INTRODUCTION
The Triumph of Democracy and the Antidemocratic Tradition
On Christmas Day 1991, the hammer-and-sickle of the USSR that had flown above the Kremlin for over seven decades was lowered and replaced by the tricolor flag of Russia. In those few moments the Soviet Union, the nuclear-armed communist superpower that had challenged and threatened the liberal democracies of the West, was left in the dustbin of history that its rulers had long predicted would be the fate of liberal democracy. For many, the end of the Cold War, which had been cast as a conflict between democratic freedom and totalitarian servitude, was more than just one nation’s victory over an undemocratic regime and a repudiation of domestic challenges such as socialism or the antidemocratic New Left of the 1960s and ’70s.
The victory over the Soviet Union was also the vindication of liberal democracy and freedom as the “single principle,” as political philosopher Pierre Manent calls it, the universal political system most suited for the modern capitalist societies to which all the world’s people presumably aspire.1 In subsequent decades the expansion of democracies across the globe seemingly confirmed this optimism. According to Freedom House, in 1989, when the Eastern bloc broke from the Soviet Union and began its dissolution, there were 69 electoral democracies. Today, there are 117.2 More recently, many greeted the “Arab Spring,” the uprisings and revolutions that started in December 2010 in the Middle East, as yet another expansion of democracy and a sign of its inevitable triumph.
The disappearance of the last major challenge to democracy and the latter’s apparent global expansion have enhanced democracy’s prestige, giving it what historian Michael Mandelbaum calls the “the best of good names,” a form of government “honored and valued everywhere” with “the same kind of aura that surrounds medicine,” and esteemed as “a high human achievement that improves the lives of those fortunate enough to come into contact with it.”3 This universal reputation has culminated the two-century-long elevation of popular government into the only acceptable form of government, and democracy promotion a noble foreign policy goal, a belief still powerful in the twenty-first century despite the recent evidence that internationally democracy is in retreat, as Joshua Kurlantzick documents.4
Democracy indeed is an astonishing historical phenomenon. That political freedom and citizen equality, liberal democracy’s most important goals, should have arisen at all in the city-states of ancient Greece of the eighth century BC is a remarkable occurrence. The notion that free citizens collectively rule and exercise autonomy over their lives based on laws, offices, and the distribution of power through neutral electoral procedures and public accountability is equally bizarre in the context of the other civilizations of antiquity. More typical was the pyramidal power-structures of empires such as Egypt or Persia, in which kings and tiny elites monopolized force and resources and ruled their societies as personal possessions—societies in which the mass of people were coerced, unfree subjects, in contrast to the self-governing free citizens of the Greek city-states.
Yet democracy—the empowerment of all male citizens regardless of birth or wealth—was just one form of constitutional government invented by the ancient Greeks. And it was the one most criticized and feared even before the fall of Athenian democracy in the late fourth century BC seemingly confirmed democracy’s fatal flaws. Indeed, until the early nineteenth century, as a form of government “democracy” was looked on as dangerously unstable, prone to violent upheaval, class warfare, and the redistribution of property that followed from endowing the mass of people, Alexander Hamilton’s “great beast,” with political power.5
From the perspective of the antidemocratic tradition, today’s idealization of democracy is itself remarkable. This tradition began with the history of the world’s first democracy, ancient Athens. The failures and excesses of the Athenians, particularly their oppressive imperial rule over other Greek cities, and their near-destruction after the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, seemingly validated the dangers of radical popular rule. This criticism set the tone for subsequent political philosophers, giving point to historian J. S. McClelland’s observation, “It could almost be said that political theorizing was invented to show that democracy, the rule of men by themselves, necessarily turns into rule by the mob.” Thus the tradition of Western political theory began with a “profoundly anti-democratic bias.”6 Any admiration of Athens was limited to its artistic, literary, and philosophical achievements, or the lives and deeds of a few historical figures like Solon, Themistocles, and Pericles—and even those heroes at times were tarnished by their involvement in the creation of Athenian democracy. When it came to practical government, for most political theorists the mixed constitutions of Sparta or Rome were considered better models, and for some even monarchy was preferred to democracy.
Despite this long antidemocratic tradition, seldom have today’s champions of democracy acknowledged its complexities and flaws. However, from the ancient Greeks to the framers of the US Constitution, that tradition raised numerous questions. Are the people wise or knowledgeable enough to be entrusted with political power? Can they resist the wiles and manipulations of demagogues? Can elected officials pursue the long-term good of the state when they are accountable to those who put them in office, and who often seek the gratification of their own short-term interests and passions? Do the verbal processes of deliberation and decision-making among a multitude of voters render democracy even more vulnerable to demagoguery? Will not the people use their political power and control of institutions to redistribute property from the rich to the poor? Can a democracy, focused as it is on the short-term interests of the people, and dependent on the decision-making of the many armed with the vote and able to hold politicians accountable, conduct foreign policy effectively? And finally, do not the political freedom and equality of opportunity pursued by democracy inevitably degenerate into appetitive license and radical egalitarianism, and create the demand that governmental power be used to satisfy both?
