On the Dangers of Democracy
Article by Kevin D. Williamson in “The National Review”
The rising authoritarianism of our
time is not an aberration.
‘Living in a democracy is no longer
protection from authoritarianism,” Joshua Keating argues in Slate. One
quibble: Living in a democracy never offered protection from authoritarianism —
democracy has as often been the handmaiden of authoritarianism.
For more than a century, we have
used “democracy” as a shorthand for good and decent government, and also to
indicate a distinctly progressive American view of good government. The
founding father of American progressivism, Woodrow Wilson, demanded a war,
because, as he said, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” When the
American Left speaks about its desire to exercise power over businesses or
private life, it says that it wishes to “democratize” this or that enterprise.
Bernie Sanders calls his proposal to plunder his political enemies his plan for
“Corporate Accountability and Democracy.” The more clever kind of Marxist
speaks about “economic democracy.” Yet in spite of all this, the word
“democracy” retains its positive connotations.
This has not always been the case.
The libertarian writer James Bovard famously worried about vulgar
majoritarianism, the kind of democracy that amounts to “two wolves and a sheep
voting on what to have for dinner.” (The quip often is misattributed to Ben
Franklin, among others.) The American founders by and large feared and despised
democracy, which they took from their experience to be a dreary antechamber to
anarchy. Democracy in their view was only dominatio plebis, a mutant
kind of tyranny but tyranny nonetheless — not a brake on authoritarianism but
authoritarianism itself. This anti-democratic spirit animated the thinking of
both of the Presidents Adams, which was philosophically sound but politically
disastrous: Each refused to flatter the mob, and they became the first and
second presidents to fail to achieve reelection.
American progressives have had a
complicated relationship with the demos. Progressives have
simultaneously sought to make American government more democratic by
undermining anti-democratic institutions such as the Senate (which they
deformed with direct elections) and by displacing federalist institutions with
nationalist ones; at the same time, they historically have sought to limit and
diminish the role of legislatures, supplanting them with an administrative
state under the guidance of experts (and “experts”) guided by what American
academic pretense has christened “political science.” (One of the early
presidents of the American Political Science Association was none other than
Woodrow Wilson of Princeton.) Progressives who argue for a more parliamentary
form of government, longer presidential terms, and longer congressional terms
and the like operate within the same contradiction, desiring a government that
is both more authentically an expression of majority preferences but also one
that is relatively unconstrained by the fickleness of majorities, who are apt
to change their minds between one November and the next. That the temporary
character of majority preferences could call into question the authenticity and
accuracy of any given election as an expression of the popular will is one of
those political dilemmas that must be studiously ignored. This is understood by
progressives to be a technical challenge for the political scientists rather
than a disability.
And if, to take a historical
example, the 2.3 million white citizens of Alabama in 1960 wish to oppress the
980,000 black citizens of Alabama, this kind of workaday democracy in action
must be understood as a violation of a rarefied higher kind of spiritual
democracy rather than the ordinary, predictable, horrifying behavior of human
beings operating under a politics of might-makes-right in quantitative form: 50
percent +1 = vox populi, vox Dei.
The Democratic party is, for reasons
that are obvious enough even from its name, committed to the rhetoric of
democracy-as-decency. Among other things, that necessitates that Donald Trump
and his presidency be understood as democratically illegitimate, the
work of Russian hackers or secret streams of corporate “dark money” or the last
gasp of the wicked old Electoral College. Trump stands accused of attempting to
weaponize government policy to disadvantage his political enemies by people
whose entire party platform is dedicated to weaponizing government policy to
disadvantage their political enemies: economically through taxes and
regulations that are designed with political outcomes in mind, politically
through proposals to muzzle independent political voices by prohibiting
financial support for them, etc. American presidential politics is primarily a
quasi-religious exercise in Anno Domini 2020, so set Trump aside for the
moment. There is very little doubt that figures often lumped together with
Trump as exemplars of the new illiberalism are the result of genuine and robust
democratic practices: Narendra Modi is one, with his Bharatiya Janata party
winning 303 seats in the 2019 election against 91 for the United Progressive
Alliance and 52 for Congress and a combined total of 98 for everybody else.
Brexit was the result of a referendum, the most basic of democratic protocols.
The election that brought Viktor Orbán to power in 2010 was a thoroughly
democratic affair, and it was not close. None of that represents a perversion
of democracy — it illustrates that democracy is in itself insufficient.
