Can democracy afford the state-of-emergency provision?
In liberal democracies, power can be suddenly and dramatically concentrated by declaring a state of emergency.
Individual rights and liberties are then suspended ‘for our protection.’
But can we afford to be ‘protected’ at the price of our own slavery?
WATCH OUT: The bosses want to make the state of emergency permanent.
Those who would give up essential liberty,
to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve
neither liberty nor safety.
—Benjamin Franklin
The Western bosses are going to declare a state of emergency. It’s been creeping on us all this time. But they will reach for a frank declaration—a clear line in the constitutional sand—at some point. So you need to understand how this works, and what it will do to you.
Wikipedia defines the state of emergency—or ‘state of exception’—as follows:
“A state of emergency is a situation in which a government is empowered to be able to put through policies that it would normally not be permitted to do, for the safety and protection of its citizens. A government can declare such a state during a natural disaster, civil unrest, armed conflict, medical pandemic or epidemic or other biosecurity risk. (…) rights and freedoms may be suspended during a state of emergency, depending on the severity of the emergency …”
For the safety and protection of the citizens, rights and freedoms may be suspended.
It’s the same principle your friend invokes when he throws you to save you from a passing bus. He violates you, in a sense, because he doesn’t ask your permission. But only thus can he protect you. You are asked to map these intuitions to the national level. In an emergency, the State—our ‘friend’—apologizes for violating us (for suspending our rights and freedoms), but this is necessary—the government alleges—to protect us.
Let me now point out the relevant differences:
You know your friend. Your relationship is built on gobs of information. It is personal. By contrast, the bureaucrats making State-level decisions—you don’t know them. There is no personal relationship. You are an abstraction to them. They are an abstraction to you.
You can see the bus that almost crushed you. It is concrete. There is zero doubt that a danger existed and that your friend acted to save you. The determination of a State-level emergency, by contrast, is abstract. Even when you can see a concrete danger, it may still be highly ambiguous whether it rises to a sufficiently dangerous emergency above the constitutional threshold. And the information asymmetry between those making that determination and you, the ordinary citizen, is vast.
Your friend does not become immensely powerful with his emergency behaviors. He does not enslave you. By contrast, State bureaucrats do become immensely powerful with their emergency behaviors. At the limit, they become all powerful, enslaving the citizens utterly.
What follows? Let’s build the syllogism.
Premise 1. State bureaucrats in a democracy have a giant incentive to exaggerate and prolong a real emergency, or to manufacture an entirely phony emergency.
Why? Because a state of emergency can confer—at the limit—totalitarian power on those State bureaucrats.
Premise 2. State bureaucrats in a democracy have ample opportunity to exaggerate and prolong a real emergency, or to manufacture a phony emergency.
Why? Because the State bureaucrats enjoy a tremendous information asymmetry advantage vis-à-vis the ordinary citizen.
Conclusion: The state-of-emergency provision will probably be abused, undermining democracy.
As with any syllogism, the strength of the conclusion is weakened (the probability of abuse is lowered) if we weaken the premises. If the emergency powers granted are carefully limited and for a brief period, and/or if quality information reliably reaches the citizens (if a truly free, competitive, and investigative press exists), then abuses of power may be relatively constrained.
But the deeper point is this: though the provision for a ‘state of emergency’ in a democratic constitution is invariably framed as necessary for the State bureaucrats—your ‘friends’—to give you protection, it is more adaptive for you to see in the state of emergency your own vulnerability. This vulnerability follows from the concentration of power that a state of emergency produces, because the following is a sociological axiom: power is abused. And here’s the corollary: the more you concentrate power, the greater the abuse.
Lord Acton famously said it like this:
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men…”
The observation is hardly new. When the ancient Israelites—whose acephalous system dissipated power to decentralized judges—came to the Prophet Samuel demanding that power be concentrated in a king, Samuel replied: “you shall be his slaves” (1 Samuel 8.11-18).
Why is power abused? Frederic Bastiat—a classical liberal (these days we call them ‘libertarians’)—explained that it’s just human nature:
“[a] disposition … common to [humans] … is to live and to develop, when they can, at the expense of one another. This is no rash imputation, emanating from a gloomy, uncharitable spirit. History bears witness to the truth of it, by the incessant wars, the migrations of races, sectarian oppressions, the universality of slavery, the frauds in trade, and the monopolies with which its annals abound. This fatal disposition has its origin in the very constitution of man—in that primitive, and universal, and invincible sentiment that urges it towards its own well-being, and makes it seek to escape pain.”
It is certainly true that Bastiat—a free-market, liberal economist from the nineteenth century—was expressing the fundamental creed of his exotic academic tribe: humans are selfish and will maximize their material and personal self-interest. But if you find yourself indignantly—or perhaps smugly—rejecting this vision of human nature, then allow me to point something out: even if Bastiat is wrong to present the above as universal, my axiom and corollary both still hold under much weaker assumptions.
If we grant that in every complex society there are at least some people—and more probably lots of people—such as Bastiat describes, and that such people—almost by definition—are more likely to accede to positions of power, then the axiom and corollary both still follow: power is abused, and the more power is concentrated, the greater the abuse. And that is indeed why, as Bastiat points out, we’ve had “incessant wars, the migrations of races, sectarian oppressions, the universality of slavery, the frauds in trade.”
Liberals—or perhaps I should say libertarians—such as Bastiat therefore always consider the State—even when they accept some form of it—as a necessary evil. And to protect the citizens from tyranny, they strive to make the State as small and constrained as humanly possible.
But now, watch closely.
You can weaken the assumptions even further—in fact, radically—and the axiom and its corollary still hold! Even when you assume—like a lunatic—that everybody in a position of power is well meaning, power will still be abused. Power will be abused out of sheer do-gooder narcissism—evil intent is hardly necessary. And the result will be the same, because once you begin to abuse power, you do become evil, by degrees. And liberty vanishes—“for their own good.”
This is why communist government repeatedly produces totalitarianism. Not “because Marxism has never been done right,” as so many of our young Western leftists think, believing naively that this is a question of purity of intention. No, the reason that communist governments so naturally become totalitarian is that the communist goal is invariably to concentrate all power in the State, and that’s just asking for totalitarian tyranny.
