Democracy Always Chooses Barabbas
Why the Bad Decisions? They're Baked into the Cake
“Now at the feast the governor was accustomed to releasing to the multitude one prisoner whom they wished. And at that time they had a notorious prisoner called Barabbas. Therefore, when they had gathered together, Pilate said to them, “Whom do you want me to release to you? Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?” For he knew that they had handed Him over because of envy. While he was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent to him, saying, ‘Have nothing to do with that just Man, for I have suffered many things today in a dream because of Him.’
“But the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitudes that they should ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus. The governor answered and said to them, ‘Which of the two do you want me to release to you?’ They said, ‘Barabbas!’ Pilate said to them, ‘What then shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?’ They all said to him, ‘Let Him be crucified!’ Then the governor said, ‘Why, what evil has He done?’ But they cried out all the more, saying, ‘Let Him be crucified!’
“When Pilate saw that he could not prevail at all, but rather that a [b]tumult was rising, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, ‘I am innocent of the blood of this just Person. You see to it.’ And all the people answered and said, ‘His blood be on us and on our children.’ Then he released Barabbas to them; and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered Him to be crucified.”
-The Gospel according to Matthew, 27:15-26, New King James Version
This article was written around the Easter season, which means this was written as we celebrate Christ the King’s victory over death and the decision to put him to death. Who made that decision? The crowd. Democracy. As such, now is as good a time as ever to examine the rot at the root of the crumbling West: democracy. The reason for that is that democracies always choose Barabbas. Or, to put it less pithily, democratic crowds are whipped up by those with ulterior motives and choose the worst decision long term because it’s the desirable decision in the present and thus what the demagogue can whip the crowd into wanting.
This article will, by examining a few turning points in the famous democracies, from Athens’ decision to invade Sicily during the Peloponnesian War to America’s inability to reform Social Security, show how and why democracy chooses Barabbas and how that explains the rot at the core of our system.
“Give Us Barabbas” Throughout History
The Sicilian Barabbas
Aristotle recognized the failings of democracy hundreds of years before the mob in Jerusalem demanded Pontius Pilate give them Barabbas rather than Christ. In his Politics, he noted that while tyranny (essentially iron-fisted dictatorship) and oligarchy (rule by the wealthy, for the wealthy) were worse than democracy, democracy, or mob rule, was worse than polity, by which he essentially meant a republican form of government.1
That understanding makes sense today. Most Americans, at least of the reasonable sort, see George Washington’s Federalist America2 as a better-functioning system than the chaos of mob rule democracy in Tammany Hall in the Gilded Age3 or vote-harvesting mob rule by mail today. Similarly, it makes sense that democracy is less bad than oligarchy or dictatorship; bad as Biden might be, he’s far less bad4 than the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe5 or pirate-like oligarchs who ruled Russia in the 1990s.6
It would have been even easier for Aristotle to understand. A student of Plato, he grew up in the shadow of the Peloponnesian War, the titanic conflict in which Athens threw away its strength and never recovered while fighting the Spartan oligarchy and its allies. He saw democracy fail.
However, more than living in the shadow of a war Athens simply lost, he lived in the shadow of Athenian democracy facing a devastating defeat because it chose Barabbas. As recorded by Thucydides, Athens had, at the mid-point in the Peloponnesian War, gained the upper hand over the Spartans. Athenian victory at Sphacteria,7 in which Athens captured hundreds of the irreplaceable Spartiates, led to the Peace of Nicias.8 Though far from a complete victory, Athens had the upper hand in the war itself and could have used the temporary peace to catch its breath, recover from years of war and plague, and prepare to recover Amphipolis, one of its main objectives.
