Chapter07

Imagine you've been invited to join a group of friends at a vacation house. The rules for the weekend are majority rule. When you arrive at the lovely little beach house, your friends let you know they've already had a vote and you'll be spending the weekend in the tiniest room—the one with only a couch next to a ventilator that hums and rattles all night. You trudge off to put your bags in the closet of a room, when your friends inform you that they're also heading out to a well-reviewed restaurant. Except you'll have to house-sit one of their dogs. Majority rule and all. When they get back, they'd really appreciate finding the pool muck skimmed out. Someone has to do it. They had a vote and you lost. Majority rule. You'll also be paying twice as much in rent for the weekend. You got a great bonus this year, right? They all voted on it, and it's only fair. Majority rule.

That nightmare weekend is the key to understanding liberty conservatism. It's an insight about democratic government central of the ideas of the American Founding: the tyranny of the majority.

LIBERTY, AMERICA, AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Liberty is at the heart of the American story. When colonial patriots organized to fight for their rights against the British crown, they called their organization the “Sons of Liberty.” They launched a revolution to promote, as they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” As they fought to free their nation from what they believed to be a tyrant king, they waved a flag reading “don't tread on me.” Patrick Henry cried out “give me liberty or give me death.” The American republic these revolutionaries created now stamps the word “Liberty” prominently on its coins. Its pledges allegiance to its flag “with liberty and justice for all.” Among its most potent national symbols is the Statute of Liberty standing in New York harbor, depicting a national symbol we call Lady Liberty. Liberty is America's sacred national value.

Nearly everyone in mainstream American politics, whether out of sincere reverence or mere political necessity, has always sought to connect their beliefs to principled American liberty. Throughout American history, the words “liberty” and “freedom” have peppered political speeches. Every major American party has claimed to stand for liberty. Every successful American political leader of real significance, from Washington to Jefferson to Lincoln to Roosevelt, has proclaimed their reverence for liberty. A genuine commitment to political liberty is a baseline precondition to legitimacy in American politics. Which is why, whenever anyone has sought to implement major and controversial change in America, their opponents have frequently accused them of acting like a demagogue or a tyrant. Because liberty is America's national value, every powerful figure, energetic movement, and political party seeking radical change first has to prove it isn't flirting with tyranny, demagoguery, or mob rule.

When the Federalists proposed national reforms during the early republic to strengthen the national government, Democratic-Republicans attacked them as monarchists and aspiring tyrants. In return, the Federalists painted Democratic-Republicans as Jacobin demagogues harnessing the mob. A few decades later, National Republicans didn't just call the strong executive Andrew Jackson “King Andrew,” they renamed their party the Whigs, after the revolutionaries who defeated King George.1 In the middle of the nineteenth century, the enemies of Know-Nothingism attacked the followers of the American Party as a dangerous and ignorant mob. Abraham Lincoln's enemies called him a tyrant so often it might as well have become part of his name—when John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln he yelled out “death to tyrants” in Latin. After the Civil War, Democrats howled about federal tyranny over the defeated states of the Confederacy. William Jennings Bryan's enemies called him a terrifying demagogue. Elites from both parties dismissed the Gilded Age Populists as a stirred-up mob. Huey Long they (quite correctly) called a demagogic would-be dictator. When Franklin Roosevelt's opponents called him a tyrant and his controversial New Deal an attack on liberty, it was hardly an innovation. When politicians and parties win an election, their supporters naturally see opportunities to push through their most cherished ideas. The election's losers naturally seek to remind them of their obligations to the republic.

What frequently makes these attacks invoking liberty contentious in American politics is not everyone agrees on what liberty means or what it requires. Countless definitions of liberty exist, from those of John Stuart Mill to Robespierre to Ayn Rand to Milton Friedman. To some people, liberty means freedom to live life as you wish without judgment or interference from neighbors. For others, it means the freedom to speak and write and organize against the government. For others, it means the freedom to compete on fair terms against the friends and children of the powerful. For others, it means freedom to conduct the affairs of your business without interference from government authorities. For others, it means freedom from want. For many, liberty has come to mean a government that leaves as much as possible to the individual with as little state interference as possible, leading to policies like low taxes, minimal regulation, and market-based rules rather than those of command and control. For others, liberty has become just a word to describe a nation with free elections and representative government. The liberty revered in American politics that grew out of the American Revolution, however, has always meant just one thing—the Enlightenment idea of a rational government wary of majority tyranny.

The American Revolution was a product of the intellectual whirlwind that swept over Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that we call the Enlightenment. From the days of the Roman Empire, through the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, authority and tradition—not reason—governed Western culture. Everything from government to science to culture was dominated by the dogma of kings and bishops. Ideas were true or not true, and actions taken or not taken, because people born or raised into authority said so. Those figures of traditional authority naturally supported what had always been done and what kept them securely in power over the common men and women of the world. Then a generation of new thinkers arose to question this consensus, unleashing an intellectual and philosophical tsunami that crashed into the foundational rocks of Europe. That storm, proposing that reason replace tradition and dogma as the foundation of Western culture, was the Enlightenment.

We widely consider the start of the Enlightenment to be Isaac Newton's publication of his Principia Mathematica in 1687, which popularized a radical new idea—the scientific method.2 Throughout human history, philosophers had mainly guessed at the laws of the universe through conjecture and a dose of mysticism, constructing stories to explain forces they didn't yet understand. Newton observed the workings of the world, recorded them, crunched the numbers, and from there established truths, revealing with mathematics how the fundamental laws of the universe actually worked.³ Newton's discoveries awed people, but, just as importantly, his method inspired them. Over the next century, a parade of thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant applied similar methods to one new realm after another. Like Newton, these philosophers examined beliefs that had ruled Western society for centuries and subjected them to rigorous testing, study, and logic.⁴ Embracing the radical idea that reason could replace tradition and dogma as the basis for society, they collectively challenged almost every bedrock assumption of European society.

The Enlightenment they sparked led to countless new ways of thinking across every human endeavor, from government to economics to religion to science and even to the nature of the good life. As the idea of reason seeped into one field after another, it triggered a vast flowering of scientific and social change. It spread the scientific method—that we should understand the world around us by conducting experiments and recording our results. It led to classical liberal economics—that economies should be governed not by guild rules and royal decrees but by individuals freely exchanging items of value. It led to religious tolerance—that people should be free to choose their religious traditions. Perhaps most importantly, it led to new ideals of republican democracy—that the people should choose their rulers instead of accepting those born into authority as their betters.5 Each of these revolutions grew out of the same big idea, that reasoning, experimenting, and discovering truth can guide us toward a better society. Traditional authority crumbled.

Among the most important ideas to grow out of this Enlightenment was republican democracy. Enlightenment thinkers naturally rejected traditional and nonrational sources of political legitimacy, such as the divine right of hereditary kings or brute power. They sought instead a rational basis for some people to rule over others, and the only reasonable basis they could discover was consent. Enlightenment thinkers thus mainly agreed the most legitimate social order was a republic in which the people elected leaders to represent them. They disagreed, however, on how those elected representatives ought to govern in the people's interest. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau—who believed people were inherently good and it was society that turned them toward evil—believed such a republic had a duty to rule according to the people's general will.⁶ To Rousseau, inherently good people, freed by republican government of the wicked pressures of social oppression, would never choose to oppress themselves. A just government, he therefore believed, should follow the majority's general will wherever it led, as if it were a sacred trust. Rousseau became an idol of the leaders of the French Revolution, and they put his ideas of liberty at the center of their republic. The French revolutionaries were eager to sweep aside anyone who dared oppose the general will of the people—naturally defined as the policies that French leaders had developed in the people's name—even in a bloody Reign of Terror against the Revolution's perceived enemies. Rousseau's conception of republican liberty continues to hold a powerful influence in many democracies around the world, particularly European ones that connect their legacies to the French Revolution.

America's Founders, relying on a second strain of thinking based in the works of philosophers like Locke, Hobbes, Hume, and Montesquieu, had very different ideas about what liberty required in a republic.7 They didn't believe people were inherently good, like Rousseau did. In fact, they believed imperfect people often tended to abuse power and authority. Some people, when given power, take advantage of others. Some people are careless, selfish, greedy, or cruel. Sometimes irrational passions run through segments of society. Sometimes groups bear such hate toward others they would eagerly use any power available to them to torment perceived enemies. A majority of citizens, the Founders recognized, if left unconstrained, might band together into a ruling class to abuse the losers of elections—subject them to indignities, seize their property, and render them slaves with the legitimacy of a majority vote. To prevent this, America's Founders believed liberty required strong antidemocratic protections for minorities so a republic didn't become a different sort of irrational tyranny. It wouldn't do much good, after all, to replace a king with a majority of citizens who acted like one toward electoral minorities. In Democracy in America, the essays he wrote about his journeys through the young American republic, French writer Alexis de Tocqueville popularized a phrase for this concern—the “tyranny of the majority.”⁸

