On my first visit to the United States in 1968, I had the privilege of meeting Mario Savio. He had been the leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which in many ways had lit the fuse that set off the explosion that became the 1960s counterculture. His most famous speech was the “Operation of the Machine.” He delivered it before four thousand people at Sproul Hall in December 1964. (“If this is a firm, and if the board of regents are the directors; and if President Kerr is in fact the manager; then I’ll tell you something. The faculty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be . . . made into any product!”) Savio’s fierce commitment to freedom of speech was admirable and unquestionable. Like John Milton and George Orwell before him, heroes to many who are passionate about freedom of speech, he knew that post-truth politics is impossible. Freedom of speech begins, ends, and runs throughout on an unshakable commitment to truth and to addressing truth to power.
Nearly fifty years later, that meeting with Mario Savio came to mind as I watched two entirely different campus responses to President Trump’s election in November 2016. On the one hand, there was the “milk and water” response. Their favorite daughter had lost. The “wrong” candidate had defied all expectations and won, and campus after campus across America was in the process of setting up safe places and therapy sessions for traumatized students—replete with puppies, coloring books, Play-Doh, and LEGOs. The University of Michigan offered “post-election self-care,” Yale put on a “group-scream,” and Cornell students were invited to a “cry-in.”
A student in Madison, Wisconsin, put up a Post-it note on a window with the words, “Suck it up, you p_____!” The trivial note was thunderously attacked by a dean in a three-page letter as a “hate crime” and an “act of political intimidation” that “violated every value for which the college stood.” At George Washington University, students pressed to join the list of “sanctuary universities,” while others—presumably tongue in cheek—requested sanctuary from exams, from repaying student loans, and from obeying the laws regarding the age of drinking (which they claimed were causing emotional distress). Many colleges and universities canceled classes and exams so professors could express their sympathy to fearful students who felt they had been “othered.” All in all, “It’s a generational/racial/gender/cultural thing. You who don’t understand wouldn’t understand.”
On the other hand, there was the “blood and iron” response, as left-wing riots broke out at Cal Berkeley, New York University, Middlebury College, and elsewhere. Demands for free speech had degenerated into the silencing of all speech, as insults, threats, violence, and arson were used to strong-arm opponents they disagreed with. The wheel had come full circle. Just as American sex, from early feminism to the hookup culture, had gone from one objectification to a new and worse objectification, so American speech has gone from one repression to a new and worse repression as the United States has become caught in an ugly culture of “trolling,” “flaming,” “group-trolling,” “crap-flooding,” and “doing it for the lulz” (lulz being derived from LOL, laughing out loud). In the words of one commentator, “the more you talk online, the more likely you’ll be nasty; talk long enough, and it’s a certainty.”1
The newspaper has given way to the internet, and the integrity and wisdom of the old-fashioned adult editor has been ousted by a toddler’s style imperative to command attention. And what commands attention more than the shocking and the outrageous? The final commandment in the 12 Commandments of Flaming is “When in doubt, insult.”2 In the high-decibel cacophony of American incivility, the best way to be heard is to insult and be outrageous. So who today talks with the cool reason of the Greeks or listens for the “still, small voice” of the Hebrews?
Where are the moral courage and the sense of history in the young American mind today? Where is the realism about life in generations that have experienced no depression, no world war, and take prosperity and invincible military superiority as their birthright? Both the silliness and the seriousness of the student responses were unmistakable. Campus events in 1964 triggered a passion for justice, a wave of robust dissent, and a fresh commitment to free speech that galvanized the world and even brought governments to their knees. Campus events in 2016 reduced American campuses and American students to the level of either 1920s anarchists or a kindergarten, with juvenile behavior more appropriate for toddlers in a playpen.3
When a sports team is defeated, it sets about making sure it never happens again, and the same is normally true of political parties in a democracy. In the next election they will work to reverse the result of the previous defeat. But not in America today. America’s “sore loser culture,” with its politics of blaming and victim playing has become either a cauldron of all-out political resistance, fired by a self-righteous anger that is toxic, or a hospital ward of sensitivities, suspicions, and slights, hugging to itself the consolation that there is one thing better than being right—being wronged.
Many Americans have become the great affrontables, and much of American public life has become a simmering stew of hypersensitivity, self-pity, resentment, rage, protest, and complaint. “We lost,” but “life is not fair,” so now is the time for a recount. There is always someone, something, somewhere, to blame—especially for a generation well trained in detecting microaggression, the art of spotting ever smaller splinters in the eyes of neighbors, and detecting the concealed weapon in every word. But the damage to democracy and the outcome of such sorry behavior are impossible to deny. If the responses of the younger generation are any indication, American freedom and responsibility are languishing. The capacity to recover from an insult or an attack is always the measure of an individual’s and a nation’s self-reliance and sense of responsibility, which suggests that young Americans are not taking responsibility robustly, and are not recovering well.
To be fair, there are reasons for the so-called snowflake generation (emotionally pampered children and students who melt when they hit the ground). There are many real wrongs and real victims in America, especially racial and sexual, and there should always be an important place for human compassion and for a penetrating analysis of what caused the wounds and the injustice in the first place. And to be fair too, the silliness and the illiberalism are broadly Anglo-American and not uniquely American. Earlier in England, for example, a protest against the “no-platforming” of the radical feminist Germaine Greer led to the no-platforming of the protester Peter Tatchell, and then to the no-platforming of Richard Dawkins, who had protested the previous no-platformings. Thus in quick succession, and with no sense of the comic hilarity, three grand icons of liberalism—one a pioneer feminist, one a leading homosexual advocate, and one a champion new atheist—had all been caught in the toils of political correctness and silenced for their pains.
What do such shenanigans have to do with freedom? Slippery-slope arguments are notoriously prone to becoming a form of scare-mongering. Yet James Madison was surely right to declare in his “Memorial and Remonstrance” in 1785, “It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.”4 After all, freedom, as we have seen, is mercurial and protean, and needs to be guarded jealously if it is to thrive and endure. Change, of course, is at the heart of the modern world, and change may well be for the better and not for the worse. But that is precisely what Americans must assess, so they must constantly follow the trends, developments, and changes, and judge how they are affecting freedom in their time—to judge whether the changes are indeed for the better or for the worse. This, then, is the ninth question on the citizens’ checklist: Are Americans vigilant about the institutions that are crucial to freedom in America today?
There are countless current issues that bear on the state of freedom today, but let me open up just two areas in two separate chapters: first, the many current challenges to American democracy, and, second, the problems posed by different sets of ideas flowing through the American republic. The latter is particularly crucial as it forms the conflict that throughout this book I have called the “tale of two revolutions,” as the heirs and allies of 1776 clash with the heirs and allies of 1789. The importance of the first, the challenges to democracy, lies in the fact that most Americans have already replaced the concept of republicanism with the term democracy or liberal democracy as their term of choice to describe America. So there is an added danger if democracy is undermined in its turn.
The primacy of democracy over republicanism owes much to the impact of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, to Lincoln’s stirring definition at the end of the Gettysburg Address, and to the glory of America’s heroic victories over despotism and totalitarianism in the world wars. The leaders of the nation had come to the field of the recent battle, Lincoln declared, to demonstrate their resolve “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”5
Lincoln’s definition was simple, bold, and clear-cut, and it gave democracy an air of solidity, permanence, and grandeur that is easy to state and hard to argue with. George Orwell called it the Gettysburg ideal, and always sought to steer by it. Democracy is the order of the day. Democracy is the spirit of the times. If freedom is self-determination, then self-government for a free people follows as naturally as two plus two equals four. Democracy, then, is as grand and clear-cut as the carving on the wall of Lincoln’s magnificent memorial in Washington, DC. And if that is democracy, who in their right mind would choose to give up the chance of ruling themselves? Surely only a madman or a fool would hand over control of their lives to a monarch or an aristocracy.
But democracy is like freedom—far from self-evident, anything but easy, and all too often short-lived. Lincoln’s words were not in fact original, as he and his contemporaries knew well. They were a quotation from John Wycliffe, the master of Balliol College, Oxford, in the late fourteenth century, and the man who was called the “Morning Star of the Reformation.” They came from Wycliffe’s introduction to his translation of the Bible into English in 1384, and were among the ideas for which he and his followers were severely persecuted by the medieval church—“This Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People.” In other words, religious freedom goes hand in hand with civil freedom, just as negative freedom requires the complement of positive freedom for it to be full freedom. People can be trusted (and are therefore free) to read and interpret the Bible for themselves, without the intervention of priests and scholars. And with certain assumptions in place, they can also be trusted (and should therefore be free) to have their say in ruling themselves, without the intervention of overbearing political authorities and burdensome experts. The self-rule and responsibility of the faith-based freedom of the Bible make possible the self-rule and responsibility of democracy.
Lincoln’s definition is no less powerful for being a quotation, but the fuller story stands as a reminder of the rise and fall of the career of ideas over time, especially those that are controversial and changeable. There were many centuries between Wycliffe and Lincoln, centuries when democracy was as far from reality in Europe as it looks in certain countries today that use the word but make a mockery of the meaning. Words alone are never enough, however eloquent. As the Greeks and Romans knew well, the wheel is always turning. So there is always the danger that the tyranny of the minority will be replaced by the tyranny of the majority. Or in Lord Acton’s words, there is the risk that just as monarchy hardens into despotism, and aristocracy contracts into oligarchy, democracy will “expand into the supremacy of numbers” and then become “mob rule and tyranny.”6 The status quo must never be taken for granted. One generation’s certainty easily becomes another generation’s doubts, another’s question mark, and yet another’s target for ridicule and rejection.
So the question for Americans is, How is liberal democracy faring in America today with the double challenge of a large democracy and a lasting democracy? And what does the answer say about the founders’ republicanism? An obvious opening question is, What does the self-rule of the people mean when American democracy numbers more than three hundred million people? Even at its best, democracy is not really genuine self-rule but the rule of the majority of the people over the minority. For how else can three hundred million people express its will apart from speaking and being counted? But what then does self-rule mean for the individual citizen when it is obvious that each individual is only one in three hundred million? How does each individual feel as the smallest possible, indivisible mathematical unit of democracy, when each has to cast their vote anonymously, secretly, and with no legal responsibility for the outcome? Every vote counts, but the individual as individual is practically, though not completely, powerless. As a mathematician, Bertrand Russell put the point like this when Britain had only twenty million citizens rather than America’s more than three hundred million: “You have, it is true, a twenty-millionth share in the government of others, but only a twenty-millionth share in the government of yourself. You are therefore much more conscious of being governed than of governing.”7
This means that when the question about democracy is, Who rules? the answer seems simple and inspiring. We are free. We are sovereign, “the Rulers R Us.” We are ruling ourselves. But as soon as the question changes to, How are the rulers to rule? the problems proliferate on all sides, and the sense of genuine self-government starts to weaken appreciably.
Some of the changes in liberal democracy since Lincoln are plain and undeniable. On the positive side of the ledger, new groups, such as women and African Americans, have been franchised and made eligible to vote, but at the same time there has been a fateful transformation of the first of the two terms. As we have seen, the term liberal has changed from a concern for personal freedom to a concern for progressive freedom. For Lord Acton, John Stuart Mill, and the nineteenth century at large, personal freedom was the required assumption that made someone liberal and constituted liberalism (liber being Latin for “free”). They therefore held that it was the duty of the government to limit itself, and to protect and promote the freedom of the individual person and of private life as the untouchable arena of freedom.
This view of freedom has been stood on its head, so that suffrage has been expanded but the understanding of liberal has changed. Whereas nineteenth-century liberals sought to protect personal freedom by limiting the role of government in private life, twentieth-century liberals sought to achieve each purported advance of freedom by expanding the role of government in more and more of life, including private life. Freedom as individual citizens saw it for themselves has changed into freedom as the government sees it for everyone, and thus limited government has morphed into statism, ever-expanding government, and less individual freedom—1789 once again.
The seeds of this shift can be seen in Rousseau’s ideas of sovereignty and the general will of the people, and they flowered fatefully in the French Revolution. But in the English-speaking world, Christopher Dawson raised a lament for classical liberalism in the 1930s, and noted how democracy was used to justify the shift:
Liberalism is a dying power. What the non-dictatorial States stand for today is not Liberalism but Democracy, a very different thing. . . . Liberalism stands for the rights of the individual and the freedom of private opinion and private interests, while Democracy stands for the rights of the majority and the sovereignty of public opinion and the common interest.8
More recently, F. A. Hayek defended personal freedom in his famous classic The Road to Serfdom. He commented caustically on this huge change: “It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that ‘liberal’ has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of governmental control.”9
So how do Americans assess the result of that shift in the United States and view the status of freedom in relation to liberals and liberalism? Does this new liberalism of the Left/liberals make Americans less free, as the former liberals who are now conservatives lament? Or are Americans today freer, as twenty-first-century Left/liberals, progressives, and socialists claim? Americans must weigh the reality and decide for themselves what they want: personal freedom from government or progressive freedom under government.
In some areas the overall balance sheet is hotly disputed, and benefits such as health care are now part of the equation and a vital part of arguments about freedom. But whichever answer wins, a key part of the challenge to the original concept of freedom itself has been clear from the beginning. Before power corrupts, power expands, or in the words so favored by earlier Americans, it encroaches and annexes. Power must therefore be watched, and especially the encroaching power of the government that is called on to advance progressive freedom. Based on the human potential for the abuse of power, such warnings go all the way back to the earliest Puritan tradition. For example, John Cotton, the father of New England Congregationalism, cautioned, “Let all the world learn to give mortal men no greater power than they are content they shall use, for use it they will. . . . It is counted a matter of danger to the state to limit prerogatives; but it is further danger, not to have them limited.”10 The political problem is therefore unavoidable, Thomas Hobbes argued. All humans share “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”11
Another change to be watched and weighed concerns the second of the two terms liberal democracy. The founders were in favor of republicanism and notoriously wary of democracy, for what they regarded as democracy was the direct democracy of Athens. That was the system through which the free men of Athens, never more than a few thousand, could come in person to the agora, the civic and political center, and take part in the debates and deliberations that decided the policies of their city-state. With the free men expanded from a relative handful to more than three million citizens in 1776, with little chance of intimate relationships, and a population scattered over an area far vaster than Athens could even imagine, such a direct democracy was obviously impossible for the new American republic. It is even more impossible today.
