In Part 1, I introduced the topic and offered four important caveats that lay further groundwork for the discussion. I then concluded with the rather grim, but hard-to-dispute, recognition that “democracy” failed to prevent our recent (and very rapid) slouch into dystopia. In spite of the fact that “the people” supposedly rule in countries across the globe, it seems clear that we are being ruled (and, to an increasing degree, attacked) by a small oligarchy, fueled by a global leftist ideology.
It is undeniable that government of the people, by the people, for the people failed to stop this. The next question, then, is why.
I see three possibilities:
Democracy could have stopped it, but somehow, owing to a particular set of bad actors or unfortunate events, failed to do so in this circumstance.
Democracy is generally powerless to stop these things, which will happen eventually.
Democracy ultimately causes these things, or creates the circumstances that allow these things to occur, because of some inherent flaw in democracy itself.
As I mentioned in Part 1, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in his Democracy: The God That Failed, makes a resounding case for number three. While one can easily come away from that book feeling as though the case has been made thoroughly enough, I feel compelled to engage in further inquiry. If we’re going to make the claim that the system we’ve believed in, even cherished, for so long is inherently flawed, it’s important to be sure.
Possibility #1
Our first possibility above is obviously the most hopeful and charitable reading. Here, we would say that none of this is democracy’s fault—that as soon as we get rid of the bad actors, democracy can go back to doing it right. Even if we set aside the obvious fact, discussed yesterday, that all of these bad events have happened in, and been perpetrated by, democracies, that would still leave us with the all-important question of how we get rid of the bad actors. Democracy has basically one answer: voting. There are other mechanisms, of course: courts, for example, might find that there has been wrongdoing and then order police to remove and incarcerate the wrongdoers. Yet this too ultimately depends on voting: politicians appoint judges (or they themselves are elected), and elected officials oversee law enforcement (or they themselves are elected, as is the case with sheriffs).
(As an aside…note that every government official cannot be elected: some must be appointed, who then hire others. This leaves a vast administrative state of unelected bureaucrats and operatives entirely removed from the scrutiny of voters, and connected to them by a thread so tenuous as to be essentially nonexistent. We voted for the person who appointed the person who hired the manager who hired the bureaucrat who vexes us. Democracy in action! Worse still…only some of us voted for the old lady who swallowed the cat who swallowed the bird who swallowed the spider to catch the fly. The rest of us didn’t. Yet we all have to live by her unelected and barely accountable edicts. Color me unimpressed.)
Of course, once we reach the heights of oligarchic tyrants, no local sheriff or police department will be called upon to do anything. In the modern era, stopping tyranny through official governmental organs has generally been the job of the highest law enforcement agency or the military. In the case of the United States, the highest law enforcement agency is the FBI, under the control of the Department of Justice—a government bureau now so thoroughly politicized that the word “justice” in its title is rapidly becoming pointless.
Unfortunately, all it takes is one elected official who prefers power over all other concerns, and the principles and spirit of democracy can be easily circumvented and overborne. Such was the case with President Obama, who, during his first two terms, systematically removed normal humans from Justice, the Pentagon, and the intelligence establishments and replaced them with leftist operatives. Whistleblowers sounded the alarm about this while it was happening, but it went underreported and few took any notice. I just happened to learn about it and it stuck with me, because it sounded a lot like a slow-motion coup taking place, entirely within the legal bounds of our democratic system. And now, as we reap the bitter harvest of those seeds, it seems the concern was warranted.
Even without such a legal ‘coup,’ however, the nature of the political process serves as an obstacle to justice. This is a subject we discussed last week in Can’t He Be Impeached for This?, in which we explore some of the reasons why the partisan nature of democracy ends up making it very difficult to deal with wrongdoing at the highest levels. The truth of the well-worn expression, “You can vote your way into tyranny, but you’ll have to shoot your way out” is certainly supported by the historical record. Could it also be that the nature of democracy itself makes it true?
Our first possibility, then, charitable though it may be, leaves us disappointed. Even if we say our decline into this ever-growing oligarchic dystopia was not inevitable, do we really think that voting, and whatever other mechanisms are afforded to us by our democratic system, are going to pull us out? Or is it possible to reach a point of corruption from which we cannot extract ourselves through normal democratic means?
