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The End of Democracy
Most people would agree that democracy throughout the world is in deep trouble. From the polarizing politics of the United States to the endless refugee crisis in Europe to the rise in radical Islam, there is a widespread feeling that our way of life--political, cultural, and social--is under siege. But what if democracy itself is to blame? What if the current threats are not distortions of but inherent to democracy? What if the solution to our present ills is not "fixing" the system, but junking it entirely? Christophe Buffin de Chosal asks these forbidden questions, and answers them unarguably with Gallic wit and glittering style. If you read only one book on politics this year, let this be it!
- GenresPoliticsPhilosophy
163 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2017
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February 12, 2020
I have had many of the thoughts expressed in this book on my mind for some time as I have watched US "democracy" floundering while other so called "democracies" fail miserably. The author treads where others fear to tiptoe. I doubt that an American author would be so explicitly truthful.
In my opinion, the USA's "democracy" has outlived the democracy life expectancy of about 200 years, thus this book is extremely timely and the points it makes about the wealthy elites actually overriding popular voters are right on target.
By a very strange coincidence, just after finishing reading the book I accidentally came across an article that is quite pertinent. See "The Day I Stopped Believing in American Democracy" by Benjamin Sledge: https://humanparts.medium.com/the-day...
I would probably have given this book 5 stars but my conscience hurts to criticize "democracy," something I have believed in, supported and worked for during my entire life. Its inevitable coming demise makes me very sad.
In my opinion, the USA's "democracy" has outlived the democracy life expectancy of about 200 years, thus this book is extremely timely and the points it makes about the wealthy elites actually overriding popular voters are right on target.
By a very strange coincidence, just after finishing reading the book I accidentally came across an article that is quite pertinent. See "The Day I Stopped Believing in American Democracy" by Benjamin Sledge: https://humanparts.medium.com/the-day...
I would probably have given this book 5 stars but my conscience hurts to criticize "democracy," something I have believed in, supported and worked for during my entire life. Its inevitable coming demise makes me very sad.
December 17, 2025
2014's bold thesis has become 2019's received wisdom.
Since this book was published we have watched democracy in action through the United States presidential election and the ensuing Russiagate investigation, the Brexit mess in England and the massive immigrant invasion throughout Europe.
Buffin de Chosal will say that these are not exceptions – this is the way democracy works.
At the time of the Russian Revolution, Vasiliy Rosanov wrote that: "democracy is the system by which an organized minority governs an unorganized majority."
The organized minority of his day were the Bolsheviks. Though they claimed to speak for the Russian working class and peasants, they were of a different religion and background and in fact had shown and would show themselves contemptuous of artisans and the people on the land. The organized minority of our day, throughout North America and Western Europe, are the bankers, financiers and news media magnates – ironically, in no small measure descendants of the instigators of the Bolshevik revolution.
Buffin de Chosal states up front that he does not have an alternative to propose. The alternative models that exist and have existed for the past century have all called themselves democracies. The totalitarian states of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union took pains to dress themselves in democratic guise. The fascist governments of Germany and Italy were democratically elected.
Moreover, they were movements of the left – socialists, just as they called themselves.
One of Buffin de Chosal's observations is that there is a hierarchy of control. The elected politicians are merely front men. They depend for their financial and political support on political parties whose kingmakers remain behind-the scenes. These kingmakers are in turn controlled by the financial interests.
A politician can not afford to get out of line – he will be sidelined. In American politics we see this today with Tulsi Gabbard and Ron Paul. In Europe we see Beppo Grillo and Sebastian Kurz sidelined. Pym Fortuyn and Jörg Haider died untimely deaths.
The fascists found themselves at odds with the moneyed interests, who (per Pat Buchanan and others) made extraordinary efforts to ensure that Britain and then the United States warred against Germany. The fascists were defeated, and even seven decades later fascist remains one of the worst epithets that can be hurled at anybody. The Communists, responsible for body counts an order of magnitude larger, seem to get a pass. The organized minority has power!
