It Could Happen Here - Democracy in the Age of Riots

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

Mia and James discover the meaning of democracy and why democracy and riots are more similar than you might think.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's my getting absolutely screwed over by the medical establishment voice.

People thought it was another sheep podcast they were briefly extremely excited nope the sheep the sheep podcast will uh i make no promises about the sheep podcast well we're going to tell them about the lost sheep episode no yeah okay we'll try we'll just leave that one yeah this is this this is it could happen here the podcast where uh you you would think that the medical issue is a trans thing and it's absolutely not and it's amazing and i love it uh yeah it's it's a podcast where i complain about medical issues and talk about other stuff uh with me is james yeah uh i'm a person who complains about medical issues and sometimes goes to mexico to buy drugs so yay legal drugs medical drugs while we're being recorded

the thing is making me think of is i was in oh god i don't remember where in mexico i was um i was not very old but so we took off we took a ferry and it was i got like so seasick it was like the most seasick i've ever been so we had to like go back and um we so i i this my spanish is not great at this time my spanish was much worse than it is now. And we go to this drugstore, and we're trying to find something that's like an anti-seasickness drug, and we buy this drug called Vomisin. Face name. We're looking through the thing.

We find the part where it says side effects, and I remember I look at this, and I read it, and it says, hallucinaciones. And I'm like, oh, no. And I was like oh god it wound up actually it was completely fine uh yeah yeah i did not vomit over the rails again i'm in hydra on the ferry ride back i have a good uh i have a good inadvertent medicine hallucinogen story and then we can we can actually do the podcast and i was when i was a bit younger i was climbing a mountain in morocco and um became like extremely altitude sick like my fucking nose was just like

unleashing my blood like it was a real moment um yeah i bet i look great and uh so i tried to get some medicine we went somewhere and like you know i French, but most of the people spoke Berber and it wasn't a language that I speak at all. Anyway, I received some medicine, which I took in the form of, I think, like a powder that I mixed with honey. And I was like, OK, this is unique and different, whatever. Fuck me, did I have some incredible dreams. I just kept taking it because I was like, well, it was definitely opium. The thing I was taking was like, I bought it down and was like It was definitely opium The thing I was taking was

I bought it down and was like This stuff just really helps with my altitude sickness One of the adults I was with was like Ah Yeah, don't do drugs kids Speaking of not doing drugs Okay, so we're here today to talk about democracy the opium of the masses yeah so this this script was originally written in a period where i had

spent an enormous amount of time being forced to watch documentaries about what democracy was and my conclusion from all of this is that the history of democracy begins with a mistranslation. Okay. So, okay, what does that mean? The answer is that, okay, whenever someone starts talking about democracy, the first thing they do is they go like, I'm going to start by translating the word democracy. Yeah. now the the most common translation that you'll see this like like everywhere from like astra taylor's like documentary what is democracy to just like the thing that's on wikipedia holds that democracy is derived from two greek words right you have demos meaning the people

and kratos meaning rule so you put these two together you get demos kratos you get democracy i my greek i can't pronounce greek very well it's fine whatever it's this is ancient greek um yeah but you know this means rule by the people so okay this translation has several advantages right foremost among them it is simple enough to be taught to a school to school children and catchy enough there's a non zero chance that like the most pedantic of them will remember it after like the day after the test which presumably is the explanation for why this is this is the translation of democracy it opens every single fucking thing people write about democracy unfortunately unfortunately for our beleaguered grade school teachers and and

sort of the broader populace as a whole. This translation is so blatantly wrong that I have been forced to start a thing about democracy and also about rioting, yelling about ancient Greek. Great. Okay, so what is the actual issue here? The actual problem is the mistranslation of Kratos in particular is incredibly important, both conceptually and ideologically. And the actual sort of proper translation and the implications of this are worth examining in some detail.

So the anthropologist, David Graeber to have mentioned a lot on this show wrote in, in his regrettably very poorly read essay. There never was a West, describes Kratos thus, This in turn might help explain the term democracy itself, which appears to have been coined as something of a slur by its elitist opponents. It literally means the force or even violence of the people.

Kratos, not Archos the ancient greek word for ruler also the root of anarchism or without archos yeah so what he's yeah so what he's saying there wasn't kratos a dude like he he's a dude and uh i've undersold him an immortal dude uh yeah he's also he's's the main character of the God of War games. Okay, that is the thing I did not know. And hilariously,

that is like, him being the main character of the God of War games, that is actually a better way to understand what Kratos is than the rule by thing that everyone usually translates this out.