America's Founders struggled with how to create a republic of the people that didn't turn into a horrific rule of the mob. Just because people consented to an election, they thought, didn't mean people had consented to everything the election's winner might decide to do. Some actions fall outside any consent—things people would never agree be done to them, no matter who wins. The Founders therefore intentionally designed their republic to frustrate momentary passions stirring through society, making sure leaders were only able to act when broad national agreement existed.⁹ They created a complicated republic loosely modeled on a proposed design by the political philosopher Montesquieu, with three federal branches, a two-chambered legislature, substantial power preserved in coequal state governments, and an extensive Bill of Rights placing limits on these institutions. It's a system intentionally designed to be so clumsy that it's nearly impossible to ever “get anything done” apart from things that already have broad support across every significant faction of America. America's Founders hoped this untested and often frustrating republic would ensure government would always rule by reason.10 As James Madison said in a speech to the Virginia ratifying convention about the Constitution he designed:

On a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism…. This danger ought to be wisely guarded against. Perhaps, in the progress of this discussion, it will appear, that the only possible remedy for those evils and means of preserving and protecting the principles of republicanism, will be found in that very system [the Constitution] which is now exclaimed against as the parent of oppression.¹¹

This insight about liberty—that democracies need strong counter-majoritarian protections to shield minorities from majority abuse—is one of the reasons America's Founders are considered among the greatest philosophers of the Enlightenment, and their works—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist—are seen as core Enlightenment achievements. This didn't mean, however, that the Founders thought their Constitution was just some interesting system for majorities to game. They intended these constitutional protections only as last-ditch safeguards against the worst actors. The Founders certainly didn't believe it would be acceptable or moral for a majority strong or savvy enough to get around the protections of their Constitution—controlling enough offices and levers of the republic to impose its will on the election's losers—to do everything the Constitution gave them the power to do. The Founders presumed liberty's primary and most important safeguard would always have to be the American people vigilantly protecting it. In most cases, they expected the American people to guard against encroachments on their liberty, and to stop would-be-tyrants from trampling on the liberty of others, long before the Constitution's safeguards were necessary to kick in as a last resort. This constant political pushback against political majorities seeking to impose their will on minorities is what American political liberty is about.

Where the French Revolution's conception of liberty, following Rousseau ideas, believed liberty meant a society following the majority will, the American Revolution's conception held almost the opposite. According to the American conception of liberty, a republic is free only when political minorities are protected from majority abuse. The American idea of liberty doesn't believe human beings are inherently good and that it's only the external influences of society that pushes them to act badly. It believes people are inherently flawed and that those in power must be constantly restrained, checked, and balanced to ensure those under their power are not unfairly abused. Societies obviously need laws and governments to survive. In a democratic republic, the majority is empowered to make those laws and govern under them. That doesn't mean, however, that majorities can morally use those vast powers however they please. Throughout American history, we have always separated the issue of the legal exercise of a democratic government's power from its just and moral use. We draw a careful line between legitimate democratic self-government and what's essentially majority bullying. That's what political liberty has always meant in America since its Founding—protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority.

THEORIES OF LIBERTY DURING THE FIFTH PARTY SYSTEM

For most of American history, liberty was a universal American ideal any party might invoke when its opponents overstepped. It wasn't partisan. That changed during the New Deal debate, which was essentially a fight over the size and power of government. In practice, one party during the Fifth Party System found itself adopting liberty as its own, while its rival constantly had to fend off charges of tyranny and demagoguery. Over time, many Americans started to associate liberty with the agenda of the Fifth Party System Republicans. For decades, Republicans—applying the principle to the specific issues of the New Deal political debate—invoked liberty when advocating for their agenda of tax cuts, reducing regulations, empowering markets, and limiting the scope and role of government. They got comfortable seeing themselves as the defenders of liberty. Liberty conservatism became an identifiable ideological faction within the party. Democrats, on the other hand, grew suspicious of a word often used to attack their plans. In the course of this debate, two alternative theories of liberty rose to prominence, each a partial application of principled liberty to the specific issues of the Fifth Party System era.

