(Part 1 | Part 2)
Democracies all over the world are descending into increasingly undemocratic dystopias. Democracy—the very system in which this is not supposed to happen because, at the last minute, the collective wisdom of the voting public is supposed to swoop in and save the day.
It hasn’t. It doesn’t. As we discussed in our first two installments, all the voting in the world couldn’t stop our recent rapid descent, nor has it prevented our two-century-long drift away from the classical-liberal principles that fueled the democratic revolution in the first place.
The Founders certainly expected it to. As cold-eyed as they were about human nature, they still believed in the power of voting. They argued that in addition to all the other intricate systems they were putting in place to prevent accumulations of power, the voters themselves would serve as the final rampart. In theory, this seems true.
In practice, it has not worked out that way…
We could vote out careerist politicians, but we generally don’t. Heck, sometimes we don’t even vote out the corrupt ones.
We could vote for people who would restore fiscal sanity and prevent the economic train from plummeting off the cliff (as has become inevitable now—debt and unfunded liabilities alone have us living on literally borrowed time). We could, but we don’t. At best, a few politicians make some ineffectual squeaks on the subject. They get rags shoved in their mouths for their trouble, while everyone else just keeps shoveling more coal into the engine.
We could, in theory, get rid of government programs that don’t work…that threaten to bankrupt us…and that violate the fundamental classical-liberal principles that gave us democracy in the first place. Have we ever gotten rid of one? Heck, we cannot even get rid of changing the stupid clocks twice a year.
We could, in theory, elect people who will restore the government of limited purpose that the Founders intended. Have we ever even come close?
We could, but we don’t.
As we discussed last time, all we ever get are minor fluctuations in an overall downward trend. That should tell us something. The fact that this is happening in every democracy on planet Earth, to one degree or another, should tell us more.
Let us focus for now on one easy, obvious explanation: the voters themselves.
When the Founders gave us our system, classical-liberal principles were in the air. Obviously not everyone thought exactly in lock-step, but the Enlightenment, and the classical-liberal, political revolution in helped engender, were the zeitgeist of the era. This is why the “We hold these truths…” section of the Declaration of Independence, which describes those philosophical principles, is only 111 words long, whereas the list of grievances takes up most of the rest of the document. They took the principles for granted—people were most interested in the question of whether the grievances violated those principles to a degree sufficient to justify revolution.
At the time, the Founders had no experience of modern leftism—the dominant zeitgeist to come. Its first stirring, the French Revolution, hadn’t even happened yet. So perhaps we can understand why they might’ve had a rosier view of the voters than was justified. Perhaps a majority of the voters of their day really would have served as a strong rampart for classical-liberal principles.
But their day—as are all our days—was short. Today, voters who will vote to defend classical-liberal principles are far outnumbered by those who won’t. And there is no sign of that changing any time soon. (Indeed, one of Hoppe’s points is that democracy itself causes this change in “the people.”)
“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”
—Frédérick Bastiat
First, we have the voters who see the mechanisms of democracy primarily as a means to acquire things that they want, at others’ expense. Classical-liberal philosophers had long feared that such a thing would happen, and by the middle of the 19th century, men like Bastiat were sure of it. But the Founders might perhaps be forgiven, since in their day, a much greater percentage of people would have been horrified at the notion of the state taking things by force from one person to be given for the sole and exclusive use of another.
Today, by contrast, that activity is a fetish, an idol, a holy rite. Recipients want goodies. Narcissists want to virtue-signal about how generous they are…with other people’s money. Politicians want the support that comes from both. The perverse incentives here are overwhelming. Against that, all we have is the moral truth that the practice is wrong, and the cold reality that people ought to earn what they want for themselves, and rely on the voluntary charity of others when truly in need. In other words, given how venal and self-serving much of mankind tends to be, we’re on the losing side of the fight.
What mechanism of democracy, then, could we possibly use to fight back? We might, I suppose, envision a constitutional amendment—perhaps worded something like this:
Congress shall make no appropriation of any property from any individual, cohort, or entity to be given for the sole and exclusive use of any other individual, cohort, or entity.
But even that would not work. They would find a way around it. They would change the definition of “property.” They would define everything as being for the “general welfare,” and thus nothing would ever fit into the category of “sole and exclusive.”
They will find a way around anything. There are goodies to be taken! Taking things by force is what some humans do—what some humans have always done.
People unfit for freedom—who cannot do much with it—are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a ‘have’ type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a ‘have not’ type of self.
—Eric Hoffer, “The True Believer”
The next type of voter wants a more authoritarian government. There are so many reasons for this, some of which “longshoreman philosopher” Eric Hoffer explores in his masterly work The True Believer.1 Some simply want the goodies that only a large state can seize on their behalf (see above). Some adhere to the ideology of leftism, which requires a large (and ultimately, a massive) state, and tells them that such a state is both good and a Hegelian inevitability. Some are fearful by nature, and feel like they need a large state to control the behavior of others.
Thomas Jefferson certainly noted this latter distinction, believing that it is “founded in the nature of man”—that “the weakly and nerveless, the rich and the corrupt” will seek “safety and accessibility in a strong executive, while “the healthy, firm, and virtuous, feeling confidence in their physical and moral resources” are “willing to part with only so much power as is necessary for their good government.”