Because like, like ancient Greek has a perfectly good word for like rule by right it's archos it's the root of anarchism it's like an anarchist it's a word it's like the the normal thing where you have a greek derived word where you want to say rule by is that is archos right yeah but democracy is not that right yeah like all the girls like that but like like democracy is specifically kratos and this is because what democracy literally means is ruled by the violence of the people based yeah well and this you know okay so like this this this like this sounds like i am

essentially pearl clutching about translations but the context here is actually important right as as grammar points out the sort of you know athens which is the exemplar society society against which the original anti-democratic philosophers rail by the way this is like plato etc hates democracy most of the people who you read from sort of classical greek like yeah philosophy despise democracy even though they live in them uh huge you know not not not not to like whitewash athenian society but like these people are like sparta apologists and it's like we haven't really it's funny people have definitely i don't know if they've actually recovered plato or red plato or they just uh get mad when donald trump doesn't win elections but

like this whole like this whole like benevolent philosopher king shit has definitely uh definitely made a comeback in recent years and it's troubling yeah and i think i think part of this this is this is another complaint that i've had about sort of like the the way that like the sort of like great authors thing is taught in in in universities is they deliberately like there was like an in in in what in what specific readings they assigned there was like an incredible intellectual effort that goes into making sure you never see the absolutely deranged shit that these people believe like plato plato literally worships angular momentum i like that is his god is angular momentum um like he he he he hates democracy he loves like spartan like oligarchy

basically like all of this stuff is like that's like something like you don't read when you get a side play though it's like yeah there's a huge like um as someone who's taught like a ton of universities there's this huge fucking impediment to you assigning that stuff like i've specifically tried to to assign different stuff in these like writing courses which which end up being like great white dudes of history right like um that like if you can assign different things but like the cost of of assigning those and that cost isn't borne by you or the university right it's borne by your students it It's massive. Like even if, like for a while there,

like we would just write like a lot of texts, you know, if you take the time as a professor to label out the text, you can take it to a print shop, get them to photocopy it. And almost inevitably you need to find someone who's willing to kind of play fast and loose with copyright. But still it will end up costing your students so much more than the the texts which are in the book that you can fucking auto generate the quizzes because the book also has

a website and you still get paid like you're doing a job when you're not so yeah yeah and bad yeah and and this stuff has had you know like this has had sort of profound ideological influences it's had you know it's had sort of profound it's had profound influences on like the i mean just sort of the the way that like ancient greece and rome are like conceptualized and and and i think this also really has uh you know it hasn't it makes it very hard to see what was sort of actually going on in a place like athens and you know a great graver sort of points this out right like athens is a sort of actually going on in a place like athens and you know a great graver sort of points this out right like athens is a sort of like exemplar uh like you know sort of it's a sort of exemplar like it is literally like the place for which like like most descriptions of

sort of democracy are are sort of originally about and athens you know, we are trained to think of Athens as like, oh, it's like, well, this is like the first democracy or whatever. This is actually like a very normal sort of society. And it's not. This is an extremely weird society. And what Graeber sort of points out about this, right, is, you know, the thing that is, you know, okay, so like there have been lots of societies over sort of the course of human, like, you know, hundreds of thousands of years in the sort of like course of human history, right?

That have had collaborative decision-making systems. What is very, very weird and almost unique about Athens is it has two things put together. together it has a decision-making apparatus where people have equal say and it also has a violent enforcement mechanism to impose the will of the people on other people and as you know as we'll get to in a second uh also impose the will of those people on other people most society yeah that that that that turns out to be a very important part of sort of the athenian empire etc etc like who the people are yeah this is not all the people yeah well we'll get to that in a second too nice but so so most societies graper argues either have one or the other of you know having a having like a decision-making

apparatus for people of equal say and a violent enforcement mechanism right you have a lot of societies with collective decision-making apparatuses that involve the entire community. But the thing is, these processes invariably sort of like develop some kind of consensus process as a sort of expedient to keep the community from just tearing itself apart through constant conflict, right? Because like, okay, if you can't actually,