But it didn’t. After less than a decade of peace, the Athenians were whipped into invading Sicily by Alcibiadies, a young and glory-hungry nobleman, over the caution of longtime leader Nicias. Nicias, explaining the lack of wisdom in invading Sicily said, in part:9
[T]he Sicilians, even if conquered, are too far off and too numerous to be ruled without difficulty. Now it is folly to go against men who could not be kept under even if conquered, while failure would leave us in a very different position from that which we occupied before the enterprise. The Siceliots, again, to take them as they are at present, in the event of a Syracusan conquest (the favourite bugbear of the Egestaeans), would to my thinking be even less dangerous to us than before. At present they might possibly come here as separate states for love of Lacedaemon; in the other case one empire would scarcely attack another; for after joining the Peloponnesians to overthrow ours, they could only expect to see the same hands overthrow their own in the same way. The Hellenes in Sicily would fear us most if we never went there at all, and next to this, if after displaying our power we went away again as soon as possible. We all know that that which is farthest off, and the reputation of which can least be tested, is the object of admiration; at the least reverse they would at once begin to look down upon us, and would join our enemies here against us. You have yourselves experienced this with regard to the Lacedaemonians and their allies, whom your unexpected success, as compared with what you feared at first, has made you suddenly despise, tempting you further to aspire to the conquest of Sicily. Instead, however, of being puffed up by the misfortunes of your adversaries, you ought to think of breaking their spirit before giving yourselves up to confidence, and to understand that the one thought awakened in the Lacedaemonians by their disgrace is how they may even now, if possible, overthrow us and repair their dishonour; inasmuch as military reputation is their oldest and chiefest study. Our struggle, therefore, if we are wise, will not be for the barbarian Egestaeans in Sicily, but how to defend ourselves most effectually against the oligarchical machinations of Lacedaemon.
The Athenians disregarded the wise words of Nicias and decided to invade Sicily, appointing Alcibiades as head of the expedition. Alcibiades was soon recalled in an incident involving the vandalism of the sacred hermes, and he fled to Sparta to teach them how to counter Athens in Sicily and win. They did, resulting in a crushing Athenian defeat10 and Athens’ eventual loss in the war as a whole.11 It never recovered, and by the time of Aristotle, was under the thumb of the barbarian Macedonians to its north12 and he tutored the new ruler of his city-state, Alexander the Great.13
What happened in Athens was, with all the little variations that come with different cultures, the same thing that happened with Barabbas in Jerusalem. A wiser leader, though one not in control because of the threatening mass of the mob, gave sage advice. Had Nicias been listened to, Athens would have avoided the worst decision of the war. But he was not listened to. Instead, the crowd listened to the man who wanted control come what may, Alcibiades, and so Athens embarked on the disastrous expedition. As a result, it lost the war and never regained its former position in the next 2500 years: “Although it would be several more years before Athens finally surrendered to Sparta and ended the Peloponnesian War, the debacle at Syracuse had laid the groundwork for that defeat. Never again would Athens flourish—its days of glory were at an end.”14
Britian’s Fall from Glory and the Socialist Barabbas
Britain, unlike Athens, didn’t have one Barabbas moment that doomed it. Rather, it had three: the intentional destruction of the aristocracy, entering WW1, and choosing Attlee over Churchill in 1945.
Death and Taxes Were When British Democracy Chose Barabbas
Democracy, as a result of its poor results in Athens and the wise words of Aristotle, gained a terrible reputation for the next two thousand years. A few polities, or Republics rose, namely Republican Rome and the Venetian republics, rose in the Classical and Middle Ages, but Rome’s republic fell when it drifted toward democracy and ended in dictatorship, Venice was just a city-state with limited reach or wealth for centuries, it wasn’t until the Renaissance that republican government returned in force. The Italian city-state republics like Genoa and Venice rose to the fore and the Durch Republic grew wealthy and fought off its absolutist Hapsburg overlords. Then, with the early modern period, Britain lurched toward having a less powerful king and more powerful Parliament, culminating in the monarch becoming largely symbolic by the end of the reign of George III.
Fortunately for Great Britain, that legislative body remained much more an aristocratic, representative body similar to an Aristotelian polity than a democracy for the next century. Over that time period, Britain went from being a poor backwater that had lost the jewels of its North American Empire to the greatest empire in the world, one on which the sun never set. Though the land was far from perfect, Britain under Victoria became wealthy, powerful, and crowned with glory. It was guided in doing so by a Parliament run by and composed of an aristocracy with ties to the soil and close connections to the yeomanry, villagers, and tenant farmers, all of whom the aristocrats were generally on good terms with and cared for. As such, the land and its inhabitants, with the exception of the vagrant poor in cities, were generally improving materially, cared for, and had their interests represented in Parliament.
Barbara Tuchman, describing that state of things at its height in her book The Proud Tower, wrote:
THE LAST GOVERNMENT in the Western world to possess all the attributes of aristocracy in working condition took office in England in June of 1895. Great Britain was at the zenith of empire when the Conservatives won the General Election of that year, and the Cabinet they formed was her superb and resplendent image.