Buffin de Chosal repeatedly makes the point that elected politicians are forced to have a short-term focus. They cannot afford to consider the long-term implications of their policies. As a case in point, Obamacare was enough to get Obama elected. Although it was patently clear to anybody with a sharp pencil that the economics wouldn't work, the idea was enough to sway the election. Balancing the budget as a long-term objective, not in the interest of any politician. They all
want to spend now to have it paid for later.
President Trump is bragging about the strong economy he supposedly created. It is done with smoke and mirrors and the world's first-ever trillion dollar (almost) budget deficit. It is patently unsustainable, but for his purposes it just has to last until November 2020. After that, who cares?
Buffin de Chosal writes about the benefits of monarchy, the ancient régime that prevailed in Europe into the nineteenth century. He writes "In the Ancient Régime, the people were not sovereign, nor did they claim to be so. Sovereignty was embodied in the monarch, who ruled and governed. The monarch was a true sovereign insofar as he was not divided against himself or enmeshed in quarrels of interest."
In a democracy, the ruling group by definition represents a minority or a coalition of minorities, each with its own special interests. The monarch, at least in theory, should be above that. He should reign with the long-term interests of his country at heart.
Not all monarchs of course had the character and foresight to do so. Buffin de Chosal would say, so what, they might at least some time. It is incredibly rare for a democracy to produce a true statesman. As Edmund Burke wrote, the law does not make people virtuous. It is custom, religion, and ties to their fellow man that make them virtuous.
Democracy has weakened all of these bonds to the point that there is what Buffin de Chosal calls a "legal vacuum." The citizen is assumed to be ignorant, unable to make up his mind about anything. Custom counts for nothing. Therefore, in the Democratic state it seems that everything must be legislated, otherwise order will not prevail.
Joe Bob Briggs writes that San Francisco "outlawed plastic bags, clove cigarettes, Coke machines, bottled-water machines, people playing stickball in the street, people playing chess in the street, pet stores, goldfish, masked balls, the sale of furs, and the practice of letting your dog stick his head halfway out the window while you’re driving. Long ago they banned toys being given away with Happy Meals at McDonald’s."
Buffin de Chosal takes on the 1948 UN declaration on human rights, a progressive project that Roosevelt had been incubating even before entering the second war. The document confuses rights (life, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, right to property) with human needs (healthcare, education, housing, leisure and pension income).
Rights don't cost money, but satisfying needs does. Conflating the two gave democratic governments a license to expand their power. Of course democracies needed money to satisfy these supposedly "rights," which in turn entailed increasing tax revenues and/or public debt, and employing legions of well-paid bureaucrats to administer the largess.
Buffin de Chosal writes "Democracy tends toward totalitarian government through legal pretensions designed to substitutions for morality. A government which does not recognize any moral law for which good and evil do not exist, but only the will of numbers, opens before itself a field free to manipulation and oppression. In democracy, good and evil must become one with the law, for it is inadmissible that there should exist something superior to the law."
The expansion of the Democratic state is most visible and most pernicious in the supposedly virtuous anti-discriminatory measures. Buffin de Chosal writes: "The Democratic state presents anti-discriminatory measures as a means for protecting minorities against abuse of the majority's dominant position. Few people have seen just how much this reason is hypocritical. It is a mere pretext for extending the state's power." The state which arrogates to itself the right to discriminate has in fact a weapon which is capable of annihilating every individual freedom. The state will soon no longer be under the rule of law."
"If the democratic state succeeds in fashioning opinion, it enjoys a solid, lasting and quasi-unlimited power. It is therefore the inevitable objective of any democracy to fashion and control opinion. For this it resorts to principal means – the media and education."
"In all the countries of Western Europe, the major media outlets are in one form or another under political control. Most of the major dailies and weeklies receive government subsidies, without which, very often, they would go into bankruptcy."
