A lot of people are complaining about how poorly governed we are these days, but even the self-identifying “conservatives” I speak to are taken aback when I suggest that the problem might not be the administration currently in power (as destructive as it may be), but the natural evolution of democracy itself. We are so conditioned to think of Democracy as an end in itself that we lose sight of its many essential liabilities, foremost of which is the necessary fact that, because democracy is inherently a ‘leveling’ ideology that tends toward the lowest common denominator, the quality of democratic rule is determined by the lowest qualities of the governed, not the highest.
It is a reflex of the Western mind to associate democracy with liberty, but they are different things, and if you are more concerned with maximizing the quality, liberty, and happiness of social and individual life than with which particular system of political administration happens to provide you with your government, it is important to keep this in mind. To put it another way, how well you are governed should matter more than who is running the government, or how they are selected.
In response, most Westerners would probably — again, almost completely reflexively — insist that, even so, democracy is the best way to ensure that we are well-governed. But is this true? It’a an empirical question. It may be that democracy delivers good government, but only for a time, then succumbs to congenital pathologies. It may be that how long or how well it works depends very sensitively upon the character and culture of the people who try to implement it. And so on.
If we wish to diagnose the pathology of modern Western civilization, then whether we like it or not, we must critically examine our commitment to democracy itself. This realization is at the heart of the “neoreactionary” intellectual movement, and one of the most penetrating examinations of this question so far has been the book Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Time, written in 1952 by the Austrian political theorist Erik von Kuhnelt-Leddihn.
In that book, K-L had this to say about the orthogonality of democracy and liberty:
Fifty-one per cent of a nation can establish a totalitarian régime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic; while an old-fashioned dictator might reserve to himself only a very few prerogatives, scrupulously refraining from interfering in the private sphere of the citizens. There is little doubt that the American Congress or the French Chambers have a power over their nations which would rouse the envy of a Louis XIV or a George III, were they alive today. Not only prohibition, but also the income tax declaration, selective service, obligatory schooling, the finger-printing of blameless citizens, premarital blood tests””none of these totalitarian measures would even the royal absolutism of the seventeenth century have dared to introduce.
Besides conflating democracy and liberty, the confusion in the modern liberal mind is compounded by an emphasis on equality as a social goal of paramount importance; indeed, many go so far as to identify equality with justice, when of course these are also completely different things, and are often mutually antagonistic, in that one must come at the expense of the other.
But it is impossible simultaneously to maximize liberty, equality, and justice under any political system. K-L writes:
“Nature’ (i.e., the absence of human intervention) is anything but egalitarian; if we want to establish a complete plain we have to blast the mountains away and fill the valleys; equality thus presupposes the continuous intervention of force which, as a principle, is opposed to freedom. Liberty and equality are in essence contradictory.
Those who see liberty as a higher goal than equality (this view being the original referent of the word “liberal”) may, then, be inclined to shop around:
The fact remains that the true liberal is not pledged to any specific constitution, but would subordinate his choice to the desire to see himself and his fellow-citizens enjoying a maximum of liberty. If he thinks that a monarchy would grant greater liberty than a republic, he would choose the former; under certain circumstances he might even prefer the actual restrictions of a military dictatorship to the potential evolutions of a democracy.
Democracy, as time goes by, will always tend to favor equality over liberty and justice. Kuhnelt-Leddihn quotes William Lecky:
A tendency to democracy does not mean a tendency to parliamentary government, or even a tendency towards greater liberty. On the contrary, strong arguments may be adduced, both from history and from the nature of things, to show that democracy may often prove the direct opposite of liberty. In ancient Rome the old aristocratic republic was gradually transformed into a democracy, and it then passed speedily into an imperial despotism. In France a corresponding change has more than once taken place. A despotism resting on a plebiscite is quite as natural a form of democracy as a republic, and some of the strongest democratic tendencies are distinctly adverse to liberty. Equality is the idol of democracy, but, with the infinitely various capacities and energies of man, this can only be attained by a constant, systematic, stringent repression of their natural development…
– William E. H. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, 1896
K-L continues:
Yet since democracy cannot relinquish its egalitarian heritage, the jealousy, envy and insecurity of the voting masses tend to give new impetus to the egalitarian mania as well as to ever increasing demands for “social security’ and other forms of “economic democracy.’ These cravings and desires result in specific measures, and thus we see finally a bureaucratic totalitarianism restricting personal liberties.
When K-L wrote this, “social security” was at the cutting edge of this process. Needless to say, things have moved along briskly in the ensuing sixty-two years.
