The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (42 page)

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DEMOCRACY AND UNITY

I
n 1928, then New York governor Al Smith famously said, “All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.”

This, of course, is high-proof nonsense. Where else do we talk this way? All the ills of gluttony can be cured by more eating? All the ills of pollution can be cured by more pollution? All the ills of disco can be cured with more disco? Aha, but that’s not fair. Those are all bad things, and democracy is a good thing, a wonderful thing, a sacred thing. And, indeed, it is all that (though reasonable people might argue about the sacred part).

But there’s a reason why we say you can have too much of a good thing. Love may be the only exception, and even there there are caveats. Too much unrequited love is an invitation to sorrow and, in certain instances, an excuse to pay through the nose for a telescope-lensed camera to spy on the subject of your affections. More seriously, while it’s difficult to imagine a man could have too much love for his wife or a mother for her child, it is obvious that the phrase “love is all you need” is demonstrably wrong. You also need food, clothing, and shelter. You need marketable skills, a good work ethic, and a sense of responsibility. The tagline for the film
I Am Sam
was “Love is all you need.” The story was about a severely mentally disabled man who insisted he could raise his daughter because,
while he couldn’t navigate daily life, he loved his daughter so very much. It was a saccharine but ultimately outrageous message to send. Many terrible fathers rotting in prison love their children very much. The reason they are in prison and are bad fathers is that they needed a good deal more than love to successfully honor their obligations as fathers and as citizens.

Anyway, something similar goes for democracy. It is a necessary but not sufficient ingredient of the good society. And let us remember that the perfect society—Heaven—is an absolute dictatorship where God rules absolutely. In fact, the best form of government is, in theory, enlightened dictatorship. Again theoretically, a dictatorship can protect freedom of speech, association, etc., better than any other institution. In practice, however, it doesn’t work like that at all. Even if you could come up with a perfect dictator—what my ancestors called “the good czar”—there’s no way to make sure such an institution would last beyond a single lifetime. This is true for many reasons, but one of the most overlooked is that the power we would be willing to bequeath to an infinitely just, wise, and kind ruler is precisely the power that would make it impossible to remove an evil, cruel, or dumb one. History shows that even halfway decent absolute rulers tend to be replaced by pretty crappy ones. The most decent dictators recognize the problem and set it up so that they are the last dictators. That’s essentially what Franco and Pinochet did, yet they were still men whose sins and crimes make it quite unlikely that their souls will have an easy time of it in the hereafter.

A more accurate formulation of Smith’s sentiment would be that more democracy is the cure to all the ills that come from a lack of democracy. Meanwhile, too much democracy makes all the ills of democracy worse. The same is true for all the ingredients of a healthy civilization. More order is a remedy for the ills of too much disorder. More freedom is a remedy for the ills of too little freedom. Food, after all, cures starvation. But food does not cure spontaneous human combustion or prevent meteor strikes. More democracy will not solve problems that are caused by either too much democracy or that simply have nothing to do with it. Simply put, there’s such a thing as too much democracy.

A pure democracy, one unalloyed by republican institutions and virtues, is merely a populist dystopia where 51 percent of the people get to pee
in the cornflakes of 49 percent of the people. A society without courts, codes, and laws is government by mob rule, the purest form of pure democracy. Even societies with laws and courts that put all authority and power in the hands of the elected can be despotic. As Thomas Jefferson put it in his
Notes on the State of Virginia
(quoted at length in
Federalist
48), concentrating all of the powers of government in the hands of a legislature does not insulate against the dangers of tyranny. Rather, to do so “is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation, that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one. Let those who doubt it, turn their eyes on the republic of Venice.”
¹

All too often we throw the cheap paint of democracy over the edifice of despotism and think no one will notice the whitewash. The United Nations General Assembly is a mosh pit of “world leaders.” Some so-called leaders represent decent and honest democratic regimes. Others are merely the bureaucratic lickspittles and yes-men of organized barbarisms and tin-pot tyrannies. “The world voted” to condemn Israel, they say, after the roll was called in the United Nations. The world did no such thing.

But even if it did, even if the UN really was the “parliament of man,” so what? Voting isn’t alchemy; it cannot transform the leaden dross of wrong into the gold of right. If the world votes on the issue of whether two plus two is four, the fact that the sum is four will not be changed if 51 percent say it is five. In America we have a Bill of Rights precisely to protect us from the tyranny of majorities. The simple fact is that the Southern slave-holding states were not merely tyrannies; they were
democratic
tyrannies.
^*
Even if blacks enjoyed the vote in all likelihood they would have been outvoted on the issue of slavery in most of the slave states. The results of that vote would not have changed the moral equities of the issue one iota. That a certain despotism is democratic is as relevant as the color of a bullwhip lashing your back.

Madison likewise understood that the majority was no less apt to impose tyranny from below:

Since
the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. On a candid examination of history we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which in republics, have more frequently than any other cause produced despotism. If we go over the whole history of the ancient and modern republics, we shall find their destruction to have generally resulted from those causes.
²

This is why Madison, Jefferson, and their colleagues established a system of government that pitted faction against faction, institution against institution.
The Federalist Papers
—the greatest instruction manual ever written for democratic, republican government—is one extended essay on this point. We have separation of powers, checks and balances, and divided government from the federal level down to the county seat so as to divide, dilute, and diminish power in any one place.

(Lost on many conservatives is the fact that the two core stanchions undergirding the American system are quite simply
unnatural
. Democracy is not natural. Capitalism is not natural. Both depend on and exploit natural phenomena—self-interest, the yearning for respect—just as a house depends on stone, wood, and metal. But you won’t find a naturally occurring house in the woods, will you? Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for peacefully universalizing prosperity, but it doesn’t feel like it because it is unnatural. Democracy is the noblest of experiments; you will be hard-pressed to find a tribe putting everything up for a vote as a matter of custom and ritual, never mind binding law.)

