Scientific Pretense vs. Democracy

Unpacked, this sentence means: “Under my administration, Americans will have fewer choices about how they live, and fewer choices as voters because, rightfully, those choices should be made by officials who rule by the authority of science.”

Thus our new president intends to accelerate a trend a half-century old in America but older and further advanced in the rest of the world. There is nothing new or scientific about rulers pretending to execute the will of a god or of an oracle. It’s a tool to preempt opposition. The ruler need not make a case for what he is doing. He need only reaffirm his status as the priest of a knowledge to which the people cannot accede. The argument “Do what we say because we are certified to know better” is a slight variant of “Do what we say because we are us.”

Human nature rebels especially violently against those who pretend to special knowledge but who then prove inept, whose prescriptions bring misery. When politicians lay out their reasons why something should or should not be done, when the public accepts those reasons, and then the ensuing measures bring grief, the public’s anger is tempered by its own participation in the decision, and is poured out on the ideas themselves as well as on the politicians [...]. But when the politicians make big changes in economic and social life on the basis of “science” beyond the people’s capacity to understand, when events show them to have been wrong, when those changes impoverish and degrade life, then popular anger must crash its full force only on those who made themselves solely responsible. The failed sorcerers’ apprentices’ excuse “science made me do it” will only add scorn to retribution.

Human nature rebels especially violently against those who pretend to special knowledge but who then prove inept, whose prescriptions bring misery.

I think the Chinese have a term for this when it happens: "Losing the Mandate of Heaven"

We would call it a "Crisis of Legitimacy".

First off please lose the term “American democracy”, we began as a constitutional republic which is not the same thing no matter how many so called leaders try to say that it is. The word democracy was not commonly used to refer to this country until WWII, “The war to make the world safe for democracy”. The founders wanted nothing to do with democracy which in their wisdom they considered pretty much a dirty word.

The American Republic has been undermined largely by the failure of the press (now the media) to do its duty of reporting the facts. We now have, with the exception of talk radio and to some extent Fox news, only a propaganda arm of the left wing. Had we a media doing the duty of reporting the truth as closely as it could be determined, this would be a very different country and we would still be referring to it as a Republic and not a Democracy.

There is a reason why totalitarian states so often call themselves the Socialist Republic, Democratic Republic, People’s Republic etc. rather than simply Socialist or Communist. The word Republic is the lipstick on the pig. They may have the form of a constitutional republic but they ignore the constitution, exactly what is happening here and now. When you start to hear this country referred to as a “Democratic Republic” you will know that you live in an end-stage communist hellhole.

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