…
The Lord President of the Council was a Duke who owned 186,000 acres in eleven counties, whose ancestors had served in government since the Fourteenth Century, who had himself served thirty-four years in the House of Commons and three times refused to be Prime Minister. The Secretary for India was the son of another Duke whose family seat was received in 1315 by grant from Robert the Bruce and who had four sons serving in Parliament at the same time. The President of the Local Government Board was a pre-eminent country squire who had a Duke for brother-in-law, a Marquess for son-in-law, an ancestor who had been Lord Mayor of London in the reign of Charles II, and who had himself been a Member of Parliament for twenty-seven years. The Lord Chancellor bore a family name brought to England by a Norman follower of William the Conqueror and maintained thereafter over eight centuries without a title. The Lord Lieutenant for Ireland was an Earl, a grand-nephew of the Duke of Wellington and a hereditary trustee of the British Museum. The Cabinet also included a Viscount, three Barons and two Baronets. Of its six commoners, one was a director of the Bank of England, one was a squire whose family had represented the same county in Parliament since the Sixteenth Century, one—who acted as Leader of the House of Commons—was the Prime Minister’s nephew and inheritor of a Scottish fortune of £4,000,000, and one, a notable and disturbing cuckoo in the nest, was a Birmingham manufacturer widely regarded as the most successful man in England.
An aristocratic government, to be sure, and thus one at which Americans might bristle (though they shouldn't; even Tiberius Gracchus was a patrician),15 but one that undoubtedly did its job and did its well. The empire was at its height and well-ordered. The nation was largely prosperous. Most of the citizenry, particularly the yeomanry and middle-class on which prosperous societies are built, were well-off and had bright prospects.
Unfortunately, free trade and the Industrial Revolution led to the eclipse of the aristocracy at the hands of a grubby plutocracy by the end of Victoria’s reign,16 and public-minded leaders like Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, the First Duke of Westminister,17 were replaced by factory owners who treated their workers worse than southern planters treated their slaves.18 Meanwhile, the representatives of the mistreated workers made their way to Parliament and what had been the preserve of gentlemen who cared about their tenants and their patrimony, men who were acquainted with the idea of planting trees in the shade of which they would never sit,19 became a battleground over public programs and spending waged by feckless politicians instead of great statesmen.
With those changes, ones that really began around the turn of the century and escalated in the interwar period,20 came a complete reordering of society for the worse. What had been a land of low taxes, little regulation, and wise leadership ratcheted taxes up to painful levels,21 particularly for the great families that had guided the country to glory and prosperity and fell in its battles.22
That destruction of the aristocracy was mainly accomplished through death duties, which taxes the vast real estate holdings of the aristocrats, including their country seats, making it near-impossible for land-rich but cash-poor families to survive,23 particularly when the income tax stole ever larger shares of their incomes.24 In fact, a study into the wealth of Britain’s leading families found that it was almost exclusively government policy, namely confiscatory levels of income taxation and near100% death duties, that came close to destroying the aristocracy as a class.25 Those death duties, which applied even to families whose sons died in war,26 were only possible because, with the 1911 Reform Bill, the House of Commons managed to wipe away the veto power of the House of Lords thanks to the collaboration of George V.27
With that decision, Britain’s House of Commons and ceremonial king chose Barabbas. The tough decision would have been to recognize that the problems with the Industrial Revolution lay with the hellish factory conditions, not with country gentlemen and their estates. Doing the tough but right thing would have involved focusing on trade and industrial policy to help Britain cement its prosperous position. That is what the lords, many of whom were, like Grosvenor, reformers on the side of the yeomen, were trying to do. It was the proper way to help all Britons.
The wrong decision, the one that led to Britain’s decline as an economic and cultural powerhouse, was to tax the lords to oblivion while seizing assets at a near-100% rate upon death and thus chase capital out of the country. Yet that is what the mob chose. Led by radicals and socialists, furious at the wrong people, the mob of democracy chanted, “give us Barabbas,” elected a Liberal government, and the empire began its long decline as it gave up on the sacred right of property and patrimony that had made the Anglosphere the idol of the world.