Here is an interesting discovery: a totalitarian communist government is functionally indistinguishable from a full-powers state of emergency, indefinitely extended. Or, if you wish, the state of emergency is a form of ‘compressed communism.’ In both cases, liberty is destroyed by elites who coerce us “for our own good.”
The difference—and it is a big one—is that communists are explicitly revolutionary. They are always talking about conflict and violent overthrow. You know they’re coming. This improves the chances of a timely anti-communist counteroffensive. The state of emergency, by contrast, is sneaky: it gives State bureaucrats the opportunity to enslave you without seeming to—without paying the price of showing you in advance their totalitarian hand.
And that is precisely why Western Civilization cannot afford the state-of-emergency provision in our constitutions. That will be my argument.
Yes, getting rid of the state of emergency will entail important costs—this is true. But the costs of keeping the state-of-emergency provision, I claim, are far larger.
World War II—the most important test case
The global war of conquest launched by the Nazis against liberty and democracy cost more than 70 million lives. On top of that, hundreds of millions of Westerners who were not killed lost their basic rights and liberties under totalitarian government. What made this Catastrophe possible? Many things. But the constitutional state of emergency was not the least of them.
As the Wiener Holocaust Library explains, barely a month after Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany,
“On the 28 February 1933, President Hindenburg signed the Emergency Decree for the Protection of the German People [literally: ‘Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State’]. This decree suspended the democratic aspects of the Weimar Republic and declared a state of emergency.
This decree gave the Nazis a legal basis for the persecution and oppression of any opponents, who were to be framed as traitors to the republic. People could be imprisoned for any or no reason.
The decree also removed basic personal freedoms, such as the freedom of speech, the right to own property, and the right to trial before imprisonment.
Through these aspects the Nazis suppressed any opposition to their power, and were able to start the road from democracy to a dictatorship.”
Paul von Hindenburg, who signed that emergency decree, was not the greatest fan of democracy. But neither was he a Nazi. As president of the Weimar Republic—the liberal-democratic system that governed Germany between the two world wars—he was like a constitutional monarch with structural rather than administrative power. Only he could declare a state of emergency. Why did he? Because he was old and uncertain, and because he was scared by the political violence then gripping Weimar Germany.
Significantly, for my main argument, the Nazi brownshirts and their far-right paramilitary allies appear to have been the most important drivers of that political violence. And agents of the Nazis worked hard privately to scare Hindenburg into declaring the state of emergency. On the circumstantial evidence, many suspect the Reichstag Fire on 27 February 1933, which precipitated the ‘Protection’ decree on the 28th, was a Nazi plot. But whatever the truth on authorship, it is undisputed that the Nazis blamed the fire on a communist revolutionary plot and used that allegation to support the Nazi insistence that only by declaring a state of emergency could Germany avoid catastrophe.
“The [‘Protection’] decree was never repealed, so that from a juridical standpoint the entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that lasted 12 years.”1
Nazism is, like communism, an indefinitely extended state of emergency. This is yet another feature supporting Axel Kaiser’s thesis—argued in his latest book, Nazi-Comunismo—that there is little essential difference between Nazism and communism. “Identical twins,” he calls them.2
Keeping to the grammatical—therefore obligatory—etiquette which requires the State to promise protection for the citizens, Hindenburg’s emergency decree was titled ‘Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State (Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat). But instead of protecting anybody, this emergency decree made the German people maximally vulnerable. The Germans were destroyed.
Others—many others—would also be destroyed, in a profusion of violence without precedent in all of human history.
Did you need a second example? COVID
Westerners have not yet settled their acrimonious debates on the meaning of the COVID crisis, the two sides of which we have tried fairly to characterize here:
On the skeptical, anti-authoritarian side (which includes me), specific theories have been advanced against authorities across Western Civilization that allege deliberate manipulation and deception for every component of the COVID crisis: the origin of the virus; the severity of the disease; the numbers of infections; the numbers of casualties; the safety and effectiveness of the COVID ‘vaccines’; the efficacy of alternative treatments; and the rationale for the draconian policies imposed. These claims of manipulation and deception have become increasingly well-supported by the emerging evidence, leading some to perceive organization at the macro level. I will point readers to some of our own investigations on these matters.
For starters, the virus responsible is almost certainly a product of ‘gain of function’ research, indistinguishable from biowarfare research.
The ‘scientific authority’ employed by health bureaucrats to evaluate the public danger and justify their emergency policies was an epidemiological modeler who had repeatedly conjured false pandemics out of nothing.
The draconian emergency policies implemented had no precedent in the history of epidemic response. They were argued for on the basis of the urgency of ‘protection,’ of course, but they imposed costs far larger than the alleged benefits.
Both the severity of the disease and the numbers of casualties were exaggerated upward, ludicrously, in order to promote and then to keep the draconian emergency policies in place.
What was the result? Western citizens were confined in their homes unless the government gave permission. And they were unable to travel, visit public places, and sometimes even to work unless they consented to be ‘vaccinated’ with an experimental genetic intervention. The World Bank estimated that between 100 and 200 million people were impoverished. A great many were killed. Untold numbers were sickened.
We were made slaves. And lab rats. We lost sovereignty over our bodies.
Those responsible for mobilizing the entire ‘public health’ machinery against the democratic citizens of the West made many billions of dollars by the maneuver, as we explain here:
And here’s the clincher: they’ve been at this for a while. Back in 2005, with George W. Bush, the US government prepared a comprehensive plan to shut everything down and declare martial law on the basis of a pandemic scare.
Only one problem: the chosen virus in that year—though it initially looked promising—failed to kill people, so they had to pack up the entire show. Nobody talks about this now.
But they would try again. And they did in 2009, with the porcine flu. But they didn’t succeed there either—the only country they got to lock down was Mexico. Once again, the virus didn’t kill enough people.
But they would try again. And they did.
And they will again.