Besides, the founders and many American thinkers since then all shared the skepticism born of history that had built up around direct democracy. Plato detested democracy because he had seen his beloved mentor Socrates condemned and executed by democrats. But the founders were equally wary of the chronic volatility of democracy and of its proneness to mob rule and the slide toward the tyranny of the strong man. Indeed, historian Martin Diamond noted that “not a single American voice was raised in unqualified doctrinaire praise of democracy.” On the contrary, “All the American revolutionaries knew that democracy was a problem in need of constant solution, in constant need of moderation, in constant need of institutions and measures to mitigate its defects and guard against its dangers.”12
In the seventeenth century, John Winthrop called democracy “the meanest and worst of all forms of government.”13 In the nineteenth, Herman Melville wrote of the “Dark Ages of Democracy.” (“Better to be secure under one king, than exposed to violence from twenty million monarchs, though oneself be one of them.”)14 Immanuel Kant described direct democracy as “necessarily a despotism.”15 But John Adams was the bluntest of all in the eighteenth century. History shows beyond a shadow of doubt, he argued, “proofs irrefragable that the people, when they have been unchecked, have been as unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous, and cruel, as any king or senate possessed by an uncontrollable power. The majority has eternally and without any one exception usurped over the rights of the minority.”16
The founders’ choice, like that of England, where they had come from, was for representative democracy rather than direct democracy. And around it they built an ingenious system of checks and balances to encourage the promotion of seasoned wisdom and to safeguard against the weaknesses of direct democracy—including the provision of the much-maligned electoral college to provide a balance to the more populous states. To be sure, representative democracy creates its own challenges for freedom, contained in the relationship between the representatives and those that they represent. Should the representatives speak and vote for themselves, exercising their own wisdom and judgment, or are they to be merely the chosen mouthpiece of their electors? Edmund Burke’s “Speech to the Electors of Bristol” in November 1774 remains the classic expression of the first view. (“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. . . . You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament.”)17
But what do such arguments mean now? American citizens now number more than three hundred million; civic education in public schools has collapsed; there is an increasing reliance on political instruments such as referendums; and the rise of the social media means that the “consent of the governed” has been transferred from establishing the government to daily and hourly feelings (Likes) about everything the government does. The numerical expansion creates problems by itself, for in Bertrand Russell’s terms, every added citizen means that there are more people having a say in the government of each single citizen than the single citizen believes he has in governing himself. Further, democracy is not strictly self-government at all but government by numbers, or the decision of the majority, and government of the majority through the wisdom of the specialist/expert/lobbyist/activist/pollster, who is the advance guard of a new oligarchy.
The overall problem of size adds the challenge of a large republic to the challenges we saw earlier of a lasting republic. The problem of size was identified and addressed in the nineteenth century as suffrage expanded, and more and more Americans became eligible to vote. But the answer, they thought then, was simple. All it took was for universal education to expand and keep pace with universal suffrage. (President Garfield: “We confront the dangers of suffrage by the blessings of universal education.”)18 Democracy could steadily expand its base and still be safeguarded so long as the widening electorate was educated well and the citizens were sufficiently wise to be able to choose their representatives wisely. Hence the vital importance of education as well as civic education and the significance of the “melting pot.”
Have all the requirements for such a large republic been kept fresh and updated? What happens if educational standards decline; civic education disappears; money floods the political landscape like a deluge; the mainstream press grows biased toward one side or the other; the branches of government are confused; the twenty-four-hour news cycle means the endless chewing, rechewing, and spitting out of breaking news; truth-free “fake news” sprouts like tares among the wheat; and the social media corrupt the possibility of deliberation, civility, and wisdom? When the term opinion was used in the Declaration of Independence, it meant considered thought, seasoned reflection, and many have argued that the idea of the US Senate was to act as the “chamber of second thoughts.” Tocqueville argued in the same vein when he wrote that “Newspapers become more necessary in proportion as men become more equal.”19