without the threat of force, right? You can't actually have a society where you constantly have really, really controversial decisions being made by like 51-49 splits where both sides absolutely hate each other and one side is opposed your state together, right? You have to actually create political solutions that people, not that they necessarily fully agree with, but that they're willing to live with. And this generates sort of like various, increasingly elaborate, sometimes not very elaborate, but various sort of forms of consensus processes. On the other hand, you have societies with extremely violent enforcement mechanisms, but these societies are almost always incredibly hierarchical and they're ruled either by sort of monarchs or oligarchs who just simply do not care about the notion that like people should rule themselves or that, you know, other, like other people who are not like the king or the body of oligarchs should have like anything even remotely to do with making

decisions and that that's what makes athens really weird right is that athens has both of these things it has a sort of it has like a violent it has a way of like imposing decisions on people through violence and also it has this principle that like people should be able to make decisions for themselves collectively by you know like through through a sort of process that doesn't involve them all being ruled by just like some guy. And what makes Athens and the other sort of Greek democracies – because there are other democracies in Greece over the sort of period that this goes on. What makes them unique is that the people, quote unquote, is composed largely of soldiers. As Graeber puts it, in other words, if a man is armed, then one pretty much has to take his opinion into account. One can see how

this works in its starkest in Xenophon's Anabasis. I have now been told by several dictionary sites that this is in fact how you pronounce it. I don't know. Anabasis sounds terrible to me, but such is the will of, I don't know, dictionaries. Which tells the story of a Greek army of mercenaries who suddenly find themselves leaderless and lost in the middle of Persia. They elect new officers and then hold a collective vote to decide what to do next. In a case like this, even if the vote was actually 60-40, everyone could see the balance of forces and what would happen if things actually came to blows. Every vote was, in a real sense, a conquest. So what we're dealing with here, right, and this is sort of what democracy is and it is very rawest form is you are dealing with a group of very heavily armed men who need to find a way to convince slightly more than half of the group to agree to help them impose their rule on everyone

else do you know what i will get you well do you do you know who will fail to pay your mercenary contract leaving you stranded in the middle of a Persian civil war, which you have backed the wrong side? Vladimir Putin. Yeah, don't take mercenary contracts on Vladimir Putin. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast and we're back so you know as i was sort of saying what we're dealing. So, you know, as I was sort of saying, what we're dealing with here, right, we have a group of very heavily armed men and they need to find a way to make, you know, they need to find a way to make like half of like slightly more than half of the group agree with them to impose their sort of rule on everyone else. impose their sort of rule on everyone else. So in slightly more technical terms, right, Athenian

democracy, or democracy in the Athenian sense, is composed of two co-determining elements fused together. There is a decision making apparatus and an enforcement mechanism. The two are co-determining because the structure of the enforcement mechanism, which is

51 blokes with sticks beating 49 blokes with sticks over the head, also determines the structure of the decision mechanism which is 51 blokes with sticks beating 49 blokes with sticks over the head also determines the structure of the decision making apparatus which no longer needs to concern itself with the opinion of everyone in the group as they would in a society without the ability to sort of employ violence to enforce decisions as long as they have enough people to sort of militarily defeat a minority of the group right you know and you could you could see how the how the structure how how the enforcement mechanism is is the thing that is structuring what the decision making process has to look like right it's the thing that sort of sets its limits and this is something that it turns out is very very

sort of important in what a democracy is the The enforcement mechanism, too, is also determined by the sort of decision-making apparatus because the people here are armed soldiers. So the 51% that becomes the sort of basis of democratic majority rule, it literally composes the enforcement mechanism itself. And this sort of double-coated termination is the origin of majority rule democracy, right? The institution

that, you know, in various forms, and we will get into this, like, this has gotten increasingly less and less quote-unquote democratic over time, but this specific form is the thing that has come to sort of define what democracy is. If we of define what democracy is. If we look at what democracy is as a political project, though, right, what we see is that the essence of democracy itself is to transform the majority from a simple count of military strength even a lot of people who are either not citizens of a democracy and live in it or who don't live in a democracy, simply believe that it is the moral right for a majority of people to be able to impose their will on a minority. This is just – this is what forms a kind of democratic common sense, right? It is the thing that everyone believes that is sort of the basis of everything about how a democracy functions right and you know democracy is almost never framed this way explicitly except by you know every