The state-of-emergency provision interacts with political culture
Ask yourself: Why did the Nazis want an emergency decree? Why not just impose themselves violently—since they were violent already? Because the state-of-emergency gambit produces less resistance, lowering the risk for the would-be totalitarian usurpers.
All paid employees of State bureaucracies in a modern democracy are trained to follow lawful orders. If the state of emergency is lawfully declared, most will accept it. The same goes for most of the citizens. The general acceptance of a lawful state of emergency by State employees and the bulk of the citizenry is precisely what allows the top State bureaucrats to exercise emergency powers.
We saw this clearly in the COVID crisis. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben denounced “the frenetic, irrational and entirely unfounded emergency measures adopted against an alleged epidemic of coronavirus,”3 and he marveled at
“the ease with which an entire society has acquiesced to feeling itself plague-stricken, to isolating itself at home, and to suspending its normal conditions of life, its relationships of work, friendship, love, and even its religious and political convictions.”
This, to Agamben, was remarkable. He asks: “Why were there no protests and opposition, as is usually the case in these situations?”4
But what can he mean that people “usually” protest and resist? In which situations? People don’t usually revolt when others rush to their protection. Most ordinary folk assume (or did) that health bureaucrats—guardians of ‘public health’—act with proper scientific rigor and in good faith, so they obeyed. The state of emergency—sold to the public as ‘protection’—was perceived as legitimate.
It’s as simple as that.
When the citizens innocently grant emergency powers, State bureaucrats, acting quickly and deftly, can transform the institutional structure to make those emergency powers permanent, protected now by a radical force asymmetry. This is precisely what the Nazis did.
The deeper point here is that, at root, what makes possible this sneaky transfer of sovereignty under cover of emergency is the distribution of ideas in the population concerning legitimate State behavior.
If the distribution of ideas is very different, we can make things a lot harder for would-be totalitarians. On that note, I invite you now to imagine a counterfactual modern Western history—one that didn’t happen.
The counterfactual
Imagine that, as Western societies transitioned into democracy, they had enshrined in their constitutions the following imperative, perhaps as the first or second article to highlight its fundamental importance to the preservation of liberty.
Article 1: Under no circumstances will any institution of this Republic be allowed to declare a state of emergency that suspends the constitutional rights and freedoms of the citizens. Any attempt to do so, for whatever reason, must be interpreted by the citizenry as a threat to the basic democratic survival of the Republic. If a grave danger is perceived, State bureaucrats are allowed to inform, recommend, and cajole the citizenry, and they may employ the powers already granted to mitigate the danger. But no institution of the Republic may—for any reason, including, or perhaps especially, a claim to be ‘protecting’ the citizenry—suspend the constitutional rights of the citizens. For though State bureaucrats without emergency powers will find it more difficult to respond to some dangers, they will also find it more difficult to extinguish citizen rights and liberties, and no greater danger exists than the loss of liberty itself.
In a world like that, the citizens would be brought up in an educational system that teaches them to see the very attempt to declare a state of emergency as suspect and illegitimate, for the law makes no provision for it and instead warns the citizens against it.
If Article 1 of Germany’s Weimar constitution of 1919 had said something like that, and if the importance of that first Article had been a major component of civic education, the Germans would have known to recognize, in the appeal to trade liberty for ‘protection,’ the on-ramp for totalitarianism. In such a civilization, the Nazis would have had a tougher fight on their hands.
Don’t forget that the Nazis were not inevitable. They had only captured about a third of the German vote and their popularity was already waning past that peak when they went for the state-of-emergency gambit. Without that gambit, they really might have failed. Especially considering that in the early days of the Nazi regime, their ideology sparked an international boycott that almost destroyed the Third Reich in the cradle, as discussed here:
So now ask yourself:
What catastrophe—costlier than World War II—has the state-of-emergency provision saved us from?
Can’t think of one.
World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (himself co-responsible for the COVID mess) has expressed the opinion that COVID did more harm than World War II.5 I don’t know whether that is true. I don’t think Ghebreyesus knows either. But the mere fact that he compares COVID to World War II puts the COVID crisis in the category of greatest-ever harm.
That matters because the COVID crisis is likewise in the category of harm imposed via abuse of emergency measures (though in many places these were implicit rather than formally declared). So we can ask the same question:
What catastrophe—costlier than COVID—has the state-of-emergency provision saved us from?
I don’t believe you can name even one.
The general claim these observations support, which forms the basis for the text of my proposed constitutional article, is the following:
A civilization for which emergency powers are a hard taboo will suffer less harm, overall, than a civilization with state-of-emergency provisions in its democratic constitutions.
COVID has given us a clear empirical illustration. Consider the following data on ‘excess mortality’ during the COVID years:
You may recall that mainstream authorities all over the West strongly criticized the Swedish government for not coercing the Swedes, either to lock them down or to ‘vaccinate’ them. But can you argue with the results? In the hierarchy of COVID harm, Sweden is happily at the bottom.
The statistic of ‘excess mortality’ for the COVID years cuts through all the bullshit. Because it no longer matters what your theory was about anything; this is just telling you how a country did overall, during the COVID years, relative to normal expected mortality in the same country. Sweden seems to have outperformed her European peers—COVID harmed her the least.
What was different in Sweden? The Swedish constitution forbids declaring a state of emergency in peacetime.
“The Swedish government is not allowed to declare a state of emergency in peacetime. Thus, the main factor behind Swedish exceptionalism during the present pandemic is that the Swedish constitution prohibits the use of lockdowns as seen from Chapter 2, Article 8 in the Swedish constitution (Regeringsformen).”6
The citizen is sovereign only when he rejects emergency arguments on principle
The great political theorist Carl Schmitt founded his entire theory of sovereignty on the state of emergency. He opens his famous Political Theology by intoning:
“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”7
The term “state of exception” means the normal constitutional order is suspended, and it is synonymous with the “state of emergency,” because the constitutional order is juridically suspended in a liberal democracy by alleging an emergency. However, “emergency” and its specific remedies, Schmitt points out, cannot be exhaustively nor minutely defined in advance:
“it can neither be stated with subsumable clarity when an emergency will exist, nor can it be substantially enumerated what might happen in such a case when it truly comes to an extreme emergency and its elimination.”8
The state of emergency is therefore declared on the basis of a rather flexible interpretation.