Even the best American papers have failed to strive for so responsible a role today, but recent evidence raises the question whether such considered thought is even possible now. Popular referendums, with their simplistic either-or choices, are a return to the direct democracy that the founders feared. Incessant polling and the social media reinforce feelings (Likes) at the expense of thought, information at the expense of knowledge, and knowledge at the expense of wisdom. And America’s new “bubble democracy,” with its echo chambers, serves to compound prejudices, exclude unwanted alternatives, block compromise, fuel anger, incite instant mob-making, and excuse evils such as cyber bullying and e-lynchings. Henry Kissinger raised a concern on behalf of statesmanship in international affairs, but his question applies far more widely: “Can democracy avoid an evolution toward a demagogic outcome based on emotional mass appeal rather than the reasoned process the Founding Fathers imagined?”20
Many other factors now bite into Lincoln’s definition of democracy like an army of mice nibbling at a rope, and all the factors need to be addressed in their turn if the lifeline is not to become frayed. For a start, the founders warned against the potential dictatorship of the judiciary if it were allowed to usurp the place of the legislature, but judicial activism now overturns the voice of the people routinely. First, following Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the law is only what the judges say it is, regardless of the original intent of the author. And second, judges can be planted and counted on to block the initiatives of any White House or Congress they disagree with. The result is worse than mere obstruction. Jefferson wrote to William Jarvis in 1820 that if judges were to become the “ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions,” that would be “a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”21
Or again, the founders built in checks and balances for power with a fierce determination to prevent the abuse of power at every level, but they did so only for political institutions. Now, however, there are powerful state and federal agencies outside the three main branches of government, such as the CIA and the FBI, and extremely powerful actors such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, who were not elected and have no public accountability—apart from the goodwill of their executives. Google’s famous founding motto is “Don’t be evil,” but there is mounting disquiet over its silencing of dissent. When Mark Zuckerberg was asked what were the checks and balances for Facebook now that it had become “the most influential commercial enterprise ever created, with its personal data on nearly 2 billion people, and its unparalleled power” to shape the way people see and think about the world, his answer was vague. It went little beyond the fact that he saw himself as the one-man check and balance, and that he could be so simply by “listening to what people want” and seeking to give people “the power to share” as he pursued his own mission to “connect the world.”22
Yet, as critics noted, when it comes to the unprecedented power of the tech giants to shape American thinking and discourse, the triple problems of monopolistic power, secret algorithms, and lack of accountability have yet to be addressed satisfactorily—if they are not to make a mockery of democracy and genuine diversity, and if the social media are not to become gigantic data-harvesting “surveillance machines.” In the industrial revolution, a monopoly over the means of production was seen as a leading threat to justice. In today’s information revolution, a similar threat comes from any near monopoly over the means of communication.
Or yet again, the election of 2016 underscored another lesson of history. Under a constitutional monarchy, when a king or queen succeeds another (“The King is dead! Long live the King!”), the succession typically reinforces the sense of unity in the nation. As Thomas Aquinas taught, and Queen Elizabeth II has shown with such distinction, a key role of a monarch is to be a uniting force for the people. In American democracy, by contrast, an election now signals a decisive division, and the greater the differences between the parties, the greater the divisions in the handover from one party to another. Hence today’s concerns about the “deep state,” the administrative, bureaucratic state. For entirely different reasons, both Abraham Lincoln and Donald Trump shared the same bitter legacy of their respective victories. Their opponents were not only opposed, in the style of a loyal opposition, but spoke and acted as if they were out to prevent their governing at all (#notmypresident). European-style shadow government has degenerated into open resistance and a shady new form of continuing Washington bureaucracy, in which holdovers from the previous administration spy, leak, block, and obstruct the new administration as much as they can.
One final consideration, and another distinctive lesson of history, is that democracy and freedom are not the Siamese twins they are often taken to be. As the story of democracy shows, 51 percent of the people can violate freedom, oppress minorities, and legitimately still call itself democratic. Adolf Hitler, for example, was voted in by a majority of the German people in 1933, just as the terrorist group Hamas was in Palestine in 2006. Supporters of both aristocracy and anarchism, though poles apart in their conclusions, like to point out that an old-fashioned dictator may guarantee peace, stability, and freedom—especially freedom in the private sphere—far better than a freedom-loving democracy that regulates and snoops on its citizens at every turn, as the intelligence services are now capable of doing. Americans today, it is said, are far less free under modern presidents than the American colonists under King George. The point is not to assert equivalency or to defend other forms of government, but to be vigilant about the relationship of freedom and democracy, and to ensure that democracy does not degenerate into the tyranny of the majority led by an elite minority in the name of the majority.