The first of these theories proposes that liberty is fundamentally about limiting the power of government so individuals can live with the least possible interference from the state. It holds as its model what some philosophers call a “night watchman state,”12 an idea with roots going back to Enlightenment philosopher John Stuart Mill's “harm principle.” According to Mill:

That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.¹³

According to the harm principle, the only legitimate reason for the state to coerce people is to protect others from harm. Thinkers have reached conflicting conclusions about what constitutes such harm. Some believe government should only step in to prevent direct acts of harm, such as physical violence or theft. To others, including Mill, a failure to do something—such as watching a child drown—was also harm, meaning government sometimes has an obligation to affirmatively intervene to prevent bad things from happening. Philosopher Robert Nozick, among the most celebrated libertarian thinkers, believed liberty meant government that treated people like means instead of ends, leading to the most minimal government possible, one responsible only for preventing assaults, thefts, and fraud.¹⁴ Ayn Rand believed that, since humans had reason and free will to choose, the highest moral value people could pursue was following their reason and perception toward their own well-being—meaning it was immoral to demand anyone betray their self to act for the benefit of others.15 The specifics of these various theories differ, but under most versions the state is to act solely as a policeman stopping individuals from using guile or violence to hurt or dominate one another.

The night watchman state, which advocates a starkly limited state without extensive government intervention, was politically attractive in an era in which many associated liberty with opposing “big government.” The problem is no major party in American history—including the current Republican Party—has ever seriously advocated for a night watchman state. A night watchman state makes no place for national infrastructure like the roads and bridges and airports that power the nation's commerce, presuming the private sector will provide them and private owners will coordinate them without creating so-called “tragedies of the commons.” It leaves no room for economic regulation or regulation of the natural environment, simply presuming that negative effects on others—what economists call externalities—won't cripple the nation. It has no place for social welfare programs like Social Security and Medicare, or for any assistance to even the temporarily poor or unemployed. Despite the rhetoric sometimes employed, only the most utopian activist actually advocates abolishing all government—no public roads or infrastructure to backbone our economy, no army to protect us, no public schools to educate the next generation, no one to enforce contracts, and no one to stop cheats and swindles. It's possible a society built around the night watchman state might work, but it would be a completely untested society requiring a radical restructuring of America. It certainly isn't what America's Founders meant when they employed the term liberty. Sharply limiting the power of government and empowering individuals are concepts the modern conservative movement developed as applications of principled liberty to the specific problems of the New Deal era, but the core philosophical basis for the liberty that America's Founders proclaimed is clearly something else.

Over time, however, a number of respected voices rose to question the consensus in favor of planning. Many were scholars with backgrounds in economics, such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, or other academics clustered around economics departments in places like the University of Chicago.16 These “free-market economists” believed human knowledge is inherently limited, and that even the most dedicated and wise experts are unable to know everything. Any system relying on central planning, they believed, would be inefficient and flawed because imperfect human planners, no matter how well-intentioned, couldn't actually know every fact necessary to design a wise or efficient plan—where everything is, what everybody is doing, what they all need, or what they all want. As individuals, however, we each possess pieces of knowledge, meaning that as a group we collectively know almost everything. These free-market economists argued that centralized government regulatory schemes accomplished goals less successfully than decentralized ones in which individual choice and the mechanisms of price powered markets.

In a market, price acts as a signal to weigh the wants and needs of every individual and organization in society to instantly determine an efficient allocation of scarce resources. Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations and considered the world's first economist, described the price mechanism as an “invisible hand” shaping the world. As Friedrich Hayek famously explained using the example of allocating tin from a mine in his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society”:

Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say, tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. It does not matter for our purpose—and it is very significant that it does not matter—which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere and that, in consequence, they must economize tin. There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen, or in favor of what other needs they ought to husband the supply. If only some of them know directly of the new demand, and switch resources over to it, and if the people who are aware of the new gap thus created in turn fill it from still other sources, the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system and influence not only all the uses of tin but also those of its substitutes and the substitutes of these substitutes, the supply of all the things made of tin, and their substitutes, and so on; and all this without the great majority of those instrumental in bringing about these substitutions knowing anything at all about the original cause of these changes. The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all. The mere fact that there is one price for any commodity—or rather that local prices are connected in a manner determined by the cost of transport, etc.—brings about the solution which (it is just conceptually possible) might have been arrived at by one single mind possessing all the information which is in fact dispersed among all the people involved in the process.17

Nobody has the knowledge or expertise to plan even a small part of the complex economy of the entire world. In theory, by simply allowing people to trade goods and services in a market, everything in the world gets delivered in an efficient way that keeps the entire system functioning without anyone having to understand what's going where or why.