once in a while you'll get someone who makes this argument who is like i don't know they're a billionaire or they're like you know uh what's his name i i yeah hayek will like like if you press him like milton freeman for to also, if you press him, will make this argument, which is like no one actually wants to live in a democracy because if we actually live in a democracy, everyone will just increase our tax rate or marginalized groups will – These are critiques made of the United States as well. It's like earliest inception right yeah you know what's his name i think it was i think it was john adams so some of the early founders like very explicitly this was their argument against like made very anti-democratic arguments against giving anyone who didn't have property to vote which was like i think the exact

line was if you give people the vote the first thing they will do is uh erase the debts and redistribute the land yeah there was a whole ass rebellion about this right yeah yeah i wish it would have been based uh good program usually kind of kind of messed up in the u.s where you have to ask where that land comes from but you know yeah but like you this is an argument you really only ever hear from people who have like the only minority that makes this argument are people who have a shit ton of property who are like oh god and you know and their their thing here is well okay we need to make the system less democratic so that people can't take our property away yeah or give property rights yeah yeah but on the other hand the reason for sort of pointing out that this is what

democracy is in theory is really sort of cynical and like reactionary but the thing that the reason this argument works well quote-unquote works with sort of like you know with sort of libertarians is that this equation of of sort of numerical superiority with the moral right to exercise power is like the key underlying assumption of democracy it is the idea without which democracy simply ceases to function right but but this is something that you know people don't talk about democracy like this right the the sort of trick of of the democratic system is to make is to push the enforcement mechanism into the background right when when you talk about democracy with like regular people the

thing that they walk and normally they think about voting right but you know and any any kind of thing that is like a collective like decision-making process right a regular person is going to call democracy and you know they're if that's kind of true but but you know if but if if you want to sort of get like technical about it it's not and there's an there's an incredibly large ideological apparatus that's specifically built up around making sure that people don't look at the way that the that the enforcement mechanism is is as much if not more so a sort of key element of what of what democracy is than the part we you know where everyone comes together and make it makes a decision that everyone talks about all the time i was watching an an interview with Graeber the other day,

such are the things I do in my free time, and he was talking about democratic confederalism in northeast Syria, right? And he talked about it as democracy without the state, which I think is interesting. It's him using that vernacular kind of definition. So, okay, so I'm taking a lot of the arguments from stuff Graeber wrote, Which I think is interesting. It's him using that vernacular kind of definition. So, okay, so I'm taking a lot of the arguments from stuff Graeber wrote,

but he backs away from the implications of his own argument. Right, yeah, and goes back to, albeit like caveating. And I guess it's worth noting that there are a ton of hugely divergent, like prisoners of etymology right like like yeah the meaning like i think it's rosa luxembourg who said government is uh politics in the people's

interest or something like this kind of bullshit tanky interpretation of of like what most people would see it as there are these broad definitions you know and i think this is something that like like asher taylor's documentary right like you know the part about that's good right it's like there's i forget who says it there's this like kind of famous political line that's like i if if if there if there is a thing that everyone agrees is good no one will agree on what it is right like you know this is something that like you know like i I think I think it speaks to the power. I think it speaks specifically to the power of the sort of like like the idea that more people be like agreeing with something like gives gives legitimacy, gives legitimacy to that thing, which is that like every like like even societies that are like not even like really remotely democratic. Right. We'll pretend that they're still democracies.

Right. Like the Bathurst's have elections every sort of like cycle. not even like really remotely democratic, right? We'll pretend that there's still democracies, right? Like the Bathists have elections every sort of like cycle, right? Yeah. I mean, like, like this, this is the thing I think isn't very well understood,

but like, like this, this was also a thing. Like for example, China has this like, okay. Sorry. I,

I, I, as, as, as I'm preparing to explain this, I'm realizing that the china want like the the like chinese government experts are going to get mad at me because i'm i think i think i'm about to confuse the united the united front with the united front works department but so china china like technically speaking is there are like other parties technically that are kind of remnants from like – for example, like the left faction of the KMT, which is like the Chinese Nationalist Party, right?

There's like technically a faction of them that's part of this thing called like the United Front. There's like technically other parties, and they have like this like constitutive – it's an incredibly convoluted and elaborate system, but you know, like that whole thing and you, you, you, you can find, you know, like the Chinese system is like, not, it's not democratic in the sense of like, you can like vote for someone or like, okay. Like it's not democratic in the sense of you can make a vote that will make a thing happen. Right. You know, and to be fair, the U S is also not democratic in the sense of you can cast a vote and make a thing happen, right? But this is sort of like – okay, it is a society that is less democratic than the U.S., which is sort of astounding considering the U.S. doesn't even have one person, one vote.

