Kisin up to the Western liberal democratic delusion

The generational problem of talking without thinking

Feb 13, 2024

A post in which I question the wisdom and the dangers of low information, fuzzy thinking.

I can be triggered just as easily as any woke Gen-Z-er. This time it was an interview of John Anderson with Konstantin Kisin and the teaser part of a post of Elle Griffin’s

The Elysian

pondering: “Should we turn the whole world into democracies?”

My reaction to them was the same: what the …… are they talking about? Do they have any idea about the concepts that they are trying to discuss? What democracy actually means and what represents actual value in Western civilization?

I do not know how old Elle is, but I know that

Konstantin Kisin

is 31 and I guess that they are of the same generation. I cannot help but to see the painful shortcomings of their arguments as generational problems.
But let’s get back to this later…

Konstantin’s love letter

There is a short clip of his much longer interview saying:

“People in Russia and China are not sitting around doing identity politics. As I said at the time, they are getting ready. And now, you are starting to see, Sergey Lavrov the Russian foreign minister, talked only days ago, about how the purpose of what they are doing in Ukraine is to push America out of Eastern Europe, and it is to end the American global dominance in the world. That’s what people want and make no mistake about it; they are coming for what we have. And I am trying to make this point to people over and over and over again. We don’t live in some magical rainbow-colored world in which everyone lives happily, and trade and whatever. There are a lot of people in the world who just want what we have. And they are coming.”
(Emphasis is mine. Sort of. The big bold red lettering is his.)

Really? What exactly is it that “WE have?”
What exactly is it that ‘THEY’ are coming to get? They will just come here with their greedy hands and snatch away from us all the goodies we have?
So, again, I have to ask, what are those goodies?

The unsustainable debt?
The fiat currencies they are based on?
The collapsing productivity and deindustrialization?
The desperate dependence on Russian natural resources and Chinese manufacturing?
The collapsing birthrate and the insane level of culturally incompatible immigration to compensate for it?
The dysfunctional universities?
The bankrupt healthcare?
The nearly bankrupt world reserve currency?
The dysfunctional welfare-state?
Running out of taxpayers with an increasing demand on social security and health care?

As usual, I could continue…. And I would be ecstatic, if the Russians and the Chinese could take any of these away from us. But they cannot. What makes Konstantin’s fear-mongering so egregious is the insinuated message: “we have the good life, and those mean, bad people are trying to take it away from us.”
But there is nothing physical to take away. Nobody will dismantle the Eiffel Tower to reassemble it in Voronezh or move the Colosseum to Shanghai. Maybe they can buy the Mona Lisa from the French for a few sacks of potatoes when they go bankrupt.

The ‘West’ is an idea. Whatever is good about ‘The West’ are ideas and ideals. Mostly betrayed ones. Not trinkets. Konstantin does not need to worry; nobody will take away his candy cane.
What we really have to worry about is not Russia and China, but the implosion of
“The West” that he professes to love. Every single problem of the West is self imposed.

As John Adams pointed out:

“Remember, Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself.
There never was a Democracy yet, that did not commit suicide,”

That is what we should worry about. How to survive the turmoil.

The BRICS now has nine members, 15 approved candidates, 19 in the waiting line. What these countries want is to be left alone. To have agency over their own future. They are fed up with being bullied, coerced, exploited, occupied and jerked around by the Western hegemon, its allies and the international institutions they control.

Elle’s democracy

The first problem with Elle’s question is the cognitive dissonance in the question, the idea that we could FORCE people to accept a political system that they may not want.
Just like antifa, which considers even the most fascistic behaviour acceptable in the cause of fighting fascism, which is defined as any opposition to their postmodernist, relativist, collectivist, identity politics driven ideas.

Can we call an imposed democracy “Democracy”? Is it a good idea ever? Just look at Afghanistan:
It started with the religious autocracy of the Taliban and ended with the religious autocracy of the Taliban.
The only difference is 2.3 trillion dollars of taxpayers’ money pissed away and hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed in the process with absolutely NOTHING to show for it in the end.

But this, imposed democracy, is just the silliest point of Elle.
The serious question is whether democracy itself is a good idea.
Not according to Benjamin Franklin who defined it as:

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner”

In my post “Why Marxism” I tried to address the foundations of the conceptual problems, here we will have to look another set of the pragmatic ones in defining what democracy actually is.

There are no two democracies alike. Different constitutions, different rules for representation, different types of administrations, different rules for elections. Which one is the REAL democracy? Which one is the best? Which one can be considered the gold standard?
The US Congress has two political parties represented in the House and in the Senate. The Canadian house has five parties represented. The Russian Duma also has five. Does that make them more democratic than the US? The German Bundestag has seven. Italy has so many, that they are only counted in coalitions.

American federalism is different from the Canadian and the German. Which one exactly does Elle have in mind when she talks about democracy?
Should I continue with the Multi-ethnic federalism of Russia and India (the later with 22 official languages)?

China would deserve a post on its own, but for now, for this discussion, all you need to do is to consider this TED talk: Eric X. Li: A tale of two political systems (there are several talks out there on the subject.)

Then we could ask with Elle:

“What if China and Russia become democracies as a result? What would the world be like if most of it was democratic and all of the superpowers were?”

What indeed? Will it be a centralized or a distributed democracy? Will some democracies be more equal than others? How much power would we delegate to global bureaucracies? Who would make the laws? What would be the scope of those laws?

And yet again, I could go on asking questions, while we still did not get close to the relevant ones.
The ones about our personal autonomy and our power to make or influence the decisions that have an effect on our personal lives.
Democracy is a structure of power over decision making. But this is not the subject of this post.
Read my series linked below for more.

The subject of this post is the sorry state of our culture in which the likes of Konstantin and Elle can ask questions and make public statements without putting ANY effort into thinking about them.
The questions I asked:

“What exactly will be taken away from us and how?” - and
“What is democracy and what would a globalized version look like?”

… should be the most obvious questions for any thinking person.

Konstantin is coasting on the fact that he was born in still communist Russia and can posit himself as an expert on the subject. But he still doesn’t really get either, especially the fact that the Western world is slowly descending into a very communist like totalitarianism. The jackboots are not coming from the outside but from within.

Elle got her ‘facts’ from the Our world in data web-site. Not completely useless, but if you go down the rabbit hole, you will find a research and methodology so biased, so subjective that half the abstract is talking about the difficulties caused by the bias and subjectivity.
Eggheads talking to each other trying to figure out how many democrats can dance on the head of a Western liberal pin. Just another example of seriously corrupt, speculative Marxist ‘science’.

The problem with both Konstantin and Elle is that their attitudes and passions are running far ahead of their analytical minds in a world where it is the later that we need the most. Instead of analyzing the problems, they are just hanging on to their poorly defined delusions about democracy and Western liberalism. And they are not alone, which is the generational problem.

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