Alain de Benoist: The End of the Modern World: Interview with Alain de Benoist

...people have the feeling of no longer being represented by their representatives, many think that it's useless to make use of a sovereignty on the election day which they know they will lose the day after. That's why populisms aspire to more direct, referendum based, or participative forms of democracy, conscious of the dysfunctions and limits to a liberal democracy that has replaced popular sovereignty by parliamentary sovereignty and that is today directed by an oligarchic caste that only seeks to defend its interests alone.

The popular classes are not only exasperated by the “way in which the city is managed.” They want to end administrative management, that is to say end the power of an expertocracy that pretends political problems are only technical problems in the final analysis (for which there only evidently exists a single rational solution) and who seek to seek to turn the governing of men into the administration of things. They realize that “governance” is only a means of governing without the people. What Vincent Coussedière called the “populism of the people” which is nothing other than a demand addressed to the politicians to actually practice politics in place of sticking to management.…

It's not a coincidence if the criticism of populism very quickly transforms into criticism of the people, currently represented as a mass of ignorant bumpkins.

This is what Steve Bannon means by the trifecta of 1) national sovereignty and security, 2) economic nationalism, and 3) the destruction of the administrative state as goals of the Trump administration.

Katehon
Alain de Benoist: The End of the Modern World: Interview with Alain de Benoist
Yann Vallerie interviews Alain de Benoist

       

Chris Dillow — The centralizing-decentralizing axis

Here’s a theory: one of the most important, yet under-rated, divisions in politics is that between centralizers and decentralizers.

This isn’t quite the same as the authoritarian-libertarian axis used by Political Compass, or Haidt’s liberty-oppression axis. For one thing, the axis I have in mind is often an instrumental one – it’s about how our values are best achieved – rather than one of values themselves. For another, some centralizers can be quite libertarian: some Blairites, for example, favour strong central political leadership and yet are socially libertarian. And for yet another, some forms of central organization can be freely entered into.

And it’s certainly not the same as the left-right axis. For example, Seamus Milne and left-libertarians are both on the left, but on opposite sides of the centralizer-decentralizer axis. And that subset of right-libertarians who are sincere and consistent are on the same side of this axis as we left-libertarians, whereas securocrats such as Theresa May are on the opposite.

Here are some examples of the centralizer-decentralizer axis:

Stumbling and Mumbling
The centralizing-decentralizing axis
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle