Rome’s popular assemblies – for unlike most poleis, Rome has not one but four major assemblies, three of which matter – are the subject of something of a paradox in Roman political history which has in turn served as the hub around which a fairly active debate on the nature of Roman politics has rotated now for decades. The paradox is this: on the one hand, legally the Roman assemblies are sovereign. Their decisions, once rendered, are final and cannot be overridden by any other part of the res publica. That would seem to make Rome quite democratic, but to the contrary: apart from a few very notable exceptional moments, the assemblies are largely the dog that did not bark. They have vast power, but in part because of the traditional conventions of Roman politics (the mos maiorum, the “customs of the ancestors”) and in part because of how they are structured, the power of the assemblies often sleeps.
And today we’re going to look at why it is that the assemblies never roar quite so often as you’d expect and in the process begin developing the arguments of perhaps the central scholarly debate currently about the Roman Republic: how democratic was it really?
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Part II: Romans, Assemble!”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-07-28.
October 4, 2025
QotD: Roman … democracy?
October 1, 2025
“Sean Fraser, the current minister of justice and attorney general, has made two major mistakes of late”
If you’re at all interested in Canadian affairs, you should subscribe to The Line … even a free subscription will definitely provide you with some excellent non-propagandistic coverage of what is happening in the dysfunctional dominion. For instance, last weekend’s weekly post from the editors included this segment about Sean Fraser, who is perhaps the worst of Mark Carney’s cabinet (and that takes some doing):
Sean Fraser, as Minister of Immigration, Refugees & Citizenship, during day one of Collision 2023 at Enercare Centre in Toronto, Canada.
Photo by Vaughn Ridley via Wikimedia Commons
We at The Line contend that Sean Fraser, the current minister of justice and attorney general, has made two major mistakes of late.
The first was in deciding not to rescind his decision to spend more time with his friends and family when it became clear that Justin Trudeau was no longer an anchor on his electoral chances. After failing to fix Canada’s housing problem and proving himself integral to blowing apart a pan-partisan consensus on immigration that was once the envy of the world, the man had a real opportunity to leave office on a high note. But, no.
Instead, after hitching his bloated baggage to Mark Carney’s trunk, Fraser decided that Canada needed more of him.
And so, as justice minister, instead of addressing petty stuff like, oh, bail reform, or fixing prisons, or getting crime under control, he turned his attention to … Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The notwithstanding clause.
You may recall that Quebec’s contentious Bill 21 — which prohibits public-service employees in positions of authority, and teachers, from wearing religious symbols while on the job — is currently before the Supreme Court of Canada. Despite numerous mixed rulings on the law, Quebec moved forward with its stance on secularism by invoking Section 33, which allows parliaments to temporarily override judicial rulings.
Section 33 was placed in the Charter for precisely this kind of situation; one in which the courts and parliament disagree about governance. As we still live in a democracy, and are still nominally governed by representatives we elect, the clause was always a bit of a compromise gesture intended to preserve parliamentary supremacy after granting the courts broad powers to basically reinterpret law according to an expansive and ever-expanding understanding of both their jurisdiction, and of the concept of “rights” writ large.
Section 33, nonetheless, has maintained a heavy odour about it, which has generally limited its application, especially outside Quebec. Among the Sean Fraser set, and the largely Liberal collection of lawyers who will insist that the Supreme Court isn’t remotely political, and how dare we entertain the thought, Section 33 was only ever intended as a symbolic right.
But as the definitely-not-political Supreme Court has edged ever deeper into the territory of override and governance, so too have provincial parliaments responded with a very not-symbolic application of the clause.
We do think there’s some blame to be placed at everyone’s door, here. But we also never really took much issue with Section 33. That’s because, at heart, we at The Line believe in, well, democracy. We believe that the people we elect should be able to decide our laws; and we believe that while the Supreme Court of Canada serves as an important check on Parliamentary power, that power doesn’t and should never override the will of the people.
And that’s basically where we part ways with Fraser and many of his — dare we say it? — Laurentian Consensus ilk. Because the unstated critique of the use of Section 33 is basically always the same: these people dislike the application of the clause because they think politics is icky, and that politicians fundamentally cannot be trusted.
In other words, these people don’t actually want a democracy.
They want a technocracy. One in which the smartest and ablest individuals (as defined by them, of course) are the ones who actually get to set the rules and guardrails for society writ large. One in which parliament really is as theatrical, symbolic and pointless as it often regards itself.
There’s an obvious illogical inconsistency here — Fraser and his colleagues are politicians. We aren’t sure if this desire to go out and limit the ability of he and his fellow parliamentarians to do the best jobs they can for the citizens reflects mere self-loathing, or a particular brand of Liberal blindspot, one that leads them to believe that they alone among politicians are exempt from anything as crass political considerations and/or motivations. Those moral failures are apparently for the other guys. But in any case, we have an elected official making the case that unelected courts should have the ability to override legislators, and that the legislators should have no recourse. However Fraser rationalizes this to himself, it’s where we are.
We think the people who have issues with Section 33 are generally not being honest with themselves in that regard; we also think that their instinctual aversion to politics (or their exemption of themselves from it) tends to make them naive. If you vest all the real power of governance in a “non-partisan” Supreme Court, what you’ll get is not a dispassionate government, but rather a heavily politicized Supreme Court. We need only look at what has happened in the U.S. over the past 30 years to see how that pans out in the long run.
Look, we at The Line don’t like Bill 21. It’s a bad law. It needlessly tramples on minority rights. But there’s a very obvious way to get that law repealed that doesn’t involve flirting with a full-blown constitutional crisis in the midst of, you know, all of the other crises going on right now.
Elect a government that will repeal that law.
That’s what democracies do.
To me, one of the most puzzling things about the Carney government’s recent actions is the overall incoherence of them. They are going ahead with one of the worst policies inherited from the Trudeau years with the “gun buyback” program that the minister responsible has openly admitted is almost completely a sop to voters in Quebec. Okay, that makes cynical sense as the Liberal vote is about as “efficient” as it possibly can be so losing just a few seats in Quebec would make it impossible for the Liberals to get re-elected. Fine. Scummy as hell, but fine. Yet the challenge to Section 33 is guaranteed to piss off far more Quebec voters — and stir up controversy across the country to boot — and you’re going to stage a pitched battle against pretty much all the provinces before the Supreme Court? Are you sure about that?
