The Free Market 8, no. 5 (May 1990)
The sudden collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe has amazed and elated the West. But what does it mean? If Communism has lost, what has won?
The usual answer is “democracy.” And this is assumed to be not only obvious and unambiguous, but unquestionably good.
True, free elections are finally being held in what used to be tyrannical one-party oligarchies. So far, so good. But we are entitled to doubt that this is the end ofthe matter, let alone “the end of history.”
The mere possession of democracy does not guarantee freedom in every respect, because democracy is only one form of freedom, whose exercise may work to the detriment of other forms. This is recognized by those who fear that the end of Communism may mean the resumption of other evils of the past, long suppressed: violent nationalism, the crushing of minorities, and so forth.
Most of us pay lip service to democracy, but we don’t all agree as to why it is good. We merely agree that it is to be preferred over certain things in our historical memory: oppressive regimes that could be overthrown only with difficulty and danger.
This, I submit, is the real virtue of democracy: it institutionalizes the peaceful overthrow of rulers. It is a principle of succession, and as such is opposed to hereditary succession, appointment within a closed oligarchy, or violence.
To be sure, there have been thoughtful dissenters. Samuel Johnson preferred heredity, on grounds that it made for stability. Being in a sense “accidental,” it aroused, he thought, less envy and rivalry than any attempt to establish rule according to merit. Johnson detested political agitation, and for that reason distrusted popular election. When Boswell suggested that the election of mayors of London might be better than the chancy custom of rotation by seniority, Johnson snapped that “the choice of a rabble” was no better than chance. We need not accept his belief fully—Johnson’s Tory biases are notorious—but we ought to give his reservations some weight. Even good things have their attendant drawbacks.
On one point Johnson was eminently right. “The end of political liberty,” he said, “is private liberty. “ He insisted that the freedoms now associated with democracy, such as freedom of the press, ought to be judged according to whether they tended to promote private liberty. His insistence on this principle sets him apart from those who identify certain specific freedoms with freedom itself.
A good deal of modern liberal opinion equates freedom more with the ballot-box and freedom of expression, say, than with the security of private property that was the great criterion for such diverse 18th-century thinkers as Johnson, Burke, Jefferson, and Madison. Modem liberalism, in fact, regards it as an advance for freedom if wealth is “democratized” by being claimed for “the public sector.” And modern democracy has increasingly become a public competition for what was formerly private money.
The Founding Fathers would have been horrified by the change. Madison himself wrote in The Federalist that the “chief object” of government is “to protect the separate and unequal faculties of acquiring property.” The nominal goal, at least, of modem democratic government is to equalize the possession of wealth. This, as we should have learned by now, can’t be done. But even the attempt to do it renders all wealth insecure, by making it subject to political power.
Democracy in our time has become infected with a version of socialist or “progressive” ideology that is deeply at odds with the traditional ideal of an impersonal rule of law. According to its almost unquestioned idiom, the role of the state is not merely to provide a set of rules to create peaceful and stable conditions of social intercourse; it is to pursue “social justice,” to remedy “historical inequities,” to “eradicate prejudice,” and the like.
The traditional rule of law doesn’t pretend to make large moral and historical judgments. Its province is not merit or desert, let alone collective guilt, but simply legal entitlement. It decides which driver had the right of way, not which was on a more urgent mission or had the more worthy destination; which claimant possessed the deed, not which was more admirable or pathetic. It is the virtue of law, not its defect, that it is immune to the fluctuation of passion or sympathy and uninterested in the personal qualities of litigants.
To abandon this impersonality is to plug the state into controversies it is incompetent to decide, and to require it to intervene in a thousand areas of formerly private life. The attempt to create “racial justice” beyond merely treating race as an irrelevant category for legal purposes, leads to wholesale “compensation” to large categories of people, who mayor may not personally suffer from the putative injustice, at the expense of other large categories of people, most of whom have committed no injustice.
Guilt is not proved but crudely presumed, and a penalty is imposed without trial. What would be intolerable if done to the individual is somehow justified if done to the mass. And in classifying whole categories ,of citizens as accredited victims, the state renders gross historical verdicts that no serious historian would make.
“Historical” wrongs can’t be atoned for. Only specific legal wrongs can be redressed. The federal government itself, in my judgment, illegally interned thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II. If so, the government owes compensation, not to all Japanese-Americans, but to those people whose individual rights it violated, including any who were actually, say, Chinese or Korean.
Not all official victim categories are ethnic. The state now tries to remedy the alleged “wrongs” or meet the alleged “needs” of the poor, the handicapped, the elderly, the homosexuals, and other categories. Politically, there is a simple standard: power. You have to have a lot of clout to be a victim. And in a modem democracy, “rights” become privileges whose actual effect is to diminish, not enlarge, personal liberty.
Powerful and power-seeking constituencies illuminate a basic problem of modern democracy. It is a principle of the rule of law that no man is to be judge in his own cause. Yet democracy invites all citizens to assert their own interests. As long as people merely use the franchise to defend their interests against state encroachment, democracy is working as it should. But what if they use political power for the purpose of urging the state to encroach on the interests of others?
This is what Madison called the problem of “faction.” But what Madison saw as a problem less scrupulous politicians have seen as opportunity. Whereas he hoped that factions, or special interests, would cancel each other out, more recent politicians, especially since the New Deal, have sought to surmount the checks and balances of federalism and to consolidate power by building coalitions of factions into a sort of ruling super-faction.
The use of bribery, graft, and political spoils is as old as politics. All politicians realize that the surest way to amass power is to make as many people as possible dependent on themselves for jobs and favors. The traditional way has been to bestow appointments on political allies. But the number of government jobs is always limited.