We could explore the various reasons and personality types all day, but for now, suffice it to say that there is a large cohort that want larger, more active government sticking its nose into an ever-greater portion of human activity. Jefferson knew it, and hoped that the American system would mitigate the problem. And it did…for a time.
Totalitarian systems have always been maintained primarily by systematic indoctrination and propaganda, injected into the population on a daily basis via mass media (without mass media, it is not possible to generate such long-lasting mass formation as that which gave rise to Stalinism and Nazism). This way, the population is literally kept on the vibrational frequency of the voice of totalitarian leaders.”
― Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism
A certain percentage of the human population can, for all intents and purposes, be hypnotized into believe just about anything. Gustave LeBon famously began exploring this phenomenon in the 19th century. Recently, Ghent University professor Mattias Desmet has added significantly to the field, noting that around 30 percent of the population are highly susceptible to durable conditioning: once they get ahold of a delusion, many will continue to hold onto it no matter what. Another 30 percent or so are also susceptible, but can more easily be broken out of it by a sufficient accumulation of evidence.
Here, then, we have a full 60 percent of voters who are highly susceptible to manipulation. This is a problem for any sort of democracy.
[Classical liberalism] has no party flower and no party color, no party song and no party idols, no symbols and no slogans. It has the substance and the arguments. These must lead it to victory.
—Ludwig von Mises
The desire for goodies has a corrosive effect on any democratic system—even a constitutional republic designed to be resistant to such trends.
Fear, insecurity, and a love of control will lead some to vote for bigger government. And bigger government eventually gets so big that it does not need the voters’ help anymore—it can keep getting bigger all on its own, no matter what voters do.
And then there are the easily hypnotized, who will fall for anything that the avatars of this increasingly authoritarian government tell them to fall for.
Against all these, what chance do classical liberals have?
The Founders gave us a system intentionally and cleverly designed to prevent rapid accumulations of power. And with the people of their day as blueprint, they imagined that voters would take care of the rest…or perhaps they simply prayed they would, rolled the dice, and hoped for the best.
What they gave us has been remarkably durable and resistant to rapid accumulations of power. And yet power has slowly accumulated nonetheless: In the bureaucracy. In the central government, at the expense of the states. In all layers of government, at the expense of the people. In the way that the constitution is treated as a “living, breathing document”—in other words, as a document that does not actually mean anything.
The American system, and other systems in the same general “democratic” category, seem to be vulnerable to ideological capture, and, while resistant on the surface to rapid accumulations of power, appear to be very susceptible to slow, steady accumulations of power behind the scenes. Not only have voters not arrested that process—they appear to have abetted it.
American conservatives—that is, classical-liberals who want to conserve the gains of the classical-liberal revolution and the American system that was its greatest political implementation—still hold out hope. They imagine that we can restore the spirit of that system, as envisioned by its Founders. I respect and admire their commitment, but by the numbers, I just don’t see how any such hope is justified.
There are other problems with democracy that will need to be discussed. We will leave those for a time and continue this series at some point in the near future. For now, I believe I have provided enough grist for your mental mill to grind away on. Does democracy contain the seeds of its own inevitable destruction? Is there any way to reclaim, using democratic mechanisms, some semblance of what its early advocates hoped it would be?
There are also some basic philosophical problems with any system of involuntary governance, and with any “social contract” that is imposed, involuntary, and inescapable. Those too will have to be factored into any future discussion.
For now, as an exit question…
Ask yourself why any group of people should have the authority to control the fate of any particular individual person? Even if they do it by voting. Even if we call them by the august name of “we, the people”…
A little more re: Hoffer’s analysis, from two footnotes in my book, which is now in a completed (though unpublished) state:
Mass movements (orthodox leftism, national socialism, e.g.) attract people who crave "self-renunciation" (the desire "to be rid of an unwanted self") and who "see their lives as irremediably spoiled" and thus "cannot find a worth-while purpose in self-advancement.…Their innermost craving is for a new life—a rebirth—or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause. An active mass movement offers them opportunities for both. If they join the movement as full converts they are reborn to a new life in its close-knit collective body, or if attracted as sympathizers they find elements of pride, confidence and purpose by identifying themselves with the efforts, achievements and prospects of the movement. To the frustrated a mass movement offers substitutes either for the whole self or for the elements which make life bearable and which they cannot evoke out of their individual resources." "Faith in a holy cause," notes Hoffer, is "a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves," and "[t]he less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause." Without an independent, confident self, the focus is on external things: "A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business. […] When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need of something apart from us to live for." And, as Hoffer unequivocally asserts, all of this results in, and is concealed by a web of, virtue signaling: "The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless." (Hoffer, The True Believer, 12–15.)
Needless to say, this does not describe everybody on the left. However, as harsh as it may seem, the historical, statistical, political, and observational evidence all support these contentions to a significant degree.
and
Here again is Hoffer with contentions about some adherents to mass movements that, though seemingly harsh, also appear to be borne out by the evidence:
"The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy. They also crave to dissolve their spoiled, meaningless selves in some soul-stirring spectacular communal undertaking — hence their proclivity for united action." (Hoffer, The True Believer, 24–25.)
"The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement." (Ibid., 47)
"They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society… They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society." (Ibid., 33)
"Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual… . Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden." (Ibid., 31)