[ " ©#£! " = " It's either Cooperation or Hash / Cash / Bash " - either Republicanism or coercion by numbers ( Democracy ) / economics ( Aristocracy ) / violence ( Monachy ) - unless someone can rhyme -ash again ? ]
This just spilled out by accident, but maybe it will prove useful for you in defining your personal positions in CBRD 2013.
You often seem to be puzzled by my saying that as a ' hard line ' republican I am against voting, yet for the rule of law ...
... but are you also alarmed by my polemicising ' against Democracy ' and ' for Republicanism ' because it is ' religious ' - ?
Are you thinking that I am out of whack, that I am wrong in stating that democracy and republicanism are not the same ?
BUT !!!! Take it with a pinch of salt, this says that Anarchy is inevitably violent - but Anarchists merely claim that the state is not necessary to the upholding of the law, that people will happily consent to good laws and therefore if ' Y Repwblic ' is both rational and reasonable and taught to people they will recognise it to be so and uphold the law because everybody wants to live peaceably together in goodwill and harmony as created by the justice of those laws ... and no coercion is necessary, since those who have erred are eager to apologise and ardent to be corrected by further education ... some hope, I am not that idealistic about human nature - the institutions of the state are necessary, but they must be held to account and their uses carefully scrutinised and controlled so as not to lead to abuses.
When I talk of Republican Democracy I am talking about that kind of discursive approach to politics which makes decisions without voting but accepts voting as a means to elect representatives, where those making laws and policies have as their prime concern the public interest - the Res Publica. This lessens the abuses caused by those who create political parties in order to be elected to pursue private interests, and other means of decision making can also be devised by selecting instead of electing representatives e.g. from those vulneable minorities who can never get representatives elected, from those specialist disciplines which have expert knowledge of an issue, from campaign groups which can not get their issues adopted onto the manifestos of conventional Democratic Republican parties.
When I talk of Democratic Republicanism I am talking about the conventional approach to politics which makes decisions by voting and uses voting as a means to elect representatives, where minorities have to support a party in the hope but not the certainty that it will fulfill its promises to them, where the sole specialist skill which is exercised is in getting elected and nothing more in the way of skill in actually governing is required of any politician. In Democratic Republicanism decisions are not properly scrutinised and any criticism is ignored because the laws are passed by whips driving their elected representatives through lobbies who have not even read through what they are voting into law. Democratic Republican political parties are coalitions created by representative bartering for a share in the power with their votes, manufacturing manifestos in order to bribe electorates to give them their votes in order to get elected into the assemblies which give this acess to opportunity to barter for a share in the power over the state. Their need for power becomes their main conviction as a Democratic Republican party but their pitch to various voters alludes only to the various political ideas that those voters may want to vote for and so they only paying lip service to the Res Publica.
Thus when I label the conceptions of the Res Publica offered to the electorate in exchange for their votes, I do so in a systematic way, the emphasis being either upon the Public Interest being decided by debating towards a consensus to be achieved by compromise with others - e.g. ' Republican Anarchist ' - or upon a victorious Private Interest to be decided upon by parties winning elections outright or forming a coalition with other elected representatives in order to force a division in which one's own side triumphs by at least one vote in order to enforce a law or policy upon the others. Such laws and policies will of course merely be overturned after the following election and the new laws and policies will in turn be replaced by those that will be overturned in the election that follows that : I call this wasteful narcissistic kind of politics that we are cursed with in the United Kingom either ' pendulum ' or ' see-saw politics.' The counterpart ideology of Democratic Republicanism to that example I might name ' Anarchist Republican ' or ' Democratic Anarchism ' but anyway I regard it as being just one of those six political ideologies of Modern Republicanism ( c1850 - 2050 ? ) which have discarded one of the vita balancing aspects of the original political philosophy of Republican Democracy. I refer to these six Democratic Republicanisms collectively as ' Voltaires Bastards,' as political ideologies devoid of meta-ideology and the are all that can be found in the text books of political students in the United Kingdom because the original political philosophy of Republican Democracy has been propogandised against for over two hundred years as ' criminal.'
Therefore the defective ' Voltaires Bastards ' are the six ideologies that have come to predominate in political thought in the English-speaking world, each advocating particular ideas of what the Res Publica consists of and seeking to impose them to the exclusion of all other ideas by seizing control of the state to promote their supporters' own private interests. These sectarian private interests are pretended to be ' The Public Interest ' - the ' Res Publica ' - at the expense of the private interests of the supporters of other ideologies which have been chosen to justify other sectarian interests, and in Democratic Republicanism anybody and everybody naturally tries to do the same because this is how Democrats conceive of politics - as a form of civil war pursued with ballots instead of bullets. The ideologies of Democracy in my diagrams are arranged in antagonistic pairs upon three axes ( Anarchism V Conservativism ) ( Socialism V Fascism ) ( Communism V Liberalism ) with Republicanism located in and around the central intersection of these axes, repudiating the faults of each. The implication of the terminology that I use is that no Republican is expected to be poised perfectly and permanently at the centre of this diagram, drawing equally upon ideas from all directions at once, but instead is expected to have personal inclinations to ideologies that they habitually draw upon in contributing to the debate as to what the Res Publica is in examining a particular issue e.g. Anarchist ideas. The distinguishing mark of Republicans is that they are interested in others and willing to adapt and adopt useful ideas from other people's ideological arguments.
After years of casually drawing these 1, 2, 3 and 4-D diagrams as ways of getting myself to think about how people construct and use ideologies, I modified the concept slightly recently to add more ' layers of the sphere of politics ' to consider how the way in which Democracy, which coerces others by the use of numbers at the ballot box, can be used as a disguise for Aristocracy, political parties receiving large amounts of money and resources from those who use these to bribe and coerce them. I can see also that behind that disguise can be Monarchy, ' the Syndicate ' associated with the military-industrial-banking-crime etc complex which coerces others using violence. It becomes immediately obvious then that ' Moral Force Republicanism ' is at the centre of the model, and ' Physical Force Republicanism ' is a species of Monarchism to be located at the surface or exterior of the model, beyond the sphere of politics which ends where war begins. If the centre of the political sphere is the enlightenment of rational reasonable discourse, the politics of Kant's ' Perpetual Peace,' then moving outwards through tints and shades of the colours of the various ideologies employed by Democracy, Aristocracy and Monarchy, to the surface of the sphere of politics, paler grey becomes darkest black and darkness prevails thereafter. The ' White Faction ' and the ' Black Faction ' of Republicanism in Wales can therefore be easily conceptualised as equal and opposite reactions to the failure of the political system of the United Kingdom, some driven by desparation into the outer darkness to prepare for war and others moving hopefully towards the inner light to prepare for peace. It has always been fairly obvious to me that the ' Black Faction ' of Republicanism in Wales was indeed spawned by the ' Black Faction ' that the political parties of the United Kingdom seek to be elected to serve, and that they can equally be regarded as the enemies of the Republic in Wales - as we should also regard any who seek to take control of any government anywhere in the world by the use of violence, economic advantage or force of numbers.
When you can elevate political philosophy this far, way above the grubby tiresome business of getting the drains unblocked, it acquires that aesthetic quality that science has when it draws light and reason out of darkness and confusion : it becomes a spiritual practice providing a vision to sustain us in the religious exercise of preaching hope to the fuddled masses ... the Republic in Wales is not merely our aspiration but the rule by which we measure injustice by.
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