The View From 1776

Democracy means literally government by the people (demos being the Greek word for people).  The question is how the will of the people is to be expressed.

President Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” assuredly did not mean that every citizen should have an equal vote on every political decision.  Nor did it mean, as many appear to believe today, that the economic, social, and foreign policies of the United States should be determined via public opinion, formed by slanderous political ads and thirty-second sound-bite news programs, and sampled by political pollsters.

Like it or not, political experience of the past 2,500 years demonstrates unequivocally that some policy questions require depth of knowledge and experience-formed judgment not available to the average person in the street.  Hence the conservative posture of Edmund Burke in the 1770s when he supported the American colonists in Parliament, asserting that his constituents had elected him to exercise his best judgment in Parliamentary debate, not to vote on the basis of public whim.

In Greece, where the concept of democracy first appeared, at the time of Pericles and Socrates (around 450 BC), democracy was rule by the 501-man Athenian judicial assembly whose members were chosen by lot.  Plato was at pains to condemn the influence of uninformed opinion that could so easily lead the assembly to poor judgment and hasty action (cf. the “Apology"). 

Nor had Aristotle any kind words for Athenian democracy, which he did not list among the best forms of government: “...for by trying all causes whatsoever before the people, who were chosen by lot to determine them, it was necessary to flatter a tyrannical populace who had got this power; which contributed to bring the government to that pure democracy it now is.  Both Ephialtes and Pericles abridged the power of the Areopagites, the latter of whom introduced the method of paying those who attended the courts of justice: and thus every one who aimed at being popular proceeded increasing the power of the people to what we now see it.” (cf. “Politics” Book XII).

Thucydides, the contemporary Athenian military officer and author of the history of the disastrous Peloponnesian War, attributes Athens’s downfall, in considerable part, to the impetuousness and instability of democracy.  This same quality we experience today in the overweening influence of media-formed public opinion as a limitation upon our ability to stick with a protracted death struggle against Islamic jihad. 

In a pure democracy, lust for hedonistic pleasure, the easy way out, always outweighs prudent judgment.

Fully aware of Greek history, the writers of the Constitution in 1787 emphatically rejected pure democracy.  As James Madison expressed it in Federalist No. 10:

“From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.

“Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.”

What the Constitution opted for, instead, was:

“A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. ....The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.”

Again Madison, Federalist No. 48:

“In a democracy, where a multitude of people exercise in person the legislative functions, and are continually exposed, by their incapacity for regular deliberation and concerted measures, to the ambitious intrigues of their executive magistrates, tyranny may well be apprehended, on some favorable emergency, to start up in the same quarter.”

In Federalist No. 63, Hamilton wrote:

“What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard [as the Senate provides in our Constitution] against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock [execution] on one day and statues on the next.”

During the 20th century, our educational system became atheistic and philosophically materialistic.  The understandings of 1787 were deliberately obscured and replaced with the idea that the true nature of our 1776 War of Independence was most fully reflected in the 1789 French Revolution that destroyed the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the Catholic Church.  In France, then in the United States, the concept of democracy became inextricably entwined with hostility toward the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western civilization.

History was rewritten in the 1910s and 20s by Progressive historians such as Vernon L. Parrington ("Main Currents in American Thought") and Charles A. Beard ("An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution").  Their intent was to teach students that the true aim of 1776 had been to make all political decisions subject to universal popular vote so that property and incomes might be redistributed equally to fulfill the then-new and hopeful socialist paradigm.  Our aim, the Progessives taught, should be replacing the indirect election procedures of the Constitution with what Tocqueville called tyranny of the majority, direct popular vote manipulated by the media.

Democracy and freedom in the United States have, since the 1960s, become associated with the ACLU’s love of hedonistic license and its campaign to eradicate all vestiges of religious morality in order to clear the path for socialism.  It is this concept of democratic freedom that animates liberal hostility toward Christians and religious Jews.

Liberal-socialist philosophizers like Michael Walzer define democratic freedom as socialism’s full access of all citizens to all of society’s goods and services.  This goal necessarily requires ever-tightening control of individual economic action to suppress entrepreneurial activity and personal striving for excellence.

It is in this sense that Trotskyite-socialists like the late Irving Howe speak of social democracy, the outgrowth of late-19th and early-20th century Progressivism that metamorphosized in the 1920s and 30s into full-blown advocacy of socialism.  It is also the concept behind the Social Gospel, which converted Christianity into a materialistic doctrine in which the socialist political state replaced God as mankind’s creator and benefactor.

Freedom thus is defined as removal of individual freedom to pursue one’s personal economic goals, because the collective good, as determined by intellectuals, always outweighs individual freedom.  Freedom and social democracy become ivory tower abstractions, conceived on-high by intellectuals and imposed upon an abstraction called humanity, for what the intellectuals believe to be humanity’s good.  Such was the Soviet Union’s rationalization for liquidating tens of millions of its citizens.

Within that liberal-socialist framework, the Bill of Rights is turned upon its head.  What were seen in 1789 as inalienable individual rights against the power of the political state become, instead, the right of the majority to seize individual property and to abrogate individual liberties in the name of “the people.” From this comes judicial activism to “discover” never-before-suspected Constitutional rights to welfare benefits, affirmative action, free health care and housing, and other elements of the socialistic welfare state, along with abortion and same-sex marriage.

This is the image in the minds of liberal Republicans and Democrats when they promise to fight for democratic rights of their constituents. 

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