By the later part of the twentieth century, however, central planning gradually lost luster across the West.18 Western policy makers couldn't help but notice the experiences of nations like the Soviet Union and China, which, when attempting to rush mainly agricultural economies into the industrial age using rigid central plans, floundered.¹⁹ Plans that made sense in national capitals, supported by data and sophisticated analysis, too often failed to anticipate the real-world consequences of their ambitious policies. The Soviets forced independent farmers into large-scale collective farms with the most modern equipment, believing they could jump-start industrial food production—and national agricultural output fell.²⁰ Mao imposed national quotas for metal production in China to quickly industrialize the country, but national bureaucrats passed down unrealistic production orders to peasants living in areas with little metal, who then melted down household implements and tools in backyard forges to meet the aggressive quotas—not only inflicting great hardship, but also producing a product that cost three times more, only a third of which was even usable.²¹ Conservative political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who believed that central planning implanted over previous decades was now choking the vibrancy and innovation of their own economies, became popular by promising to replace planned regimes with systems based on markets.²² Even large conglomerates in the private sector began to unwind into more nimble and competitive entities. With the causes of political liberty, free markets, and conservative politics increasingly overlapping and intertwined, people started to think of liberty and “free markets” as aspects of the same thing.

As support for market-based regulation grew, however, something interesting happened. By the 1990s, Democrats started to jump on the market bandwagon. A rising group of “New” Democrats suggested liberalism could also harness insights about markets to better meet their own policy goals.²³ They embraced ideas like tax cuts, “reinventing government” to reduce regulatory burdens on industries, and welfare reform plans that engineered the incentives of recipients. They embraced carbon trading as an alternative to hard limits on carbon emissions. They embraced regulated insurance exchanges as an alternative to a single-payer government health-insurance plan. They embraced sin taxes on less healthy foods, congestion pricing to reduce traffic, and even, in some quarters, privately run charter schools that competed with public school systems. Instead of commanding outcomes, regulators could enlist markets by engineering incentives so citizens mainly chose the preferred government outcome on their own. Professor and former Obama adviser Cass Sunstein popularized this sort of thinking as market-based regulatory “nudges.”24 As Democrats increasingly injected market mechanisms into public regulation, something even more interesting happened—Republicans opposed them. What's more, Republicans frequently cited principled liberty as the reason for their objections. Suspecting hypocrisy and crass political calculation, Democrats became indignant that Republicans would reject market-based regulatory schemes, many the party had once endorsed.

The reason Republicans rejected these Democratic plans was because markets and decentralization were never the real principle at stake. As a practical matter, since the New Deal was at its heart a program of industrial planning, when liberty conservatives argued against the New Deal during the Fifth Party System, they often found themselves arguing about economics and markets. They frequently found it easier to convince people who didn't agree with their principles by discussing tangible policies and their intended effects—things like markets, decentralization, lower taxes, jobs, and prosperity—than by discussing abstract and theoretical things like liberty or encroachments on dignity. Yet markets were always simply the means to pursue liberty given the specific political battles at the time, never the principle at stake. Liberty conservatives made pragmatic arguments about free markets, devolving power to local authority, efficiency, and the wisdom of crowds because market regulatory schemes that achieve goals with a lighter hand are less likely to leave minorities feeling abused. While a liberty conservative might prefer a “nudge” by which government sets up penalties and incentives over a system requiring more centralized control, that liberty conservative would probably prefer no government scheme at all. In practice, Republican arguments about liberty and policies based around markets were frequently intertwined during the Fifth Party System. That doesn't mean markets are what liberty is philosophically about.

The policies and programs since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal over which Democrats and Republicans have argued while citing principled liberty were always mere applications of liberty to specific problems of middle-of-the-twentieth-century America. The principle of liberty, however, is and always was something far greater. It was never just a practical philosophy about the limits of state power. It's a moral philosophy about separating what's legal for a democratic majority to do from what's moral for it to do—what's wrong for the people who win elections to do to those who lose.