We'll get into republics a bit in a second. But Chinese quote-unquote democracy is not. It has very little to do with the principle of 51% of the population votes for a thing and it happens. But if you look at the sort of rhetoric that you see from, and the internal

justification of you sort of read Chinese bureaucratic documents or you read their PR stuff, they constantly talk about like yeah we're going to make a more democratic society because like that legitimacy like the idea of democracy is really incredibly powerful and enduring and it's something that like even like you know like i mean like i don't know like the saudis don't pretend to be a democracy really but like like most of the other like gulf monarchies have like electiony things right like it's it's it's an idea that is that is enduring and powerful enough

that even people who don't agree with it are forced to sort of like do this pageantry of it and i i i think that's really interesting and i i think it explains a lot of the kind of – I mean especially around Occupy, but I think it explains a lot of the kind of political movements that we've been seeing over the last about 15 years. also an explanation for why why we see so many riots as as a form of sort as a form of politics and why you get these demands that are sort of like i don't know you you like in the 2011 revolutions and you sort of also see this now you get a lot of sort of very abstract calls for democracy while also doing things that like are quote-unquote not legitimate in a democratic society like for example like rioting is not supposed to be sort of like a legitimate political action in a society because you know like there's this whole like a because there's a system under which violence is supposed to be administered administered right like you have a state the state is the thing that's supposed to do violence

if anyone else does it outside of that they're like you know they're an illegitimate extremist but okay if if we go back to our sort of base definition of what democracy is right democracy is a collective decision-making apparatus and an enforcement mechanism it's like well what is a riot right a riot is both of those things happening at the same time there are a bunch of people collectively making a decision and then imposing that decision immediately yeah it's a p thompson who called the luddites collective bargaining by riot quite possibly yeah yeah it's uh it's often like referenced now and other stuff like uh like

people talk about like uh you know like your hair your hair they're used all the time. I think the original that is... Or is it Eric Hobsbawm? Could be Hobsbawm. Anyway, yeah, famously the Luddites were called collective bargaining by riot. Yeah, I think... Well, I think there is something sort of interesting there about collective

bargaining by sort of physical force. It's like the decision-making apparatus is happening outside of the sort of it's like the decision-making apparatus is happening outside of the sort of normal bounds in which decision-making apparatus is supposed to happen and i think i think there's there's a sort of this isn't there's another i forget exactly which graber thing this is from but you know there's graber this might actually this might actually be from sassy about batman which is pretty funny um what's his what's his take on alfred's class status i don't think he unfortunately i think that's i think that's the one thing he

doesn't mention i'm pretty i'm pretty sure there's no alfred discourse in it there's lots of other discourse he calls uh is it bane no he calls the joker he calls one of the Batman villains a Zerzanite, which I think is very funny. Yeah, but you know, okay, he has this argument about sort of like, okay, how do you, you know, so the other part of democracy is the part about the people, right? And this is always a thing that's very much in contention. Like, how do you determine what the people quote-unquote are and you know the structure of athenian society is very much determined by who is and isn't included in the people right like you know women can't vote if you're a slave you also can't vote there are lots of people who are directly under athenian rule who can't vote and are you know not part of the

people and therefore are sort of like and and and this is in some sense the origin of like – the trajectory of democracy goes on, right? Which is that – the trajectory, it goes through is republicanism because like the founders of the US, right? If you look at sort of that style of 50 plus one style majority democracy, right? Those guys, as we talked about about like they didn't want a democracy because they thought in a democracy people would vote against their sort of like aristocratic interests yeah and so what did side on in that yeah they're like yeah it's like okay well all these people own slaves all these people own a bunch of land all these people like i don't know

like bankers and shit they're like okay so it's gonna be a bad idea if we let people like decide what to do with our stuff. So instead, you know, they go to this Republican structure and the Republican structure is, I think, very interesting because it takes the 50 plus one structure. Right. But, you know, it abstracts it to the point where like like your vote. For the most part, basically, simply does not matter. Like every once in a while, like a local part, basically simply does not matter. Every once in a while in a local election, it can do something. But what's actually happening is you are selecting who is going to rule you.