Whoever wields the power to thus interpret and suspend the constitutional order is the true sovereign. The sovereign is “he [who] will decide immediately whether an extreme emergency exists, as well as what should be done to eliminate it.”9
There appears to be a problem in Schmitt’s formulation, because he collapses two powers into the same institution or person. You can see this by considering the historical example of Weimar Germany. There, it was the president (institutional office)—specifically, in that moment, Hindenburg (person)—who had the power to sign the emergency decree; yet it was the chancellor (institutional office)—specifically, in that moment, Hitler (person)—who wielded the extraordinary emergency powers. The two aspects of sovereignty identified by Schmitt—deciding on the exception and wielding it—were therefore not located in the same institution or person.
Can Schmittian theory wiggle out of this? It can.
Hindenburg was sovereign until he signed the decree, because until that moment it was he who decided on the exception. Thereafter, though Hindenburg technically retained the juridical authority to annul his own decree and restore the constitutional order, and even to dismiss Hitler, he lost the material power to do so because Hitler quickly exercised his emergency powers to make the State respond to him personally. It was now Hitler, therefore, who decided on the exception, and he extended that exception—the state of emergency—indefinitely. He was now the sovereign.
With these qualifications, Schmitt is still right. But we need to keep our eye on sovereignty—located, yes, as the power to decide on the exception—as a ball that can, in principle, be transferred rather quickly from one player to another.
But now, accepting Schmitt’s definition, let us ask:
When is the democratic citizenry sovereign?
I propose the following:
The democratic citizenry is sovereign only when the attempt to impose the exception—the state of emergency—is reflexively (axiomatically) treated as usurpation.
To make the democratic citizenry sovereign we need the democratic constitution itself and the civic education of the citizenry jointly to build a culture in which the citizen learns to regard anyone who attempts to suspend the constitutional rights and liberties—on whatever pretext—as a danger to the citizens, precisely according to the text of my proposed constitutional article above.
When the attempt to impose a state of emergency on any grounds is—by definition—extra-constitutional, and therefore illegal, any move in this direction is automatically a warning and alarm to politically aware citizens. But they must be politically aware, which is why citizen sovereignty is not merely a matter of constitutional design but one of civic education that produces widespread political literacy.
Put another way, if sovereignty is revealed in the exception, then only when State employees and citizens alike regard the state of emergency as fundamentally illegitimate can the citizens be considered sovereign. In this condition, the attempt to establish the exception becomes a legitimate trigger for State employees and citizens alike, for whom disobedience and revolt now become imperative to defend freedom. And it is this—the credible threat of disobedience and revolt in defense of citizen freedom—that reminds the State bureaucrat (or whoever may informally lord it over the State bureaucrat) that the citizens are sovereign.
Only by this credible reminder are the people truly sovereign—that is my claim.
I am proposing, therefore, an inversion of traditional liberal theory. Traditional liberalism says that the emergency legitimizes suspension of constitutional rights and liberties. I am saying, to the contrary, that any attempt to declare an emergency suspension of constitutional rights and liberties should be the legitimating trigger for citizen resistance. And I am saying that only when this becomes the law and the culture can we say, in honesty, that the citizens are sovereign.
Mind you, this hardly invalidates an emergency response by the government. It invalidates only an emergency response that tramples on citizen rights and liberties.
I am making explicit the implications of classical liberalism
Baruch Spinoza is the great Founding Father of the European Enlightenment, and therefore of modern Western classical liberalism, which must be carefully distinguished from what the term ‘liberalism’ now denotes in the Unites States, which is the opposite of classical liberalism, and is in fact—especially now—a kind of stealth Marxism.
Spinoza argued for all the basic ideas that are cherished in modern democracy: freedom of thought, freedom of religion, universal suffrage, etc. On the question of structure, he recommended 1) an executive subject to law; 2) a division of powers with respect to interpretation and implementation of the law; and 3) a separation of religious and civil authority.
It follows that none of this is original with the good Baron de Montesquieu, who was undoubtedly reading Spinoza—because everybody was (though not everybody was brave enough to confess it). So you have Spinoza to thank for modern democracy. But since Spinoza, as he explained with astonishing erudition, was getting his ideas from the Bible, you have the Bible to thank for modern democracy.
I find it significant that everything I have defended above concerning the state of emergency is already contained in Spinoza. He wrote:
“No one can ever so utterly transfer to another his power and, consequently, his rights, as to cease to be a man; nor can there ever be a power so sovereign that it can carry out every possible wish …, [for] it would then be possible to maintain with impunity the most violent tyranny, which, I suppose, no one would for an instant admit.” (ch. 17)
This lengthy circumlocution is as close as Spinoza could come, in the 1600s, even in the comparatively liberal Netherlands, to say that a people trampled may legitimately revolt. And since the “high-handed actions” of such trampling were routinely dressed up as ‘protection,’ Spinoza was implicitly calling for revolt against that very argument.
“Those who administer or possess governing power, always try to surround their high-handed actions with a cloak of legality, and to persuade the people that they act from good motives; this they are easily able to effect when they are the sole interpreters of the law; for it is evident that they are thus able to assume a far greater freedom to carry out their wishes and desires…” (ch.17)10
I find this striking: modern Western liberalism was born with this claim: you may revolt against the elite promise of ‘protection,’ because they are just manipulating you to seize more power.
This of course hit Spinoza’s readers right in the belly, because his audience was chock-full of feudal aristocrats and their retainers, who claimed for themselves a number of ‘rights’ by which to oppress the commoners in exchange for—they claimed—‘protecting’ them.
If you are thinking that Baruch Spinoza was very brave, then you are one-hundred-percent correct. And as smart as they come. He published Theologico-Political Treatise anonymously in 1670, with false publisher information and a disguised place of publication, because he knew what would happen: the book was quickly denounced across Europe as dangerous and was banned in several places.
But Spinoza’s ideas could not be stopped. Everybody read him.