DEMOCRACY VERSUS BULLYING BY THE MAJORITY

The freest society with the broadest form of market capitalism can't function without a government that establishes and enforces the rule of law so citizens are protected from random violence, confident their agreements will be enforced, and sure frauds against them will be punished. Where there's no rule of law or public order, warlords carve out turf and terrorize people. Violence becomes a daily threat. The strong prey on the weak. The powerful wall themselves off from the people. A society with no government wouldn't be one of freedom but of chaos, as the violent and cunning dominated and subjugated the kind and the meek—as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes said of this state of nature, mankind would live in “continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man [would be] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”25 As James Madison wrote in The Federalist, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”²⁶ But men are not angels. It's not a question of whether government is good or bad; some government is necessary.

That “government,” moreover, is merely an abstraction. It's just the name we give the collective decisions of the people currently empowered to make and enforce the laws. While those officials theoretically represent everybody in a republic, in reality we know they owe their positions to the factions that voted them into power. Government is also the one social institution to which we give what political philosophers call the “monopoly on violence”—the legitimate power to force everyone else to obey.27 Corporations, criminals, gangs, and individuals may grow powerful. They can dominate people or even influence government. Yet government can, if it wants, always break the power of any other group in society because only government has the lawful power to maintain armed police forces and armies and judicial courts with which to impose its decisions on everyone else. That's what makes something a law—if you refuse to obey its command, an official with a gun strapped to his belt will eventually find you and force you to comply, or drag you in front of a tribunal to punish you if you won't. When we say “the government” has done something in the American republic, we therefore mean the people who won the last election ordered something to be done. The question, therefore, isn't really what an abstract “government” should or shouldn't do. The question is when is it okay for a group of human beings to band together through politics to impose their will by force over weaker or less organized groups?

What, then, separates legitimate democratic governing from majority bullying? Where is the line separating Rousseau's general will from the Founders' counter-majoritarian concerns? It's easy to see that line when a law or plan isn't actually intended for everyone's collective benefit. It's never legitimate or moral in the American system for a faction to use its control of government to loot the state for itself or its friends, or to punish others in society it doesn't like. Majorities aren't supposed to use their greater numbers to take advantage of minorities. They're not supposed to use their power to reward their friends. They're not supposed to act indifferently toward those who didn't vote for them. When officials take office, they're supposed to represent all Americans equally, not act as the sword of the dominant group. Americans have always recognized it's immoral for the winners of the election to use their power to benefit themselves or to hurt their enemies, as opposed to governing in the best interest of everyone without regard to faction or identity. That's why FDR's “Soak the Rich” tax—a bill meant to punish one specific man—was so controversial. It's why the South's Jim Crow laws outrage us. It's why Americans have always loathed politicians who waste public money on pet constituencies. A republic can't long survive if losing an election becomes a tragedy because those who won refuse to treat us with respect when they exercise power over us—much less intentionally set out to hurt us. Americans shouldn't gloat that “elections have consequences” because that's essentially bragging that we have our neighbors at our mercy and intend to make it hurt. It's corrosive to democracy. This sort of factional politics, governing not for the benefit of all Americans, is always immoral majority tyranny violating principled liberty.

The more complicated case exists when a majority believes its plans are best for everybody, but the election's losers deeply disagree. It's important to never forget that overpowering someone's will, using power over them, is an assault on their autonomy and thus their human dignity. When someone with power forces you to do something against your will, it makes you feel small, angry, and horribly injured. The indignity of feeling weak and powerless and at the mercy of the strong is embedded in human nature. When people use power to dominate us—to force us to do things they want us to do, or to not do things we want to do—it hurts our autonomy and injures us. Since every government policy essentially involves the political majority wielding its collective power to subdue the desires of political minorities—the winners of the election overriding the interests and desires of the losers—every time the government acts, some people are going to feel weak and powerless. That inflicts a real harm, one that often matters to people just as much as any physical harm. Even when the government makes things better in some way. Sometimes, especially when it does.