It was the genius of Franklin Roosevelt to see that millions of voters could, in effect, be bought with the promise of income from the federal government—which meant, ultimately, with taxes levied on the income of other citizens. He privately boasted that “no damn politician” would ever be able to repeal “my Social Security system.” That system was fraudulent—the sort of scheme that businessmen go to jail for—but it was a tremendous success politically.
More recent federal programs have made tens of millions of Americans recipients of federal money. The money. is collected by an agency that operates outside the restraints of the Constitution and the rule of law. The beneficiaries of the system are jealous of their benefits; the victims—the people who pay for it—are too intimidated and demoralized, and have little incentive, to resist. They face their annual tax inquisition with quietly bitter resignation. In relation to the federal government, the American citizen today is either a dependent or a defendant.
The new system, a virtual abrogation of the original constitutional plan, has destroyed economic privacy. At the same time, voting has come to be regarded as a purely private act. There is something askew in this arrangement. A voter is a sort of public official. He should at least be held morally responsible to his fellow citizens in the use of his franchise. If he votes to enrich himself at their expense, he is no better than a politician who takes a bribe.
In fact, the sort of interest group politics that prevails in the United States today amounts to a system of mass bribery. In the old days an occasional citizen bribed an occasional politician and, if caught, was punished. Nowadays nearly all politicians bribe as many voters as possible, and get elected. Our pundits and even our civics books celebrate this process as the fulfillment of the Framers’ plan, when it is really the defeat of that plan.
Liberal opinion has lately been exercised about the “greed” allegedly unleashed during the Reagan years, meaning the transactions of a few fast operators on Wall Street (many of whom harmed nobody). But the most pervasive form of greed in America today is the greed that seeks to gain other people’s money by electing politicians who will take it on your behalf This form of greed, however, is now called “need.” The word “greed” is reserved for those who would protect their own earnings from the state and its clients.
The triumph of Roosevelt and his successors lay in implicating huge masses of voters in a gigantic conflict of interest. As citizens, we have a moral obligation to vote with strict regard for the public good. As prospective recipients of federal money, however, we are invited to urge the state to rob our fellow citizens on our behalf
Democratic politics has become largely the manipulation of voting blocs; and as Benjamin Ginsberg has brilliantly explained in his book The Captive Public, the federal government keeps generating new constituencies for itself, new blocs demanding new benefits. The civic-minded individual voter gets lost in the gargantuan shuffle among the groups that really count, the powerful forces contending for victim status.
The word “minority” has a halo of pathos about it. But in modem politics, a “minority” is always a bloc to be reckoned with. It has translated its pathos into power, and it dwarfs the unaffiliated individual whose personal income is up for grabs.
George Will has praised Roosevelt for introducing into our national politics an “ethic of common provision.” But this would be a plausible description only if those who received benefits were debarred from voting—a stipulation that would now be denounced as heartless, inhuman, and (of course) undemocratic, though John Stuart Mill, among others, thought it axiomatically necessary to preserve the welfare state from corruption. Without such a stipulation, what we are likely to have is less an “ethic of common provision” than a politics of rapacity.
Democracy is morally legitimate only as long as citizens are delegating to the officers of state the powers that rightly belong to self-government. But democracy can’t bestow on a state power that no government is entitled to. Democracy is powerless to sanctify robbery and bribery.
At the Nuremburg trials the civilized world was appalled to learn how the ostensible rule of law could be perverted into mass murder by bureaucratic delegation. Of course I am speaking of something infinitely less serious. But it is serious enough to notice, and the principle is the same. An enormous state apparatus is routinely committing, on our behalf, acts that would immediately be recognized as criminal if we performed them personally.
The arrogance of the modern state—democratic, Communist, Fascist—lies in its claim to alter even the moral principles that customarily guide human beings in their dealings with each other. Apart from being wrong, this is a futile and dangerous undertaking. It destroys the good faith and social trust on which any society, with any form of government, depends.
The socialists have always spoken hopefully of “building a new society”; the Communists even claimed to have created a “new Soviet man.” But what Mr. Gorbachev has painfully learned is that the real task of a ruler is to build an old society, not by switching all the rules and abolishing traditional understandings, but by preserving the essential components of concord. Building a society is slow work, like establishing a credit rating. The only assurance we have that a thing will last is that it has already lasted.
The euphoria of the moment shouldn’t make us suppose that Communism and modern democracy are polar opposites between which lie all the possibilities of government. ]0 a lesser degree, the democratic state in our time also invades and constricts the area of private life. Unlike the Communist state, it does so at the behest of powerful masses of voters who can’t be overthrown and can hardly be restrained. We should be grateful that their rule is far less onerous than Communism. But this doesn’t mean that their dominion is any sort of ideal.
Even under democracy, modem man has the unpleasant sensation that the state is closing in on him. “There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business,’” C.S. Lewis lamented. “Our whole lives are their business.” Politicians are seen, and see themselves, not merely as “rulers,” Lewis noted, but as “leaders”—a change in terminology he thought deeply significant, implying as it does that the purpose of the state is not to stabilize but to change.
Even our inner lives are not immune, as public schools engage in “consciousness raising”—monitoring and supposedly correcting childrensattitudes on “social” issues; to liberal opinion, the Politically Correct Attitudes seem so self-evident that there is’ no reason not to instill them into every child.
Lewis was sensitive to the dangers posed by enlarging the public sector: “I believe. a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the free~born mind.’ But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an· education not controlled by government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that’s the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and.turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer?”
A good question. Modem democracy has yet to answer it.
