Democracy’s Dangers & Discontents

The danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily. The holders of authority are only too anxious to encourage us to do so. They are so ready to spare us all sort of troubles, except those of obeying and paying! They will say to us: what, in the end, is the aim of your efforts, the motive of your labors, the object of all your hopes? Is it not happiness? Well, leave this happiness to us and we shall give it to you. No, Sirs, we must not leave it to them. No matter how touching such a tender commitment may be, let us ask the authorities to keep within their limits. Let them confine themselves to being just. We shall assume the responsibility of being happy for ourselves.

—Benjamin Constant1

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

—C. S. Lewis2

Tocqueville’s “soft despotism” is still a work in progress, “a possible outcome of the democratic adventure,” as political philosopher Daniel Mahoney writes, and will in the end result from choice, not destiny.3 The United States still possesses the resources of our constitutional structure and US character that make possible a return to our foundational ideas of limited government and citizen self-rule.

Despite all the modifications of the constitutional order, US citizens still have the right to vote every two years. Ballot-box accountability has dangers evident from ancient Athens to today, but nonetheless provides an opportunity for people to change course when the encroaching power of the federal government goes too far, as we witnessed in the 2010 midterm elections that gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives. The ongoing problems with the Affordable Care Act—especially people losing their health insurance or seeing premium costs increasing—may bring home to people the costs of empowering a kinder, gentler Leviathan that “provides for their security [and] foresees and supplies their necessities,” as Tocqueville wrote, at the price of ever greater interference and control over their lives. The midterm congressional elections in November 2014 appear likely to punish many members of Congress who supported this legislation, and perhaps mark a growing sense among the electorate that the progressive Leviathan has overreached, that the entitlement state is fiscally and morally unsustainable, and that it is now time to start returning to the constitutional ideals of limited government and citizen self-rule.

Citizens have another form of resistance against federal encroachments—“Irish democracy.” This idea originated among Irish Republicans in the early twentieth century, who resisted British rule by refusing to cooperate with the authorities in numerous, often trivial ways. Political philosopher James C. Scott defines it as “the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people.”4 An ongoing example is the refusal of young people so far to sign up for the Affordable Care Act, the linchpin of the program, since the healthy young are necessary to finance the sick and old. Millions of the uninsured for whom the program was designed have likewise refused to participate. Fewer than half the 7 million enrollees expected by the end of January 2014 had signed up, and most of those have been older, sicker, and the previously insured. If these trends continue, the Affordable Care Act will be repealed or seriously modified because millions of citizens simply have refused to participate in the program.

Next, for all the erosion of state sovereignty over the last century, state governments still exist and still remain what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1932 called a “laboratory” in which citizens can “try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”5 In recent years states have gone their own way on numerous issues such as gun control, voter identification laws, same-sex marriage, restrictions on abortion, or legalizing marijuana. As professor of politics John Dina writes, states have several resources for resisting federal power. They can decriminalize some behaviors, refuse to participate in federal programs, and pass their own laws inconsistent with federal law or Supreme Court precedents.6 Exploiting these powers and lessening tax burdens and regulations on business allow states to become more successful and illustrate the boons that follow from resisting Leviathan. The worsening economic and social problems in those states, like California and Illinois, which practice the big-government “blue model,” as historian Walter Russell Mead dubs it, and the growing success of those like Texas and Florida following the “red model” of more-limited government power over the economy and social life, illustrate how states can offer attractive alternatives to soft despotism, especially if enough citizens vote with their feet and migrate to successful states.7

These trends do not mean that we will restore completely the Constitution’s vision of limited government, or dismantle completely the entitlement state. But even if we cannot slay Leviathan, we can put it on a diet. We can reenergize at the state level the constitutional federalism that leaves it to citizens and their local and state governments to work out more efficiently than distant, unaccountable technocrats can the issues most important to them and the solutions more cognizant of their variety of passions and interests. And by doing so we will restore a more robust freedom for all people whatever their political persuasion, for they will be free to leave a state whose policies they dislike and live in another.

Another strength of the United States that offers the possibility of resistance is our civil society, the 1.5 million nonprofit organizations, fraternal societies, and other voluntary associations independent of government in which people can pursue common interests, lobby government, and hold politicians and government agencies accountable.8 In addition there are 350,000 churches that also can provide alternatives and mobilize resistance to big government, as the Catholic Church has been doing in fighting back against the Affordable Care Act’s mandate to provide birth control and abortifacients in health care programs offered by the church.9 Participation in such organizations, as political philosopher Robert D. Putnam has documented, has declined from their peak in 1970, and not many today provide the active, face-to-face involvement in community affairs and civic engagement that has traditionally made them schools of self-government and citizen autonomy.10 Yet compared globally, US civil society is still robust, and still offers opportunities for citizens to exercise political power and push back against the encroaching power of the state.

