Jonathan Capehart at the Washington Post writes that the rise of populist oligarch Donald Trump spells the death of the GOP — and laments that as something regrettable, because at least two viable national political parties has long been considered a criteria for the health of a liberal democracy — at least internationally.

From the column:

The hate-fueled self-immolation of the GOP would be a laugh riot were the consequences not so dire. Our democracy depends on a thriving two-party system where competing parties and the voices within each vigorously debate ideas and then reach the reasonable compromises needed to govern an enterprise as important as the United States. Since 2010, the Republican Party has succumbed to its basest voices for short-term political gain. Compromise became a dirty word. Lies were peddled as truth and never corrected by those who knew better. Invective was liberally employed against opponents no matter the party and without consequences.

Trump has pledged to stuff his cabinet with fellow oligarchs and experienced operators in the business world, while pledging a grab bag of vaguely phrased anti-immigration initiatives combined with inflationary monetary policy, protectionist trade policy, and presumably more social liberalism. He’s recently praised Japan’s Shinzo Abe as an example of a leader whom he’d like to emulate.

Despite all this, people out to shave off legitimacy from liberal democracy in the US and elsewhere tend to be pleased with this development.

Ironically, the people least pleased with Trump’s popularity in the polls are the ones who have the strongest belief in the righteousness of liberal democracy with universal suffrage. Trump embarrasses this crowd because he knows how to give the masses what they want in a bombastic and entertaining manner. Most of the time, people in the political sphere compete at a lower level than someone like Trump needs to. They’re in a different competitive league — it’s like sending a professional football team to compete with the peewee league.

The critics of universal suffrage claim that it rewards shallow politicians who are willing to tell people what they want to hear in order to get elected. Popular policies are rarely also wise policies. Plenty of unpopular policies are also stupid, counter-productive, or corrupt policies.

Fundamentally, the existing GOP and its auxiliary media organizations act as a legitimizing outer party. Trump, like every other GOP candidate, supports radical progressive initiatives like graduated income taxes, universal education, and the other raft of alphabet agencies instituted during the second Roosevelt regime.

The substance of the candidate’s platform matters less than the demoralization that the campaign inflicts on the Outer Party and the actual administrators of the regime. This is one of the reasons why he’s so entertaining. If Trump wins the presidency and succeeds in creating a lot of internal confusion and conflict within the administration, then that’s mostly a good thing rather than a bad thing.

The permanent marginalization of an alternative party to the Democrats is also a good thing, because the loss of popular legitimacy would make it much harder for progressives to actually administer the country. If the right-leaning hoi polloi realizes that they have no hope whatsoever of influence in Washington, they will be less willing to comply with the raft of other policies — which means greater difficulty enforcing compliance with the regulatory state, more children pulled out of public schools, more people tuning out from the media, and a lot of other positive consequences.

History is full of dead civilizations. Few apart from a few archaeologists much cares about who the Etruscans were or what gods they worshiped, but the Etruscans mattered a lot to the Etruscans before they were destroyed by military invasion. The Etruscans are mostly significant because of the civilization that absorbed them afterwards.

Anyway. No one gets weepy over the Etruscans like they get weepy over dead lions. They’re a long-extinct people.

Some mixture of economic declines and military & naval losses resulted in a string of rolling catastrophes for them which they weren’t able to recover from. They lost their independence and coherence to their stronger neighbors, in stages. It’s certain that the Etruscans were aware that they were in decline, but there was no period of time during which awareness would have made much of a difference at all in their collective fate.

In democratic politics, agitators tend to see raising mass awareness as the critical antecedent to the resolution of some political problem or another. This is so solidly believed that ‘raising awareness’ often becomes the sole end of an agitation. The idea is that the people will ‘wake up,’ demand action, just action will happen, and the world will be improved. It’s often the case instead — just about always — that the demanded action is stupid and destructive, because the enthusiastic masses have no idea how to manage anything at all.

Agitation is usually something that’s better directed against your enemies, which is what it’s typically used for even when some idealistic cover story or another gets adopted. The point of agitation, properly understood, is to undermine the authority of some state or another that you want to destroy. It’s not something that results in an improvement, properly understood.

In a universal suffrage democracy, mass agitation isn’t actually quite so important as it sometimes seems. The way to get a law passed is to bribe politicians to pass the laws that you write, and then those politicians will use the bribe money to agitate the party faithful to keep them in office. Politicians challenge one another for a chance to be a channel for that bribery. They will also sometimes get the chance to serve on helpfully labeled committees and caucuses that tell bribers from different industries whom they should funnel money to, for convenience purposes.