The Sicilian Expedition to Flanders
The Liberal government, one no longer dominated by lords like Salisbury, did not just destroy Britain’s human capital by taxing it to death. It also recklessly entered World War I and sent millions of men across the Channel, one that could have been easily defended by the Navy,28 to die in the trenches.29
Britain never recovered from that disastrous decision. Its great wealth was squandered for nothing in the fields of Flanders, a land in which it had no real interest,30 and its best and brightest were wiped away by German gas, shells, and Maxim guns.
Like Athens, it had chosen to launch a disastrous expedition at the behest of an ally, and it suffered mightily as a result, losing its financial dominance to America and seeing its naval dominance significantly eroded. Meanwhile, the immense financial burdens of the war placed further strain on the land’s financial and human capital, making it difficult for Britain to recover after the war.31
Had Britain’s Liberal government listened to wiser heads during the outbreak of war it either would have avoided the war entirely or followed the strategic advice of naval strategist Sir Julian Corbett and followed the traditional British way of war: using its navy to defend its shores, its financial might to back continental allies doing the fighting, and its army as a small expeditionary force to raid the enemy and, when the chance for a great offensive came, used as a spearhead alongside other allies.32 Instead, it puffed out its chest and sent a million men, including many of the best men who would be its future leaders, to die in the mud while millions more were wounded or faced a lifetime of psychological damage. It ignored Nicias to its great disadvantage.
Attlee, the Sheep in Sheep’s Clothing Who Became Barabbas
While the death duties were disastrous and World War I was perhaps Britain’s largest mistake of all time,33 the empire managed to struggle on for a few decades more. It tried and failed to bring back its pre-war gold standard, successfully dealt with a national strike, and even expanded the territories under its grasp.
But throughout that time period it refused to recognize the dangers of the day. Nationalist movements grew in size and scope in India and Africa. Germany reawakened after defeating communist insurrections and muddling through a sickening bout of hyperinflation. Communism not only survived in Russia, but began to spread.
Instead of doing the hard thing and nipping the problem in the bud, getting rid of Ghandi early on and working with France to crush Germany before it could rearm, Britain’s now fully-fledged democracy did the easy thing: nothing. Distracted by economic issues at home, the world went unaddressed until German troops were poised on the edge of the Sudetenland. Then, when Chamberlain was outmaneuvered at Munich and returned home crowing “peace for our time,” the public cheered and cheered.34 Knowing the horrors of war, it chose Barabbas and rejected tackling the situation head-on, instead giving Germany more time to arm and waiting until it was nearly too late to declare “this far and no further.”
By then, British boys were facing the ridiculous prospect of fighting a new world war over the ownership of Danzig,35 something from which many recoiled. The problem could have been nipped in the bud years before, but it wasn’t. So, instead, World War II broke out, and Britain spent its last reserves in a desperate battle that, thanks to Churchill’s leadership, America’s industrial capacity, and Soviet blood, it eventually won.36
At the end of the war, the coalition government of the war years was dissolved and an election came. British voters had a choice between Churchill and Attlee. Churchill, whatever his faults, represented the last embers of Victorian England. He would have kept at least some of the empire, holding onto the empire for which it had just fought so hard.37 The other choice was Attlee, famously described by Churchill as a “sheep in sheep’s clothing.”38 Attlee represented a socialist future: nationalization of industries like coal mining, socialized healthcare, continued rationing, higher taxes, and more regulation.39
Seeking handouts and welfare rather than imperial glory, the British public cried, “Give us Barabbas!” and chose Attlee. The result was just what Attlee promised: socialism.40 That post-war decision destroyed most of the last great families, with only a few exceptions, most of whom only recovered recently, and cemented America’s rise at Britain’s expense as a world leader. Britain shed its empire, nearly all of it going without a fight, as New York took over from London as the world’s financial center and Britain’s industry fell into further irrelevance. Churchill in his second prime ministership and Thatcher later on did some to correct Attlee’s worst decisions, but the destruction of Britain had, with Attlee’s election', been mostly accomplished and now it is a second-rate power, if a power at all.
It’s Barabbas All the Way Down
At each step along the way after the death of Victoria and Edward, the voting public followed in the footsteps of their Athenian forebearers and chose Barabbas when it came to it. Like the decision of whether or not to invade Sicily, they faced complex questions. Handling the consequences of the Industrial Revolution, deciding what to do in World War I, and holding onto the empire after the war all would have required statesmanship and the miracle-like capability of being able to guide a camel through the eye of the needle.
