Arguments against democracy have been on my mind lately, especially a contradiction I’ve noticed for many years in some Dissident Right critiques. The argument, as I understand it, is that democracy gives the ruling class a false claim to legitimacy. Even when people are unhappy with the direction of the country, they are less likely to revolt because they are led to believe (implicitly or explicitly) that “the people voted for this.” In other words, democracy turns elite rule into something that appears to be the will of the majority.

That is a serious critique, and I do think there is merit to it. Elections, media, donor influence, bureaucracies, and public opinion can all be managed/manufactured in ways that make people feel like that the majority consented to policies they never really wanted. Democracy can hypothetically become a pressure valve. It can make people accept outcomes they hate because they assume those outcomes must have some kind of popular mandate behind them.

But the contradiction is that the proposed alternatives are always systems where the ruling class does not need the consent of the governed at all. The Dissident Right argument seems to be that this would at least make elite betrayal more obvious. If the rulers are traitors, people would know they are traitors because there would be no democratic illusion hiding the relationship between ruler and ruled.

But that still does not solve the initial problem. A system where the people have no representation, no veto, and no meaningful mechanism for removing the ruling class does not give them more power over treacherous elites. It gives them less. Sure, It may make illegitimate rule more visible, but it also makes it harder to resist through any normal political means; or any means whatsoever if the population is inevitably disarmed by that more totalitarian/autocratic system, thus leaving the people with absolutely zero recourse.

So the argument almost ends up proving the opposite of what it intends. If elites are always going to rule, and if the best a system can do is force them to seek, manufacture, simulate, or manage public consent, then democracy may actually accomplish more of what the Dissident Right claims to want than their own alternatives do. “Democracy” may be flawed, manipulated, and manufactured consent —but even manufactured consent still forces rulers to acknowledge that the people’s consent matters. A system that openly discards consent does not expose elite rule so much as remove the last formal obstacle to it.

TL;DR: If democracy is bad because it hides elite rule behind fake consent, then replacing it with a system where elites need no consent at all does not solve the problem — it just makes the people even more powerless.

Getting rid of democracy only makes sense (works in our favor) if our population can permanently maintain widespread possession of modern, military grade weaponry in order to physically remove and replace any traitorous ruling class/establishment.