By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
‘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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