At the end of the day, the questions now asked of democracy in America are mounting. Is representative democracy still possible under modern conditions? Is modernity mocking us, one moment bringing self-rule closer as an aspiration and the next pushing it away as a reality beyond our grasp? Will the constant calls for fully participatory democracy (a.k.a. direct democracy) cause anything but gridlock and chaos? Why is America so often accused of hypocrisy around the world as American intelligence routinely interferes in elections in other countries, while—thanks, for example, to WikiLeaks exposure of political campaigns—Americans can be seen doing their utmost to contradict genuine democracy at home? China’s current term of choice to describe its politics is consultative democracy, a fancy rhetorical fig leaf to cover for Chinese authoritarianism. But is the day coming when calling American democracy the “government of the people, by the people, for the people” strains credulity too?
What would happen if a sufficient number of Americans no longer believed that anything close to Lincoln’s definition of democracy still operated? And if the country remains as deeply divided then as it is today, might more and more Americans become too frustrated, cynical, or angry to want to be part of the process at all, let alone to play by the rules? Or at a deeper, though quieter level, what would happen if a sufficient number of Americans reached the point at which they said they wanted strong government rather than self-government, and saw the two as mutually exclusive—and then reached out for a strong man to carry out their will and put things right?
Plainly, American democracy is now sailing in troubled waters, and Americans should reflect on John Wycliffe and Abraham Lincoln with greater care. For example, consider Yuval Harari’s blithe and breezy argument that politics is now one with all modern life in being ordered by humanist maxims and ruled only by our feelings—with no need for divine authority or cosmic meaning. Do we need to listen to God any longer? No, he declares. “Listen to yourself, be true to yourself, trust yourself, follow your heart, do what feels good.”23 Freedom of choice, or the freedom to follow feelings, is the “authentic inner voice” that has become “the ultimate political authority.”24 It tells modern citizens how to vote just as it tells them how to run their lives without divine authority or cosmic meaning in a thousand areas. “Likes” have simplified and replaced true, false, right, wrong, wise, foolish, and all previous intellectual and moral categories. This advance from the will of God to the will of the people, Harari claims, is what has made modern democracy and what drives our modern world.
Harari is doubly wrong. Inner feelings and freedom of choice did not make democracy and it will not sustain democracy. It will in fact bring down democracy. What in fact made democracy possible in Western history was not humanism, let alone the primacy of feelings, but the Reformation and its rediscoveries of the Bible. As Wycliffe argued rightly, though long before his time, it was the Bible and its teaching about covenant, human dignity, human freedom, and human responsibility that made it possible to achieve “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” It is questionable whether democracy will survive the primacy of inner feelings, and it is a certainty that it will not if the wider truths of the Bible continue to be repudiated decisively.
Harari is correct about one thing. Where did the authority of inner feelings come from? The tale of two revolutions enters again. The source of the primacy of inner feelings is emphatically not 1776. No such idea could be further from John Adams, George Washington, James Madison, and Andrew Hamilton. It comes directly from 1789, and in this case from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel Emile. If anyone wishes to look for life’s rules of conduct, Rousseau wrote, they can be found “in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface. I need only consult myself with regard to what I wish to do; what I feel to be good is good, and what I feel to be bad is bad.”25 What Harari calls Rousseau’s “bible of feelings” has become the bible of modern feelings, and democracy—not to speak of Rousseau’s wife and children, and countless broken modern families after them—is the loser.
Again, will it be said that freedom was too hard a challenge for Americans to overcome? Here, then, is the ninth question on the checklist that Americans must answer constructively: Are you vigilant about the institutional challenges that are crucial to freedom?
What must also never be forgotten is the relationship between democracy and republican liberty. For the founders and for all who love freedom, republican liberty is the goal, and democracy is only the means. To mistake the means for the goal is to put the cart before the horse, and to keep on doing it stubbornly is to pronounce a death sentence on freedom and the republic—“Likes” or no likes.