The American founders, schooled in this tradition, recognized all these dangers and sought to avoid them by creating the mixed government of the Constitution. The power of the people to elect directly their representatives was limited to the House of Representatives. The remaining officials, including senators, the president, and the Supreme Court, were elected indirectly to provide an institutional “filtering” that would temper the interests and passions of individuals and factions in order to find virtuous and wise leaders, and to check the power of the majority over the minority, and the power of elites over the majority. The innate hunger for power in all people, whether taken in the mass or in elites defined by wealth or birth, would then be held in check, their factional interests limiting each other, so that the federal government could not become the instrument of tyranny. And tyranny was the great fear of democracy’s critics going back to the ancient Athenians. Give the masses power, and they will be so corrupted by license and egalitarianism that the first tyrant who offers to restore both will seize power by promising the people to redistribute wealth from the rich.
Starting with the first term of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the democratic sentiments that had been held in check by the Constitution began to seek more scope. The great transformation, however, came with the Progressive movement of the late nineteenth century. The Constitution of checks and balances founded on a mistrust of human nature and its passions and interests was rejected as outmoded given the unprecedented changes wrought by science, technology, and industrialism. The power of the federal government had to increase in order to solve the numerous problems created by these changes. The Constitutional “filters” that helped limit the people from precipitately acting on their self-interests and passions, like the election of senators by state legislatures that was an important expression of federalism and state sovereignty, were weakened or eliminated. As the twentieth century progressed, under the stress of depression and war federal power expanded and created a coercive regulatory regime, an incursion upon citizen autonomy sweetened by the redistribution of property from the well off through the income tax and entitlement transfers.
Since the New Deal legislation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Great Society programs of Lyndon B. Johnson, the Leviathan entitlement state has continued to expand. The republic of the founders has become more democratic, but it is a “Potemkin democracy,” as James Kalb puts it, in which political freedom has become hedonistic license, while self-government and individual autonomy have been diminished by a powerful federal government, transformations made palatable by social welfare transfers.7 This epochal change from the constitutional order of the founders in our own time has been made easier by modern developments that have perpetuated and worsened the flaws of democracy long catalogued by the antidemocratic tradition. As a result, we have created the “softer despotism” prophesized by Alexis de Tocqueville as the great danger of modern democracy.8
Many of democracy’s flaws, from ancient Athens to the modern United States, can be traced to the perennial weaknesses and flaws of human nature that freedom and popular rule unleash. An uncritical view of democracy, then, is a kind of utopianism that ignores the tragic nature of human beings, their propensity to be driven by passions and interests rather than reason and the good. As such it can lead to policies doomed to failure because that destructive capacity of human nature is ignored or idealized. The critics of democracy from Athens to the US founding all started with a tragic view of human nature and its self-destructive passions, selfish interests, and propensity to let both override reason and fact.
Yet as the US government has evolved away from its Republican origins into something closer to Athenian democracy, the dangers and flaws of democracy acknowledged by critics for twenty-five hundred years have become more evident. Nor does it help, as classicist Loren Samons writes, that many people within the US population are confused about the type of government under which they live, a representative republic designed to protect freedom against the excesses of popular rule as well as elite dominance. In contrast, today “we believe we live in a democracy [and] we also have come to act, and to expect our political leaders and system to act, as if our government is a democracy (traditionally defined) and as if the popular will represents a moral ‘good’ in society.”9 And as the government has indeed evolved and institutionalized some of the flaws of direct democracy first analyzed in the history of ancient Athens, this confusion undermines the founders’ architecture of mixed government, federalism, and the balance of power that in part was designed to check the excesses of popular government inevitably given the passions and interests of human nature.
An uncritical promotion of democracy, then, as a self-evident good beyond argument or cavil reflects the modern belief in a universal, rational human nature continually progressing beyond the destructive behaviors and passions that have marred human history and that trouble the world today. History offers little evidence that such improvement has indeed taken place, or that the suspicion of either a minority or a majority monopolizing power that underlay the crafting of the Constitution is no longer necessary. The aim of this book is to recover that forgotten antidemocratic tradition and its tragic vision of human nature, and to show that the dangers and discontents of democracy still afflict us today—not, as Tocqueville wrote, “to render it weak and indolent, but solely to prevent it from abusing its aptitude and strength.”10
1. In Democracy without Nations?, trans. Paul Seaton (Wilmington, DE, 2007), 83.
2. “Freedom in the World 2012,” http://www.freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/inline_images/Electoral%20Democracy%20Numbers%20FIW%201989-2012–Draft_0.pdf.
3. In Democracy’s Good Name (New York, 2007), 96.
4. In Democracy in Retreat (New Haven, CT, and London, 2013).
5. Attributed to Hamilton in The Memoirs of Theophilus Parsons (1859); in Henry Adams, History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, abr. and ed. Ernest Samuels (Chicago and London, 1967), 65.
6. In The Crowd and the Mob (London and Boston, 1989), 1–2.
7. James Kalb, The Tyranny of Liberalism (Wilmington, DE, 2008), 46.
8. Democracy in America, ed. Philip Bradley, rev. Frances Bowen (New York, 1994), vol. 2, 316.
9. What’s Wrong with Democracy? (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2004), 5.
10. Democracy in America, vol. 2, 323.