How the Hell did we ever end up with this damn democracy?
Upon the adjournment of the Constitutional Convention, as its members filed out of Independence Hall, a woman is said to have approached Dr. Benjamin Franklin and asked, 'What kind of government have you given us?" Franklin famously replied, "A republic, if you can keep it."
It's important to note that whether Franklin also ever said, as is often attributed to him but contested by some, "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting over what to have for dinner," the Framers never intended for the United States to be a democracy- that much is incontrovertible. I won't waste my time offering an elaborate proof, but will offer the structure of our Constitution, with its numerous checks against the power of the majority and an emphasis on state's rights and individual rights (which trump the will of the majority) as a simple one. The Federalist Papers and numerous other writings from the Founding Fathers also attest to their opposition to democracy.
The Framers understood that true democracy is nothing more than a government-sanctioned lynch mob. Under a true democracy "the people" might hang, incarcerate, confiscate the wealth of, or otherwise abuse or infringe upon any individual or group of individuals if 50.1% of the (voting) population could be persuaded to endorse such violations. That the need or good of the "collective" threatens the rights of the individual is a no-brainer, and the Framers understood that democracy was inherently a threat to individual liberty- the abrogation of which they considered to be inherently 'sinful.'
Equally significant to this concept of democracy as an inherent threat to liberty is that even proponents of Marxism and Socialism have acknowledged its truth, and advocated for it as such. V.I. Lenin said that, "Democracy and Socialism are inseparable." Karl Marx wrote, "...that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class, to establish democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest by degrees all capital from the bourgeoisie; to centralize all of the instruments of production in the hands of the state."
We might prove something to be true not only by offering evidence of its truth, but also by offering evidence that its converse is false; similarly it is proved that democracy is antithetical to liberty because opponents of liberty advocate democracy and advocates of liberty oppose democracy- quod erat demonstratum.
What is extraordinary about our Constitution and our Republic is that they are based upon a a philosophy, a fundamental understanding of human nature and the fairest way to govern men. This philosophy, and the principles and laws inherent to our system of government do not change, much as human nature does not vastly change, even over centuries, except when manipulated by the coercion of others (particularly the State).
"Progressives" don't want to hear that because they are too busy trying to determine how to govern men they consider too stupid to govern themselves, but there are timeless principles which undergird our REPUBLIC, and threats posed by democracy which have not changed for centuries. I offer as proof an excerpt from one of the 20th Century's greatest philosophers, whose thinly-veiled predictions for the future of democracy, particularly as it pertains to public education, while penned a half-century ago, read as contemporary observations of our own American democracy today:
"(O)ur leaders contrived to call into full life an element which had been implicit in the movement from its earliest days. Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn't know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side), we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a toolshed in his own garden...
Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won't. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether "democratic behaviour" means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.
You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal...As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.
The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I'm as good as you.
The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid, resounding lie. I don't mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says I'm as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.
And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: "Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I -- it must be a vile, upstage, la-di-da affectation. Here's a fellow who says he doesn't like hot dogs -- thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here's a man who hasn't turned on the jukebox -- he's one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they'd be like me. They've no business to be different. It's undemocratic."
...What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.
In that promising land the spirit of I’m as good as you has already begun something more than a generally social influence. It begins to work itself into their educational system. How far its operations there have gone at the present moment, I should not like to say with certainty. Nor does it matter. Once you have grasped the tendency, you can easily predict its future developments; especially as we ourselves will play our part in the developing. The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.” These differences between pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences – must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time. Let, them, for example, make mud pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have...“parity of esteem.” An even more drastic scheme is not possible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma -- Beelzebub, what a useful word! – by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.
In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I’m as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers – or should I say, nurses? – will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us.
Of course, this would not follow unless all education became state education. But it will. That is part of the same movement. Penal taxes, designed for that purpose, are liquidating the Middle Class, the class who were prepared to save and spend and make sacrifices in order to have their children privately educated. The removal of this class, besides linking up with the abolition of education, is, fortunately, an inevitable effect of the spirit that says I’m as good as you. This was, after all, the social group which gave to the humans the overwhelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, jurists, and administrators. If ever there were a bunch of stalks that needed their tops knocked off, it was surely they. As an English politician remarked not long ago, “A democracy does not want great men.”
...what we must realize is that “democracy” in the diabolical sense (I’m as good as you, Being Like Folks, Togetherness) is the fittest instrument we could possibly have for extirpating political democracies from the face of the earth.
For “democracy” or the “democratic spirit” (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first sign of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be. For when such a nation meets in conflict a nation where children have been made to work at school, where talent is placed in high posts, and where the ignorant mass are allowed no say at all in public affairs, only one result is possible...
It is our function to encourage the behaviour, the manners, the whole attitude of mind, which democracies naturally like and enjoy, because these are the very things which, if unchecked, will destroy democracy."
This was written 50 years ago, in 1959, by C.S. Lewis. It is an excerpt from an article, Screwtape Proposes a Toast, which was an article written for an American magazine and reprised the role of Screwtape (from his book The Screwtape Letters), a demon who advises less experienced demons as to how best to draw humans into sin. Like Ayn Rand, like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Linbcoln, it wasn't hard for Lewis to understand the implications of democracy.