September 23, 2025
Voters didn’t have to pay attention, but now they really, really should
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tristin Hopper posted the best explanations I’ve seen for why Canada is in the state it’s in:
Canadians took it for granted that, no matter which party was in government, the country would continue to be stable, predictable, and competent. That’s clearly wrong today, yet the voters haven’t really accepted the new situation yet. Until they start paying attention, things may not improve.
It’s not just Canada, of course, but Canada is further down the road to ruin and thanks to the governments’ conscious actions, it will probably take longer to recover (and I don’t see a Canadian Javier Milei on the horizon, more’s the pity).
At The Freeman, Will Ogilvie Vega de Seoane discusses a related issue with most forms of representative government:
We are stupid. There, I said it. I feel much better now — like I’ve finally opened up in group therapy. PhDs won’t fix it, nor will subscriptions to all the best outlets. As individuals, we simply do not have the capacity to decide what is best in public life. As voters, we don’t usually care what our representatives are up to, nor do we have the faintest idea what the best policy on agriculture, artificial intelligence, or healthcare should look like — and that’s on a good day. But we do think we know. Deep down we think we are sovereign, that democracy is “all of us”, as though the government were some noble embodiment of “the people” rather than just another collection of organized persons with private agendas.
“Aristeides and the citizens” from Plutarch’s lives for boys and girls (1900).
Plutarch tells a story that I have always found marvelous. It’s about Aristeides “the Just”, one of Athens’s heroes in the Persian Wars. The Athenians, weary of kings and tyrants, invented ostracism — a mechanism to expel for ten years any citizen who got too powerful. Each voter would scratch a name onto a shard of pottery, and if more than 6,000 shards had the same name on them, the man was politely asked to take a decade-long sabbatical. Today we’d probably call it “a career break for the common good”.
Anyway, one day a farmer approached Aristeides himself — without realizing who he was — and asked him to write the name “Aristeides” on his shard. Surprised, Aristeides asked if he had ever harmed him. “No,” said the farmer, “nor do I know him by sight. But I am tired of always hearing him called ‘the Just’.” Aristeides, being annoyingly noble, wrote down his own name and handed the shard back. Later, as he left the city in exile, he prayed the opposite prayer of Achilles: that no crisis should come which would force the Athenians to remember him. On LinkedIn, Aristeides might have written: “Currently on a ten-year sabbatical generously sponsored by the people of Athens. Seeking new challenges outside the Attic peninsula #OpenToWork.”
This, in miniature, is how people vote. Not with knowledge, or vision, or even vague coherence — but out of envy, spite, boredom, or some other glorious irrationality. The Athenians had shards; we have hashtags. Instead of ostracism by pottery, we have ostracism by X: one bad joke, one leaked email, and the digital mob sends you packing. Today in Britain, people can even be jailed for their comments on social media. So much for parrhêsia, that old Athenian virtue of speaking frankly to power. We’ve managed to turn it into a crime — and worse, the canceling mob thinks it’s “speaking truth to power” when in fact it is obedience dressed as rebellion.
Modern voters aren’t any better. Some vote because the candidate owns a cute dog. Others because the candidate is endorsed by Taylor Swift. Entire campaigns have been won on promises of free cable, or by a politician smiling the right way on TikTok. In Spain, we even coined a term for it: the Charo. A Charo is usually an old lady with pink hair who parrots whatever our president says. Charos cannot resist the presidential smile. Even when the president contradicts himself, as he normally does, doing the exact opposite of what he promised, they just blush and blink as if to say: “Oh, Pedro, always misbehaving — we love you all the more for it.” They pamper their charming president and dismiss any criticism as fascist slander. Welcome to the Charocracy.
That’s a pitch-perfect description of the typical Liberal voter in Canada. Mark Carney’s Canada is clearly a maple-flavoured Charocracy.
July 19, 2025
No issue is so important that we can’t have a proper debate on the merits
On Substack, Lorenzo Warby refutes the claim that some issues are just too important/too urgent/already decided:
One of the features of the “progressive” politics of the unaccountable classes — those who are just paid for turning up — is the demand that there be “No Debate” about various issues. The most obvious instances are “No Debate” about Trans and “No Debate” about climate change — hence demands that climate scepticism be outlawed.
All such “No Debate” claims are crap. First, any “No Debate” claim is presumptive evidence that what you are pushing is either not true or, slightly more subtly, is a mountain of bullshit erected on a molehill of truth. Robust cases for claims about the world are not afraid of debate.
Various moral urgency claims are mounted to support such “No Debate” claims. How do we determine moral urgency? From the evidence. If the evidence is clear, debate will not threaten that alleged urgency. On the contrary, it will reveal the urgency more clearly.
The underlying philosophical dynamic underlying “No Debate” claims is Critical Constructivism — the claim that reality is socially constructed; that all statements and knowledge claims are, in fact power claims; and that the righteousness of a claim can be determined by their (alleged) effects on (morally differentiated) social groups.
The underlying social dynamic is the use of affirmed beliefs to determine and display righteousness. If affirming X shows one to be one of the righteous, then not believing X shows one to be of the unrighteous. This is typically expressed in various terms of moral abuse (racist, Transphobe, Islamophobe, etc) whose use in media and academe has soared since 2014.
This is not because Western societies have become more bigoted — on any reasonable measure they have become far less so over time — but because the politics of Righteous Affirmed Belief has dramatically surged and so has therefore the stigmatisation of dissent.
To claim that affirming X shows ultimate moral propriety requires stigmatising not-X. For something is morally proper — indeed morally trumping — only if the opposite is morally improper. Thus is moral propriety is enforced by stigmatisation. Hence silence is violence — one must profess righteousness. Hence also words are violence — if affirmation of belief is the ultimate marker of righteousness then expressed disbelief becomes the ultimate marker of abusive malevolence. These dynamics lead to a great deal of preference falsification — people publicly affirming, or at least not opposing, claims that they do not privately believe.
