Re: Down with Democracy!

Kevin Dempsey Peterson (peterson@ocf.Berkeley.EDU)
Sat, 20 Dec 1997 15:53:34 -0800 

On 17 Dec 1997, Daniel C. Burton wrote:

>Actually, now that I think about it, we should scrap all those formal
>criteria.  #2 is good and pretty basic and maybe we should use that as a
>guideline, but in true libertarian style we should try to work with
>whoever we can, and if we can't work things out to mutual satisfaction,
>we should just get up and leave them.

We don't need to say "if you want to participate you have to agree to
these."  The best way to accomplish that is to say "We are going to be
publicizing this rally as a protest against excessive democracy,
seeking to make people realize that no one, not even a group, has a
right to restrict your individual liberties, and that a government must
be strongly restricted to avoid being a tyranny".  People who don't
agree with this won't show up.

I'm still not sure what that 209/TWC protest was.  All you need to do is
state the purpose in advance, in the 209 example, either "On friday, we
will be protesting the absurd claims and political opinions advocated by
the Third World College", or "On friday, we will rally to support prop.
209, and protest any form of discrimination based on race."

>I guess what I said before about the "fuck everything" anarchists isn't
>really what I meant to say.  I a lot of my friends are anarchists of some
>sort, but not libertarians, and definitely not leftists.  I don't think
>they want us to all go up in flames either, and they seem to have an
>innate respect for individual sovereignty (beyond merely an ideology), but
>chaos is part of their thing.  Actually, I prefer some chaos to too much
>institutionalized authority as well....  These are the supposed "Type 3"
>anarchists I briefly mentioned earlier.  Basically take an
>anarcho-capitalists and subtract the capitalist part, or take an
>anarcho-socialist and subtract the class struggle, and this is what you
>get.  Personally, I think people like this are a lot closer to
>libertarians than left-wing anarchists are.  I've even heard people
>influenced by this sort of thinking call themselves "essentially
>libertarian, but not political."

We might want to give out info sheets, outlining the various and
contradictory systems (or lack of any system) people are advocating.
Just get someone of each group (official or just sharing the same
opinions) to do a paragraph explaining it.

>It would do us good to seek out people like this, because they just might
>be interested in something as bizarre as a political rally against
>politics.  (None of the ones I know actually go to Cal.  They just live
>around here.)

What are the rules about involving non-students in student group
activities?  Not only your friends, but I'm no longer a student at Cal
(dropped out - free at last) either.  I think it would be great to get
as many people as possible, even if it means narrowing what it's about
down to "anarchy" or "no mob rule" rather than "anarcho-capitalism and
minarchism"

Some ideas for people to get in touch with would be Republican Youth
Majority (I think I have mailing list of a few people around here
somewhere); Houman Shabad, if he's still around here; the local
crypto-anarchists - I don't know any, but Seth mentioned he knows Ian
(whose political beliefs I don't know, but he might know people); and
any one else who you can think of.

>As far as the objectivists go, Ayn Rand wrote a lot of stuff about how
>freedom shouldn't be subject to the vote of a majority.  She even has some
>good quotes if we can dig them up.  I think we could work that in and
>objectivists would like it if that was part of the theme -- a protest
>against excessive democracy.  We should explicity state at the beginning
>that we don't all agree with eachother, but we do agree on some things.

I'll look through Anthem, which should have some good stuff.

>As long as we're moving in the right direction and we don't get the
>fascists involved, I think we'll be OK.

Are we important enough that we have enemies yet?  Do we need to look
out for infiltrators (anarchists in name, socialist-authoritarians in
reality)?

>Start thinking of slogans....
>
>Warning:  Excessive democracy can be harmful to your health.

Mob rule lynchs liberty.

There's no government like no government.

A million tyrants voting against freedom is a million times worse than a
single tyrant. 

-- 
peterson@ocf.berkeley.edu       
http://www.autobahn.org/~peterson