Democracy Turns Us into Crappier People

We stopped being a 'moral people' BECAUSE of our system, not in spite of it. (DN 1.15)

Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9 | 1.10 | 1.11 | 1.12 | 1.13 | 1.14 | 1.15

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Chapter 1: WHY

1.15 — The Democracy Problem, Part 2

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Say what you will about Ayn Rand—she definitely cut to the chase:

“Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).”

Her clarity is perfect for our purposes here, so let us continue in kind…

She is either correct or incorrect. Either the rights of the individual should not be up for a vote, or they should. There is no third option.

If you say that the rights of the individual should be up for a vote—that a majority, through their votes, ought to be able to cause violations of the natural rights of others—isn’t it rather difficult to continue to call oneself a classical liberal?

After all, natural rights are at the base of most normative classical-liberal thought. The vast majority of conservatives and libertarians hold, as an article of fundamental conviction, that the rights of the individual human person pre-exist government. That they are a natural and ineluctable consequence of our very existence. That they are inalienable. If a majority can dispense with those rights simply by voting, must we not reject such a democracy?

Yet what other sort of democracy is there?

In our constitutional republic in the United States, we have a Bill of Rights that partially protects some rights. We’ve all seen how that has worked out. Better than our Anglophone cousins, certainly, but we are clearly on the same road as they are—just not quite as far yet.

But that is not even the issue here. The problem is not that the Bill of Rights is incomplete or insufficiently strong, or that it has been ignored and subverted. The problem is that even if the Bill of Rights were perfectly well respected, the system would still violate individual rights.

We have already demonstrated this throughout this chapter, and we need not belabor it too much further. Even in 1789, when all was fresh and new, the system produced nonconsensual outcomes for the individual human person.

An indirect-democracy—even one of the constitutional republican variety—will forcibly impose things to which the individual did not consent. Checks and balances, constitutions, and bills of rights to the contrary notwithstanding, the system does give majorities the power to take away rights.

And the system itself is being imposed upon people who never consented to it—who never signed a contract or even raised a hand and said, Yeah, I agree to this. As we have previously shown, if the individual is denied consent, he has been placed in the same category as a slave.

Put it together and what have you got? Surely not something that any classical liberal can accept.

This is the moment when it will occur to some to ask, Okay fine, but what is the alternative? That is a question we must indeed answer, and we will. But not right now.

Right now, you must address the issues above. Either you accept that majorities can vote away the rights of their fellow humans, or you do not. Either you accept systems that allow this, or you do not. Either you accept that the American constitutional republic is one of the systems that allows this—and always was—or you continue to live in a reality-denying delusion. The choice is yours.

I do recognize, of course, that these sorts of abstract moral principles are just not as convincing for some, no matter how clear and obvious they are. Some people simply prefer consequentialist justifications. In other words, some of you will want to know why democracies produce worse results.

Let us take some time, then, to focus on consequentialist reasons why democracy is bad and must ultimately be rejected if we are to evolve to the next level of human freedom and flourishing. To that end, we will turn to the man who has offered the most thorough and devastating critique—Hans-Hermann Hoppe and his book Democracy: The God That Failed.

For today’s lesson, we will use Hoppe’s analysis as launching point for a discussion of the ways in which democracy causes a decline in the character of the people who live under it.

The Welfare State

One of the inevitable realities in any democracy is that it will trend toward ever-greater amounts of control. Power follows its own logic, and as such, limited government never stays limited. Government will always assume greater power and take ownership of ever-more areas of human life.

Couple that with Frederic Bastiat’s observation that “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else,” and we get a toxic brew. Once people become aware that they can vote themselves goodies—that they can take from those who make—an ever-increasing number will do so. And government, always eager to take control over more money, more activity, and more areas of life, is all too happy to oblige.

The result is a degraded people…

Democracy causes dependence. Instead of assuming control over their own lives, exercising personal agency, and taking responsibility for their own survival, an ever-growing number in a democracy find it easier to outsource this role to government.

Democracy causes moral decay. Dependence leads to a decline in work ethic. Why work when others can be made to do it for you?

Democracy creates perverse incentives. Eventually, some of those others realize they’re being played for suckers. Why work for $20/hr and have some of it taken to pay for others when you can do nothing and get $17/hr worth of welfare?

Democracy causes moral hazard. If people can outsource the consequences of their choices to someone else, they can and will behave in riskier and less prudent ways. Thus, the makers who are forced to pay for the takers are paying for increasingly destructive and costly behavior.

Democracy causes generational degradation. Under government welfare, the feeling of gratitude for a direct act of charity is replaced by a sense of entitlement. Dependence becomes generational. Stripped of the desire and opportunity to earn one’s own success, the dependent are deprived of dignity. Bitterness toward themselves eventually metastasizes into bitterness towards those who are supplying the welfare money. They’re not paying “their fair share.” Democracy makes people bitter, entitled, and corrupted.

Democracy causes inhumanity. No normal, decent person would ever walk up to another, stick a gun to his ribs and demand money. But if you give people the cover of being part of a voting majority—and having a third party point the gun—all of a sudden they feel perfectly comfortable robbing others. They even virtue signal about it. Democracy turns people into nasty little virtue-signaling thieves.

Democracy creates people who have no understanding of human rights. They do not respect the property of others. They do not respect the rights of others. Democracy gives cover for the worst of human impulses.