May 24, 2025
German democracy trembles as the extremely extreme extreme right AfD aren’t going to be banned
eugyppius updates us on the continued shaky state of German democracy, as the scary extremely extreme right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party seems to have somehow escaped being banned from participation in politics due to some ridiculous “lack of substantive evidence” excuse:
Last week, a supersecret assessment of Alternative für Deutschland by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) leaked to the press. This document was supposed to prove, in excruciating detail, why the AfD are so evil and so fascist and so Nazi and so Hitler, and in this way make a preliminary case for banning the party. In fact its contents turned out to be such an arrant joke that it sapped all remaining momentum within the German political class to prohibit the AfD. I suspect even the “right-wing extremist” classification of the AfD is now in jeopardy and may well be thrown out by the courts, that is how bad this much-heralded supersecret assessment turned out to be.
It took a few days for the full impact of the report’s idiocy to really sink in. That’s how it is with really stupid things – the incredulity they inspire must first dissipate. Finally, though, on Tuesday of this week, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt announced that the dubious evidence marshaled by the BfV was “not sufficient” to support ban proceedings. Dobrindt also said that the whole debate had become “counterproductive” and that it was time to begin finding ways to “end social polarisation”, whatever that means. Hours later, it emerged that Chancellor Friedrich Merz had ordered the entire CDU leadership never to say another word about banning the AfD. If everyone will just shut up, Merz believes his party can “avoid further debate” and avoid “giving voters the impression that the CDU is aiming to eliminate a rival party” – which is of course exactly what the CDU were hoping to do until the BfV fucked everything up with their retarded 1,108-page collection of dyspeptic Facebook-grade political takes.
There’s still a few scattered calls for ban proceedings coming from the left, but their heart isn’t in it and they don’t matter anyway. Without Union votes, no ban application will ever get to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. Raed Saleh, an extremely obnoxious politician who heads the SPD faction in the Berlin House of Representatives, whined to the press this morning about how “appalling and disgraceful” it is that outlawing the opposition is no longer on the table and that his party is now being asked to “engage in political debate” with the AfD instead. Federal Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig, also of the SPD, likewise fervently hopes that the AfD might still be banned and she thinks the Interior Ministry should spend more time “evaluating” that BfV dumpster-fire assessment. Since Hubig is Justice Minister and not Interior Minister it doesn’t really matter what she thinks the Interior Ministry should be doing. I don’t understand why so many are citing Hubig’s remarks like they mean anything.
The implosion of this ban-the-AfD arc seems like kind of a big deal to me. Since 2021, the party have been “under suspicion” of right-wing extremism, but despite four years of snooping the BfV have been able to come up with nothing that is not some combination of legally irrelevant, harmless, banal, uninteresting, stupid and a complete waste of government resources. At some point, you have to put the question: If the AfD are so evil and so Nazi and so fascist and so Hitler, why can’t anybody, anywhere, adduce any evidence of their evil Nazi Hitler fascism?
May 22, 2025
Trump, “the American Mussolini”, versus ever-so-democratic Mark Carney
In the National Post, John Robson contrasts the authoritarian dictator at the helm of the American ship of state with our peaceful, democratic, and fully accountable to the voters prime minister:
President Donald Trump greets Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney, Tuesday, May 6, 2025, at the West Wing entrance of the White House.
(Official White House Photo by Gabriel B Kotico)
It was the best of budgets, it was the worst of budgets, it was the age of restraint, it was the age of profligacy, it was the epoch of the legislature, it was the epoch of the executive, it was the season of open debate, it was the season of closed doors, it was the spring of Canada, it was the winter of America. Or possibly the other way around.
The confusion arises because as a patriotic Canadian I keep hearing how U.S. President Donald Trump is an American Mussolini who has abolished the last vestiges of the old Republic, so we should drink rye not bourbon or some other decisive action easily performed while sitting down. Yet the news media mysteriously insist that the Bad Orange Man is having trouble getting his budget through some quaint relic called the United States Congress while Green Mark Carney isn’t bothering to get his spending plans rubber-stamped by some quaint relic called the Canadian Parliament. How can it be?
Tuesday’s the Morning newsletter from the New York Times, which is no MAGA outlet, reads: “Speaker Mike Johnson has a math problem. He wants to pass a megabill before Memorial Day to deliver President Trump’s legislative agenda.” But with only three spare votes in the House, “there are way more than three G.O.P. dissenters, and they don’t agree on what the problem is. Some think the cuts to Medicaid are too large. Others think they’re too small. Some want to purge clean-energy tax breaks. Others want to preserve them because their constituents have used them.”
Likewise The Atlantic, part of the thundering herd of independent liberal American minds, says: “The struggle to pass Donald Trump’s second-term agenda in Congress has never been between Republicans and Democrats … it’s been a battle between the House and Senate GOP, between moderates and hard-liners, and, most salient, between Republicans and reality.”
Egad. What manner of rambunctious folly is this? Open debate within the Maximum Leader’s own party? Dictatorship! By contrast here in decorous Canada can someone remind me which inane or malicious measures from former prime minister Justin Trudeau were ever put at risk by the principled courage, truculence or mere pandering even of his NDP coalition non-partners, let alone the trained seals in red?
Periodically one would bark. But which ever bit? To be sure, as the Canadian Press noted on Sunday, “Prime Minister Mark Carney says the Liberal government will present a federal budget in the fall, allowing time for clarity on some key economic and fiscal issues to emerge”. But if there’s going to be a brawl, it will be inside his office, or head, with his finance minister promising to brush aside Parliament with an “economic statement” before Carney overrode him, saying the government would introduce “a much more comprehensive, effective, ambitious, prudent budget in the fall”.
May 17, 2025
German democracy … saved by bureaucratic incompetence?
