Shouting the Obvious: We Don’t Live in Democracies Anymore. The transition of Western politics in my lifetime.
Sat 11:11 am +00:00, 31 Oct 2026
Source: https://jupplandia.substack.com/p/shouting-the-obvious-we-dont-live
Above: The Democracy is Dying US meme is a fascinating example of Communist inversion. Obviously, it is a leftist meme suggesting that Trump has destroyed democracy while a foolish US public, like a compliant 1950s housewife, accepts this in return for empty patriotic celebrations. It is a total inversion of the truth, from those who actively support a Communist all-powerful State.
When I was a kid and a young man growing up in the late 1970s and the 1980s (I was born in 1974) I lived through the end period of the Cold War, the Thatcher and Reagan years, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union in 1990, and overall a pretty hopeful period were it seemed as if the Soviets had been defeated, Communism had been defeated, and the world could only get better as a result.
At home, despite the potential chaos of the Soviet collapse, I never felt as if nuclear war might happen. Despite Hard Left parties and individuals existing, despite groups like Militant in the Labour Party or the GLC in London (before Thatcher abolished it) and despite the Union strikes (particularly the miner’s strikes) turning violent it always seemed as if the Right was winning. Students and academics might whine and snarl and TV comedians might all be left-wing, but all those telling us how much they hated Thatcher didn’t stop her winning three elections.
I became politically minded very early, even as a child. And I was a Thatcherite. I thought the Conservative Party was the party of patriots. My family were working class or at best lower middle class. We always struggled for money, but my parents always hid that from me and my sister. We had plenty of toys at Christmas. My father voted Conservative. We both liked Thatcher. When I went to university in the early 1990s my university was one with a hisrory of student sit ins and leftist radicalism. The Socialist Workers Party tried to recruit on campus, but most people weren’t interested. Generation X had a mild scepticism for all of it, which encompassed leftist promises as well as rightist government. Thatcher had been replaced by the ultimate grey man in the middle, the comically anal, pedantic and boring John Major. Political apathy was king, and Hard Left students were basically ignored.
For easily the first half of my life so far, and maybe in some ways right up till 2016, I assumed I that I was living in a democracy. I never had to worry about whether my basic rights were taken away. Even being unusually politically engaged, the existential threats seemed somewhat distant. A Labour victory would bring economic mismanagement and a recession, not permanent radical changes that might never be reversed. A Jeremy Corbyn could become an MP, but not the leader of a party. My vote might lose….but it couldn’t be taken away. If an election was stolen, at home or abroad, there was a base assumption that the media would tell us that, rather than directly lie that it hadn’t been.
All of the networks of unaccountable, unelected, parasitic corruption had been built and were still being built, but this was largely in the dark background, hidden from view as much by public ignorance as by media bias, lack of scrutiny, and deliberate conspiratorial concealment. The transnational networks had been there from the end of World War Two. The UN was castigating Israel and funding the Palestinians. The EU was expanding its powers again and again without public consultation. Major signed the Maastricht Treaty. The public had no say. I was trapped in the EEC/EU my entire life without a say. Mass immigration to the West had been sanctioned and encouraged since the 1940s. Race legislation that was unjust to white majorities existed from the 1960s onwards. Even in the 1990s none of my teachers at school or university were rightwing. Thousands of NGOs and charities existed, all of which pushed leftist ideology and policy.
The Revolution was happening, but it was doing so quietly. For 80 years the trend was leftwards, regardless of electoral results. The Reagan-Thatcher years were really the sole exception, and all the hope, success, and plenty of the 1980s, all the cultural confidence and Western optimism, came in that period. I understand that this was not the case for some, but for me it was.
In a way the EU one alone should have told me. People don’t really stop and think about it. Even those who were Eurosceptics or who became Leavers. Even those who knew how fundamentally undemocratic the structure of the EU is. We still all acted somewhat as if it was normal, and within the bounds of what a democracy is, for generations of people to be kept in a system presided over by foreign bureaucrats when none of those millions of people had ever been asked if this was the system they wanted.