But instead of even trying, they went with Barabbas. The wrong decision was made. The country’s leadership was kneecapped by punitive financial measures. That meant that by the time the crisis that caused World War I came about, the best and brightest were no longer in power. Instead, the new men were, and they chose Barabbas, going along with the Alcibiades-like jingoists and going to war unnecessarily rather than considering how to benefit their country and those in it over the long term. That disastrous decision crippled the Empire, which somehow staggered to 1945. But then, after the supreme effort of defending most of the Empire and regaining what had been conquered, the public chose to give it all up in exchange for higher taxes, welfare handouts, and socialized medicine. That third choice of Barabbas doomed Britain for good, and now it’s all but irrelevant on the world stage, losing nearly all the traces of its former glory. As Churchill said, "I think I can save the British Empire from anything—except the British."41 He was more right than he realized.
Unlike Athens, Parliament made those decisions, not a mob. But Parliament was elected by the public and cheered all the way. The public toasted the death of the lords, cheered the outbreak of war, and then rallied to elect Attlee. It chose Barabbas, and sealed its fate. Now, London is overrun with foreigners and Pakistani rape gangs sexually assault tens of thousands of young British girls as the government does nothing.42 Lord Salisbury would never have allowed such a state of things; but his world was wiped away to cries of “give us Barabbas,” so the rape gangs remain.43
America’s Social Security Mob-Rule
America, like Britain, has chosen Barabbas numerous times. It gave up the economic system that made it the wealthiest nation in the world with FDR and the New Deal, frontrunning Britain’s Attlee decision. It gave up its traditional policy of neutrality when Wilson entered World War I to public acclaim, leading it on a path that now means we are facing nuclear war with Russia and the sure armageddon that would result for no reason.
Fortunately, we survived those decisions and even came out ahead. “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America,” as Bismarck recognized.44
But, though we survived them, they still altered the fundamental fabric of the country. What had been a constitutional republic, as the Founders intended,45 changed dramatically when Lincoln battered down the aristocratic and yeoman-friendly South with millions of immigrants drafted as soldiers,46 more immigrants poured in during the resulting Gilded Age,47 and their lack of means turned many into socialists of sorts. The result was that America, already more a democracy than a republic, became, in terms of political organization, little more than the mob-rule democracy Aristotle and the Founders abhorred.48 Tammany Hall,49 for example, relied on mobs of voters to stuff the ballot box and enact “democracy” in action. The results were expectedly poor, as one would expect from mob rule in a republic-turned-democracy.
That scenario playing out across the nation fundamentally altered the fabric of the nation. What had been a collection of individualistic Scots-Irish settlers, southern cavaliers, and Yankee Puritans, all of whom had varying degrees of skepticism toward true democracy, suddenly turned into John Adams’ nightmare in the late 19th and early 20th Century, around the time Britain’s voters were choosing Barabbas by taxing the lords to death.
What that wrought was democracy,50 and what democracy wanted was Barabbas. In America’s case, Barabbas meant “reform,” by which the mob-rule reformers meant that they would be taxing the successful at punitive rates to create entitlement programs for the mob.51 The wolves voted for who was for dinner and chose the sheep, which effectively meant that yeomen farmers were crushed by government regulation,52 gold was confiscated (leaving Americans vulnerable to theft by inflation and financial tyranny),53 and massive entitlement schemes were created54 that are now bankrupting the country.55
Thanks to the shift from being a constitutional republic to mob rule, America faces a critical turning point like the invasion of Sicily that, if it makes the wrong decision and chooses Barabbas, could mean disaster. That turning point is what to do about the Social Security/Entitlement/Debt Regime.
As we have already discussed the rot at the root of Social Security in-depth,56 and covered the coming unfunded liabilities disaster,57 reiterating the full story on both would be unnecessary; reading those articles will do both as well. Suffice it to say, America’s unfunded liabilities, which mainly stem from entitlements, now total $213 trillion and will be closer to $300 trillion by just 2030. Much of that comes thanks to Social Security, which is dramatically underfunded, and few of the relatively painless solutions proffered for that problem would work.58
That means a tough decision must be made: will America cut benefits, helping young people financially prosper with a reduced tax burden at the expense of elderly pensioners, or will it put the elderly first and bury the young under an insurmountable debt burden? Or will it try to inflate its way out of the problem, impoverishing everyone except for the select few who can use hard assets to ride the inflation tiger?