And the other part of this is that the enforcement mechanism becomes autonomous from the people itself because you know unlike unlike an Athenian thing where like everyone's either like on a ship because they're like a you know they're part of the Navy or they like you know they can go strap on their fucking shield and like plates and grab their big ass spear right and you look like okay well this is this is the state

right the state is like fucking Jerry and his friend like Patrickless or whatever the fuck you know like forming forming a shield wall with like the shields they have at home you know but but you know and that's like in in in in sort of like warrior democracies of that style like there are there are like the kasachar republic i think the same of it um there are these sort of like they're like you know like there there are republics like this or quote-unquote republics like this that that exist in in various places in the world you have these sort of like military classes that you know like do 50 plus one but

those people right the the enforcement mechanism is very is very very direct in a republic the enforcement mechanism becomes autonomous and also the decision making apparatus becomes both with both of them become autonomous from like the people quote unquote who are supposed to be making the decisions and suddenly you have the situation where you know okay if you live in the u.s right it is very very clear that there are lots of things that everyone supports that simply like are not is not like like it's not happening right like you know i mean you you could look at sort of like universal health care like i mean for example look at another example that we could take that's i think for poignant right now is like there was a pretty recent study on like what percentage of the population in the u.s supports trans people getting like friends affirming health care it was

like 70 and then you know but you look at it on a fucking state-by-state basis right and it's like well we'll be talking about this more sort of later but you know on a state-by-state basis like oh well that's not fucking happening right people are just making it illegal and it's very easy to look at this and go like well okay so the principle of 50 plus 1

is being violated right like this is not a democracy something else has happened. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. Turunum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know it. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. One sort of solution to this is to go back to, you know, is to very literally go back and ask the question, who is the people and and this is this is you know a lot of ways what occupy is doing right like occupies answer this is like

we are the 99 right it's okay so like there there is a thing that is claiming to be the like the demos in in democracy which is you know congress right but like okay congress trivially is not the people right it's at best a section of them it is definitionally not in any in any yeah right you know and okay so you have you have lots of versions of this like the american one tends to be a lot of people sitting in a square you know but like like can actually convening a a something that's kind of like a democracy but even but you know that's the other thing about it's like is is occupied democracy right like they don't have violence as like a political tool really i mean this isn't to say that like there wasn't some weird shady shit that happens but like you know like they don't have the ability to sort of like coerce

people into accepting like a 51 decision that people like genuinely can't live with right so so they don't they don't really like they they in some in some sense in challenging democracy they create something that isn't really a democracy right they create a sort of like elaborate consensus process and this is you know like if if the kratos part is i'm trying to think of a way i've been trying to think for like 10 minutes but wait to phrase this but like if the if the strength and power is power is the people and is evenly distributed among the people as opposed to it's the state and the theoretical abstraction of the will of the majority of the people, then that leads to a consensus almost by definition right like like if yeah well i mean i think i think the the sort of breaking principle here is if you think that it is legitimate to use for a group of people to use violence to enforce something and at that point everyone is still armed then then you you

you get a 50 plus one structure right right but if if you don't think it's legitimate to use violence to coerce people into sort of like doing whatever the thing is you want to enforce, then by definition, you get some kind of consensus process. But, you know, we have a system that everyone like thinks that what's happening,

like, you know, in some sense, like the ideological principle is that like, you know, everyone thinks that what's happening is you have a 50 plus one system and that's where the legitimacy of the system comes from. Because like, you know everyone thinks that what's happening is is you have a 50 plus one system and that's where the like the legitimacy of the system comes from because like you know we voted for these people but also it's so clearly not and also like the police are so clearly just this sort of like roaming like bandit force that is like not even like remotely like they technically

draw legitimacy from the people but like you know okay like what what what what what happens if you try to convene an assembly of the people in the u.s the answer is they beat the shit out of you with uh sticks and then tear gas you and then like start shooting you yeah so yeah you know this is sort of what you know like like this this is what occupy proved right which is like if if you challenge the sort of the claim of of the government to represent the people right because like who who the fuck are these assholes to like to be like a hey no like we we we are the people we are sort of like the legitimate manifestation of people if you want to do anything like you have to go through us well

