http://www.thedailybell.com/1654/Tibor-Machan-Reexamining-Democracy.html
Reexamining Democracy
Dr. Tibor Machan
Over the last several decades of American political life the idea of liberty
has taken a back seat to that of democracy. Liberty involves human beings
governing themselves, being sovereign citizens, while democracy is a method by
which decisions are reached within groups. In a just society it is liberty that
is primary – the entire point of law is to secure liberty for everyone, to make
sure that the rights of individuals to their lives, liberty and pursuit of
happiness is protected from any human agent bent on violating them. Democracy
is but a byproduct of liberty. Because we are all supposed to be free to govern
ourselves, whenever some issue of public policy faces the citizenry, they are
all entitled to take part. Democratic government rests, in a free society, on
the right of every individual to take whatever actions are needed to influence
public policy.
Because freedom or liberty is primary, the scope of public policy and, thus, of
democracy in a just society is strictly limited. The reason is that free men
and women may not be intruded on even if a majority of their fellows would
decide to do so. If one is free, which means a self-governing person, then even
the majority of ones fellows lacks the authority to take over ones governance
without ones consent. This is what the US Declaration of Independence means
when it mentions that government derives its just powers from the consent of
the governed. In a just society no one loses his or her authority for
self-government without giving it up as a matter of choice. No one gets to
operate on you, no matter how wise and competent, without your giving your
consent, and the same is true, in a just system, about imposing duties and
obligations on people. They must agree to this. If they do not, they aren't to
be ordered about at all. The only apparent
exception is when it comes to laws that protect everyone's rights. One may
indeed be ordered not to kill, rob, rape, burglarize, and assault other
persons, even if one fails to consent to this. And when the legal authorities
do this job of protecting individual rights, they may order one to abstain from
all such aggressive actions.
However, this doesn't actually involve intruding on people, only being duly
authorized, via the consent of the governed, to protect everyone from
intrusions. It is along these lines that the idea of limited government – or
legal authority – arises: it may only act to protect rights, to impose the laws
that achieve that goal, nothing more. Again, as the Declaration of Independence
notes, it is to secure our rights that governments are instituted, not for any
other purpose. Of course, this idea of limited government hardly figures into
considerations of public policy in the USA or elsewhere. We have never actually
confined government to this clearly limited, just purpose. It has always gone
beyond that and today its scope is nearly totalitarian (albeit somewhat
"permissive"), the very opposite of being limited. But there is no doubt that
even though liberty has been nearly forgotten as an ideal of just government in
America as well as elsewhere,
democracy does remain something of an operational ideal. In this way liberty
has been curtailed tremendously, mainly to the minor sphere of everyone having
a right to take part in public decision-making. Whereas the original classical
liberal idea is that we are free in all realms and democracy concerns mainly
who will administer a system of laws that are required to protect our liberty,
the corrupt version of this idea is that democracy addresses everything in our
lives and the only liberty we have left is to take part in the decision-making
about whatever is taken to be a so called "public" matter.
One way this is clearly evident is how many of the top universities in the USA
construe public administration to be a topic having to do primarily with the
way democracy works. Indeed, after the demise of the Soviet Union, even though
the major issue should have been the establishment and maintenance of a regime
of individual liberty, the experts in academe who write and teach the rest of
the world about public administration are nearly all focused on democracy, not
on liberty.
For example, the courses at America's premier public administration graduate
school, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, are
mainly focused on problems of democracy. At this institution nearly 40 percent
of the students attending come from 75 foreign countries, many of them from
those that used to be under Soviet rule, and what they focus on in nearly all
their courses is democracy, not liberty. Assignments in these courses tend all
to raise problems about implementing democratic governance and leave the issue
of how individual liberty should be secured as practically irrelevant. Or, to
put it more precisely, the liberty, or human right, that is of interest in most
of these courses is the liberty to take part in democratic decision-making.
("Human rights" has come to refer in most of these course and their texts
mainly to the right to vote and to take part in the political process!)
Yes, of course, that is a bit of genuine liberty that many of the people of the
world have never enjoyed, so for them it is a significant matter, to be sure.
But it is clearly not the liberty that the Declaration of Independence mentions
when it affirms that all of us are equal in having unalienable rights to our
lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness. The Declaration speaks of a very wide
scope of individual liberty, while the premier public administration school of
America teaches, at least by implication, that the only liberty of any
importance is the liberty to take part in public policy determination.
This, I submit, is a travesty. Once democracy is treated as the premier public
value, with individual liberty cast to the side except as far as the
citizenry's freedom to take part in democratic decision-making, the scope of
government is no longer limited in principle or in practice. Nearly anything
can become a public policy issue, so long as some measure of democracy is
involved in reaching decisions about it. And that, in fact, turns out to be a
serious threat to democracy itself. Because when democracy trumps liberty,
democracy can destroy itself, and the law could permit the democratically
reached destruction of democracy itself!
That is just what happened in the Weimar Republic, where a democratic election
put Hitler in power and destroyed democracy. If you ever wonder why it is that
public forums, including the Sunday TV magazine programs, the Op Ed pages of
most newspapers, the feature articles of most magazines do not discuss human
liberty but fret mostly about democracy, this is the reason: the major
educational institutions tend not to care about liberty at all and have
substituted a very limited version of it, namely, democracy, as their primary
concern. Once that is accomplished, individual liberty becomes defenseless.
Indeed, democracy is just as capable of being totalitarian as is a
dictatorship, only with democracy it seems less clearly unjust, given that this
little bit of liberty is still in tact, namely, to take part in the vote. (A
little of this has come to be discussed recently on some programs because of
Harvard educated Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria's recent book,
The Future of Freedom [W. W. Norton, 2003], which is subtitled "illiberal
democracy at home and abroad." Sadly Zakaria seems to have abandoned his
concerns about the matter and is now mostly taking part in discussions about
how the country ought to be managed, like a firm.) True enough, democratic
totalitarianism appears more benign than a system under the direction of a
tyrant but, as In Venezuela, unrestrained democracy can give rise to the most
belligerent version of dictatorship since Hitler's Third Reich. The proper
approach to governance is to make all of it focus primarily on
protecting the rights of the citizens to their lives, liberty and property.
This extension of the idea of the body or security guard is the best model for
how government should work and how their work should be appraised. Free men and
women require this so as to live their lives by their own judgment and in
voluntary cooperation with their fellow citizens instead of being regimented by
some group of "leaders" who view themselves as knowledgeable about the public
interest.
In caring about democracy mainly or only, the more robust liberty that everyone
is entitled to is neglected. The result is not all that different from how
feudal orders behave.
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"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of
opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of
increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all
its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” - Harry S.
Truman
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations,
or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and
evidence." - John Adams
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually
come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State
can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences
of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its
powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and
thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one
fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a
few points and repeat them over and over.”
“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”
— Paul Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933
to 1945
"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless
minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." - Samuel Adams
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by
evil men." - Plato
"Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not." -
Thomas Jefferson
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