A nation willing to listen to the best voices and make the hard but correct decision could thread the needle and find a way out. But Americans are largely unwilling to even consider the issue, much less decide how much the program will need to be cut to keep the program solvent. Instead democracy reigns, and both parties have to pledge to the populace that they won’t cut Social Security, however dire the situation may be.
Similarly, decisions such as appeasing the jingoists by weakening the dollar by seizing Russia’s reserve assets,59 shutting down the economy during Covid to appease the Covid fanatics, and allowing Rhodesia, and thus much of southern Africa, to fall to the communists as a way of appeasing race-baiters in the US like Andy Young,60 were all terrible decisions rooted in listening to the mob rather than letting cooler heads and wiser voices prevail. We could have condemned Russia in the UN but kept the financial plumbing intact, much to our benefit. We could have kept Rhodesia and South Africa alive and thus kept some of the richest deposits of resources in the world from falling into the hands of communist dictators. We could have kept the economy open and been a shining light on the hill for the free world during Covid. But none of that happened, as the mob was making decisions and, in each case, it chose Barabbas.
Perhaps Bismarck will be proven correct, and we will find a way out, or the public will come to its senses and listen to the Nicias of the day. But such seems unlikely. Instead, when crisis comes and the tough solution, massive entitlement cuts, is presented, the voting base is likely to choose Barabbas. It’s likely to do what it is currently doing, which is demand that the government take out debt and raise taxes to pay for the government benefits. That’s the choice Britain made with Attlee, and it destroyed the country. Now America faces the same fate, and seems unlikely to avert it. Why? Because democracy always chooses Barabbas.
What to Do?
The point is not that a tyrant or oligarchy would be better. As Aristotle recognized, those forms of government are even worse than democracy, though for different reasons than the mob-rule Barabbas one. Idi Amin would not make America great again, nor did the Russian oligarchs do anything to benefit the average Russian. It’s unlikely that they would be able to fix Social Security.
So, democracy has to go because of its tendency toward Barabbas when presented with the choice, and tyranny and oligarchy are both horrible. But that leaves three good forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and polity, or republicanism, each of which can be more relevant to certain countries.
El Salvador’s Bukele, the miracle worker who rose to power and used executive power to crush the gang problem previous, much more “democratic” leaders had been unable to handle,61 styles himself a “philosopher king.”62 Lee Kuan Yew was effectively a monarch, as he exercised sweeping executive power and his family remains in control; Singapore was a stunning success thanks to his sage leadership.63 In Lichtenstein, the heredity monarch rules again64 and the country is one of the best-governed in Europe. Britain was ruled best by its aristocracy, and likely would be again.
Despite those successes and opportunities for renewal, America is suited for neither an aristocracy nor a monarchy. Rather, it’s suited for a republic. In fact, that’s what the founders intended it to be, as they abhorred democracy. Sadly, we’ve drifted from our republican roots. The property qualification for voting was removed, opening the franchise up to even those who aren’t tied to the soil and thus rooted in the country’s future. The Seventeenth Amendment put the power to elect Senators in the hands of democracy rather than states, pushing America even more towards democracy. The electoral college is still around, but on its last legs as Democrats routinely attack it. Democracy is here in force.
That is what must be rooted out to rid it of the Barabbas problem. If you don’t want a crowd chanting “give us Barabbas” to determine your country’s fate, which usually means either the mob voting for more welfare handouts of some sort or making a disastrously bad foreign policy decision, the solution is to take power out of the hands of the mob and put it in the hands of the best men. That’s what the Founders wanted,65 what Aristotle recognized as best, and what works in the real world. Letting the wolves vote the sheep to be dinner does not work, nor does having the mob listen to Alcibiades and Nicias and make a decision based on impassioned speeches.
Such a change can be accomplished with monarchy, aristocracy, or republican government. In America, it would be best accomplished with republican government, and thus republican reforms. While not likely, it is possible, and at least worth a shot.
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1279b: 4-10: There are three systems of government diverging from the three “straight” systems: tyranny diverging from kingship, oligarchy diverging from aristocracy, and democracy diverging from polity. Each diverging system (parekbasis) is structured to operate to the advantage of the ruler(s); for example, democracy is rule to the advantage of the poor. None of the diverging systems aims at the profit of every type of citizen in common.