Which brings us back to Slate
and Joshua Keating. “This isn’t quite what we thought the age of Trumpian
authoritarianism would look like,” he writes. “We are accustomed to thinking of
authoritarianism vs. democracy as a team sport: the Axis against the Allies,
the Soviets against the West.” (Of course the Allies were far from uniformly
democratic, and the anti-Soviet bulwark in the West included such leaders as
Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet. But never mind that for now.) Much of
the authoritarianism of the current scene is precisely what many conservatives
from the 18th century onward thought authoritarianism would look like:
factional strife and popular passions; politics with a quasi-religious
character focused on a sacramental strongman; contempt for tradition,
institutions, morality, civil society, and the rule of law; the cult of
might-makes-right and the cult of self-justifying power (“winning!”) as an end
in itself, etc. We have democracy, vats and oodles of it.
What we are missing is . . .
everything else.
Before the poetical Thomas Jefferson
put his quill in it, the language of the Lockean trinity was clear enough:
life, liberty, and property. The right of property is of course always
and everywhere a necessary but not sufficient condition for the flourishing of
genuine liberty, which is a different thing from genuine democracy. Democracy
despises property when it does not envy it and envies it when it does not
despise it, and hence Senator Bernie Sanders et al. extol democracy in
their war on property, which is a war on liberty, its sometime
synonym. Property creates and sustains independent centers of action and makes
possible the emergence of men and women of genuinely independent mind and
action who are not easily coerced into the obligatory conforming heterodoxies
that go along with salaried employment and dependence upon some corporation or
another in the private or public sector. That was true of rich men such as
George Washington and of poor men such as Mohandas Gandhi. Property provides
the wall protecting the circle of private life, the independent sphere of life
from which the state and its agents may be criticized and opposed.
The American constitutional order
assumes property. It accommodates democracy as a procedural convenience and as
a contribution to the “balanced” form of government described by John Adams,
one in which popular enthusiasms are taken into account but constrained by the
anti-democratic features of the government. Those include the Senate and the
presidency, which in theory were to function (but do not) as a kind of
republican aristocracy and monarchy braking the engine of democracy, as well as
by belt-and-suspenders constitutional restraints on the scope and ambitions of
the national government, those being a doctrine of “enumerated powers” that
tells the national government what it may do and an explicit Bill of Rights
telling it what it may not do. On top of that are the elements of civil
society, including a press and churches that are constitutionally protected
from political domination, and a population that is difficult to dominate
because it cannot be silenced, dispossessed, or disarmed so long as the Bill of
Rights stands. Those who fear rising authoritarianism in the United States —
and they are right to fear it — may be fixated on Trump and his servile party
but must also turn their attention to the other side of the aisle. It is the
Democratic party, not the Republican party, that has attempted to gut the Bill
of Rights, not only the Second Amendment but the First Amendment as well, which
Senate Democrats voted to effectively repeal under Harry Reid’s leadership. It
is progressives who promise to “democratize the workplace” and use employment
as a weapon of political coercion, as they have at firms ranging from Google to
various entertainment and news-media properties. And their antipathy toward
property is remorseless, not only among confessing socialists such as Senator
Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but also among more
moderate-seeming figures such as Elizabeth Warren, who proposes to nationalize
American corporations and dictate to them the composition of their boards and
their terms of corporate governance, among other intrusions.
Increasingly, Left and Right
converge in the worst of their vicious democratic passions, holding that
Americans may trade only at the sufferance of the state, speak only at the
sufferance of the state, hold their property only at the sufferance of the
state, etc. Managing the relationship between democracy, the rule of law,
liberty, and property was, until not long ago, at the very center of one of the
two major American political tendencies. But after the liberals abandoned
liberalism, the conservatives began to abandon conservatism, with the
destructive consequences that are everywhere to be seen in our politics, not
the least of which is a U.S. government that is increasingly authoritarian in
its assumptions but, perversely, unable to get anything done, swollen with
power and ambition but bereft of skill and competency. Historical experience
suggests that states become more vicious and intrusive as they become less
effective — and less liberal as they become more democratic in the true sense
of that word.
The rising authoritarianism of our
time is not an aberration but the ordinary natural fulfillment of mass
democracy when it has overflowed its constitutional restraints. A good
government must ask the People what they want from time to time, but a decent
one also must tell them “No” from time to time.
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