The truth is that every transfer of power abroad, every transnational institution there is, is a denial of basic accountability, basic consent, and basic democracy. A nation state can only have accountable rule when the nation state has national sovereignty. Any rule from abroad immediately destroys both sovereignty and democracy. The two are intertwined and cannot be separated. It was obvious, but even we critics ignored what it really meant. The EU was just one part of a vast institutional network that had been built without our consent or our consultation, that took over responsibility for political acts once exclusive to our national governments, and this network grew even if we despised it, even if we disagreed with everything it did and imposed on us, and even if we kept telling our national governments that we didn’t want it.
We were never asked. If you were born at a historic point where these transnational institutions and NGOs already existed, you never had a say. And all of them decided policies that our national governments followed, all of them drew funding from our taxes without us having any representation in these organisations, and the policies they insisted on included disastrous ones like the constant expansion of immigration until our borders were opened completely and we found ourselves funding and welcoming third world savages with our governments and media prepared to imprison us for dissenting from this policy, from truthfully describing its effects, or for campaigning against it. The UN and the EU and the international courts decided vast areas of policy (what the EU somewhat ironically describes as its areas of competency) rather than our elected governments, and our governments were also composed of people who increasingly obviously served these foreign institutions rather than our national interests.
Until 2016 though, it still felt as if we had some version of democracy, some ability to insist on change or reform or different policies, and some confidence that those ruling us did not have utterly insane plans and desires that included either our destruction or our enslavement. The basic assumption was that the system would still let us have some say, still respect a vote it lost, still offer largely free and fair elections, still present the possibility that a government could choose a different path and the judiciary, the civil service, the administrative state, the intelligence services, the police….would all accept the change.
That ended in 2016 and 2020.
The vast, illegal, criminal conspiracy launched against Trump from the moment of his first candidacy in the US, with the active participation of the departing Barack Obama and the CIA, the FBI and US alphabet agencies, the full collusion of the entire mainstream media in these illegal activities, fully exposed the true nature of things in the USA, the ‘leader of the free world’. The vast, illegal, anti-democratic activities of almost the entire political and media Establishment in the UK to prevent, deny, limit and gradually destroy Brexit served the same purpose of exposure in the UK.
From these moments on, from the refusal of the system to accept these democratic choices, the nature of the system was exposed. The fact that we did not live in democracies or a Free World was made plain to us.
The extreme insanities of COVID policy in 2019 and 2020, the suspension of basic civil rights across the entire Western world, the vast wealth transfer of four trillion US dollars during the ‘pandemic’, the patently ludicrous measures taken and the obviously tyrannical manner in which obedience to these measures was demanded and obtained, all served as confirmations that so far as our leaders were concerned all of our rights are conditional on obedience rather than inalienable by nature. An imaginary emergency could be constructed to place us in a position that, overnight, reversed centuries of acquired rights and expectations.
Western liberties had not been so abused on such a scale, so routinely, since before Magna Carta. We still don’t acknowledge how extreme it was, and what it says about the system we live in. Medieval peasants had more rights after the Black Death than modern citizens had during COVID, the great pandemic which was actually no worse than a seasonal flu and of immediate threat only to the most elderly and vulnerable…..the same elderly and vulnerable who were locked in with COVID patients in a COVID ‘protection’ policy that massively increased death rates in nursing and care facilities. COVID policy both turned a mild threat into an unavoidable one for those most likely to die, and removed the liberties and rights of everyone….even before we consider the unsafe, unnecessary and ineffective but harmful nature of mRNA vaccines.
When I was growing up I never worried about the State deciding to lock me in my home under curfew when I had committed no crime and posed no threat. After COVID, none of my basic liberties are as secure as I once assumed them to be, which goes far beyond the conventional fear that a bad western government might cause a recession.
In British schools today children are still being taught ‘British Values’. Many of these alleged values are actually component features of a classical liberal democracy. They tend to include features such as these:
- Free and fair elections. An electoral system of rule where governments regularly acquire the consent of the citizenry via elections with universal suffrage for adult citizens, with one vote per citizen.