“...in the years immediately following [Spinoza’s] death, an incubation period of modernity, Spinoza’s influence was widely felt. His ideas, Leibnitz said in 1704, were ‘stealing gradually into the minds of men of high station who rule the rest and on whom affairs depend, and, slithering into fashionable books, are inclining everything towards the universal revolution with which Europe is threatened.’ ”11
The Baron Gottfried von Leibnitz—in science a great Enlightenment figure but in politics a total reactionary—was not happy about this. Yet it was happening: there was no denying the civilizational impact of Baruch Spinoza. For Spinoza was forcing the Western Judeo-Christian aristocrats—the “men of high station who rule the rest”—to confront the question: Are we just?
When the political faction led by Shaftesbury in England collapsed after the Rye House Plot, John Locke fled to Spinoza’s country, the Netherlands. This was “in the years immediately following [Spinoza’s] death,” when everybody was reading the famous Sephardic Jew from Amsterdam, the infinitely controversial philosopher Spinoza, hero to all liberals, expelled from his own Jewish community for his radical ideas about God, and banned in so many places. How terrifyingly exciting it must have been for Locke to find himself in Spinoza’s intellectually frothing liberal environment. Any suggestion that John Locke—easily the greatest liberal mind of his generation—was not profoundly influenced by Spinoza is just obtuseness (or perhaps antisemitism).
Locke wrote that “wherever law ends, tyranny begins.” If a constituted authority violates the law on any point, then, on that point the citizen may legitimately resist, he says.12 The state of emergency amounts to the abrogation of all law, so, by Locke’s own definition, it is the greatest tyranny and hence legitimates a general citizen revolt.
In 1850, a century and a half after Locke passed away, the great French liberal Frederic Bastiat took the argument further. He argued that even a lawful ‘liberal’ order—operating ‘normally’—can be tyrannical, and that the liberal constitution of the French Second Republic that Louis Napoleon Bonaparte presided—elaborated with fanfare after the great pan-European revolutions of 1848 that midwifed the birth of modern democracy—had already, instantaneously, betrayed the citizens.
“… [law] has destroyed its own object; it has been employed in annihilating that justice which it ought to have established, in effacing amongst Rights, that limit which it was its true mission to respect; it has placed the collective force [the monopoly of force] in the service of those who wish to traffic, without risk and without scruple, in the persons, the liberty, and the property of others; it has converted plunder into a right, that it may protect it, and lawful defense into a crime, that it may punish it.”13
A state of emergency only makes all of this worse, for whatever constitutional protections remain for ordinary citizens—though Bastiat already considers them woefully inadequate—disappear entirely in the state of emergency.
A few years later, in 1864, the great liberal political theorist Maurice Joly accused that Louis Napoleon was using his secret police to manufacture “sham conspiracies” against his own government, thus “arousing the people’s sympathy.” Joly wrote a philosophical dialogue in which the character ‘Machiavelli’ explains this and other techniques of Louis Napoleon (always called ‘the Prince’ rather than named) to the character ‘Montesquieu.’ The Prince has “control [over] the various revolutionary elements in the country,” says ‘Machiavelli,’ and so, “if there is a commotion somewhere, it is my hand that sets it going. If a plot is hatched, I [the Prince] am the instigator. I am the head conspirator.” And by such ruses, “the public can be intimidated, and the Prince can, if need be, procure the harsh measures he wants or put into effect those already at hand.” A state of emergency.
In the 20th century, the great free-market economist of the libertarian Austrian school, Friedrich Hayek, wrote in The Road to Serfdom that
“[central] planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals and, as such, [it is] essential if central planning on a large scale is to be possible.”14
If bureaucrats are given central-planning powers, dictatorship follows. Yes, because the more you concentrate power, the greater the abuse. No greater concentration can exist in a liberal-democratic order than when a state of emergency is declared. Hayek is worried about communism, and communism, as noted earlier, is an extended, full-powers state of emergency. Or else the state of emergency is ‘compressed communism.’ So, following Hayek’s own logic, the state of emergency is the greatest possible danger to a liberal-democratic order.
Another classical liberal—perhaps we should call them all ‘libertarians’ now—who worries about the growth of government is Robert Higgs. He explains that, in the United States, “each genuine crisis has been the occasion for another ratchet toward Bigger Government.” It is “the Progressive ideological imperative that government must ‘do something,’ must take responsibility for resolving any perceived crisis,” that underwrites this.15 This progressive (leftist) vision of the State bureaucrat as ‘friend’ and ‘protector’ is what has led citizens to assume that bureaucrats will act with probity and compassion if State powers are increased.
Higgs points to the empirical fact, historically documented: every time progressives have successfully argued for giving the US government more power to ‘solve’ a crisis, the US government has gotten “bigger,” meaning that the powers gained each time via the ‘solve our crisis’ gambit are never relinquished, leading to greater and greater normalized concentration of power. It’s a ratchet.
Can you hear echoes of Orwell bouncing off the walls?
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”16
One does not suspend rights and liberties to solve an emergency; one leans on the emergency to suspend rights and liberties. Bureaucrats never let a crisis go to waste. And a crisis so serious that citizens allow a suspension of the constitution, birthing a maximal Big Government, is simply the limiting case of Higgs’ ratchet-effect framework.
The ‘use the crisis to grab more power’ gambit has also been how the European Union government has grown, squelching the rights and liberties of Europeans at every turn. And this was explained in so many words by Jean Monnet, “the founding godfather or European integration”:
“Europe will be forged in crises and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.”17
Yes, every crisis becomes a power grab for the EU, so long as nobody is paying enough attention to complain, as explained by Former EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in 1999 to Der Spiegel:
“We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”18
Murray Rothbard, the great continuator of the libertarian Austrian school, writes in ‘War, Peace, and the State’ that
“… domestic tyranny … is the inevitable accompaniment of war. The great Randolph Bourne realized that ‘war is the health of the State.’ It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society. (…) In war … the State frantically mobilizes the people to fight for it against another State, under the pretext that it is fighting for [the people].”19
Some wars may be just—truly fought in self-defense. But bureaucrats may seek a war in order to produce the perfect emergency that will call them forth as ‘protectors,’ thus augmenting their tyrannical powers to the limit. It is undoubtedly for this reason that the US Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 11) vests the exclusive power to declare war, not in the executive, but in Congress (a provision ‘honored’ almost always in the breach!).
