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The word “democracy” comes from the Greek, but when the system was first used, it was a selective one, with men of means being the only ones eligible to vote. It has come a long way since, with American lefty busybodies trying to give the vote even to illegal migrants who have more or less snuck into the country. Personally I have always been a monarchist, although my type of monarchs—the Romanovs, Hohenzollerns, and Habsburgs—no longer rule and have been replaced by monarchies as in Britain, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries that have no governing power.

The historic transformation from the royal to the democratic may be characterized as that of Austria to that of America, during and after World War I. Austria started it, America finished it, and as far as I’m concerned, the genie had been let out of the bottle and has been making trouble ever since. The murder of the Austrian crown prince could not be ignored, but the slaughter of the next four years reminds me of the overreaction by the Israelis who are yelling foul while murdering more than 20,000 Gazan innocents.

Woodrow Wilson is my bête noir; without his intervention the war would have ended in a stalemate around late 1916 or early 1917. A mutually accepted and face-saving compromise peace was at hand due to exhaustion by both sides, rather than the Versailles dictate that assured another world war. Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Russia would have remained monarchies, and the bloody Bolsheviks would still be whistling Dixie. Millions upon millions of Communism’s victims would have been saved, had Woodrow Wilson croaked three years before his actual demise.

All that’s in the past, needless to say, so no use crying over spilled you-know-what. Democracy has won the Cold War and everything’s hunky-dory. Or is it? Ex–British premier Boris Johnson was my editor for years and is a good man, but he was hustled out of office by undemocratic means by those people who hold power while remaining in the shadows. They go by the name “elites,” and like unseen microbes, they are everywhere. Boris has obviously not learned his lesson. He recently wrote an article praising the state of democracy in the Western world, which reminded me of a cuckold I once knew who spoke admiringly of another man who had run off with his wife. Boris insisted in his article that free speech, free press, free politics, freedom of religion, and freedom of association are all doing fine, and I suppose they are doing just that over on our side, if one discounts the fact that Western democracies can never make the truly big decisions. By that I mean democracies are incapable of taking the bull by the proverbial horns when it comes to, say, immigration, a problem that will become an existential one in the very near future.

I have yet to meet someone who is not worried about Muslim and African immigrants pouring into Europe, or South American and Caribbean ones into North America. Yet the moment someone raises their voice it’s deemed racist, no ifs or buts about it. With tens of millions of Africans coming north in the next twenty years in search of food and water and a better life, Cassandra voices will cry out, but it will be too late. Our free speech and free press and freedom of association will have failed us. And they will have done so because there is no REAL free press and REAL free speech—only a few voices such as ours ignored by our elites who call the shots.

In Western Europe, a single European superstate with its own laws, currency, economic policy, defense, and parliament—the E.U.—is not my idea of a democratic institution. All the major decisions are taken by unelected bureaucrats who live high on the hog and view voters in the manner a benevolent parent sees his children who need guidance and direction above all. When someone rears their head about the flood of illegal Muslims pouring in, and does something about it, as is the case of the great Viktor Orban in Hungary, he is ostracized by the great and the good and painted a fascist by woke papers like The New York Times and the TV media.

Better yet, take crime. Although crime in American cities is completely out of control, stop-and-search methods are deemed by media leftists as unacceptable because minorities are those they’re aimed at. Hence crime continues to rise while media leftists feel safe in their expensive houses in crime-free sections of town. And another thing: What kind of democracy is it when there are more illegal migrants entering a country—the good old US of A—than there are births? Just think about that.

So let’s get back to democracy. We Greeks began it in a very cautious manner, making sure that only educated people with a stake in the game could use it. The ancient ones in their infinite wisdom knew all about human nature. Just look at the E.U. It went from a trade agreement to a proto-state involved in defense, criminal justice, immigration, the environment, and foreign policy. Democracy passed over into the hands of unelected civil servants and not a peep was heard. The results are mass protests relating to ethnic and religious identity highlighting how divided Western countries have become. While nice Boris is praising democracy, there is an elephant in the room that all our leaders are ignoring, starting with him, and the pachyderm is called immigration.