Democracies increasingly stridently defend "politically correct" positions on a large number of topics which affect their management of the levers of power. Climate change is a huge bureaucracy, and gives government power over a vast number of aspects of the citizens' lives. Diversity and its corollary, anti-discrimination, named above, give the government arbitrary power to discriminate against citizens. Court decisions and legislation in the realm of family law decreased the family's scope of action in important matters such as education, health, and even free association. At the
same time they give legitimacy to new definitions of the family. Certain of them such as gay and transsexual marriage seem to be liberal positions. They are blessed by the establishment. Polygamy seems to be more of a conservative enterprise. It remains taboo.
No one would argue when Buffin de Chosal laments that "All of the educational systems have deteriorated in both formative quality and content during the past decades." The curriculum has been politicized – in the United States we derisively call it "rain forest math." The curriculum has been "dumbed down" to mask whatever differences a native ability exist among different demographic elements among schoolchildren.
Buffin de Chosal devotes an entire chapter to the European Union, the most undemocratic of supposedly democratic structures. The bureaucrats in Brussels and Strasbourg are extremely well insulated from the people that they supposedly represent. They are highly paid, and yet highly bribable as well. Member of the European Parliament Nigel Farage has made a career out of lampooning their hypocrisy.
The problems of democracy are self reinforcing. The debt is bound to increase, and even the rate at which it increases is condemned to continue to increase. It must "run to failure." It appears that the level of corruption is likewise increasing.
A factor Buffin de Chosal does not investigate is the fact that the electorate is getting dumber. Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley of Menie provide an excellent analysis in [[ASIN:B07M8NG2CN At Our Wits End - Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future]]. The thesis is made up of simple to understand parts. Most significantly, intelligence is highly heritable, and smart people have not been having as many children as dumb ones since the Industrial Revolution. Put another way, the incredible inventions made by the smart ones have allowed the dumb ones' progeny to survive, and with them increasing load of mutations within the genome. Dumb people remain religious, whereas smart people no longer heed the command to "be fruitful and multiply." This is compounded by massive immigration of people who are less capable of functioning in an industrial society – put simply again, people who don't do well on measures such as IQ tests that predict success in modern Western societies.
A bit more history would also be in order. My ancestors, arriving in America prior to the revolution, at what Dutton and Woodley claim was the acme of human intelligence, were humble people. They, and the framers of the American Constitution did not trust their own ability to understand the complexities of economics and world affairs. They set up a representative government, expressly in the form of a republic rather than a democracy. "Democracy" worked well in the young United States because the people were smarter, the people were much more homogeneous… and it wasn't a
democracy. A survey of democracy elsewhere in the world – see my review of [[ASIN:9500816385 Manual Del Perfecto Idiota Latinoamericano (Spanish Edition)]] - demonstrates that however attractive the idea may be, it can simply never be well implemented.
A five-star effort for its time. One can hope that Buffin de Chosal survives to write an account of democracy's dénouement. If he is right, he should survive to have the opportunity.
Since this book was published we have watched democracy in action through the United States presidential election and the ensuing Russiagate investigation, the Brexit mess in England and the massive immigrant invasion throughout Europe.
Buffin de Chosal will say that these are not exceptions – this is the way democracy works.
At the time of the Russian Revolution, Vasiliy Rosanov wrote that: "democracy is the system by which an organized minority governs an unorganized majority."
The organized minority of his day were the Bolsheviks. Though they claimed to speak for the Russian working class and peasants, they were of a different religion and background and in fact had shown and would show themselves contemptuous of artisans and the people on the land. The organized minority of our day, throughout North America and Western Europe, are the bankers, financiers and news media magnates – ironically, in no small measure descendants of the instigators of the Bolshevik revolution.
Buffin de Chosal states up front that he does not have an alternative to propose. The alternative models that exist and have existed for the past century have all called themselves democracies. The totalitarian states of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union took pains to dress themselves in democratic guise. The fascist governments of Germany and Italy were democratically elected.
Moreover, they were movements of the left – socialists, just as they called themselves.
One of Buffin de Chosal's observations is that there is a hierarchy of control. The elected politicians are merely front men. They depend for their financial and political support on political parties whose kingmakers remain behind-the scenes. These kingmakers are in turn controlled by the financial interests.