- A free press. The press (any by implication, wider media) are independent and able to challenge and discuss the actions of the government.
- An independent judiciary. A justice system where judges are objective, and where these judges apply the law without political bias, political prejudice and favour, and without political or personal intent contrary to the law itself.
- Civil liberties. A system where there are established, traditional and agreed limits on what the State can do to the individual, and within which individual rights are protected from State abuses of power.
- The rule of law. A system in which the law limits and constrains everyone while protecting and serving everyone equally, where every citizen has equality before the law and where the agents of the law (the police as well as the judiciary) are themselves subject to the law.
There are others which often recur in such lists, but let’s concentrate on this four. Even with such a limited list of what constitutes a classical liberal democracy or a modern democracy as we assumed we were living in when I was a youth, there is no way we can now consider ourselves to be living in such a democracy.
We do not have free and fair elections and voting systems. As soon as your leadership endorses stolen elections the integrity underpinning our trust in the system is gone. How can we be sure our elections are free and secure when our leaders treat stolen elections as legitimate ones? This has occurred on multiple occasions. 2020 was obviously stolen in the USA. Our entire political system in Europe and the UK endorsed, validated, accepted and legitimised that theft.
Since then, the EU colluded with Romanian judges to reverse a legitimate election result. There was no condemnation of this. The EU directly interfered in the recent Hungarian election that ousted Victor Orban. That, too, was a rigged election, celebrated as a ‘win’ for Democracy. Student activism seems to have swung the Serbian election, and we don’t know whether there was EU, globalist and western interference there, but again the result is touted as a triumph of democracy when it is probably suspect. The Brazilian election was a Communist rigged election, with a corrupt Supreme Court appointee determining the ‘result’ and with Lula immediately ordering the arrest of his opponent. Again, the stolen nature of that election is obvious and again all Western governments except the US have treated it as legitimate.
If we extend meaningful democracy to offering and honouring referendum results, which we should, then the EU’s record is even more obviously anti democratic and tyrannical. Every major extension of EU power has seen one of two possibilities. Either no consent is asked for and the extension passes by fiat, signed by compliant and corrupt national governments with no public consultation or consent. Or a referendum is offered, the vote is rigged, and if even despite the rigging the vote goes the other way….the result is blocked and ignored. Brexit partly fits this template. French and Irish votes against EU expansion of powers fully fit it. Look at the Lisbon Treaty. Look at nations being told to vote again immediately if they deliver the ‘wrong’ result. In Greece, following the 2008 financial collapse and EU, World Bank and IMF demanded changes, Greek elected governments were effectively replaced with an imposed ruling junta of technocrats that would push through demanded austerity measures. Greece was only allowed to return to an appearance of self-rule when those forced changes had been implemented.
No nation within the EU is a democracy. It cannot be while the EU itself is undemocratic, has the structure it has, and insists that democracy is simply a term applied to results it favours rather than results the voting public favours. No EU enthusiast has any love of, respect for, or desire to allow actual democratic rule and real democratic accountability of rule.
Nations which endorse electoral theft cannot themselves be considered democratic either.
Similarly what is meant by a ‘free press’? It must mean more than the existence of news corporations that aren’t directly under State control. It must mean that there is market competition within the media, incentives for the media to offer divergent views, ethical and professional limits the media applies to itself, a respect for democracy and freedom within the media itself, a degree of objectivity in the media, or an obvious declaration of opinion and political bias which distinguishes these from factual news content. In other words, a free press understands and values freedom. It doesn’t just have State or professional accreditation. It doesn’t just operate with a formal independence. It operates with a REAL independence and is not the direct agent of a party, an institution, a foreign interest or foreign government, or our own government.
Our press and media are globalist controlled and State controlled propagandists. They lie habitually and pathologically. They do not keep to professional or ethical standards. They are prepared to support extremist ideologies, terrorist organisations, race hate theories, stolen elections, and foreign enemies. They have entered fascist arrangements of collusion and crime with leftwing governments. The BBC are State owned, of course, and have doctored video evidence, the newspapers are not in a state of real market or political competition, and are owned by just a handful of globalist corporations. Social media too has admitted working under party political direction. Civil servants in the UK, as has just been exposed, directly decided BBC editorial lines, while FBI and CIA agents were embedded in social media companies and news organisations.