Checking in to the situation in Germany, it seems that the big secret report compiled by the German spy agency on the extremely extreme extreme right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party is a bit less than what was expected. Okay, a lot less:
In my last post, I wrote that “The campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is not going well“. Today – a mere seventy-two hours later – you could say that the campaign to ban Alternative für Deutschland is all but dead. This is because the people most committed to banning the AfD also happen to be some of the stupidest, most incompetent legal and political operators the world has ever seen. Their incompetence is so enormous that I am for once willing to entertain conspiracy theories as to why they might have undermined their own project. It is that bad.
Two weeks ago, you may remember, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser forced the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to rush their long-planned upgrade of the AfD and declare the party to be a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation. Word spread of a mysterious 1,100-page assessment, full of damning proofs that allegedly supported this upgrade. This document had to be kept secret, Faeser explained in an interview, “… to protect sources and withhold indications of how our findings were obtained”. So espionage, much secret, wow.
The thing was, the anti-AfD dossier could not have been that secret, because somebody (almost certainly, somebody in the Interior Ministry) immediately leaked it to Der Spiegel, whose journalists published various excerpts in an effort to make the case for how evil and fascist and Nazi and Hitler the AfD are. In this way the press could climax repeatedly in a wave of democratic orgasms over the renewed possibility of an AfD ban, even in the absence of the supersecret report.
The media circus dissipated quickly, however. The publicity campaign, the roll-out – a lot of things went wrong, some of them inexplicably wrong. Still, I thought there was a 40% chance that the Bundestag would try to open ban proceedings sometime this year. That, as I said, was on Monday. What happened on Tuesday, is that Cicero, NiUS and Junge Freiheit all received the secret 1,100-page assessment (actually, it contains 1,108 pages) and published it in its entirety. Since Tuesday evening, a great many people have been reading this document, and they have been realising various things.
The first thing they’ve realised, is that it contains hardly anything derived from supersecret spy sources at all. It is little more than a collection of public statements by AfD politicians. Faeser’s sources-and-methods justification for keeping the report hidden was a total lie.
The second thing they’ve realised, is that it is an abomination. The vast majority of material that the BfV have collected is not even suspect. It is a lot of off-colour jokes, memes, but also just banal nothing statements – thousands and thousands and thousands of them, arranged under various hysterical subject headings. Nothing in here is remotely strong enough to support the case for banning the AfD and a lot of it is also very bizarre in terms of argument. Not only have the prospects of an AfD ban all but evaporated, but I think it’s even likely the party will succeed in their present lawsuit and that the administrative court in Cologne will throw out the “right-wing extremist” label.
May 13, 2025
Checking on the parlous state of German democracy this week
First, Sabine Beppler-Spahl points out how difficult it was for the new ruling coalition to get their candidate for Chancellor actually installed:
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, 5 May 2025.
Photo by Sandro Halank for Wikimedia Commons.
The spectacle in the Bundestag this week sent shockwaves through Germany’s political establishment. For the first time in modern German history, a chancellor candidate – Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader Friedrich Merz – failed to get elected by parliament. In the first round of voting, he received just 310 out of 621 votes – six votes short of the necessary majority. A total of 18 members of his own coalition brazenly refused to support him.
A second round of voting was then called and Merz managed to scrape through with 325 votes. But this was a stinging embarrassment for both Merz himself and the new coalition government more broadly. “Never before has there been a political car crash on such a scale”, wrote Berthold Kohler, editor of the conservative FAZ.
In hindsight, Merz’s failure shouldn’t have been such a surprise. From the beginning, the new government was always going to be in for a rough ride. For a start, it is made up of two parties that both received phenomenally bad results in February’s federal elections. The CDU suffered its second-worst result since its founding. Meanwhile, the CDU’s coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD), received its worst result ever.
Worse still, the coalition was losing even more support in the polls in the weeks running up to the chancellor vote. At times, the governing parties barely managed 40 per cent between them. Hermann Binkert, head of the INSA polling institute, described this as a “loss of approval like never before in the period between a federal election and the formation of a new government”.
Many commentators are now questioning whether Merz and his coalition will ever truly recover from this humiliation. The fiasco certainly confirms that Germany is in a deep political crisis, which isn’t going anywhere. It also undermines the smug assertions of Europe’s anti-populist establishment, which has been claiming, against all evidence to the contrary, that German politics is less prone to populist upheavals than those of other Western democracies.
Outside parliamentary machinations, the move to declare the largest opposition party to be a formal threat to German democracy isn’t going smoothly either:
The anti-AfD protest in Essen on Sunday, photographed carefully lest the viewer see how small it was.
On 2 May, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) yielded to intense pressure from their boss, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, and declared Alternative für Deutschland to be a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation“. The media filled with hit pieces and leftoids began a new round of shouting and morally hyperventilating about the evil fascist Nazi Hitler party. I thought we might be seeing the beginning of an earnest campaign to prohibit the AfD and that over the coming weeks the momentum would just build and build.
Instead it’s kind of fizzled out.
One thing that went wrong, was the roll-out. The AfD immediately filed suit with the Cologne Administrative Court to have their extremist status lifted, and the BfV ended up temporarily suspending their assessment for tactical reasons – above all, to avoid a temporary court injunction that the AfD could portray as a victory. I’ve said many times that a lot of the media pressure against the AfD seems to be coordinated by the constitutional protectors themselves. Now that they’re no longer agitating behind the scenes, the steady drumbeat of pearl-clutching news stories has ground to a halt.
The second thing that has gone wrong, is the publicity campaign. You may remember that the constitutional protectors have produced a 1,100-page assessment documenting the right-wing extremism of the AfD. This dossier, however, remains entirely secret, and so journalists have been leaking choice passages from its pages instead. Their leaks strongly suggest that this document is little more than a vast assemblage of public statements by AfD politicians and functionaries that people in the BfV find untoward.
First we had the three leaks in Welt, which I covered in my first post on this topic. These featured people saying such benign things as “There is more to being German than simply holding citizenship papers” and “Failed migration policy and asylum abuse have led to the importation of 100,000 people from deeply backward and misogynistic cultures”.
