The limits of democracy

Monday, August 18, 2014

Americans worship democracy to perhaps a greater extent than any other people, as is only appropriate for the citizens of the modern world's first and most crucial democratic experiment.

Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that admiration for democracy, if taken too far, can also jeopardize the very values democracy exists to protect.

Democracy is, after all, merely a method of making political decisions, either by the people as a whole in town-hall meetings or ballot referenda (direct democracy) or by their representatives in legislatures (republicanism). As much as we might praise it in theory and seek to perfect it in practice, self-government is not an end in itself but a means toward various ends. It is simply the least bad (to paraphrase Churchill) approach for fashioning the laws by which we collectively agree to live.

Democracy is thus essentially a process. We seek to expand the franchise for purposes of inclusiveness and treasure the civic spirit that brings us together on Election Day, but none of that tells us what the purpose of the process should be in terms of ultimate values.

Democracy is superior to authoritarianism because, unlike monarchy, fascism or communism, it gives each of us some kind of voice and control over our future, but it is not a value in the same sense that liberty, equality or justice are. When working properly, democracy supports those values, but one can conceive of circumstances in which they could also be profoundly subverted by it.

In short, the practice of democracy doesn't by itself automatically guarantee good political outcomes. Popular sovereignty is to be respected, but this doesn't mean that democratic governments are incapable of doing horrible things. If a majority of voters decided at the ballot box in November that all Americans with red hair should be immediately put to death, the heinous nature of that decision would not be mitigated by the fact that it was democratically arrived at.

Which turns us to the second point--not everything is up for grabs in a democracy, because our inalienable rights should not be subject to the whims of ephemeral majorities. Democratic government is always a reflection of the levels of virtue and integrity found within the electorate, which are in turn subject to the vagaries and imperfections of human nature itself.

Democracy cannot protect us from human fallibility, and if carried too far might even expose us more bluntly to it. Anyone who has ever taken the time to study politics surely recognizes that the "low-information voter" is the primary and persisting defect of any system in which all adults are allowed to have the same number of votes regardless of knowledge, wisdom or stake. To uncritically champion democracy is to assume that the vote of an ignorant person is somehow better than no vote at all. But we all know it isn't.

Democracies, then, are hardly immune to the temptation of demagoguery. In contemporary terms, this most often manifests itself in various forms of corruption, including the buying of votes with other people's money (under the redistributionist logic of the welfare state and its claims of compassion) and the capture of the governmental regulatory apparatus by those it is intended to regulate (crony capitalism). As government grows, both of these sources of corruption cannot help but grow with it.

The cure for the defects of democracy stemming from the defects within the electorate (and human nature) is therefore to keep government limited. To give it specific, necessary tasks and then constrain it in various ways to prevent tyranny, including the tyranny of the majority. Our rights and freedoms can be threatened just as surely by too much democracy as by too little.

A society in which government intrudes into every nook and cranny and in which every aspect of our lives becomes in some way politicized will no longer be a free one, however formally democratic its institutions and contours. Totalitarianism and democracy are not, alas, mutually exclusive concepts; as anyone familiar with Rousseau's notion of the "general will" well knows.

This is why the classical liberal concept of limited government bequeathed to us more than 200 years ago is the only one capable of both constraining the defects of human nature and preserving individual freedom.

And at the heart of that classical liberalism is found two simple, related propositions--that government should be restricted to the performance of only absolutely necessary functions, and that it should never seek to do for the people what they can do for themselves.

Adherence to those principles prevents a tyranny of the masses by both carving out a vast private sphere (civil society) into which government should not intrude and reminding us that even democratic governments that become too large and powerful can threaten the rights and liberties they were originally brought into being to protect.

As Tocqueville noted nearly 180 years ago, servitude "might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people" wherein "every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings because he sees that it is not a person or class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain."

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 08/18/2014