Or consider Giorgio Agamben. He is not a ‘liberal’ in the European and Latin American sense of the term—he is not a a classical liberal. Yet despite coming from a Marxist background, he converges (paradoxically) with classical liberals on one major point: profound suspicion of emergency power and concentrated sovereignty.
Agamben stands on Schmitt’s shoulders to argue, in his work State of Exception, that historically the state of emergency has been a powerful strategy to make democracies slide into totalitarian states.
“… the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones. … the state of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics. … the state of exception appears as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism.”20
In the COVID crisis, he accuses, there was an obvious “tendency”—which he considers a general tendency, before and after COVID—“to use a state of exception as a normal paradigm for government.”21
Yes. The new normal—that’s what they literally called their COVID emergency measures.
This follows directly and inescapably from our axiom. Power is abused; therefore, State bureaucrats will inevitably reach for the paradox: they’ll try to make the state of exception normal. Since that makes tyranny normal, the state-of-emergency provision is a fundamental threat to the citizens.
I believe I have shown that I am only making explicit the implications of classical liberalism. It is a fundamental contradiction to allow any kind of state-of-emergency provision in a liberal-democratic constitution. To the contrary, our constitutions should have an explicit prohibition of any kind of state of emergency, and this should be the first or second article to make it clear just how important this is to the fundamental stability and preservation of a liberal constitutional order.
Once again: this does not mean that the government should not respond to emergencies; it means that it cannot suspend your rights and liberties when it does so.
What happens now?
A civil war is a made-to-order crisis that power-hungry bureaucrats can harness to declare a state of emergency and impose totalitarianism. Western Civilization everywhere has long been trending—everywhere—in the direction of civil war. The result of this trend—if unchecked—will be tyranny.
There are two main reasons for the impending civil wars.
The first is that the identity politics of the woke left has completely balkanized society. The second is that untold numbers of Muslims have immigrated to the West. Neither trend is organic—both are deliberate Machiavellian policies of the Western bosses. Or so says the MOR model.
I will now summarize these processes and conclude my analysis.
I’ll be the first to recognize that the suffering imposed on the working classes by cruel crony capitalists during the Industrial Revolution largely made the argument for the revolutionary socialists. And the industrial bosses undoubtedly interpreted the growing political power of the Western working classes as a kind of slave revolt that they meant urgently to put down. I have written about these processes here:
It is nevertheless a fact, however, that the forces of change proved too powerful, and that the Western industrial bosses were humiliated: they had to order their political retainers to get on board with a more humane form of capitalism. (The threat of Marxist revolution no doubt had a hand in that.) This was not, however, a change of heart at the top—it was hypocrisy. The top industrial bosses—the true owners of the political power—have been working hard to regain their power over us (also documented in the piece above).
Yet this simple fact cannot be gainsaid: in the interim, Western capitalism was reformed. As a result, after WWII, worker resentment of the upper classes in the West largely subsided into almost nothing, and this lasted several decades thanks to sundry legal reforms and to the general enrichment of the workers.
In this new social contract, Marxist professors risked being cast adrift into meaninglessness unless they could somehow reinvent social conflict. They needed to find new ‘victims’ to ‘defend’ from ‘oppression.’ If such victims didn’t exist, they would invent them. In this manner, the profs became cultural Marxists, venturing beyond economic questions to reinterpret every social cleavage as a battleground between oppressors and their victims, identified now not by behavior, but by category membership.
Male/female, white/black, Western/non-Western, heterosexual/LGBT(etc.), handsome/ugly, thin/fat, smart/stupid—every distinction became redefined, and then split again and intersectionally micro-redefined, as an oppressor/victim binary. In a radical inversion, the Marxists—who claimed originally that they would liberate the species from traditional essentialized categories and join the workers in fraternal solidarity—were now completely conquered by racism and other forms of essentialism. Thus was born identity politics, the political left’s own brand of racism, which leftists—in grand Orwellian style—call anti-racism.
This demonstrated that social conflict is the only truly necessary ground for Marxists. “Marx’s … chief desire,” wrote Bertrand Russel, “was to see his enemies punished, and he cared little what happened to his friends in the process.”22 Everything else in Marxism, no matter how apparently fundamental, can transform, so long as some form of social conflict—represented publicly, by grammar, as a ‘social justice’ fight against ‘oppression’—is preserved or else invented.
As these New-Left Marxist professors became dominant in the social sciences and humanities, they taught their university students to reinterpret every human interaction as a ‘social justice’ battleground between a victim and an oppressor. Impressionable university students learned from their prestigious professors that there is no higher morality than extracting a vengeful chunk of flesh and a humiliating apology from an ‘oppressor,’ who will earn by this only a temporary reprieve (if that) before the guilt meter is refilled and a new payment—material and social—is publicly demanded.
People quickly pick up the logic of this political grammar. The only way to stay—briefly—ahead of a possible attack from the left is to rush to identify yourself as some category of victim, which you cannot establish except via loud action to extract some form of public contrition from whomever you’ve designated as your own ‘oppressor,’ thus ‘demonstrating,’ by the cowed apology of the latter, that you are indeed a ‘victim’ (otherwise, how come you got an apology?).
The long-term consequence of a process that drives everyone to declare themselves a ‘victim’ of an ‘oppressor’ who will be the object of a public and humiliating revenge is of course civil war, and we are now close to that. Especially dangerous is that woke grammar pits, by ‘race,’ all whites against all non-whites. If this continues we will have some kind of race war. Isn’t that what the Nazis—the extreme right-wing—wanted? But now it is the woke leftists who are itching for this fight!
This process, as mentioned above, is made-to-order for power-hungry bureaucrats (or for whoever controls them). As balkanized Westerners descend into nativist hatreds and tear each other apart, the bosses will get their excuse to march the jackbooted thugs and their security robots into the streets and impose themselves. We should suspect, therefore, that these historical processes are not fundamentally emergent but largely managed, and, in their origin, entirely manufactured by the very top bosses who will benefit.