Quoting Lecky again:
. . . in our own day, no fact is more incontestable and conspicuous than the love of democracy for authoritative regulation. . . . The expansion of the authority and the multiplication of the functions of the State in other fields, and especially in the field of social regulation, is an equally apparent accompaniment of modern democracy. This increase of state power means a multiplication of restrictions imposed upon the various forms of human action. It means an increase of bureaucracy, of the number and power of state officials.
K-L also quotes Jacob Burkhardt (bolding by me):
…we have besides as the common expression, in part of the ideas of the French Revolution and in part of the demands of modern reform movements, what is called democracy, that is, an ideology merged from a thousand different sources and highly differentiated according to the various layers of her supporters, yet in one respect invariable; that for it the power of the state over the individual can never be sufficient. As a result the boundary lines between state and society are obliterated, and the state is expected to carry out all tasks which society might possibly neglect. At the same time everything will be kept in a state of mobility and indecision.
Jacob Burkhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Bertachtungen, .n.d.
Another quote, this time from Burkhardt’s friend, the anthropologist J. J. Bachofen, who doesn’t mince words:
Since the victory of Lucerne the dogma of popular sovereignty and the omnipotence of democracy has become the practical basis of our public institutions. I don’t doubt that this ideology is going to proceed to all, even its most extreme conclusions, if the conditions of Europe permit it and if great catastrophes do not lead the people back to the true foundations of a sound political life. Yet complete democracy is the end of everything good. Republics have the most to fear from it. I tremble at the thought of its expansion, not on account of property, but because democracy throws us back into barbarism . . . for this is the curse of democracy, that it carries its devastations into all domains of life, affects church, home and family most severely, and distorts the true point of view on all questions, even the smallest ones. Because I love freedom, I hate democracy.
The modern “liberal” is deeply committed to the chimerical idea that a national ideology can emphasize both liberty and equality without inconsistency or inner conflict, and to the belief that democracy, somehow, is uniquely capable of squaring this circle. So deeply ingrained are these opinions that to question them, particularly the latter, is at the very least an “extreme” position, and borders on a kind of heresy. (If you don’t believe this, try airing these questions next time you’re at a dinner party.)
To make such a viewpoint possible requires that bien-pensant Americans, even many of the highly intelligent and educated ones I’ve tiptoed into these topics with, tend to have some profoundly mistaken notions about the American Founding. In general these errors tend to ascribe to the vision of the Founders an emphasis on equality, and an admiration for democracy, that simply weren’t there; indeed, as I wrote elsewhere not long ago, these things were the repository of the Founders’ darkest fears.
For example, in conversation with a well-educated friend the other day — a man of exceptional intelligence, with a doctorate from a leading Ivy League university — he insisted to me that the overarching principle of the American Founding was a rejection of aristocracy, and the placing, by the adoption of democracy, of the reins of power into the hands of the ordinary citizen.
Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth. I reminded him first that the word “democracy” appears nowhere in either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, then reviewed for him how power is conferred to the three branches of the Federal government. The Executive is appointed not by direct election, but by the Electoral College. The Judiciary is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. This leaves only Congress. The House was set aside by the Framers as the only seat of power directly exposed to the whim of the masses, and they set the term of office in the House to a brief two years to reflect the turbulence and caprice of popular passion; the Senate, however was designed to be a place for cooler and wiser heads, and the six-year term given to Senators was intended specifically to insulate them from the mercurial mood of the masses. To set the Senate even further apart from the demos, the Constitution stipulated that Senators would not be elected by popular vote, but appointed by the legislatures of the several States. (This was true until the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913; my friend was astonished to learn that it had ever been the case, much less that such an arrangement could have lasted into the 20th century. This is how much an Ivy League Ph.D. knows about these things. Now sit down, pour yourself a stiff drink, and imagine the erudition of the average voter.)
So: of the three branches of government, only one-half of one of them was ever meant to be under the direct control of the people governed.
As for the Founders’ egalitarianism, Kuhnelt-Leddihn gives us Jefferson, who in 1814 wrote to John Adams:
The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts and government of society. And indeed, it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed men for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?
If the Founders rejected aristocracy in any important sense, it was the notion of hereditary aristocracy as a structural component of government. It was most certainly not a denial, or a rejection, of the natural range and variation of qualities and abilities that is so abundantly evident in our species; indeed they knew from the start that the only hope for the new Republic was for men of the highest qualities to put aside their personal interests (because that’s what they had to do, back then) to serve in public office — and for the the American culture as a whole, and the people themselves, to aspire always to the higher virtues.
Let’s face it: it was a long shot, and they knew it. We should be glad it worked out as well as it did, and for so long. The question is: what are we to do now?
