Democracy is the Greatest Threat to Democracy

Public Intellectual Eric Weinstein (originator of the “Intellectual Dark Web” moniker) recently appeared on Chris Williamson’s podcast, titled “Compete Systemic Collapse” It’s a three-and-a-half hour podcast, but the first twelve minutes are truly exceptional. I’ve transcribed it:

Eric Weinstein: “I don’t know whether Donald Trump will be allowed to become President. I think that there’s a remarkable story and we’re in a funny game, which is “Are we allowed to say what that story is?” Because to say it, to analyze it, to name it is to bring it, uh, into view. I think we don’t understand why the censorship is behaving the way it is. We don’t understand why it’s in the shadows. We don’t understand why our news is acting in a bizarre fashion. Let’s just set the stage. Given that that was in February, um, there is something that I think Mike Benz has referred to as “The rules-based international order.” It’s an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, clandestine understandings, about how the most important structures keep the world free of war and keep markets open.

“And there has been a system in place, whether understood explicitly or behind the scenes, or implicitly that says the purpose of the two American parties is to prune the field of populist candidate so that whenever two candidates exist in a faceoff, both are acceptable to the world order. So what you’re trying to do from the point of view, let’s take it from the point of view of the State Department, the Intelligence community, the Defense Department and major corporations that have to do with international issues from arms trade to, oh I don’t know, food, they have a series of agreements that are fragile and could be overturned if a President entered the Oval Office that didn’t agree with them and the mood of the country was “Why do we pay taxes into these structures, why are we hamstrung, why aren’t we a free people?”

“So what the two parties would do is, they would run Primaries. You’d have populist candidates, and you’d pre-commit the populist candidates to support the candidates that won the Primaries. As long as that took place, and you had two candidates that were both acceptable to the international order, that is they’re not going to re-order NAFTA or NATO or what have you, we called that “Democracy.” So Democracy was the illusion of choice, what’s called “Magician’s choice,” where the choice is not actually – you know, “Pick a card, any card” but somehow the magician makes sure that the card you pick is the one that he knows.

“In that situation you have Magician’s Choice in the primaries, and then you’d have the duopoly field two candidates either of which was acceptable, and you could actually accept to afford to hold an election. And the populace would vote and that way the international order wasn’t put at risk every four years because you can’t have alliances that are subject to the whim of, uhm, the people in plebiscites.

“So, under that structure everything was going fine ’til 2016, and then the first candidate ever to not hold, um, any position in the military, nor position in government in the history of the Republic to enter the Oval Office, Donald Trump, broke through the Primary structure. So then there was a full-court press, “OK, we only have one candidate that’s acceptable to the International Order. Donald Trump will be under, um, constant pressure that he’s a loser, he’s a wild man, he’s an idiot, and he’s under the control of the Russians.” And then he was going to be, you know, a 20:1 underdog.

“And then he wins.

“And there was no precedent for this.

“They learned their lesson. You cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and continue to have these alliances. This is an unsolved problem. So I don’t have a particular dog in this fight. I want to believe in Democracy, I also believe in international agreements, and it is the job of the State Department, the Intelligence community and the Defense Department to bring this problem in front of the American people, and say “You don’t know everything that’s going on, and if you start voting in populist candidates you’re going to end up knocking-out load-bearing walls that you don’t understand.”

Chris Williamson: “But Trump was in office four years. Did he turn the entire table upside down?”

Weinstein: “He risked doing that.”

Chris: “Say more.”

Weinstein: “You remember there was this uncomfortable accommodation given to the Central Intelligence Agency at the beginning of his actual term, there was a question about, um, was he going to question the – I’ve a very different point of view from most of my friends who were also at least nominally Democrats, which is it was a very immoral thing that was done to him. He was asked the question, “Will you pre-commit that you will accept the result of an election?”

“Now if you’re going to rig an election, you would ask somebody that to begin with, and that’s part of the game, and he says, “Well, you know, we’ll see.” So, you have this very strange going on where Democracy is the greatest threat to Democracy. How can that be? It’s two different concepts of Democracy. One concept of Democracy is the Will of the People. You hold plebiscites, and even if you do it with an Electoral College, the political parties, the idea is that the people are elec…, by and of and for the people. The other idea of Democracy is that Democracy is about institutions that sprang from Democracy once upon a time, and that those institutions have to be kept strong. Those are two completely different concepts that are overloaded to the same word.

