MACHINE POLITICS

The election technique of liberal democracy

---

This is the tenth extract from my forthcoming book, A Brief History of Liberal Democracy.

In this post I explain where the machinery of electoral success used throughout the West came from - and where it hopes to go next, with the help of technology.

---

An AI “god” for machine politics?

Technique is the process of standardising results. It is seen in Western politics through the transition of political parties from their basis of principle to the practice of winning elections. This can be called machine politics.

Its context is the engineering of our society to present this politics as the supreme product in its line.

Why would anyone need an alternative to perfection?

---

I explained this technique in chapter eight here:

THE TECHNIQUE OF CONSENSUS

---

For over a century we have been increasingly ruled by media - the mediums of mass communication, education, workplace terms and online conditions, entertainment and all the products placed before us to consume including the output of our mass-market intellectuals.

This soft power was mobilised to dominate two spheres - foreign and domestic - meaning the purpose of cultural production collapsed the distinction between subversion overseas and abroad.

For this reason some commentators correctly observe there is no difference between foreign and domestic policy.

This technique - the sponsorship of mass culture - produces “soft power”.

---

David Beckham - metrosexual marshmallow man

MARSHMALLOW TOTALITARIANISM

This power is called “marshmallow totalitarianism” by the English writer Peter Hitchens.

Here is an explanation of this concept from 2017:

Hitchens…warned that an “established atheism” is creeping up on Britain.

Citizens are becoming the subjects of a “soft, marshmallow, totalitarianism”.

This does not involve dawn raids by secret police but instead subtle threats to employment and livelihood.

Hitchens said it is

“Made clear in the lives of particularly those who work in the public sector that there is no job security and there is no advancement if you will not conform…”.

In this case, the conformity is as it is in every case: to the liberal agenda, which makes compliance with trans-sanity a legal duty for employers - and those who wish to remain employed.

Few people are aware that Peter Hitchens has a savage deadlift.

Hitchens also called the European Union a “marshmallow tyranny”, noting how the then Czech President Vaclav Klaus said:

“It is post-democracy, really, that rules the EU.”

Hitchens said in 2009,

The sticky, marshmallow bonds of the EU are obviously not the iron shackles of the old dictators. But they are bonds all the same, and once they are in place, the Czechs will have little to distinguish them from their neighbours apart from their beer, their literature, their music and their complex language.

From having been a country, they will become a regional oddity in a state called Europe.

This “post-democracy” is a forced consensus, and it is not enforced by the brutal and overt methods of Soviet Communism - but by a process which is familiar to practically anyone living in the West today.

In our marshmallow totalitarianism, the threat is usually much softer – the dissenter’s job and standing are threatened, and if he does not give in, his livelihood and his reputation are taken away.

The terms and conditions of the liberal consensus are enforced everywhere. We are surrounded by the sticky blob of the soft, sickly-sweet power of the liberal state.

Instead of the torture machine and Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, the Twitter Mob, howling with execration, incessant and relentless, frightens most bodies into sacrificing the necessary victim.

It seems to work. The chosen individual suffers, but everyone else soon gets used to it.

Haidt is worth reading, and not only for his moral foundations theory.

Why does this work? Consumer liberalism replaces norms with normlessness, God with nothing, and meaning with the memes of its machine. The result is a passive population with no principles.

Most people don’t have very strong convictions about anything, so they never get close to these threats, and just adapt.

An opinion becomes a principle when you lose something valuable in its defence. Hitchens says the rate of change from a principled politics to the manufacture of public opinion has been giddying:

I am endlessly amused by the behaviour of politicians and mainstream media persons, presenters of TV and radio shows etc, who have seamlessly shifted their received opinions in the last 30 years, and swallow things as normal which in the 1980s they would have regarded as stark staring mad.

This is the milieu in which machine politics makes most sense. Principles come at a price few are now prepared to pay. Why not offer something else instead?

+++BELOW THE GRIFTLINE+++FROM MACHINE TO ALGORITHM+++PURPLE WITCHES STEAL YOUR KIDS+++LIBERALISM VERSUS REALITY+++MENES+++