it's like okay so like how how did how did they get that how did they get that authority right and the answer is they did it they did it by staging an armed revolution that's what their religion that's what their actual legitimacy derives from right is they they want they won the armed revolution yeah and violently dispossessed people of them before they did that like piggybacking off colonialism to do an armed revolution yeah and so like okay you know their their legitimacy is incredibly tenuous right like this gives you this question of how do you determine like what you know how does a democracy determine what the people are and one one way that you can make a sort of counterclaim again against a democracy is by a simple like physically assembling

a shit ton of people in a place and going like we are physically we are the people and we are going to make decisions and you know that can look like Occupy with like a seven hour meeting about where we want to put plants right or it can look and this is you know you get this a bit in Occupy but like or it can look like you know here are a hundred thousand people

like they are going to fight they are going to just like throw shit at the police until the police run away. And, you know, that that is that that that is a that is a thing that like we have seen in this country. This this will be like another episode. But this this this was a thing that happens in Mexico in 2006 in Oaxaca, where people basically ran out the police by literally hundreds of thousands of people. Like wait, wait, waking up to a bunch of police, like a bunch of police just beating the shit waking up to a bunch of police like a bunch of police just beating the shit out of like a bunch of striking teachers and then like picking

up a brick and throwing it you see it a little bit oh yeah not really but like in in like in spain if you're familiar with that yeah like they kind of their attempt to have people determine their policy platform is not largely a successful one but like yeah well i mean interesting obama did that too oh really yeah this was the thing obama had this job like one of obama's initial pitches was like he was going to have there's going to be this like online thing where people could vote and like decide on policy things and he immediately mandated and podemos also immediately like this this is one of the things that like this is this of the ways you try to capture this kind of – because what you're really – when riot police are fighting a bunch of people in the street, what you're watching is two kinds of democracy fighting with each other. You're watching a sort of like – you're watching the crowd, which is a very, very immediate like literal form of democracy, right? Where the crowd makes a decision and people do things.

Fighting the police who are like a very – the police are technically like a part of a democratic system right but the police are just purely the sort of like like they're you know they they they are the violence by which the people rule and you you are watching you're watching these two things sort of like clash with each other and you know i mean i i i think i think one of the the sort of like products of of of the way that republicanism like specifically developed or republicanism in the sense of like products of of of the way that republicanism like specifically developed or republicanism in the sense of like this is a republic not a democracy etc etc in terms of like yeah like yeah small r but also in the sense of like okay so instead of you voting on things directly like you know you vote for some asshole who yeah like representative democracy yeah whatever yeah right like that that sort of like unmooring of of the means of violence from the people which was

you know which is the essence of democracy good or bad right and and i would also say like you know that can go like that that sort of like having having violence and democracy like you know violence decision making being paired together like that's not always a good thing that can go really really badly right like you know because like like for example like a race riot right like like a clan march right is technically like is technically an expression of democracy right it is you know it is a group of people convening themselves as the people and then doing an action and you know and like i this has been something i've been sort of been forced to think about a lot with the

anti-trans laws which is that like trans people are like you know the most optimistic estimate you could like have is like maybe two and a half percent of the population if you assume there's a bunch of people who are trans and don't know that they're trans right like you know and if if you were two and a half percent of the population in a in a 50 plus one system it is very easy for 51 like there is no physical way that you can have like if 50 plus one percent of the population decides to kill you while there's nothing you can do right like there's there's no there's no amount of like voting that you can do that will make you not die because that that's the sort of like yeah the tyranny of the majority or whatever like or like yeah yeah have you familiar with like the argument against utilitarianism that like the greatest good for the greatest number or the

greatest happiness for the greatest number if you're looking to serve the greatest happiness for greatest number if like 10 people get two units of happiness from beating one person to death with sticks yeah yeah she can't experience as much sadness as they experience happiness like yeah yeah democratic impulse in action yeah and and you know like this is a thing that is again we've talked about like is normally brought up by like incredibly corrupt corrupt and sort of veto elites who want to protect their status but like it is also you know and like this is part of the reason why for example the u.s just fucking puts like immigrants at camps right because they can't fucking vote right like they're they're not part of like quote unquote the people right like there are large sections of the population who are just you know like booted from this entire process

right um this is an argument that william c anderson and zoe samudzi make in the book as black as resistance which is that like yeah like black people like fucking are not part of this shit right like they're not like a constitutive like part of the people tm right yeah and you know this they they call this they call this the anarchism of blackness um which is this sort of like it's it's a position of being like removed as like a legitimate sort of like subject in the state who can you know exercise your like democratic rights or whatever the fuck it's like yeah okay like lots of people have never had this and you know this the even even it even in

this sort of like you know relatively egalitarian like you know like there there have been like parts of the u.s like especially the early u.s right you have your like sort of like new england town council right it's like well what is what is your new england town council vote to do it's like well it votes to send out the fucking militia to kill indigenous people right like you know even you you can you even even even when the u.s has functioned as something that is closer to like a like democracy t, like, the means of violence and the means of sort of decision-making are actually placed directly in people's hands, right? Like, that doesn't always go well. Right, yeah.