That did not impress anybody, so Der Spiegel rushed out a new round of leaks. This piece tells us, breathlessly, that “politicians from the party have been ‘continuously’ agitating against refugees and migrants”, that “they have made xenophobic and Islamophobic statements” and that they have an “ethnic-ancestral understanding” of human descent groups that “is not compatible with the free democratic basic order”. They particularly deplore the use of terms like “knife migrants” (“Messermigranten“) which “attribute an ‘ethnocultural propensity for violence to entire groups'”. They say that the party does not consider Germans “with a migrant background from Muslim-influenced countries” to be equal citizens and that the AfD thus “devalues entire population groups in Germany”, violating their human dignity.
May 9, 2025
They keep saying the quiet part out loud – democracy is a threat to the establishment
N.S. Lyons went to Barad-dûr Ottawa earlier this month to speak at the 2025 Civitas Canada Conference, and posted his remarks on his Substack:
The 2022 Freedom Convoy induced a state of panic in the Canadian federal government, yet the elected representatives proved completely unwilling to even talk to anyone from the protests. The government clearly persuaded itself that this was an actual insurrection, and waited for the violence to break out … and there was no violence, other than that provided by the police and a few paid actors.
A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen! It’s a pleasure to visit the North and get a glimpse behind the new Iron Curtain …
As it happens, the official theme of this conference is “Freedom and its Discontents: Liberal Democracy at a Crossroads”. That is a timely theme indeed. Because I think it isn’t too extreme to say that, all around the Western world today, democracy is under assault — even that it risks extinction. It risks extinction because the authorities that run our societies seem to find the practice, values, and very spirit of democracy to be increasingly intolerable.
In France, where the ruling government maintains power despite being the most widely hated in decades, the most popular candidate of the most popular political party has been barred from challenging that government in upcoming elections, on legal grounds that are openly political.
In Romania, when the “wrong” outsider candidate appeared poised to win an election, authorities simply canceled the election outright and then had him arrested, the unelected national security state inventing entirely unsupported excuses about foreign meddling to justify their coup d’état against the democratic process.
In Germany, the state has now begun the process of banning the country’s most popular party, supported by more than a quarter of the voting population, in order to avoid facing any real political opposition. “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary”, is how a former European Commissioner confidently foreshadowed events on live television a few months ago.
One gets the sense that the honest view of our exasperated political elites is as captured in a Bloomberg News headline from last year which read: “2024 is a year of elections, and that’s a threat to democracy”.
In country after country, governments are moving to desperately tighten their grip over the people they rule, sharply curtailing freedom of speech and access to information, and using alleged threats to security and stability to justify granting themselves emergency powers, weaponizing the law, criminalizing dissent, and suppressing any meaningful political opposition.
In the United Kingdom, more than 12,000 people per year (that’s 33 per day on average) — are now arrested for speech- and literal thought-crimes, including silent prayer. UK jails now hold hundreds of political prisoners, more than anywhere else in Europe outside of Russia and Belarus. These are people persecuted for, essentially, voicing dissent over their government’s catastrophic policies. Recently, for instance, a British woman with no criminal history was jailed for more than two years for a single Facebook post criticizing the state’s willful failure to stop illegal migration.
In Brazil, a single Supreme Court judge, in alliance with the country’s leftist president, has effectively established a judicial dictatorship, locking up political rivals by decree, silencing the speech of opposition figures, and utilizing state leverage over the financial system to punish political enemies by banishing them from public economic life.
But of course Brazil’s authorities learned these tactics by observation. Observation of Canada, to be precise, where Justin Trudeau’s government first employed debanking — along with a little brute force — as a tool to crush peaceful protest of his draconian and disastrous pandemic lockdown policies.
Today, the Canadian government’s weaponization of the legal system and public institutions, including state-funded media, to impose a quasi-totalitarian progressive ideological regime, censor and jail dissenters, and effectively transform Canada into a one-party state, has, I’m afraid, won your country a real measure of global infamy. Many Canadians here may not be aware of just how your government appears from the outside, but I’m afraid it’s not a good look at all. Unfortunately I must report that when many of us look at Canada what we see is a global leader in progressive authoritarianism, out-of-control migration, growing anarcho-tyranny, foreign subversion, and ideologically-induced economic stagnation.
But then, what we might realistically call the liberal-authoritarian model is, sadly, the new normal in the West, where many hyphenated liberal-democracies seem to have concluded that they must now begin to cast off the democratic half of that historical compact.
It may seem that this hardening of control is a response to the rise of so-called populism, which has swept the Western world. Certainly many authoritarian measures have been justified, without any sense of irony, as necessary to defend “our democracy” (so-called) against the dissatisfaction of the actual demos. And it’s true that fear of populism — which is really fear of genuine democracy — does seem to consistently provoke a spiral of ham-fisted reactions by our increasingly authoritarian states. But the reality is that populism is itself a reaction, an organic immune response to the particularly unresponsive and anti-democratic new form of governance that has visibly overtaken the West in recent decades.
May 3, 2025
German democracy under threat from extremely extreme extreme right AfD
That, at least is the judgement of the German domestic intelligence agency assigned responsibility for sniffing out threats to German democracy:
This morning, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) officially reclassified Alternative für Deutschland as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organisation. The BfV is Germany’s primary domestic intelligence agency; it is subject to the Ministry of the Interior and tasked, among other things, with policing the democratic respectability of ordinary Germans and their political parties. The upgraded AfD classification is supported by an extensive and totally secret 1,100-page assessment of AfD activities and beliefs, which BfV analysts have been preparing since last year.
Everybody expected the BfV to do this. Leading Social Democrats in particular have been urging the BfV to release their new assessment for months. They see it as a political justification for initiating ban proceedings against the party. As I wrote last week, it is now likely that the new CDU/SPD government, or the new Bundestag, or both, will ask the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe to weigh an AfD prohibition. This new assessment matters mostly because it is the first concrete move in that direction.
The only thing that is really surprising about this news, is the timing: I and everybody else expected the BfV to wait until the CDU and the SPD form a new government and appoint a new Interior Minister. Instead, the sitting Interior Minister Nancy Faeser appears to have forced this assessment through in the final four days of her tenure. This, and not AfD poll numbers (as some have speculated), is the reason this is happening now.
