Still doubting that modern democracy is a travesty?

Scrofulous youngsters are out in force, demanding a re-run of the referendum. Most of them are students or recent graduates, meaning they appear as ‘educated’ in the demographic rubric.

So they are, but not in the sense in which the word used to be understood. They’ve been educated to believe that they’re entitled to belong to, or at least to be governed by, the political elite that has invalidated politics.

To be sure, elaborate games are played to determine which ideological twin rises to the top. But the system is geared to throw up nothing but twins, all mentally and morally retarded, all adept at tricking the people into believing they actually have a say.

Demos has been taken out of democracy, and the term is still bandied about for subterfuge only. Yet suddenly the silent majority was granted the chance to speak out – but only because the governing spivs were sure they’d win. The ‘educated’ elite wanted to go on lapping up the gravy falling off the EU train, while professing an undying devotion to democracy.

However, the demos refused to be tricked; it saw through the propaganda and the scaremongering. Predictably, all hell broke loose.

The scrofulous youngsters, expertly prodded by scum like Tony ‘Anthony’ Blair et al, set out to vindicate the grim vision of The Lord of the Flies. There are no rules, except the rule by the savage infants of all ages, the ‘educated’ elite.

Abuse is being heaped on the majority. They’re all stupid, bigoted, racist and [insert your own pejorative term – anything will work]. They’re too dumb to realise that democracy is but a game, a few perfunctory contortions the elite goes through before getting its way.

It’s as if someone had replaced Monopoly money with real cash – nothing like that to kill a good game. Democracy has spoken and the ‘educated’ wish it had kept its mouth shut.

Now I’m opposed to modern unchecked democracy in general and direct democracy in particular: it’s sheer folly to rely on this method in the devilishly complex task of governing a great country.

Edmund Burke argued that representatives are elected to act according to the people’s interests, not wishes. And, to make sure representatives act in the people’s interests rather than their own, elected political power needs to be balanced by the apolitical hereditary kind.

Burke would be aghast to see an issue of vital constitutional import being settled by plebiscite. But he’d be even more horrified if he realised that his cherished balance has been destroyed. One end of the seesaw has violently shot up, throwing skywards intellectual and moral retards who despise not only people’s wishes but also their interests.

The old Whig would think it over and then grudgingly admit that any method of bypassing the dictatorship of the retards is preferable to letting them run unopposed. He’d also be curious to know what the word ‘educated’ means nowadays, so different it is from his own understanding.

Back in Burke’s day any secondary school provided an infinitely better education than even today’s Oxbridge, never mind all those mock-university polytechnics. And a university degree was invariably synonymous with education.

Today it’s more nearly antonymous to it. In the humanities, even the sheer corpus of data conferred by modern universities is minuscule compared to the past. But real education is so much more than gathering information. It’s what happens as a result, a shift towards moral and intellectual understanding, enlightenment in the true, lower-case sense of the word, rather than bogus capitalised one.

If that shift occurs, any gaps in erudition can be filled by self-education. If the shift doesn’t occur, no amount of information will help.

It’s safe to say that today’s universities don’t produce any such shift, quite the opposite. It’s as if their real purpose is to keep the young infantilised for ever.

Hence no truly educated people want a re-run of the referendum. Only two types do: fools and knaves. Leaving knavery apart, just look at what the re-runners are saying, which is neither grown-up nor clever.

“The Leave campaign won by lying”. As any educated person would know, that campaign lived or died by the claim that Britain would regain her sovereignty by leaving the EU. Only an ignoramus would think that was a lie.

“The referendum was advisory, and Parliament can overturn the result”. If that statement had been made before the referendum, not after, it would ring plausible. As it is, it’s dishonest and ignorant.

“The young were disfranchised.” That would be a good idea: today’s young aren’t equipped to vote. But alas that didn’t happen; the young had the same vote as everyone else. They chose not to use it: less than a third of them voted, versus 85 per cent of the over-55s. Tough. Now they should shut up and listen to their elders – rather than doing a creditable impersonation of Mao’s Red Guards.

That’s modernity for you. Inaugurated in the name of reason, it has destroyed reason. Touting humanism, it has debauched human dignity. And, devoted to democracy, it has reduced it to an obscene spectacle in the theatre of shadows.