Multiple psy-op campaigns have been conducted through a uniform media using military techniques of psychological warfare on their resders and viewers. Multiple hoaxes which a genuine free press would expose, like the Russian Collusion Hoax of the first Trump term or the Epstein Hoax of the second Trump term, have been deployed throughout the mainstream media with no false story ever retracted or apologised for. Mainstream media have censored factual news contrary to their own political positions. They have supported draconian actions by government against citizens, while diminishing or disguising crimes by non citizens and favoured groups and parties.
We do not have a free press. We have a controlled press which possesses no interest in our freedom.
And with each of these features of a traditional democracy we can say similar things.
We have politicised judiciaries that impose the personal political opinions of the judge on the law, twisting the law to reach conclusions the political allegiance of the judge has determined on before a single word is heard in his court. We have sentencing guidelines that impose racial criteria and double standards on the law, denying equality before the law. We have judges that act as party political activists determined to block rightwing policies. We have a large number of judges who seem inclined to a perverse, disgusting and suspicious leniency when it comes to sex crimes against children. We have clearly two tier treatment at both policing and judicial levels when it comes to public protest or disturbance by different groups, with white and rightwing protesters being treated far more harshly than non white and leftwing ones.
I have already described how our civil liberties were destroyed during COVID and are no longer secure. Moves towards ever increasing censorship, the insane number of people being imprisoned for social media opinions, the growth of instirutional censorship complexes, the push towards forcing social media platforms to prioritise State propaganda news organisations, and of course attempts to create digital social credit systems are all erosions of the very foundations of the belief that we have inalienable rights the State cannot remove.
And of course all of the above means we also no longer have objective and fair policing, and we no longer have equality before the law in how the police treat us and in terms of the limits on how the police will intrude upon and seek to dictate our political opinions.
If you look at what defines a classical liberal democracy or the kind of modern democracy I was born in, that does not exist. The security I had in not needing to worry about my fundamental rights and not needing to consider existential threats to my way of life, freedom and safety, not needing to think that these things could or would be permanently harmed by my own government…that is gone.
I can be arrested for speaking the truth. I can be persecuted and imprisoned without just cause. Someone who illegally enters my country has more rights and protection than I have. The system favours Islamic terrorists above me. I can lose my freedom on the basis of favoured groups being offended by what I say. I can’t trust elections to be free and fair. I can’t trust my vote to be honoured if my chosen candidate wins. I know the State will do things that go far beyond the traditional limits of what the State is authorised to do and has public consent to do. Almost any amount of money can be wasted or stolen without consequence. Almost any level of tax can be imposed. Almost any basic freedom can be taken away.
This of course has always been the reality of raw power and of absolutist and dictatorial systems. But for my early life it was not a consideration, or a threat, or a reality we were aware of, within the West.
Now, whether it’s a transnational technocracy or a Communist takeover or an Islamic Caliphate, it is all possible, it is all here, and it is in many ways already what we are living within. All of these strands of tyranny are wrapped around us, seek to control everything we are allowed to access and experience and think, and insist on policies that most of us would not vote for which continue regardless of any votes we are allowed. Every Western nation is a sliver away from being France, where the leader insanely denies there is a problem even as the streets are on fire.
Real democracy has been replaced with ‘Our Democracy’, where those who make the streets burn and those who ignore every majority opinion there is, insist that they defend and uphold the thing they have desecrated and destroyed. In the US ‘democracy is dying’ has become a slogan for those who favour Communism, total State power, and one party Democrat rule, people who have fully swallowed the typical Communist inversion which portrays the last strong holdout of democracy in the West (the Trump administration) as its greatest threat.
While elsewhere this kind of delusion is sitting in government, busily heaping up the funeral pyre it insists is a beacon of hope.