[…]
Among other things, the assessment allegedly cites these extremely right-wing remarks from an 11 August 2024 speech by Hannes Gnauck, who sits on the AfD federal executive committee:
We must also be allowed to decide once again who belongs to this nation and who does not. There is more to being German than simply holding citizenship papers. All of us here in this market square are connected by much more than just a common language. We are connected by an invisible and simply inexplicable bond. Each and every one of you has more in common with me than any Syrian or Afghan, and I don’t have to explain that – it’s simply a law of nature.
The assessment also includes this absolutely extremist 25 August 2024 statement by Dennis Hohloch, an AfD staffer in the Brandenburg state parliament:
Diversity means multiculturalism. And what does multiculturalism mean? Multiculturalism means a loss of tradition, a loss of identity, a loss of homeland, murder, manslaughter, robbery and gang rape.
Finally, the BfV would like us to know that their assessment includes this insanely extreme (and since-deleted) tweet from Martin Reichardt, a Bundestag staffer:
Failed migration policy and asylum abuse have led to the importation of 100,000 people from deeply backward and misogynistic cultures.
Obviously the BfV are leaking their choicest, least arguable, and juiciest bits of evidence – the stuff they think will really turn ordinary Germans against those evil AfD Nazis. I invite you re-read these three passages with that in mind, and then try to imagine for yourself what an absurd cultural and ideological bubble these people must inhabit, to find these remarks scandalous.
April 30, 2025
After the votes were counted
John Carter suggests that votes should be allocated to reflect the costs imposed on the voters by taxation, that is to ensure that those with the most “skin in the game” at least have their votes weighted more than those who pay little or no taxes but can still vote themselves more benefits:
Have you ever noticed how election results are regularly broken down geographically, as well by the demographic categories of age, sex, and – depending on the country – race, yet we almost never see the results separated into taxpayer vs taxeater status?
So anyhow.
For my American readers, in Canadian elections the Liberal Party is denoted by red, as the Devil and Karl Marx intended.
It is absolutely no surprise that Ottawa voted solidly for the Liberal Party of Canada, whose base consists of three primary groups: migrants, public sector workers, and baby boomers, all of whom are regime client groups, and all of whom are tightly packed into the nation’s capital.
Perhaps it’s that it’s tax season and I’m in a grumpy mood because I just got the bad news, but I can’t help but wonder about how electoral politics would change if only taxpayers were allowed to vote. It’s common for “taxpayers” to be used as a synonym for “the voting public”, but this is a bit of linguistic legerdemain which obscures a core dynamic rotting the heart out of every liberal democracy: most of the population are not, in fact, taxpayers. First there are those who don’t earn enough to pay taxes, such as university students; then there are those receiving direct welfare payments of one form or another; then there are public employees, who although they pay tax on paper, are clearly net recipients of government largess since their paychecks come from taxes in the first place.
The most successful parties in country after country are the parties that mobilize client groups by promising to steal money from productive citizens and transfer that wealth to their non-productive clients. This dynamic is baked into the cake of any universal suffrage democracy, which is why Universal Suffrage is a Suicide Pact. Parties need client groups for electoral support; wealth can only be plundered from the productive; therefore the only available relationship is to cultivate non-productive clients.
The problem, of course, is that over time this destroys the economic productivity of the liberal democracy, because the productive groups will become less productive because what’s the point, or they’ll just look for the exits, while the client groups will swell, becoming simultaneously too expensive to maintain and to electorally heavy to dislodge.
I suspect you could fix all of this by simply tying votes to tax receipts, with only those who are net taxpayers being given the franchise in any given election. At a stroke this would disenfranchise the welfare underclass, government bureaucrats, and university students, all of whom should be prohibited from voting as a matter of principle. If you wanted to be really fancy, you could implement a tax-weighted vote: the more taxes you pay, the more your vote counts.
In addition to the salutary effects of reducing the electoral weight of female voters (since men tend to pay more in taxes), weighting votes by tax receipts would lead to a very interesting incentive structure. On the one hand, everyone hates paying taxes, and wants to minimize the taxes they pay; if only taxpayers were voting, this would place a strong downward pressure on taxes and, hence, on the size of government (thus forcing states to find other ways of funding themselves, via e.g. tariffs or service fees). On the other hand, people like to vote, so there would be a strong incentive not to evade taxes. On the gripping hand, since paying more tax means your vote counts for more, there would be a countervailing incentive to pay as much tax as you can afford. One might imagine a state functioning as a sort of de facto oligarchy, with the billionaires happily paying obscene levels of tax in order to gather as much political power to their class as possible, and enforcing their tyranny by voting to keep taxes on everyone else to the absolute bare minimum. This would be a truly dystopian brier patch to be thrown into.
Alas, we do not inhabit such a political experiment. Returning to the ostensible topic of yesterday’s Canadian election, however, it would probably not be an exaggeration to posit that if we did inhabit such a system, Canada’s Conservative Party would have rolled the Liberals in this and, in all likelihood, almost every other election.
That is not, however, what happened.
The high-level outcome is that, after running the country into the ground for the last decade, the Liberal Party has been elected for the fourth consecutive time, with a mandate to complete the project of crashing the plane of Dominion with no survivors. It brings me absolutely no pleasure to report that I predicted the Liberals would win before the election was even called. The Liberals are four seats short of forming a majority in parliament, meaning they cannot quite form a stable government on their own. This is not a problem for the Liberals, however. Despite the glorious collapse of the New Democratic Party – which plummeted from 25 seats in the last federal election to 7 in the current election, by far their lowest in 30 years – the NDP retains just enough seats for them to form a stable coalition government with the Liberals. In other words, the outcome of this election is that Canada will be in essentially the same situation it was in before the election, with the only meaningful difference being that the Liberals have a few more seats than they did before.
April 24, 2025
Saving German democracy by banning the most popular party
As eugyppius frequently points out, German democracy is at risk of being taken over by mere voters, so the great and the good of the nation seem to be leaning toward making the Alternative für Deutschland only the third political party to be banned in modern German history:
I fear they will try to ban Alternative für Deutschland.