1289a: 28-1289b5: Of these three diverging systems of government, tyranny is the worst (which is to say the furthest from polity), oligarchy the next worst, and democracy the most moderate.
From: https://www.stoa.org/demos/article_aristotle_democracy@page=all&greekEncoding=UnicodeC.html
For the modern political theory as to why, see The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics
See English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century by FML Thompson and The Victorian Country House by Mark Girourd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Grosvenor,_1st_Duke_of_Westminster; for a more in-depth study, see Victorian Duke by Gervas Huxley
For an attack on Industrial Revolution factory conditions, see https://www.jstor.org/stable/2192167
“The most famous and comprehensive analysis of the British aristocracy is no doubt Cannadine's, whose argument is that ‘the unmaking of the British upper classes . . . begins in the 1880s,’ despite their being ‘in charge and on top in the 1870s,’ and that by the 1930s their loss of land, wealth, and prestige ‘must rank as one of the most profound economic and psychological changes of the period.’”
See English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century by FML Thompson and The Victorian Country House by Mark Girourd
A fight of the “public school” boys from the famous prep schools like Eton and Harrow who volunteered died in the Great War: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/death-best-brightest-eton-rifles-may-built-slaughter.html
“Starting in 1894 with the introduction of death duties by Sir William Harcourt, the wealth of the aristocracy was adversely affected by increasing levels of taxation. Death duties rose to 15 percent in 1909 and to 60 percent in 1939, peaking at 85 percent for estates valued over £750,000 before being replaced by the Capital Transfer Tax in 1975 and the Inheritance Tax in 1986, which both saw a reduction in the amount of tax paid on estates. Other taxes affecting the aristocracy included the Incremental Land Duty and the Undeveloped Land Duty. These taxes’ relevance is not just that they affected the aristocracy: the non-aristocratic rich were hit as well. But they struck particularly hard at land and dynasty, which were so important to the institution of hereditary aristocracy.”
https://pintsofhistory.com/2016/01/08/decline-on-downton-abbey-why-the-nobles-and-gentry-went-broke/; “While there is evidence of decline, as shown in the drop of average probate values from 1908–1917 to 1918–1927, there was a rebound in the 1928–1937 cohort. Rather than a period of decline, then, it is best considered one of constancy. While the upward march of peerage wealth witnessed in the late nineteenth century was halted, the resiliency of that wealth is a surprise given the triple shock of agricultural adversity, the aftermath of war, and increasingly confiscatory levels of taxation.” From: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-british-studies/article/trajectories-of-aristocratic-wealth-18582018-evidence-from-probate/487163630EE7D49ABCA7CAD29D18E704
“This indicates, in the first instance, that it is the combination of war and sustained high levels of taxation on inheritance and marginal incomes, along with an absence of alternative government economic supports for the group, contra Bush's idea of “escape hatches,” that generates significant changes in wealth. In other words, it is government fiscal policy, not economic structural forces or the vicissitudes of prices, that governs the wealth of the peerage, and by extension the hereditary aristocracy as a whole.”
…
“It was not the special characteristics of the aristocracy as a rent-seeking, anachronistic status group that undermined their wealth, nor was it capitalism; instead, fault for economic decline lay, on the one hand, with increased taxes on wealth and inheritance and, on the other, with the shocks of war.”
See The Diehards: Aristocratic Society and Politics in Edwardian England
See The British Way of War: Julian Corbett and the Battle for a National Strategy
See The British Way of War: Julian Corbett and the Battle for a National Strategy
John Adams, for example, wrote: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.”
Importantly, this turn of events is different from Tiberius Gracchus and the dispossessed yeomen in a critical way: he was on the side of men who had been yeomen, served their country, and saw their family lands lost thanks to rapacious elites who took advantage of their continued absence and sacrifices. In America, however, socialists with connections to the USSR were using mob rule to steal from the successful in what was an attack on the very pillars of American society.
Read about Tiberius here: https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/the-american-tribune-substack-following
Read about the socialism and anti-Americanism of FDR’s mob rule here: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-new-deal-was-a-great-reset/
See Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew
Excellent article.
You might like this critique of democracy.
https://frankkarsten.substack.com/p/10-reasons-why-democracy-fails
This is an outstanding essay, very well written, presenting quite complex ideas in an easy to digest manner for non-specialists. I suggest that this be reintroduced each Easter, preferable a week or two in advance.