Bribing officials must always happen for private advantage at public expense, because otherwise there would be no motive to do it — and the advantage must come at the expense of some group.

Occasionally, the politicians will create or expand bureaucracies which will actually do the work of governing. Those bureaucracies tend to be immune from the effects of public opinion, even when it’s nearly unanimous. This tension makes it so that the state continually bleeds off legitimacy over time. The politician says “you, the people, are the sovereigns here — I will do what you ask of me in return for your votes.” After the election, the politician is not actually capable of doing what he promised, and the bureaucracies will actually rule.

Politicians have the right to perform ‘oversight’ on bureaucracies, which means that they can hold televised meetings in which they make a big show of ceremonial authority over bureaucracies which they can’t actually execute on.

Popular sovereignty is the legitimizing myth, which the actual process of ruling in a modern state then undermines. After this happens, the people whose job it is to generate that legitimacy — the press — have to stoke up more demonstrations of popular sovereignty. People marching around in the street, yelling, and burning things has come to be identified with popular sovereignty, which, come to think of it, is appropriate considering democracy’s historical record. There’s no such thing as actual popular sovereignty, but it’s easier to pretend that there is when you have mobs of ‘the people’ manifesting themselves to burn things down and complain.

This is a recipe for constant civil conflict, and constant civil conflict weakens a civilization against external enemies, and those external enemies will eventually overwhelm it. Awareness of this does nothing to stop the process.

Jim Harper comments that the Cato Institute will do whatever it can to prevent ‘racists’ from attaining political power to enact legislation that favors some ethnic groups at the expense of others.

Murray Rothbard, one of the co-founders of Cato, wrote capably about the racial discrimination inherent in the raft of civil rights legal programs. This legacy particular to Rothbard hasn’t been forgotten, institutionally, at Cato, but it has been critiqued and buried while waving away the substance of what he had to say.

If the hope was to ‘prevent’ policies that favor some races over others from coming into being, then the time for that has passed us by –by decades.

Writing in 1963, Rothbard described the dual nature of Civil Rights protests which has been maintained through today — one public-friendly face of ‘nonviolent protest,’ which nonetheless involves the ritualistic violation of private property, followed by the public-unfriendly-but-tolerated-by-the-authorities violent counterstrike by the worst elements in the Black community:

For the Birmingham struggle took place in two phases: the first phase, of the non-violent children, was on behalf of desegregation, and also compulsory integration of restaurants and forced hiring of Negroes in various jobs. This phase ended with the negotiated agreement of May 10. In retaliation for the Negroes’ success, white gangs resorted to violence: to the bombing of a leading Negro motel and the house of the Rev. King’s brother. It was this act that provoked an entirely different set of Negroes to action: to committing retaliatory violence on the night of May 11-12. These were not the sober, church-going, lower middle-class Negroes committed to the Rev. King and non-violence. These were the poorest strata of the Negro workers, the economically submerged who help to form that group which suffers from unemployment at a depression-rate, a rate twice the average for American workers as a whole. Interestingly and significantly enough, their aim was not compulsory integration, nor was their particular target the white employer or restaurant-owner. No, it was the police.

The pattern of destabilization continues today, because it’s a pattern that works for seizing power in a democracy at the expense of civil society.

If the Cato Institute wants to decrease rather than increase racial strife, it’d be wise to consider the roots of that modern strife — which lies in the broad affirmation of postwar intellectuals of a false creed of genetic egalitarianism which has not been borne out by the evidence. When the scientist who discovered DNA becomes an un-person for challenging this new dogma, a thinking person must seriously consider whether the man might have something relevant to say about cognitive and other biological differences rooted in genetics between individuals and groups of humans.

Civil Rights laws, in effect, violate property and rights of free association on behalf of some racial groups at the expense of others.

Cato is happy to publish essays critical of Civil Rights law in a roundabout way, which nonetheless praise the raft of laws as well-intentioned, while being terribly concerned about the “progressive libel” that libertarian principals are ‘racist.’ Which, by progressive definitions, they are. That’s why progressives use the slur — because it anathematizes any blocks to their political program.

This approach is one of the reasons why the rationalistic modes of most libertarian discourse can be so frustrating — libertarians are simultaneously happy to argue against Civil Rights law from first principles, but then are unwilling to align themselves with a culture that might be able to sustain those first principles. They can make a good legal argument against the legislation, and good philosophical arguments, but then they undermine anyone who might actually advance those arguments in the culture.