I spent many months last year saying this would not happen, and my reasons were fourfold:
1) Key figures in the major parties, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the SPD and Friedrich Merz of the CDU, opposed banning the AfD.
2) Marco Wanderwitz’s much-publicised initiative to ban the AfD was therefore a doomed movement among Bundestag backbenchers, overhyped by idiotic German journalists. As I predicted, it went nowhere.
3) Throughout much of 2024, the AfD were strong enough to be a problem, but not quite strong enough to cause prohibitive difficulties for the political cartel that runs the Federal Republic. They persisted in a sweet spot that ruined the risk-reward calculus of trying to ban them.
4) Through last summer, the NGO-coordinated and government-led “fight against the right” succeeded in seriously damaging AfD support. If the AfD could be kept in bounds via propaganda, a ban seemed additionally unlikely.
None of these considerations apply anymore: Support for banning the AfD is building within both the SPD and the CDU. Much more serious efforts to the ban the party are on the horizon; the Wanderwitz clownshow is yesterday’s foible. The AfD seem increasingly immune to state media propaganda and leftist political agitation.
More important than all of that, however, is the fact that the CDU have proven vastly more incompetent than I or anybody else anticipated. Through their own failures they are making the AfD into the strongest political party of the Federal Republic. Soon they will be in a position to threaten outright majorities in the East. This was going to happen sooner or later, but the CDU have accelerated the process massively. Things that should’ve taken years are now taking months, and that is very dangerous. It is far from inconceivable that the AfD will end up with a Minister President (i.e., a governor) in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern or Sachsen-Anhalt following the state elections in 2026. And however that turns out, the 2029 federal elections will be a nightmare. By then the AfD will be so strong that all other parties will have to form the world’s shittiest of shit coalitions to keep them out of power.
CDU General Secretary Carsten Linnemann warned in January that “if we in the democratic middle don’t stop illegal migration, the fringes will become so strong in the next election that they will be able to govern alone“. Well, it turns out that the “parliamentary middle” have no interest in stopping mass migration, not even to ensure their own political survival. Men like Friedrich Merz and Lars Klingbeil are like automata, locked via institutional imponderables on a predetermined course of national and political self-destruction. Unable to change their politics, they will try instead to remove the AfD from the map. If you can just ban the opposition you don’t have to solve problems, you don’t have to win arguments and you don’t have to persuade voters of anything.
Last October, Merz said he would be open to banning the AfD, if and when the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) upgrades their political status. Later thinly sourced reports have Merz emphasising again at a closed CDU meeting that he would be “open” to banning the AfD, but that this would have to wait until “just after” the February elections.
At issue is a long-awaited report on the political crimes of the AfD from the domestic intelligence agents of the BfV. As of now, the BfV classifies the AfD as being “under suspicion of right-wing extremism”. This has been the case since 2021, and the classification has allowed the BfV to use their wealth of spy agency tactics against the party. They tap their phones, read their emails and send their agents to infiltrate AfD ranks.
April 23, 2025
Germany’s extremely extreme extreme right AfD now the most popular party
Friedrich Merz, the leader of the “main” right-wing party in the Bundesrat seems to have a problem with math, as he keeps promising to cut the AfD support in half, yet ends up doubling it:
Many years ago – in 2018, to be precise – a man named Friedrich Merz was in the running to succeed Merkel as chairman of the CDU.
Merz said many interesting things back then. On 14 November 2018, for example, he gave an interview to BILD, in which he denounced Alternative für Deutschland as a party “that does not distance itself from the right” and said that “this makes them unsuitable for any coalition”. Merz pledged to win back all the CDU voters who had defected to the AfD over the years. “In the short term,” he said, “it will probably be impossible to get rid of the AfD,” but if he were chosen to succeed Merkel, he pledged that he could “cut their support in half“.
The very next day he tweeted the exact same thing – promising to lead the CDU back to 40% in the polls and to “halve the AfD“.
At a regional CDU conference around this time, Merz yet again promised to “cut the AfD in half,” adding that “this really is possible”. If I looked harder, I could probably find even more examples of Merz repeating this exact same promise. He made it such a core component of his campaign for the party chairmanship that the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung observed in retrospect: “The whole idea of Merz as party chairman was based on the notion that he would win back votes that Angela Merkel had lost“.
[…]
The latest Forsa poll (conducted for RTL and ntv) has Alternative für Deutschland at a cool 26%. That is their best result in history, and it makes them the strongest party in the Federal Republic. This is the second such poll that places AfD in first place, following an Ipsos survey from 9 April that pegged them at 25%.
Merz has indeed done something to AfD support involving the operand of 2. It’s just not exactly what he imagined.
Now all of that rhetoric we one once heard from the cartel parties – about the importance of dealing with the AfD on the issues and of making convincing appeals to the “democratically inclined” among AfD voters – have become yesteryear’s pablum. They are going to try to ban the AfD now. Because they can’t beat them in any other way, and because they believe Germans shouldn’t be allowed to cast their votes beyond the narrow confines of the political cartel that runs the Federal Republic, they’re going to try to remove the AfD from the board via legal trickery.
Of course, if the AfD is now the most popular party in Germany, it must be suppressed ASAP, and the individual members of the party must be punished “to save democracy”:
In Germany, owning guns is a privilege that can be taken away — not for breaking the law, but for holding the wrong political opinion.
Members and supporters of the right-leaning Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party are now facing mass gun license revocations. The reason? The German government has labeled the AfD a “right-wing extremist” group — a political designation that suddenly makes its members “unreliable” under the country’s gun laws. And just like that, firearms must be surrendered or destroyed.
If that sounds outrageous, it should. But it’s not surprising.
[…]
In 2021, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), designated the entire AfD as a “suspected threat to democracy”. That move allowed the government to surveil, wiretap, and investigate the party and its members.
It didn’t stop there.
Courts have now upheld revoking gun licenses from AfD members, based solely on their political affiliation. In one case, a couple in North Rhine-Westphalia lost legal ownership of over 200 firearms. They weren’t criminals. They weren’t accused of wrongdoing. They were just AfD members.
