This wonderful egalitarian woman, like billions of egalitarians, wants real, not fake, democracy. This means letting people with egalitarian values and aims have the real power, and preventing anti-egalitarians with the opposite aims from having the real power. Right?
There is a commonsense idea about democracy that the ruling class has worked hard to suppress, so that what was once obvious to people is now met with shock when the idea is expressed, which it seldom is expressed by anybody other than yours truly.
The question in the title of this Substack post, about Tories being allowed to vote, is one that I’m guessing you haven’t thought of before. The commonsense idea that the ruling class has suppressed is an idea that would lead you to guess that the Tories (who wanted Americans to remain subjects of the British Crown) were not allowed to vote. If the commonsense idea is suppressed in your thinking and replaced by the contrary idea—a democracy of ALL the people—then you would be inclined to think that the Tories were allowed to vote. So, what was your guess?
To tell you what this suppressed commonsense idea is I first need to put two definitions on the table:
Definition: Democracy
Democracy means that people make socially important decisions and resolve disagreements peaceably, never by reliance on violence or its threat, by agreeing to mutually acceptable compromise when there is disagreement and by using some kind of peaceful decision rule (such as majority vote) to make decisions if compromise doesn’t do the job.
Definition: a fundamental conflict
A fundamental conflict is one in which the two sides have conflicting aims and neither side will back down at all by agreeing to any compromise that doesn’t 100% agree with their aim, nor agree with any peaceful decision rule if it goes against their aim, and each side will use violence or its credible threat to try to achieve their aim if necessary so the outcome is determined only by which side can bring to bear the greatest violence or its credible threat against the other side.
The commonsense idea is this:
There cannot be democracy (peaceful resolution of differences by some decision rule such as majority vote) for a group of people among whom there is a fundamental conflict. A democracy can therefore only include people among whom there is no fundamental conflict.
Examples of fundamental conflicts in the United States
People living in the former British North American colonies should be, versus they should not be, subjects of the British Crown.
Slavery should be legal, versus it should not be legal.
Class inequality (some rich and some poor) should be legal, versus it should not be legal.
History: To be, or not to be, subjects of the British Crown
Because the conflict over whether Americans should be subjects of the British Crown was a fundamental conflict, it was only resolved by violence—the American revolution. And to the Founding Fathers it was just common sense that in the democracy they purported to be creating (it was hardly that, as I discuss here), Tories should not be allowed to vote or be considered part of that democracy.
Tories, who wanted Americans to remain subjects of the British Crown and for that reason supported King George III against George Washington’s army, were not allowed, after the American Revolution had defeated King George III, to vote in the state elections (by their legislatures) to ratify the Articles of Confederation in 1778.
Nor were Tories allowed to vote in the elections to ratify the U.S. Constitution. The Google AI search result returns the following:
“Generally, Tories (Loyalists) were not permitted to vote for or serve in the special state conventions that ratified the U.S. Constitution (1787–1788). Most states had disenfranchised, banished, or confiscated the property of those who supported Britain during the Revolutionary War, rendering them politically inactive during the ratification process.”
This was just common sense.
History: For slavery to be, or not to be, legal
Whether slavery was to be legal or not in the United States was only resolved by violence: the Civil War. This is because neither side would accept the decision being made by any peaceful decision rule such as majority vote.
When anti-slavery people in Missouri wrote their new state constitution in 1865 at the close of the Civil War, there was a substantial minority of people in the state who were vehemently pro-slavery and were even using violence to create enslavement of black people by another name (Jesse James was one of them.) This is why the pro-slavery people of Missouri wrote a new constitution that banned pro-slavery people from voting or holding government offices, as I wrote about here.
This was just common sense.
Today: For class inequality (some rich and some poor) to be, or not to be, legal
Today, there is a small minority that wants class inequality to be legal. The vast majority wants it to be illegal. Those who want it to be legal will never agree to it becoming illegal no matter what any peaceful decision rule such as majority vote says. And those who want it to be illegal only accept it for as long as they believe the other side has can bring to bear against them far greater violence or its credible threat than they (those who want to abolish class inequality) can bring to bear against the pro-class-inequality side.
The pro-class inequality side pretends to allow the other side to participate in the government, but only in a manner that can never actually result in the government declaring class inequality to be illegal.
If and when the anti-class inequality side prevails against the pro-class-inequality side and creates a democracy, they would be foolish to ignore common sense and allow the pro-class-inequality side to vote and participate in the democracy. This is obvious, right?
Democracy is a way for people who are NOT divided by a fundamental conflict to make decisions and resolve differences peaceably. It is not possible to exist for people divided by a fundamental conflict, and there is no good reason to pretend otherwise. This is why an egalitarian democracy is one in which ONLY egalitarians may participate. Why should egalitarians allow anti-egalitarians who want to re-establish class inequality have any say whatsoever in the government?
The problem is, if such a scenario were ever to occur, you wouldn’t be able to get anti egalitarians to admit that they are such with enhanced interrogation techniques. They’d cloak themselves, pretend to be regular good citizens, all while despising us for our cooperation and freedom. They’d start plotting in secret, as they already do. As they assuredly did to get us to this point.
Take a look at what people are saying, I think you already know. I will save my opinions for now, for my own page until the corporate/government managers of this fish bowl decide they don't like it.