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I will agree with you up to a point. Almost everyone in the West has long since abandoned the dispassionate search for truth. The problem being that truth is unkind. Most of the truth is unkind. The narrative denies that there can be bad cultures and that some should be at least reformulated into something civilized. It denies that talent exists, that not everyone is smart enough or capable of doing anything they want. It denies that some behavior should be condemned because it leads to terrible outcomes not just for individuals but for civilization as a whole.
I no longer believe in democracy because frankly it seems to lead directly to this rot. The credo of democratic politics is “your ignorance is equal to my knowledge.” The votes of people who actually know things are swamped by the votes of people who form opinions from Twitter, Bluesky, instagram or Facebook. It’s the ultimate in feels over reals, in which the key to getting into office is to lie convincingly. At least with a monarch you can teach someone to look to facts and listen to experts who have earned the right to have influence.
But you realise that this is exactly what the left says about you, right? It doesn't mean you have to retreat into pure relativism, but sooner or later two 'dispassionate searchers for truth' are going to run into the issue that both of them are interpreting the same facts differently. Or that they are both naturally, legitimately interested in certain true facts that uphold their particular hobby horse and less interested in doing a deep dive on facts that contradict it. And that's before you get into the chaos that erupts when one man's 'legitimate inference' becomes another's 'obvious delusion', as has happened to me many times in both directions.
Ultimately we have never disproved Descarte's assertion that the only thing you know 100% for sure is that you yourself exist, and we have never discovered how to dispassionately turn an 'is' into an 'ought'. Post-modernism survives because its skepticism is backed up by history: different societies and different subcultures have held very different things to be obvious facts and very different people to be 'experts who have earned the right to have influence'. And these judgements are ultimately affected consciously or unconsciously by the interests of those making them.
Truth seeking is good, but you can't do it dispassionately and so you are going to have to exercise official, ideology-driven judgement at some point. You're going to decide who's an 'expert' and who's merely highly-educated and credentialed. You're going to have to decide what's a fact, what's a controversial assertion backed up by insufficient evidence, and what's a lie. Doing that is good (again, I'm not a relativist) but you should be clear-eyed about what you're doing and you should be prepared to hold onto power while you do it.
I too am pro monarchy, not because you can teach them to listen to an expert but because you can't. Mostly, our kings and queens in the UK have been slightly thick, old-fashioned, hunting-and-shooting types who aren't particularly interested in what the weirdo with the sheepskin is saying. That's not always good, but it gets you through most of the 'you have be really clever to think something that stupid' crises we have today.
There are definitely leftists who know things, they're not the biggest problem with democracy! A democracy off Matt Yglesias and Ezra Kleins would have different problems from today's democracy, and the biggest problem with democracy is all of the low-information median iq voters, half of whom are left wing.
I wasn’t just pointing at leftists, a right-winger can do just as much damage. Ignoring the Holocaust, Hitler ran Germany into the ground and by all accounts Mussolini wasn’t much better.
My point is that the low-information median iq voters are far from perfect, but they tend to be instinctively low-c conservative and have to deal with the realities of life at some level. To really cock things up you need a smart guy with a terrible idea. It wasn’t the median iq voters who came up with One Billion Americans, Greed Is Good, or Socialism.
I think you can cock things up well enough with a dumb guy with terrible ideas. We get close to that with Corbyn.
I was never sure how bright Corbin was, because on the left you only read hagiographies and on the right only vitriol. But in any case I consider Corbin essentially a delivery mechanism for Karl Marx.
Corbyn’s personal intelligence is interesting. He was born to a high school math teacher and an electrical engineer, which suggests a good inheritance, and he went to grammar school, but as the press regularly repeated, he got 2 Es at O/GCSE level and then dropped out. From his speeches and writing, I think he was of pretty middling intelligence. It was quite interesting in that all three of the leading triumvirate under Corbyn - himself, McDonnell and Abott - were all academically very unimpressive.
As for socialism in general, I don’t think Marx was particularly intelligent. Hegel was, Lenin certainly was, Stalin probably was. Marx? Not really, his writing doesn’t have that spark.
Calling Corbyn "dumb" on my part may not have been fair, but I think he's about as low-end as you're realistically going to find among leaders of major parties in western democracies.
No, I agree with you completely.
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