Possibility #2
Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. […] Where a majority are united by a common sentiment, and have an opportunity, the rights of the minor party become insecure. (James Madison, 1787)
It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure. […] If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy. (Alexander Hamilton)
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide. (John Adams, 1814)
A simple democracy is the devil’s own government. (Benjamin Rush)
In the quotes above, the Founders are referring to a specific form of democracy, which we might call pure or direct democracy, in which matters are decided directly by a simple majority vote. With their knowledge of history, and especially of classical antiquity, they knew that this form of democracy tended not to last, and to give way to oligarchy. It is also easy enough to see the basic dangers of a simple majority vote: in such a democracy, if 51% of the people decide to seize Jim’s land to build a sprinkler park, or that all redheads should be forced to work in the sex trade, what is to stop them? Vox populi—the majority has spoken.
The Founders believed that the constitutional republic they created—with its ingenious balances and limiting mechanisms—would prevent governance from devolving into oligarchy or a “tyranny of the majority.”And so it did…for a time. But could it be that those mechanisms simply delay, but cannot ultimately prevent, the inevitable?
Again, we must look at things as they are, not as we wish they were. A world of democracies has descended into an increasingly undemocratic dystopia. But even before that process began to accelerate so drastically in the last three years, our path seemed to be headed one way: slowly, inexorably downward.
In order for it NOT to be the case that democracy’s decline is inevitable, it would have to demonstrate a cyclical pattern—getting better sometimes and worse other times, but achieving some sort of stable equilibrium around an average. That is not what we see.
Rather, in all the metrics that matter, we see a steady decline. Sure, there are cycles, but these are like driving down out of the mountains—you might go up a little bit here and there, but your overall direction is down.
A government that was once limited has continually grown. Nothing has arrested that process.
States—the very states that created the union in the first place—have increasingly become vassal administrative units of the central government. Nothing has come along to arrest that process.
The U.S. debt is rapidly approaching half of the yearly economic output of the entire planet. It has been reduced, by a marginal amount, a couple of times in U.S. history but the long-term trajectory is ever-upward (to inevitable default, at this point).
Classical-liberal philosophers warned for generations that once voters discover that they can vote to have things taken from others and given to them, they will do so, to the inevitable demise of the system. At first, voters, sharing the ideals of the Founders, restrained themselves. But such resolve eventually gave way, and exactly what was predicted has now happened. Entitlements and welfare are projected to swallow the entirely of yearly U.S. GDP by the middle of the century…and yet you’re not even allowed to talk about the most modest reforms. There has been no stable equilibrium here. The path is ever-downward.
I could go on with examples all day. Indeed, the aforementioned Hoppe adds a variety of others—including inevitable declines in intelligence, culture, excellence, the quality of people running for office, and others you might not think about right away, like a dangerous shortening of human time preferences. Hoppe makes the case that these are not unfortunate trends that might or might not occur. Rather, they are actually caused by democracy itself.
Given the general unidirectional decline of democracies around the world, without any balancing cyclical pattern, we can at least say for sure that democracy (even the Founders’ constitutional republican kind) has given no indication that it has the means to arrest the decline.
Possibility #3
For possibility number three, it is tempting to say, “Just go read Hoppe—he literally wrote the book on this.” And indeed, he does make the case thoroughly, and I do recommend the book highly. I myself plan to re-read it at some point. However, we also need to explore the case ourselves, to better understand it and add what we can.
In the Federalist Papers, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay attempt to answer questions, from the Anti-Federalists and others, as to how the proposed system would overcome a variety of potential pitfalls. One is certainly struck by the brilliance of the arguments, and the cleverness of the practical applications proposed—developed as they were under difficult circumstances, on a tight timelines. This may be hindsight talking, but reading those arguments, one also gets the feeling that the Federalists knew that there was a risk that the solutions they were coming up with might not work, but that they were rolling the dice and hoping for the best. The fact that the Anti-Federalists fears are now turning out to have been well-founded certainly adds to the effect.
Among the primary arguments the Federalists made is that ultimately, the power of voting would be our last ditch against decline. However, as deep as the Founders’ understanding of human nature was, they appear to have overlooked something important:
Voting is done by voters.
And that will be our subject in Part 3.