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The Danger of Democracy
By Thinking Man | November 4, 2008
“Statues of Liberty” — oil painting by Beth Haynes
The United States is not a democracy, nor was it ever intended to be.
The United States is, as Benjamin Franklin put it, a Constitutional Republic.
The word “democracy” does not appear one time in either the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence – and for very good reasons:
Democracy means majority rule.
Your life and your property, however, are inalienable and thus never subject to the whims of the majority.
Your life and your property, in other words, are yours absolutely — and that includes your money, which you produce through your labor — all democratic-socialistic, welfare-statist propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding.
Your life and your property — money, never forget, is property, and in this country you are allowed to grow as filthy rich as you can, and no one is legally entitled to your wealth — are not in any way, or at any time, ever subject to vote.
The Constitutional framers did not believe in unlimited majority rule on any fundamental issue, because they did not believe that the rights of even a single individual, let alone a whole race of people, could or should be at the mercy of the majority.
Indeed, democracy is known also as “the tyranny of the majority.”
As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers:
“[Under democracy] there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.”
And John Adams accurately recognized that democracies “merely grant revocable rights to citizens depending on the whims of the masses, while a republic exists to secure and protect pre-existing rights.”
Democracy was intended to have only a minor role in our government:
What some have called the “selection of personnel,” which refers to electing officials whose job is to implement the Constitutional principles; but those principles – specifically, the principle of individual rights – are fixed into place and not ever subject to vote.
Nor was the selection of personnel ever meant to be a primary issue, as it’s become today, as we’ve just so dramatically witnessed.
The fact that it has become so — when, for example, it is decided by vote if you may open your liquor store on Sunday, or when it is decided by vote if you can allow people to smoke in your place of business, or when certain politicians assume they can decide by vote how much of your money they expropriate and redistribute — tells you how little our politicians understand the nature of inalienable rights, and how far we’ve come from the original concept.
More frighteningly: it tells you how thoroughly the public does not understand it.
The public has now officially demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that their minds can be easily controlled by empty rhetoric.
“Inalienable” literally means “that which cannot be taken away or transferred” — not by vote, not by force, not by anyone.
Right are inalienable in this sense:
Persons unaccustomed to attach exact meanings to words will say that the fact that a man may be unjustly executed or imprisoned negates this proposition [of inalienable rights]. It does not. The right is with the victim nonetheless; and very literally it cannot be alienated, for alienated means passing into the possession of another. One man cannot enjoy either the life or liberty of another. If he kills ten men he will not thereby live ten lives or ten times as long; nor is he more free if he puts another man in prison. Rights are by definition inalienable: only privileges can be transferred. Even the right to own property cannot be alienated or transferred, though a given item of property can be. If one man’s rights are infringed, no other man obtains them; on the contrary, all men are thereby threatened with a similar injury (Isabel Paterson, God of the Machine, 1943).
Incontrovertibly, the biggest threat facing this country now, as it has been for some time, is the overwhelming political-economic ignorance not only of our politicians but of the people who vote them in. The vote has now become a weapon of destruction — specifically, the destruction of your and my inalienable right to our own life and property.
If you have any doubts about this, observe how the term “individual rights” — which is the cornerstone of this country — has all but vanished from political discourse.
Observe how Barack Obama explicitly rejects individual rights — “Just because you have an individual right does not mean that state or local government can’t constrain the exercise of that right” (Barack Obama, 2008, Philidelphia primary debate) — in favor of so-called positive rights, which are in fact a complete negation of rights, by definition, since your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin. There is no such thing as a positive right. It is a literal contradiction in terms.
Observe how not one in one thousand people can actually define “rights.”
Observe how it’s become commonly accepted among U.S. citizens that government bureaucrats do have legal entitlement to your money and your other property — the only question is how much.
Observe the sheer number of voters — millions upon millions — who do not have even the most rudimentary grasp of the most fundamental political-economic principles at issue here: things such as “freedom,” “redistribution of wealth,” “rights,” “capitalism,” “socialism,” “welfare-statism,” “free markets,” and so on.
These are terms that over 98 percent of surveyed voters admittedly had no conception of whatsoever — which, however, did not prevent them from shouting upon the street corners and going door-to-door telling us who we must vote for.
Please reread that paragraph.
Now observe the political ideologies of the candidates that these same voters voted in.
If you are not horrified by this, I promise that you should be.
That so many millions have been willing to just overlook Barack Obama’s thirty-year association with the despicable Jeremiah Wright, calling him his “friend, mentor, and member of the family”; that so many millions are willing to just overlook Obama’s deep ties with nationalism, Stokely Charmichael, William Ayers (who may or may not have been the ghostwriter of Obama’s memoirs), and so many other overtly neo-Marxist, anti-American people and groups; that so many millions are willing to just overlook Barack Obama’s explicit racism — racism that goes far beyond his “My grandmother was a typical white person” remark; that so many millions are willing to overlook all the proven lies — is, if any of you have ever wondered, exactly how mass hysteria builds and builds, until it takes hold in societies and makes possible people like Mussolini: this is precisely how — what we’ve just witnessed, in the election of Barack Obama as the United States President.