Another court in Thuringia blocked a blanket gun ban for all AfD members — but left the door wide open for revocations on a case-by-case basis.
In Saxony-Anhalt, officials are reviewing the gun licenses of 109 AfD members. As of last fall, 72 had already been targeted for revocation, with the rest under active review. The justification? Supporting a party the state now claims is “working against the constitutional order”.
And the courts are backing it up. According to a March 2024 ruling, former or current AfD supporters “lack the reliability” required to legally own firearms.
April 22, 2025
Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults
James Pew reviews Douglas Murray’s latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (I was first made aware of the book by the sudden uptick in antisemitic posts on social media that directly attacked Murray and his work).
The opening words of On Democracies and Death Cults by Douglas Murray contains a disturbing fact about the situation Israel, and the entire Western world, were thrust into immediately following the barbaric terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023:
Sometimes a flare goes up and you get to see exactly where everyone is standing.
Indeed. Out of all the conflicts occurring all over the world, many of which are more devastating by orders of magnitude and in terms of the scale of humanitarian catastrophe than the IDF’s Gaza campaign, why would Westerners care so much about it? Why do Canadians and Americans take to the streets and occupy college campuses over it? These and many other vital questions are asked by Douglas Murray in On Democracies and Death Cults.
So why should this particular October 7th event, and the IDF’s subsequent military response, which is taking place halfway around the world, be the one that reveals “exactly where everyone is standing”? Murray knows the answer, as do his readers and most clear thinking people who do not harbour secret loathing’s for the Jewish people. The reason is clear and plain as day: the Jews are defending themselves and their homeland from a terroristic death cult bent on their destruction, but for some reason hoards of people from all political stripes from virtually all corners of the world, believe this to be a wholly unacceptable thing for the Jews to do.
The shame I felt for Canada, or more correctly, for things that had been allowed to take place in Canada following the October 7th massacre in Israel, was immediately apparent in the introduction when Murray wrote:
In Canada alone, after October 7, synagogues were firebombed and shot at, Jewish schools were shot at, Jewish shops were fire-bombed, and Jewish-owned bookshops were vandalized.
Future generations will need to contend with the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the worst crisis to strike the Jewish people since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism erupted throughout the West. An inexplicable “shapeshifting” hatred that “locks Jews in an unresolvable set of challenges.” Murray writes:
Jews were once hated because of their religion. Then sometime after the Enlightenment it became hard to hate people because of their religion. At that point the Jews were hated because of their race. Then, after the twentieth century it became unacceptable to hate people because of their race. So, in the twenty-first century, when civilized people cannot hate the Jews for their religion or their race, Jews can be hated for having a state–and for defending it.
Murray’s head is constantly in two places: 1) Israel, including the war zone in Gaza 2) The West. The question of why Israel seems always to be the object of relentless and obsessive international scrutiny, is top of Murrays mind. But as well, the infiltration of radical Islamic ideologies into the Western institutional edifice is not lost on him. Indeed, this knowledge leads him to such observations as the following:
While there were certainly plenty of non-Muslim politicians in the West who decided to attack Israel from the moment the conflict started, it should also be noted that elected Muslim politicians across the West seemed to have a special beef with the Israelis and supported the Palestinian side …
Canada has no shortage of the exact political personage Murray is referring to. The signs of Islamic infiltration and subversion into Canadian society are everywhere. The recent adoption by the Toronto District School Board of policies concerning Anti-Palestinian Racism, is but one example of the phenomenon.
Early in the book Murray mentions the Iron Dome – the Israeli missile defense system. One thing I never considered was the economics involved with the constant rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza. Whereas the cost of a rocket shot from Gaza is estimated at around $300 US, the cost of one of the defense missiles deployed to eliminate Hamas’ rockets is around $100,000 US, and sometimes two defense missiles are required to shoot down one $300 dollar terrorist rocket. The vast amount of economic resources eaten up by the asymmetrical terrorist warfare waged by Hamas is astounding, when one considers the years over which these rocket assaults have taken place.
April 10, 2025
Too much free speech is bad for German democracy
eugyppius notes that criticizing German politicians for their lack of commitment to the principles of free speech can land you in prison if you’re not careful:
David Bendels, the chief editor of the AfD-adjacent Deutschland Kurier, has been threatened with prison time and sentenced to seven months of probation for a Twitter meme. It is the harshest sentence ever handed down to a journalist for a speech crime in the Federal Republic of Germany.
This is the illegal tweet, which Bendels posted via the official Deutschland Kurier X account on 28 February 2024:
It shows German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser holding a sign that has been manipulated to read “I hate freedom of speech!” Bendels posted the image to satirise Faeser’s disturbing plans to restrict the speech, travel and economic activity of political dissidents in Germany, which she had announced at a press conference a few weeks earlier.
Faeser personally filed criminal charges against Bendels for defamation after Bamberg police brought the meme to her attention. Last November, the Bamberg District Court summarily ordered Bendels to pay an enormous fine for this speech crime “against a person in political life”. This is yet another prosecution that proceeds from our lèse-majesté statute, or section 188 of the German Criminal Code, which provides stiffened penalties for those who slander or insult politicians, because politicians are special people and more important than the rest of us.
The same Bamberg prosecutor’s office and the same Bamberg District Court had previously pursued the German pensioner Stefan Neihoff for the crime of posting another meme implying that German Economics Minister Robert Habeck might be a moron. That case, too, seems to have been brought to Habeck’s attention by Bamberg police, who requested that Habeck file charges. The Bamberg police apparently have very little to do beyond trawling the internet for political memes and protecting democracy by suppressing democratic freedoms.
Bendels appealed his summary penalty, and so the Bamberg District Court put him on trial. Yesterday the judges found him guilty and sentenced him to seven months in prison, which they suspended in favour of probation. The judges claimed that Bendels was guilty because he had distributed a “factual claim about the Minister of the Interior, Ms Faeser … that was not recognisably … inauthentic”, and judged that his meme was “likely to significantly impair [Faeser’s] public image”. The presiding judge demanded that Bendels submit a written apology to the Interior Minister for having so egregiously slandered her.