You know, but, like, you know, we have now developed a, like, we developed a system that has, like, the worst of every single parts worst of every single aspect of this, right? We're like, okay, so we have 50 plus one as the sort of legitimating factor, but also 50% of the population plus one does not actually vote for a thing. It is possible for more than half of the population. It's possible for a majority of the population to vote for presidential candidate you get a different one right like yeah it's possible like we've seen this like so many fucking elections have had this now like two in my lifetime like like and and also also we have we we have the other part of it which is that we we also have like the the we have the other democratic principle of like

you should be able to enforce uh a political opinion by violence yeah we got that in space yep and you know i guess guess guess guess like guess guess who fucking gets to make that decision it's not 50 plus one of you like no it's a bunch of assholes in suits and like six cops i think a good way to view the u.s is like a bunch of landowners uh made a system where land votes and people don't yeah well and then you know and then they went about making sure that like even if the land does vote for a thing if it's not yeah it doesn't happen there's 75 weird dudes in between your vote and anything actually happening yeah which is how you get like this kind of constitutional magic that the trumpets are always trying to do because like

it's not actually like that far from reality right there there are like 17 magic incantations that have to get set after you put your ballot in the box and then an old white dude's in charge again yeah and but you know i think like you know the u.s system is like it's stunningly bad like it's it's what it's like a it's a really dog shit like terribly written democratic system like it is it is designed not to function like that that that was actually the point yeah yeah yeah there's like there's a king a thing that like you shouldn't have like the the president is supposed to is supposed to be a king a thing that like you shouldn't have like the president is supposed is supposed to be a king right like i think like if if you go back and read like what the balance

of powers was supposed to be it was like they're doing the roman thing of like you need like you need to combine a king and oligarchy and a democracy and it's like well okay so we have like a fucking king who could just like kill people it's great it's great it's great but you know you know okay so the the i think i think the the the the the broad total argument that i want to make here is that what what we have been seeing over the last about 15 years right with the sort of movement of the squares with the series of uprisings that we saw i mean you know in 2020 in the u.s but also like all over the world from about 2018 to i mean like some there's still some of them are still going like now right you know it's it's it's it's

it's been a reaction to sort of this right it's it's it's been a reaction to democracy as a principle not matching like democracy like you know even even even even what the principle is supposed to be and then people going out into the streets and doing democracy and the sort of clash between like democracy and theory and democracy and action mostly has resulted in democracy and action winning because it turns out the thing about republics is that they're really really really good at creating like military apparatuses that are very hard to defeat by just purely fighting them

yeah sadly yeah but however comma sometimes they lose and you know as the old IRA thing goes they have to get lucky every time

we only have to get lucky once so you know keep collectively bargaining by riot what the fuck else are you going to do you know like uh vote like yeah okay vote like uh

your life depends on it kids you can vote if you want to right there are instances in which it might meaningfully reduce the cruelty of the state a little bit some places sometimes but yeah it's not gonna it's not gonna like take away the central fucking canard of the whole thing yeah yeah so uh i do do do do do democracy by writing. That is our official legal position. This is legally non-actionable, but also legally actionable at the same time.

This is called dialectics. And yeah, this is what could happen here. Find us in the places. Don't find us in the places. Read David Graeber.ber yeah do that read the never was a west it's great nobody reads it it's it's really good people have been asking for a graber book because we keep talking about him so yeah read i'd never read there never was a west uh read towards an anarchist anthropology and bullshit jobs it's a good start if you've yeah

read if you if you if you if you want to be the real grave head and read something that fucking no one has read go read Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value I ran into one of my colleagues at a supermarket the other day and we were talking about that good book no one has ever read it it's

read more Graber it could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media Yeah, read more gray, man. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.