Now watch.
There is zero controversy in stating that the Rockefeller network and their industrial allies, at the top of US society, were comfortably in power in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. At the same time, the Rockefellers—and their allies—were leaders of international eugenics, which, in Germany, with their help, became German Nazism. In other words, the Rockefellers played a leading role producing the very movement that imposed a totalitarian state-of-emergency over all of Europe.
After the war, the Rockefeller network collaborated in the creation and direction of the US clandestine service, the CIA, which involved the absorption of Fremde Heere Ost, comprising at least tens of thousands of German Nazis and collaborators who had been Adolf Hitler’s intelligence service in the East. And the Rockefeller network, allied with the CIA, created the university departments of ‘communication’ that sprang out of nothing in the postwar and that now train virtually everyone who works in the mass media. The rest of the university system was similarly corrupted.
The entire sequence, with supporting documentation, is briefly summarized here:
By the way, the CIA’s corruption of the entire US system was scandalously documented in the US Congress.
From this history, it follows that the eugenicists who were functionally governing the US before the war, and who gave us the German Nazis, retained their position of power, and their Nazis, after the war. What should you expect from such people? That they will impose a state of emergency on us.
Now ask yourself: Who is responsible for making the cultural Marxist professors so powerful in the Western universities and the Western cultural system?
The top industrial bosses, as we just explained, have tremendous power over the mass media system that turned these cultural Marxists into superstars (consider the case of the nothing ‘intellectual’ Edward Said). And as political scientist Thomas Dye explains, “the initial resources for research, study, planning, and formulation of national policy are derived from corporate and personal wealth.” The process begins when “this wealth is channeled into foundations, universities, and policy-planning groups.”23
It follows from this that the top industrial bosses, sugar daddies of the university system, can broadly influence hiring tendencies in the ivory tower. It was on their watch that the social sciences and the humanities—the very disciplines that can produce specialists who investigate power scientifically for the benefit of the citizenry—were flooded with scientifically useless postmodernism and cultural Marxism. And it strikes me as no coincidence that this academic trend is now almost guaranteeing some form of civil war. Soon, the bosses will have the perfect excuse to subjugate us with a state of emergency, and they’ll claim to be protecting us from our hatreds—the very hatreds they lovingly engineered.
At the same time, the arrival of a large population of Muslims into the West in recent decades, many of whom explicitly want to destroy the West, virtually guarantees a civil war sooner or later, for their numbers and boldness are growing fast. The Western bosses have so far only pretended to respond to Western displeasure with this policy. And meanwhile they have increasingly become the protectors of violent Muslims against innocent Westerners (just consider, for a dramatic illustration, the official protection that Muslim rape gangs have gotten in Britain). How deliberate this all has been is evident in the policy to allow the jihadi states to finance the building of mosques all over Europe, where Europe’s Muslims are being radicalized.24
It will not have escaped your attention, unless you’ve been in a coma, that the dominant cultural Marxists in the Western university have been teaching their impressionable students to apologize for jihadi violence—even to cheer it—and to hate the Jews. This is precisely what you would expect if, behind the scenes, Nazi intelligence were pulling the strings, because in World War II the Nazis allied with the jihadis—and especially, with the Arab Palestinian movement—to murder the European Jews.
And indeed, as mentioned, the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States (CIA) was created out of Nazi intelligence.
Of course, the US bosses are trying other things too. As noted above, for example, they have tried to subjugate us with claims of pandemic. (And they will try that again.)
And, though it now seems to be petering out slowly, for years the bosses have insisted on a planetary ‘global warming crisis,’ supposedly Man-made, that allows them to steal our wealth through various forms of rent-seeking, to impoverish us via higher energy prices, and to justify encroaching on our rights and liberties. We have exposed the deception here:
Is it a coincidence that the athropogenic global-warming scare has been the work of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? You shouldn’t think so, for it is those governments—the ones that jointly created the IPCC—that accrue power by the climate ‘crisis’ claim. What they’ve been imposing on us is a slow-rolling state-of-emergency that gets assembled by parts as the claim of impending planetary doom is continually renewed (never mind the failure of the specific, intermediate climate predictions).
Many marvel at the fact that Greta Thunberg—the international poster child of climate activism—is now consumed by pro-jihadi and antisemitic activism.
What does one thing have to do with the other? It’s really very simple: both are causes pushed by the New-Left cultural Marxists in the university, sold to impressionable undergraduates as a quick hoist to moral superiority with which to narcissistically and self-righteously unleash themselves—with maximum cruelty—against others, who will deserve no compassion once identified by the all-powerful university profs as ‘oppressors.’
Antisemitic pro-jihadism (thinly dressed up—when it is—as supposed ‘anti-Zionism’) is a fundamental component of the New-Leftist moral identity that our Marxist professors have carefully constructed. And climate activism is another. It’s a bundle. This is the culture that influenced Greta, even though she quit school and didn’t go to college, because this is now all over Western society, not just in the universities. That’s because university graduates become managers in all of our bureaucracies, public and private, and they have transformed all of our organizational life.
Both the pro-jihadi antisemites and the climate activists are becoming more and more violent because Marxism always promises purification and redemption through violence. That violence will justify a frank state of emergency.
And then we will be slaves.
I don’t know whether Western Civilization will survive the true crisis we find ourselves in—the attempt to re-enslave us. But if the West does survive, I think the first order of business should be to categorically forbid anything that might remotely look like a state-of-emergency provision in our constitutions.
That, and a constitutional prohibition to establish any kind of clandestine service that can spend citizen monies in secret, as argued here:
Because we are meant to be free!
Agamben, G. (2006, February 1). The state of emergency as a paradigm of government. Tablet Magazine.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/state-of-emergency-giorgio-agamben
Kaiser, A. (2025). Nazi-comunismo: Por qué marxistas-leninistas y nazi-fascistas son gemelos ideológicos.