The Obama hysteria that has swept across this country like a plague without any reference or concern whatsoever for the actual content of his ethical-political-economic ideology — this, reader, is the stuff of nightmares.
The next time you overhear twenty-year-old kids in coffee shops talking about how they’re voting for this particular candidate because of his “belief in not killing”; or gang-bangers who are voting for that particular candidate because of something as superficial and as meaningless as skin color; or high school seniors who are voting for this particular candidate because “it’s time for change,” you may at that point be certain that the framers of the United States Constitution are spinning in their graves; they’re gasping: because America has indeed fallen under the tyranny of the masses, via majority rule, just as they had feared, and these masses have not the slightest inkling what sort of political-economic catastrophe they’re unleashing. To wit:
The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society…. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution … that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted, and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court-focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change…. I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through courts… The Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day … The Framers had that same blind spot … the fundamental flaw of this country.
– Barack Obama
Stumble it!
Topics: Constitution, Democracy, Founding Fathers, Government, Individual rights, Political freedom |
November 10th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Thanks for the tribute and the link.
I like the Paterson quote. Been meaning to read her book for a long while, so I finally ordered a copy.
Here’s a thought on democracy/majority rule:
Why do we have a system of government that supports voting at all? The underlying principle is the need to obtain a person’s consent, and underlying that is the individual’s right to his own life. That is what gives rise to the need of a government “of the people and by the people.”
It is within this fundamental principle of the right to one’s own life that justification for the mechanism of voting arises. If there is no right to life, voting has no moral meaning.
One type of voting is to use a simple majority. Another is a super-majority. But because majority rule of any type arises from an individual’s right to life, it is limited to functioning within the constraints of that right (and within its corollaries, the rights to liberty and property.)
There is no “right” to violate the right to life. A majority vote which violates the fundamental moral principles upon which it rests, destroys the very rationale for its existence. This is what makes “democracy” illegitimate.
Respectfully,
Beth
November 10th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Wow. Fantastic comment, Beth. Thank you. To address your question, there are indeed a number of pro laissez-faire folks out there who don’t believe in democracy, not in any amount — the most extreme examples of whom are the anarchocapitalists, so-called. That’s one of the main things, I think, that finally distinguishes the anarchocapitalist from the Marxist anarchist: their stance on majority rule, which, in theory — and only in theory, since, as you know, the state has never actually withered away, and never will — the Marxist doctrine hinges upon, in the end.
It all comes down to the question of organization and implementation, don’t you think? Someone, after all, must arbitrate, interpret, enforce, and protect against foreign and domestic invaders — that is, as long as the potential for disagreement and the threat of force exists among humans (i.e. always). I do, for the record, believe that a great deal of law enforcement and arbitration can be more efficiently handled by the free market — and furthermore I think that the undeniable success of private security companies, private detectives, rent-a-cops, and so on, all testify to this. But there has ultimately got to be a final arbiter; in addition to that, weapons of mass destruction in the hands of private defense firms would, in essence, make those defense firms “the government,” but without safeguards to check that awesome power.
How best to institute the legal protection of each person’s inalienable negative right to life and property is a fairly complex question (though not nearly as complex as the left would have us believe). The real point here, though, is that the Constitutional framers thought “limited democracy” the best way to “select personnel.” And this leviathan-sized state apparatus that Barack Obama explicitly advocates is about as far from a Constitutional Republic with a limited democracy as it’s humanly possible to get, more or less.
To quickly address Ms. Isabel Paterson, just as a kind of forewarning, I thought her book God of the Machine was not an easy read at all. It wasn’t nearly as accessible as I had hoped. I thought it lacked unity, felt disjointed, or tacked together, and it wasn’t for me an entirely pleasurable read. And yet there are isolated passages all throughout the book that really get it, and those alone make it worthwhile. I frequently go back to those passages. Just be prepared for a drier reading experience than you had perhaps hoped for.
Thank you so much for dropping by. And thank you again for permission to post your gorgeous painting.
November 14th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Excellent post expanding the same thought I did on my blog. Thanks for the link.(I limit my posts to 10 minutes of writing. I’m sure your in-depth post took longer.)
I totally agree with you regarding Paterson’s God of the Machine. It took me a while to get used to her writing style, but my copy of the book is now filled with highlighted passages that are truly insightful.
November 14th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
It took me a little longer than ten minutes, for sure, but that’s mainly because I’m so inarticulate that I end up editing my posts like crazy.
Awesome name, by the bye: Catch Her in the Wry.
Thank you very much indeed for dropping by.