Legitimacy: The right of government to rule
Where legitimacy is claimed, despotism reigns supreme.
Important notice to subscribers
When I started History’s Parrot I hoped to have a sufficient paid subscriber base that I could leave all posts open to all subscribers. This has not come about. On Monday January 1st all posts will be behind a pay wall, except for one free weekly post available to all. I hope you will stay aboard and continue to find the Parrot informative and thought provoking. Very best wishes for the new year— Robert
“Legitimacy is commonly defined in political science and sociology as the belief that a rule, institution, or leader has the right to govern. It is a judgment by an individual about the rightfulness of a hierarchy between rule or ruler and its subject and about the subordinate's obligations toward the rule or ruler”— Google
My blogging experience has shown me one great truth about our societies. The very issues we should be addressing are pushed off the agenda as a matter of political and economic expedience. Governments and the political parties that populate them, become self-serving entities practicing inverted totalitarianism where they abandon their obligations to the public they are supposed to serve. They have become more than ever the “useful idiots” in service to the elites controlling them.
The very essence of democracy is that it is a process that must respected, sustained by its practitioners, be truly representative, have resolute integrity and serve the best interests of its constituency. All of these have been abandoned .
Some years ago I read Brent Rathgeber’s book Irresponsible Government. It was a dismal and alarming documentation of everything wrong with Canadian politics. It is common place to say in Canada to say the “ the system is broken.” Nobody is too concerned as to why and how it is broken, but his book is a stunning indictment and detailed analysis with positive suggestions for reform.
Reform is unlikely to happen as Canada is in the stone cold embrace of corporate capture and the neoliberal ideology where the role of government is denigrated and anything resembling reform will be squelched out of existence.
As Rathgeber points out we have now reconstituted the Family Compact of 19th century colonial Canada where unelected power elites (cliques) ruled.
His book was a harbinger of things to come as he documented the break down of one closed system and now we see the larger break down of civilizational systems, values imposed on us by ruinous ideologies ranging from imperialism, neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and a predatory parasitic capitalism.
We have seen the triumph of ruinous ideologies over common sense, democratic process, human rights and civil decency.
The present situation raises the question of the legitimacy of governments to govern. Where they are supposed to deliver, “peace, order and good government” they deliver perpetual war, chaos and anarchy.
Governments are social contracts between the peoples and their legislative bodies and officials elected to lead. When that contract has been broken, as it has been over decades by the rolling abdication and lack of due diligence on the part of Western governments there is no legitimacy.
When British prime minister Margaret Thatcher declared there is no such thing as society, it was only of passing interest in the media; when in fact it was a declaration of war, a neoliberal ideological war to dismantle Western democracies and disenfranchise populations.
Where legitimacy is gone governments circle the wagons and break out the weapons of mass distraction, war, racism, and propaganda. They weaponize the law in their favor, crushing dissent freedom of speech and the press. The media is converted to the Ministry of Propaganda.
Creating phantom enemies is a very high priority, as there must be a ready supply of scapegoats. There are no enemies, just those running in the other direction to escape from the West’s self-immolation on the altar of a failing empire.
Where legitimacy is claimed, despotism reigns supreme.
Another harbinger of today’s Crisis:
Vol. 28 No. 18 · 21 September 2006, London Review of Books
Bush’s Useful Idiots
Tony Judt on the Strange Death of Liberal America
“Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?
It wasn’t always so. On 26 October 1988, the New York Times carried a full-page advertisement for liberalism. Headed ‘A Reaffirmation of Principle’, it openly rebuked Ronald Reagan for deriding ‘the dreaded L-word’ and treating ‘liberals’ and ‘liberalism’ as terms of opprobrium. Liberal principles, the text affirmed, are ‘timeless. Extremists of the right and of the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out.” — read the full article here
Thank you very much Robert!
I wish you the best for 20024!
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."
Americans need to remember the Declaration of Independence and apply it. Canadians need to write their own and do the same.
Can we have open borders again, meaning no bloodydamned passports, after that? I miss those days.