“Under that circumstance we have a paradox which is “How do we keep the electorate from overturning the – you know – the Type A Democracy from overturning the Type B Democracy. And that is the unsolved problem that they will not bring in front of the People. So what you have is the situation in which I believe there are many people in Washington, D.C. who think that Donald Trump cannot become President because he can now go for broke. He also is not going to run for re-election. He’s relatively unconstrained. He’s wealthy, he’s, uh, learned how to play a lot of these games.

Chris: “He’s also got a bit of an axe to grind after the last six years.”

Weinstein: “No kidding. And he’s a wild card. You know, there’s three people who are doing amazing versions of the drunken boxing game. Kanye, who’s probably the first one to really fail, Elon and Donald Trump. And all three of them tried to do something. We couldn’t pin them down, you couldn’t figure out what they were going to do next. And that’s what the Orders keep trying to do. “Will you commit to this, will you say this, will you mouth these words?” And none of these people would play the game.

I find this all – you ever see Emmanuel Agustus, this boxer who actually, you know, I think Floyd M – anyway he said this was his toughest opponent because he just, he wouldn’t fight in a style that anyone could recognize.

Chris: “Unpredictable.”

Weinstein: “And the most entertaining boxer I’ve ever seen in my life. I mean just check out any highlight reel and you won’t even believe this is real. It doesn’t seem possible. So that’s what Donald Trump is. He’s a guy who’s got formulas that confuse people like Sam Harris. And Sam and I have been debating this for years. I think that Trump is an incredibly intelligent man, and that there’s incredible method in his Tweets, uh, of old. You can put them into a dataset, and you say that there’s five or six different types of Tweets and that the Left falls for every one of them, every time.

“So in this situation, you have a question: How is it that Donald Trump and RFK Jr. cannot possibly reach the Oval Office and we have to have a candidate who is pre-subscribed to perpetuating these institutions, these agreements and these orders?

“And there’s only one out of three who has that character, and that person has not won a Primary. Right now we have no idea who’s running the United States of America. I just came here in a Tesla, and I did not steer once. And I would say America is in full self-driving mode, and we don’t know what the AI is that’s running the Oval Office, and that’s really bizarre given that we have something like six minutes to make a decision about nuclear launches. Uh, we have no idea what the United States government in the Executive Branch actually is. But it can’t be Joe Biden.”

Chris: “Every time it seems that an election has happened over the last decade or so, it’s always been “This one is different, this is the most important, this is the most important.” Is there something different about the one we’re about to go into? How should we think about this election?”

Weinstein: “As World War II unraveled, the order that has has produced the illusion of peace for this length of time, imagine that you were let’s say in the 2000s, that you had this thing called The Great Moderation, there was this story that we had finally banned volatility from the markets. None of that was true. What you’re doing was you were going farther and farther into a regime without understanding that sooner or later the Jenga tower has to collapse. The order that was put in place at the end of World War II, none of its architects are still alive. Very few pieces of information were passed down about what it actually is, or how it functions, because it’s secret. And I think what you can say is that, um, we’re now living on the fumes built from that victory. Uh, that is what is unravelling. You’re about to head towards a multi-polar world where the Game Theory in the dyadic game of two players doesn’t look remotely like the Game Theory in a five or ten player game.

“So Kamala is essentially the youngest boomer possible, and she’s tied to the last Silent Generation President we’ll ever have, which is bizarre to begin with. And she’s pre-committed to try to continue that order in the guise of an alternatively woke Wall Street-friendly, Indian, Black, folksy, I don’t even know what she is. To quote the great Chris Swanson, “She’s a meme of a meme of a meme.” That was from our last talk, and I would say this is probably the most insane election we’ve ever seen by a comfortable margin. I would say that there’s no one in second place. Uh, I can’t think of another election that is even close to this bizarre. Including the attempted assassination on Donald Trump.”

Here’s the whole podcast: