New York Times rules America both through government and through corporate employers. Recalcitrant heretics can be released to the private arm no matter who is president.

Well, could we change the country by taking over the New York Times? Not likely (although it’s a better idea than voting). Democracy is rule by media. Liberalism is social control by technocrats, although it tends to understand itself in terms of its critique of all rival systems. The media and civil service can’t decide to drop democracy and liberalism and rule by another ideology. As long as they rule, these ideologies will be in force. They can only be eclipsed by the rise of nondemocratic, nonliberal power structures. Taking over the New York Times would only be a good thing because then we could blow it up, but even that would be only a start.

To the extent that elected officials like President Obama have influence, it is usually to restrain their zealots. For example, Mr. Obama refuses to go along with the folly of suing Saudi Arabia and the Vatican, thus implicitly taking a stand for the validity of the political as opposed to the legal realm, simply because he must deal with political realities. My reading of Mrs. Clinton is that she is also a cautious person, always wary of political realities, and she would only launch a major liberal crusade (domestic or foreign) if the zealots manage to make restraint seem to her more risky.

What does voting say? Above all, it denotes one’s assent to the democratic system. This is something one should not do. Democracy is a bad system of government. It conceals power, making it irresponsible. It lends unlimited power without responsibility to the press. Its elections promote all the worst impulses, the selfishness and self-righteousness, of the populace. It inculcates a false notion of authority as rising from the will of the people rather than descending from the sovereignty of God. Even if one admits the bare fact that democracy can be a legitimate form of government (meaning one must to obey its laws if one is a citizen of such a polity), one can still recognize that it is the worst and most corrupting of legitimate forms, and one should not provide it the ritual affirmation of a vote.

Secondarily, voting denotes one’s endorsement of one or the other candidate. If you wouldn’t say to a friend “Hillary Clinton is an acceptable ruler for my country” or “Donald Trump is an acceptable ruler for my country”, without getting to add any qualifications about “…at least is better than…”, then you shouldn’t say it to the world by voting for either.

What does voting do? Mostly, it adds an aura of legitimacy to the process. Democracy produced a candidate you were willing to say was acceptable to you, so what do you have to complain about? It has a tiny effect on the outcome, which in turn has a small effect on how the country is governed, as I explain above. We conservatives are waiting for a new Augustus to deliver us from democratic degeneracy, and I don’t see how democratic politics is ever going to get us closer to this (except, perhaps, by failing spectacularly). Lastly, it has a small effect on the future of the Republican Party. When the Republican candidate loses an election (as he will in two weeks), the articles always appear claiming that it was the social conservatives’ fault, that if the Republican Party would only ditch conservative Christians, it could win over all those hip abortion-and-sodomy-loving young people who are just waiting to be sold the party’s message of unrestrained capitalism and world policing. This election has, I would say, offered very little to social conservatives, so I feel particularly entitled to let the Republicans go down in flames on their own without having us to blame for once.

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