The rise of the Tea Party movement in 2009 illustrates the possibilities provided by civil society. Like-minded citizens angry over high taxes, increasing deficits, excessive government spending, the bailouts of banks and the mortgage industry, and greater government intrusion into the economy began to organize themselves in order to put political pressure on their members of Congress and work to elect representatives who shared their concerns. Technologies like the Internet and cable news made it possible for this amorphous, scattered, localized discontent to quickly connect with others, publicize their concerns across the country, and coalesce into a national organization. A rant against government bailouts on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange by a CNBC business news editor on February 19 was the spark that lit this political tinder, but the accelerant was a video that went viral after it appeared on the Drudge Report, which is visited by nearly two million people a day. Overnight, local and national Tea Party websites were created, and within a few months hundreds of nationwide protest rallies were held. The movement played a big role in shifting the majority in the House of Representatives to the Republicans in 2010, with the Tea Party Caucus in the house comprising sixty-two Republicans in 2011.

The Tea Party has faded somewhat, but still remains a potent political force in national politics, whether for good or ill, depending on one’s political point of view. But the rise of the Tea Party shows that the traditional dangers of democracy such as accountability to the voters, and the new technologies that exacerbate old fears such as demagogues enflaming the masses, can also be instruments for citizens unhappy with the intrusive power of the federal government to organize resistance and effect change.

Finally, the First Amendment guarantee of free and open speech still remains in force. The explosion of raucous protests at various “town hall” meetings held by members of Congress with their constituents in August 2009, most directed against the proposed Affordable Care Act, was a rare moment in US politics of direct confrontations between citizens and their representatives, many of whom would be voted out of office in 2010. Moreover, many of these confrontations were filmed and ended up on YouTube, publicizing the events nationally and illustrating once again how the numerous blogs, websites, social networks, and online magazines have expanded the exercise of the right to political speech to millions of people. Ordinary citizens now can potentially reach a national audience once reserved for the few-score columnists, network news anchors, and magazine writers that three decades ago monopolized and controlled political opinion. Whatever the dangers of this expansion of what antidemocrats like Socrates or Fisher Ames would have considered uninformed opinion arising out of the irrational passions and ignorance of the masses, the existence of these venues for exercising free speech and reaching a large audience offers as well an opportunity for mobilizing resistance to the federal Leviathan.

Most important, millions of people in the United States still possess the qualities of independence, self-reliance, resistance to tyranny, and love of freedom that have always characterized the American character. Millions from all walks of life have not yet changed into the “innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives,” as Tocqueville described the denizens of soft despotism. Like Benjamin Constant, they want government authorities “to keep within their limits” and “confine themselves to being just,” and prefer to “assume the responsibility of being happy” for themselves. And like C. S. Lewis, they rankle at the patronizing arrogance of a government increasingly taking responsibility for their lives and well-being at the cost of their autonomy. They still see such “kindness” as an “intolerable insult” that puts them on “a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will” and “classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” In short, millions of people in the United States of all races and conditions still prefer to stand on their own two feet, to take responsibility for their own lives, and to pursue their happiness according to their own lights. All they ask is to be left alone.

The continuing vigor of the US Constitution and the US character both give us hope that democracy’s dangers and discontents do not have to end in soft despotism, and that we can restore the limited government of the founders and recover US democracy’s “aptitude and strength.”

1. “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns,” 1816, http://www.uark.edu/depts/comminfo/cambridge/ancients.html.

2. “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” 1949; in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI, 1970), 292.

3. The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order (Wilmington, DE, 2010), 18. Emphasis in original.

4. In Two Cheers for Anarchism (Princeton, NJ, 2012), 14.

5. In New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann (1932), http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=285&page=262.

6. “How States Talk Back to Washington and Strengthen American Federalism,” Policy Analysis (December 3, 2013), http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa744_web.pdf.

7. In “The Once and Future Liberalism,” American Prospect (January 24, 2012), http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2012/01/24/the-once-and-future-liberalism.

8. “Quick Facts about Nonprofits,” http://nccs.urban.org/statistics/quickfacts.cfm.

9. “Fact about American Religion,” http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/fastfacts/fast_facts.html#attend.

10. See data in Bowling Alone (New York, 2000), 438–39.