The mainstream American conservative or libertarian does not trust the Press, Mencius Moldbug says:
This person is not at all sure about how he wants to purge the Press; but, broadly, he would like it to disappear as a business, ignoring the facts that (a) privileged access to inside information will always be a good business (see under: Reg FD), and (b) if the “MSM” blows this advantage so completely that it fails as a business, it has a thousand and one ways to continue operating as a nonprofit.The democratic conservative or libertarian believes that his government is bad because it pursues the wrong policies; it pursues the wrong policies because its elected officials are the wrong people; and its elected officials are the wrong people because they were elected by bamboozled voters, miseducated by information sources 1 through 6 as described above.
Here is a question you can ask any conservative or libertarian. Granting that the MSM, today, is not supplying the People with accurate information, causing them to support misguided and counterproductive policies: when did this become true? When did it start?
If the American people of 2010 are, by and large, misinformed by their own journalists, until what date were they well-informed and capable of properly fulfilling their democratic function? 1980? 1960? 1930? 1910? If considering dates between 1856 and 1900, I recommend first consulting this historical sketch by Charles Francis Adams, Jr.
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UR’s answer to the question is, of course: never. Never — neither in the age of American democracy, nor in the Athens of Cleon the Tanner — has there ever been anything like a prudent, intelligent and well-informed democratic electorate. None of these three criteria has ever been achieved, least of all the third. Not in the 20th century, not in the 19th, not in the 18th, and not in the 5th BC.As for the self-enforcing constitution, the magic parchment that compels all to abide by natural law, without any force of sovereign compulsion that could become corrupt, it strikes me as even more fantastic and impossible than democracy itself. When government becomes corrupt, to cry for its absence is only natural. Nothing is more foul than a corrupt government. But as for natural law, nature’s first is this: she abhors a vacuum. Paper cannot rule. Some person or persons are always in the throne, or fighting for it. I prefer the former condition.