Majorities in America are supposed to respect the dignity of minorities by sometimes refraining from pushing through policies they like, respecting the fears and strong views of the minority with whom they disagree. Since overriding somebody's will by force does them an injury in itself, we must always take that cost into account. Even if you're sure your plan really will benefit everybody equally and not just yourself, it still matters that the minority disagrees. It's never enough to simply ask whether the expected benefits of a plan outweigh its surface-level costs. A government committed to political liberty always places onto the scale the additional moral cost of overriding the will of the minority—even when we think they're wrong or will come to love our ideas once we implement them. Sometimes the moral thing to do is to not use power, even when you're right, even when your plan is better, and even when a majority of your fellow citizens agree with you.

Separating a democratic result from majority bullying is therefore a weighing process dependent on context, one that places on one side the benefit of the plan and on the other the cost to the dignity of the minority compelled to go along by force. The more broadly accepted the plan, the more likely it's moral to bind everyone to its implementation. The more a minority group opposes a plan, the more likely the majority cramming it through over the minority's objections is wrong. If a proposal is urgent and essential to the nation's survival, it's almost always fair to enact it. If a proposal isn't urgent and is highly controversial—something the majority really wants but that other Americans don't—it's probably wrong to override the will of the minority, even if the majority is correct and the minority mistaken. If the proposal is the result of careful negotiation with minority factions to build a national consensus, the cost in forcing compliance is usually small. The more the plan benefits everybody in society equally, the more acceptable it is to force those who disagree to obey it nonetheless.

In American politics, liberty isn't about defining clear bright lines dividing what's acceptable for government to do. Nor is it a philosophy of small government, low taxes, market regulation, or leaving people alone—those are just applications of liberty to the issues of a specific place and time. Liberty in America is a philosophy of individual dignity. It holds that great care is owed before public officials can morally wield power to force others to obey them because their commands inflict an additional and hidden human cost—damage to the dignity of those whose will they override with force. No one in mainstream American politics wants to become a tyrant, yet every other political faction is organized around forcing agendas on political minorities. People get involved in politics because they have agendas of changes they hope to implement through government. To accomplish that, they have to defeat their political enemies at the ballot box and use the power they've won to impose change on everybody else. They accept that their political enemies would do the same to them given the chance. Liberty arguments in America are about telling everybody else in politics “no.” That right and popular aren't good enough reasons to force something on other people—people who disagree or who may be harmed by your plans, or who may simply not want the changes you seek to impose on their lives. They essentially tell the victors of elections they're acting immorally by turning their victories into power.

This American conception of liberty leaves plenty of room for citizens to work together through government. There's nothing in principled liberty that says citizens can't agree to pool their resources through government or enforce the broadly shared norms of society, so long as those efforts aren't hidden methods for election winners to abuse election losers. Making everyone chip in to build roads and airports that make us collectively richer doesn't violate anyone's liberty, so long as it's truly a consensual joint decision. There's nothing wrong with citizens enforcing a broadly shared consensus that careless or sloppy people shouldn't pollute the air and water we share, that predators can't freely cheat their neighbors, or that institutions can't comprehensively lock certain groups out of public necessities. If a society believes it's better off with interstate highways, health regulations, retirement programs, and public education systems, nothing in principled liberty prevents it. In the right political context, it's possible to imagine liberty conservatives heartily approving all those programs and policies. What matters is what the majority seeks to achieve, why the minority objects, and whether a compelling reason exists for the majority to overpower those objections with its collective power.

Liberty is a principle deeply embedded into America's institutions, its culture, and its values. American liberty separates what's legal from what's right, and it separates joint decision-making from majority bullying. It ensures the awesome power of the state is only brought to bear when there's broad consensus across every segment of society. It prevents government of the people, by the people, and for the people from becoming the rule of the mob. It ensures the winner's idea of utopia doesn't become the loser's prison. It's about ensuring republican government means citizens cooperating together to solve problems in a way that's fair to all. Whenever a winning majority has sought to impose significant national change, those who disagreed have demanded their liberty be respected. They weren't claiming their political leaders had become cruel despots. Neither were they claiming their opponents weren't legally entitled to impose their will under the existing constitutional regime. They were making a claim about how American democracy is supposed to work. Majorities in America aren't supposed to do as they like. That's what America's Founders thought Enlightenment reason demanded, and it remains just as true today. During the Fifth Party System, liberty was a core Republican ideal given the New Deal debate. As we tackle new problems in the next party system, liberty will continue to play a critical role—the only question is how.