Agamben, G. (2020, February 26). L’invenzione di un’epidemia. Quodlibet.
https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia
In English:
https://www.asc.uw.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Giorgio-Agamben-Invention-of-an-Epidemic.pdf
Agamben, G. (2020, March 17). Reflections on the plague. Journal of Psychoanalysis.
https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/reflections-on-the-plague/
Lieser, E. K. (2021, March 8). Is the hell unleashed by coronavirus worse than World War II? The National Interest.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/coronavirus/hell-unleashed-coronavirus-worse-world-war-ii-179635
Bergman, U. M., & Lundberg, J. (2020, June 12). Sweden’s constitution decides its exceptional COVID-19 policy. CEPR.
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/swedens-constitution-decides-its-exceptional-covid-19-policy
Schmitt, C. (2020). Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty (C. J. Miller, Trans.). Antelope Hill Publishing. (ch. 1)
Ibid.
Ibid.
Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza Collection: Ethics, Theologico-Political Treatise, On the Improvement of the Understanding (p. 155). Kindle Edition.
Carroll, J. (2001). Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. (p.412)
Locke, J. (1690/2003). Second treatise of government. Project Gutenberg. (ch.18)
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7370/7370-h/7370-h.htm
Bastiat, F. (1850/2007). The law. Ludwig von Mises Institute.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44800/44800-h/44800-h.htm
Hayek, F. A. (1944). The road to serfdom. University of Chicago Press. (ch.5)
www.agathonlibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Hayek-Friedrich-the-road-to-serfdom-text-and-documents-zlib.pdf
Higgs, R. (1987). Crisis and Leviathan: Critical episodes in the growth of American government. Oxford University Press. (p.261)
Orwell, George. Animal Farm And 1984: (Authorized Orwell Edition)—A Mariner Books Classic (p. 338). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Hartwich, O. M. (2020, June 2). Nothing stops the march of European integration. Oliver Hartwich.
https://oliverhartwich.com/2020/06/02/nothing-stops-the-march-of-european-integration/
Ibid.
Rothbard, M. N. (1963). War, peace, and the State. The Standard, 2–5, 15–16.
https://mises.org/articles-interest/war-peace-and-state
Agamben, G. (2006, February 1). The state of emergency as a paradigm of government. Tablet Magazine.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/state-of-emergency-giorgio-agamben
Agamben, G. (2020, February 26). L’invenzione di un’epidemia. Quodlibet.
https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia
In English:
https://www.asc.uw.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Giorgio-Agamben-Invention-of-an-Epidemic.pdf
Russell, B. (1956). Why I am not a communist. In Portraits from memory and other essays (pp. 197–211). George Allen & Unwin.
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/philosophy/bertrand-russell-why-i-am-not-a-communist/
Dye, T. R. 2016. Who’s Running America? The Obama Reign, 8 ed. New York: Routledge. (p.194)
Gomes, J. (2025, October 28). E.U. parliamentarian raises alarm over Islamist funding for Europe’s largest mosque: French intelligence report confirms that Turkish Islamist outfit behind mosque is linked to Muslim Brotherhood. Middle East Forum.
https://www.meforum.org/e-u-parliamentarian-raises-alarm-over-islamist-funding-for-europes-largest-mosque
Further evidence of the 'kayfabe' of Trump is that it's big news that Stephen Colbert is retiring this week. Trump never actually had Colbert hurt or put off of the air. Yet many loyal 'marks' insist that Colbert really hated Trump and vice versa. But they have no actual evidence of such.
They can't explain why the 'ruthless authoritarian' Trump never had his goons come after Colbert--which is what happens in a 'reality' based empire when a ruthless dictator is upset with anti-fascist opposition. Here of course Colbert always took the side of US intelligence--and Trump seems to just be an actor that spouts empty words to give the appearance of being a 'swamp drainer'--but it's all kayfabe, and it's not even worth getting emotionally invested in the theatrics.
With regard to covid, your articles and the works of others make it clear that it was just like an onion with layer after layer of lies and deception. The 'statistics' can be found to rationalize a lot of aspects of it--but the foundation from the start: shutting down playgrounds, shutting down society, masking people (ignoring what is actually required in virus/pathogen laboratories), re-defining 'sick' since the 'covid tests' would say that robust and asymptomatic people were 'sick' with covid, pretending that an illness that hardly affects any previously healthy person (of any age) is going to wipe everyone out, this was all just so theatrically absurd that the default should be that it is all bs. And while I'm sure that the UN/WHO undoubtedly have statistics in their favor, I've seen several charts of Asian countries indicating their mortality rates were entirely normal *until vaccine rollout started*--and then mortality rose. So even the timing of 'vaccine' rollout can be utilized to generate a 'result' that justifies the objectives of the profiteers.
How's this for a reading of the reality of what is currently unfolding in America? Trump has already been clamping down on freedoms. His main beef has been about undocumented immigrants. Enter ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who have been upsetting a lot of freedom loving citizens, with their heavy handedness. Similarly, he has deployed the National Guard to LA and threatened others, such as Chicago, with similar actions. He has bypassed Congress via funds empowerment, intervened in local jurisdictions such as New York, and so on, and so on. All the while, blaming "Sleepy" Joe Biden for being the bad guy. At the same time, the forces of anti-Semitism are gaining traction. A movement that started during Biden's time, presumably, they're all working as a team. Jew hate has now infected the right as well as the left to such an extent that the youth are now more inclined to Hamas than Israel. In all likelihood, as it now stands, no future POTUS candidate would dare offer visible support for Israel. Just to add a new spice into the pot, which, in all fairness, may have nothing to do with any direct action of POTUS Trump, there has been a shooting at a Mosque. That the Imam and his facility do not have squeaky clean records when it comes to Jew hatred is by the by. What is of concern is that much more of these moments will surely see the name of "Mossad" whispered, in viral fashion, on the internet. The seeds for a civil war are being planted, which may well necessitate a state of emergency to control it. Trump is running out of time if it is to happen under his watch. Added to his other seemingly 'seat of the pants' decision making and bombastic words and actions, most importantly with regards to Iran and friends, the next few months may be very definitive in where the world, and more especially Israel and world Jewry, finds themselves in the not too distant future.