A politician can not afford to get out of line – he will be sidelined. In American politics we see this today with Tulsi Gabbard and Ron Paul. In Europe we see Beppo Grillo and Sebastian Kurz sidelined. Pym Fortuyn and Jörg Haider died untimely deaths.
The fascists found themselves at odds with the moneyed interests, who (per Pat Buchanan and others) made extraordinary efforts to ensure that Britain and then the United States warred against Germany. The fascists were defeated, and even seven decades later fascist remains one of the worst epithets that can be hurled at anybody. The Communists, responsible for body counts an order of magnitude larger, seem to get a pass. The organized minority has power!
Buffin de Chosal repeatedly makes the point that elected politicians are forced to have a short-term focus. They cannot afford to consider the long-term implications of their policies. As a case in point, Obamacare was enough to get Obama elected. Although it was patently clear to anybody with a sharp pencil that the economics wouldn't work, the idea was enough to sway the election. Balancing the budget as a long-term objective, not in the interest of any politician. They all
want to spend now to have it paid for later.
President Trump is bragging about the strong economy he supposedly created. It is done with smoke and mirrors and the world's first-ever trillion dollar (almost) budget deficit. It is patently unsustainable, but for his purposes it just has to last until November 2020. After that, who cares?
Buffin de Chosal writes about the benefits of monarchy, the ancient régime that prevailed in Europe into the nineteenth century. He writes "In the Ancient Régime, the people were not sovereign, nor did they claim to be so. Sovereignty was embodied in the monarch, who ruled and governed. The monarch was a true sovereign insofar as he was not divided against himself or enmeshed in quarrels of interest."
In a democracy, the ruling group by definition represents a minority or a coalition of minorities, each with its own special interests. The monarch, at least in theory, should be above that. He should reign with the long-term interests of his country at heart.
Not all monarchs of course had the character and foresight to do so. Buffin de Chosal would say, so what, they might at least some time. It is incredibly rare for a democracy to produce a true statesman. As Edmund Burke wrote, the law does not make people virtuous. It is custom, religion, and ties to their fellow man that make them virtuous.
Democracy has weakened all of these bonds to the point that there is what Buffin de Chosal calls a "legal vacuum." The citizen is assumed to be ignorant, unable to make up his mind about anything. Custom counts for nothing. Therefore, in the Democratic state it seems that everything must be legislated, otherwise order will not prevail.
Joe Bob Briggs writes that San Francisco "outlawed plastic bags, clove cigarettes, Coke machines, bottled-water machines, people playing stickball in the street, people playing chess in the street, pet stores, goldfish, masked balls, the sale of furs, and the practice of letting your dog stick his head halfway out the window while you’re driving. Long ago they banned toys being given away with Happy Meals at McDonald’s."
Buffin de Chosal takes on the 1948 UN declaration on human rights, a progressive project that Roosevelt had been incubating even before entering the second war. The document confuses rights (life, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, right to property) with human needs (healthcare, education, housing, leisure and pension income).
Rights don't cost money, but satisfying needs does. Conflating the two gave democratic governments a license to expand their power. Of course democracies needed money to satisfy these supposedly "rights," which in turn entailed increasing tax revenues and/or public debt, and employing legions of well-paid bureaucrats to administer the largess.
Buffin de Chosal writes "Democracy tends toward totalitarian government through legal pretensions designed to substitutions for morality. A government which does not recognize any moral law for which good and evil do not exist, but only the will of numbers, opens before itself a field free to manipulation and oppression. In democracy, good and evil must become one with the law, for it is inadmissible that there should exist something superior to the law."
The expansion of the Democratic state is most visible and most pernicious in the supposedly virtuous anti-discriminatory measures. Buffin de Chosal writes: "The Democratic state presents anti-discriminatory measures as a means for protecting minorities against abuse of the majority's dominant position. Few people have seen just how much this reason is hypocritical. It is a mere pretext for extending the state's power." The state which arrogates to itself the right to discriminate has in fact a weapon which is capable of annihilating every individual freedom. The state will soon no longer be under the rule of law."
"If the democratic state succeeds in fashioning opinion, it enjoys a solid, lasting and quasi-unlimited power. It is therefore the inevitable objective of any democracy to fashion and control opinion. For this it resorts to principal means – the media and education."
"In all the countries of Western Europe, the major media outlets are in one form or another under political control. Most of the major dailies and weeklies receive government subsidies, without which, very often, they would go into bankruptcy."
Democracies increasingly stridently defend "politically correct" positions on a large number of topics which affect their management of the levers of power. Climate change is a huge bureaucracy, and gives government power over a vast number of aspects of the citizens' lives. Diversity and its corollary, anti-discrimination, named above, give the government arbitrary power to discriminate against citizens. Court decisions and legislation in the realm of family law decreased the family's scope of action in important matters such as education, health, and even free association. At the
same time they give legitimacy to new definitions of the family. Certain of them such as gay and transsexual marriage seem to be liberal positions. They are blessed by the establishment. Polygamy seems to be more of a conservative enterprise. It remains taboo.
No one would argue when Buffin de Chosal laments that "All of the educational systems have deteriorated in both formative quality and content during the past decades." The curriculum has been politicized – in the United States we derisively call it "rain forest math." The curriculum has been "dumbed down" to mask whatever differences a native ability exist among different demographic elements among schoolchildren.
Buffin de Chosal devotes an entire chapter to the European Union, the most undemocratic of supposedly democratic structures. The bureaucrats in Brussels and Strasbourg are extremely well insulated from the people that they supposedly represent. They are highly paid, and yet highly bribable as well. Member of the European Parliament Nigel Farage has made a career out of lampooning their hypocrisy.
The problems of democracy are self reinforcing. The debt is bound to increase, and even the rate at which it increases is condemned to continue to increase. It must "run to failure." It appears that the level of corruption is likewise increasing.
A factor Buffin de Chosal does not investigate is the fact that the electorate is getting dumber. Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley of Menie provide an excellent analysis in [[ASIN:B07M8NG2CN At Our Wits End - Why We're Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future]]. The thesis is made up of simple to understand parts. Most significantly, intelligence is highly heritable, and smart people have not been having as many children as dumb ones since the Industrial Revolution. Put another way, the incredible inventions made by the smart ones have allowed the dumb ones' progeny to survive, and with them increasing load of mutations within the genome. Dumb people remain religious, whereas smart people no longer heed the command to "be fruitful and multiply." This is compounded by massive immigration of people who are less capable of functioning in an industrial society – put simply again, people who don't do well on measures such as IQ tests that predict success in modern Western societies.
A bit more history would also be in order. My ancestors, arriving in America prior to the revolution, at what Dutton and Woodley claim was the acme of human intelligence, were humble people. They, and the framers of the American Constitution did not trust their own ability to understand the complexities of economics and world affairs. They set up a representative government, expressly in the form of a republic rather than a democracy. "Democracy" worked well in the young United States because the people were smarter, the people were much more homogeneous… and it wasn't a
democracy. A survey of democracy elsewhere in the world – see my review of [[ASIN:9500816385 Manual Del Perfecto Idiota Latinoamericano (Spanish Edition)]] - demonstrates that however attractive the idea may be, it can simply never be well implemented.
A five-star effort for its time. One can hope that Buffin de Chosal survives to write an account of democracy's dénouement. If he is right, he should survive to have the opportunity.
July 14, 2024
Some interesting view points. Not sure if it all will come to pass, and sometimes feels a bit over the top. But there are some astute observations that highlight some of the challenges that need to be addressed.
April 5, 2025
this is a must read for anyone who wants to be honest politically about where the world is going.
October 12, 2020
Never thought I would get swayed into believing the thesis of this book but I did. Democracy really isn't the best solution for state and humankind and M. Buffin de Chosal hammers this home factually, concisely and with a bit of humour. I read this about 2 months ago and I'm still thinking about it now as we head into a new election. The shortcomings of Parliamentary Democracies are numerous and so dominated by special interests, corruption, money, ill-equipped constituency, short-termism etc....
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