Very few people on the left or right disagree with this when their most treasured liberties are at risk. Progressives as a group do not believe that the majority can vote to deny gays the right to marry and conservatives as a group do not believe that the majority can vote to erase the right to bear arms.

Still, both left and right often fail to appreciate the scope of the Founders’ wisdom. Anyone who’s taken high school civics understands that the Constitution limits what the government can do. But too many do not
recognize that by extension it necessarily limits what
the people
can do. We live in a representative system, but even a government that faithfully represents the wishes of the people cannot do what the people want if what the people want is unconstitutional.

At least in theory.

In practice the government has often done wrong because “the people” wanted to do wrong. The government did wrong and violated the Constitution (not always the same thing) repeatedly under Woodrow Wilson and FDR, in large part because the people either wanted it to or allowed it to. The Supreme Court overturned much of the early New Deal as unconstitutional and would have continued to had Franklin Roosevelt not scandalously bullied the Court into reversing itself in the famous “switch in time that saved nine.”

There is a tendency in American politics to argue that the people cannot be wrong simply because the people are sovereign. But sovereigns—be they plural or singular—can always be wrong.

This is a point of considerable confusion. Power worship muddies the mind of democrats and autocrats alike. There’s a vast swath of political discourse that begins and ends with the proposition that if the people are for it, it must be right. We usually call the extreme forms of this mind-set populism. “The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver,” announced William Jennings Bryan. “I will look up the arguments later.” Or as Willie Stark says to the nurturing crowd in
All the King’s Men
: “Your will is my strength. Your need is my justice.”
³

Populism is such a seductive intoxicant that it often infects mainstream political analysis. Liberal strategists have convinced themselves that if we just got everyone to vote, the people would force through policies held at bay by our antiquated and undemocratic system. Hence the various schemes to return the franchise to felons, lower the voting age, or let people vote online. Not surprisingly, these efforts are invariably aimed at constituencies they have good reason to believe will vote Democratic. What it says about the Democratic Party that boosting the number of ballots of the criminal, the less educated, and the lazy will deliver liberal policy victories is something to ponder. But the simple fact is that if everyone voted the results of elections would not change very much, if at all. This has been the record of past sweeping expansions of the franchise to women
and eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds (the record of giving the franchise to blacks is more mixed).

But at a broader level this obsession with expanding democracy by making it easier to vote is deeply unhealthy. Making voting easier is synonymous with making voting cheaper. Do we really think the level of democratic discourse would be greatly improved if people who could not otherwise be bothered to vote are afforded the opportunity to do so on their iPhones during a commercial break of
Jersey Shore
? In 2008 Arizona considered a proposal to turn your vote receipt into a lottery ticket on the assumption that what our politics desperately needs is more input from the crowds lining up to play Keno, or to buy Mega Millions tickets.

As discussed elsewhere in this book, the reason democratic capitalism has always been beset on all sides by movements eager to “move past” or “transcend” it is that, like water seeking its own level, humans have an innate desire to return to form. We hang rationalizations and extravagant theories on our natural human impulse to live tribally and call it a new idea. We reify our yearning for the security of family and tribe. All of the -isms opposed to democratic capitalism are in this sense reactionary, because they seek to restore the Old Order of Man written in our genes. Speaking outside the limiting jargon of political science, the only true revolution in the history of mankind is the Anglo-American revolution. And until we find a way to rewrite our programming at the genetic level, that revolution will remain a fragile one. We pedal forward, constantly, or we fall.

It is because of this elemental fact of the human condition that the most appealing clichés are the ones that cut through our reasoning minds and fire up our inner tribesman. The principle is easy enough to understand. If I shout “fire,” your thinking mind is likely to put itself on pause and let the animal brain take over. Firefighters must be trained to suppress their natural fears. Soldiers must be trained not to let their natural instincts conquer them.

But not all appeals are quite so primal. Woodrow Wilson in his famous “Leaders of Men” essay explained that a “true leader” must play on men’s passions, not their intellects. “[O]nly a very gross substance of concrete conception can make any impression on the minds of the masses,” Wilson wrote.

“[T]hey must
get their ideas very absolutely put, and are much readier to receive a half truth which they can understand than a whole truth which has too many sides to be seen all at once,” Wilson explained. “The competent leader of men cares little for the internal niceties of other people’s characters: he cares much-everything for the external uses to which they may be put.… He supplies the power; others supply only the materials upon which that power operates.… It is the power which dictates, dominates; the materials yield. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.” Wilson, a craven lover of power for its own sake, is making the intellectual case for demagoguery.
⁴

Cynical though it may be, Wilson was nonetheless onto a fundamental truth. What rouses the crowd is not dispassionate analysis and pertinent data. Appeals to our animal brain are what get people to rise to their feet and do the bidding of “leaders of men.” And while my loathing of Wilson should be evident, it must be pointed out that this is in no way a uniquely evil insight. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches spoke to our ideals, but also to our deepest selves. Football coaches do not explain in dry statistics why it would be good to win the game. When officers extract the last full measure of devotion from their troops, they don’t do so with PowerPoint presentations alone. In short, it is what we do with these appeals that matters. This illuminates the great danger in the ubiquitous appeals to unity in our politics. How many speeches have we heard explaining that there’s nothing we can’t do if we all stick together? The problem with such appeals is that they tend to skip over the fact that people disagree, and that such dissent is valid. Like the No Labelers, unity worshippers want to ignore this inconvenient truth and hector the dissenter to drop his objections and fall in line. The upshot of countless liberal arguments is that unity is wonderful, so you should gladly open your wallets and give the government more money.