And the mystique of democracy—that it is some sort of perfect, magical, unquestionable system—allows people to think that they are actually GOOD for doing, being, and participating in all of this badness.

All of this also applies to education, healthcare, and every other way that democracy forces some to become the disposable means to others’ ends.

High Time-Preferences (short-term thinking)

The first portion of Hoppe’s Democracy… covers the subject of time preferences. When I read it, I wondered at first why he was going into such minute detail about this one economic concept.

Soon it became clear: it is not just an economic concept.

Whether you have high time-preferences (present-oriented behavior) or low time-preferences (future-oriented behavior) says a ton about you. It predicts with freakish accuracy things like how successful you will be, how long you will live, and more.

There is no time to cover this subject in the detail it deserves, so I will simply suggest reading all of the book. Here, however, are a few quick notes.

We are all used to saying that democracy was an improvement over monarchy (and in some ways, it was). Hoppe points out, however, that a king has lower time preferences than democratically elected officials, and that this carries advantages for his subjects.

A king cares about the “capital stock” of his country. He wants to pass it on to his progeny, and as such, he must have a measure of future orientation. Democratically elected officials, by contrast, have no such interest. Because they are only “caretakers,” their interest is to get as much as they can while they are in office.

They do not have to care about the debt they rack up. That’s someone else’s problem, far down the road. They do not need to care about whether the program they are proposing will actually work. They just need to know whether it will buy votes.

If you do not understand what that means, just wait another decade or two and watch as Social Security, the Great Society, and 230 trillion in unfunded liabilities destroys the United States economy, and with it the whole country. This is not an if; it’s just a when. We got Social Security 100 years ago. None of those people needed to give a crap what would eventually happen. As their beloved John Maynard Keynes said, “In the long run, we’re all dead.”

The high time-preferences of democratically elected officials spill out into the general public, promoting a culture of instant gratification. People become more focused on immediate rewards instead of long-term planning and investment. Easy credit and bailouts lead to malinvestment. People increase consumption, accumulate more debt, and save less. Hey, why not? The politicians are all doing it.

Cultural Decline

Contrary to the hype, the majority is not always correct. The masses are not always sublimely numinous in their wisdom.

In fact, the majority inevitably ends up reflecting its own lowest common denominator, and that is not something to which we should aspire. Stunning musicians toil away in obscurity while Cardi B gets rich. Some of the most amazing cultural products are hidden in cobwebbed corners, while the bright lights shine down upon utter trash.

The majoritarianism of democracy elevates the lowest common denominator to a cultural fetish, and wields it as a political weapon.

Democracy's egalitarian obsession also causes—and ultimately enforces—uniformity and cultural homogenization. Unique cultural distinctions are washed away into a faded gray, creating a more homogenized society, sapped of cultural richness and the traditions that once fostered individual character.

Mediocrity

The phrase “all men are created equal” refers to ontological equality: we all have equal claim to our natural rights. In religious parlance, we are “equal in the sight of God.” Rightly said.

That does not mean that everyone is equal in ability, determination, talent, natural endowments, or even luck, however. Yet democracy carries with it a certain leveling tendency—a measure of tall poppy syndrome, as they call it Down Under.

Hey, this is a democracy—we’re all equal here. Don’t you go thinking you’re better than the rest of us.

Democracy taxes the most successful among us. It enervates them through regulation. Some are thus disincentivized to put in the work to succeed. The culture both reveres and reviles them, producing a schizophrenic combination of hero-worship and mediocrity.

Instead of exclusively looking up to them as role models and inspiration, we feel a measure of justification in resenting them. In claiming that they’re not paying “their fair share”—as if the technologies and cures and services they have provided (not to mention the odd billion in taxes they already pay) are not enough.

The hereditary aspect of authority was always a fiction, and something we needed to move past. But at least aristocrats educated their children to be the best they could be: to sit up straight, learn multiple languages, become accomplished and well-read, satisfy their noblesse oblige, and in all ways reflect their “station.” Democracy threw this baby out with the hereditary bathwater.

Democracy also attracts mediocre people into politics. Power attracts psychopaths, but even setting that aside, democracy also just incentivizes candidates to promise the most to voters, regardless of the long-term consequences.

The result is politicians who are worse than a used car salesman who puts heavier oil into the engine to hide its knocks, knowing you’ll be miles down the road before you discover what he’s done. And then, because you’re totally infected with the democracy mystique, you blame him, but never the system that empowered him in the first place.

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Democracy produces morally and spiritually degraded people.

Democracy produces a scrum of squabbling, entitled children, scrambling to gain enough political power to impose their will on their follow man. To force their fellow man to become the means to their ends. To turn their fellow man into a resource to exploit.

Democracy breeds social conflict and envy.

Democracy atomizes communities.

Democracy is a force of entropy and decay.

Do not kid yourself into believing that there is some sort of fix for this within democracy—by voting harder or by doubling down on the delusion that there is some pure version of the American system to which we can return. There isn’t. All of this is, and always was, a one-way trip.

Conservatives love to cite John Adams’ statement that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The implication is that if only we can become moral again, the system will work.

The said truth, however, is that the system is what degraded our morality in the first place.

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PS: Democracy is not the only force that has degraded the character of the people that live under it. There are others.