Part Four Democracy Reconsidered 24 The Trouble with Democracy: Maslow Meets Hoppe

Doug French

H.L. Mencken described politicians as “men who, at some time or other, have compromised with their honour, either by swallowing their convictions or by whooping for what they believe to be untrue.”¹ “Vanity remains to him,” Mencken wrote, “but not pride.”²

The Sage of Baltimore had it correct, that to be elected and stay elected in American politics to any full-time position requires the suspension of any ethics or good sense a person may possess. Even those who begin political careers with the best intentions and have measurable abilities that would make them successful in any field soon realize that the skills required to succeed in politics are not those required outside politics.

Lew Rockwell explains that, while competition in the marketplace improves quality, competition in politics does just the opposite:

The only improvements take place in the process of doing bad things: lying, cheating, manipulating, stealing, and killing. The price of political services is constantly increasing, whether in tax dollars paid or in the bribes owed for protection (also known as campaign contributions). There is no obsolescence, planned or otherwise. And as Hayek famously argued, in politics, the worst get on top. And there is no accountability: the higher the office, the more criminal wrongdoing a person can get away with.³

Thus it becomes “a psychic impossibility for a gentleman to hold office under the Federal Union,”⁴ wrote Mencken. Democracy makes it possible for the demagogue to inflame the childish imagination of the masses, “by virtue of his talent for nonsense.”⁵ The king can do the same thing in a monarchy but only by virtue of his birth.

In stark contrast, in the natural order, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains in his monumental work, Democracy—The God that Failed, it is “private property, production, and voluntary exchange that are the ultimate sources of human civilization.”⁶ This natural order, Hoppe notes, must be maintained by a natural elite which would come by these positions of “natural authority,” not by election as in the case of democracy, or birth as in the case of monarchy, but by their “superior achievements, of wealth, wisdom, bravery or a combination thereof.”⁷ This is just the opposite of what Mencken and Rockwell describe as a characteristic of democracy.

Instead, democracy affords the opportunity for anyone to pursue politics as a career. There is no need for the masses to recognize a person as “wise” or “successful,” as Hoppe’s natural order would require. Nor does one have to be born into the ruling family, as in the case of monarchy. As the great American comedian, Bob Hope, who was actually born in England, once quipped, “I left England at the age of four when I found out I couldn’t be king.” Maybe because he knows he can never have Prince Charles’s job, Sir Richard Branson—knighted for “services to entrepreneurship”—sticks to business and reportedly owns 360 companies.

But, as Hoppe explains, democracies have expanded, and since World War I have been viewed as the only legitimate form of government. In turn, more people who have been successful at other pursuits are running for political office or becoming politically active. For instance, more and more wealthy billionaires are entering the political arena. While the wealthy tycoons of a previous generation were private and tended to covet seclusion, today’s captains of industry such as Ross Perot, Michael Bloomberg, and Jon Corzine are running for office. And while Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and George Soros haven’t sought public office personally, they spend millions of dollars on political contributions and are visible in trying to sway the public debate on political issues, when their time would obviously be more productively spent (both for them and everyone else) on other, wealth-creating endeavors. Plus, a quarter of all House members and a third of all members of the Senate are millionaires.⁸

There may be politicians that pursue elected office for the money, but many elected officials are already wealthy by most people’s standards. What makes the wealthy and otherwise successful want to hold office? Is it as Charles Derber describes in ThePursuit of Attention: Power and Ego in Everyday Life, that politicians since “Caesar and Napoleon have been driven by overweening egos and an insatiable hunger for public adulation”?⁹

The work of psychologist Abraham Maslow may provide an understanding as to why even successful entrepreneurs would seek public office. Maslow is famous for his “hierarchy of needs” theory that is taught in most management classes in American universities. The theory is generally presented visually as a pyramid, with the lowest or most basic human need—physiological need—shown as a layer along the base of the pyramid.

Maslow’s view was that the basic human needs—thirst, hunger, breathing—must be satisfied before humans could accomplish or worry about anything else. The next tranche within the pyramid, shown on top of the physiological need, is the safety need. After satisfying thirst and hunger, humans are concerned about their continued survival. If a man is constantly worried about being eaten by a tiger, he doesn’t concern himself with much else.

The next layer presented within Maslow’s pyramid is the belonging need, which lies just above safety need. After the satisfaction of the two lower needs—physiological and safety—a person seeks love, friendships, companionship and community. Once this need is satisfied, according to Maslow, humans seek the esteem need. These first four needs were considered deficit needs. If a person is lacking, there is a motivation to fill that need. Once the particular need is filled, the motivation abates. This makes these needs different than the need at the top of Maslow’s pyramid, the need for self-actualization. The need for self-actualization is never satisfied, and Maslow referred to it as a being need, or to be all you can be.

Thus, humans continually strive to satisfy their needs, and as the more basic needs are satisfied, humans move up the pyramid, if you will, to satisfy higher level needs. Of course, different humans achieve different levels, and it was Maslow’s view that only two percent of humans become self-actualizing. Maslow studied some famous people along with a dozen not-so-famous folks and developed some personality traits that were consistent with people he judged to be self-actualizing. Besides being creative and inventive, self-actualizers have strong ethics, a self-deprecating sense of humor, humility and respect for others, resistance to enculturation, enjoyment of autonomy and solitude instead of shallow relationships with many people. They believe the ends don’t necessarily justify the means and that the means can be ends in themselves.

One readily sees that Maslow’s self-actualizers have nothing in common with politicians in a democracy, but closely fit the profile that Hoppe describes of the natural elite that would lead a natural order. But a step down from the top of the hierarchy of needs pyramid is the need for esteem. Maslow described two types of esteem needs according to Maslow expert Dr. C. George Boeree, a lower esteem need and a higher one. And while the higher form of esteem calls for healthy attributes such as freedom, independence, confidence and achievement, the lower form “is the need for the respect of others, the need for status, fame, glory, recognition, attention, reputation, appreciation, dignity, even dominance.”

“The negative version of these needs is low self-esteem and inferiority complexes,” Dr. Boeree writes. “Maslow felt [Alfred] Adler was really onto something when he proposed that these were at the roots of many, if not most, of our psychological problems.”¹⁰

Now we see the qualities displayed by virtually all politicians in democracy: the constant need for status and recognition. The ends—compensating for an inferiority complex—justify whatever Machiavellian means.

Because democracy is open to any and all who can get themselves elected, either through connections, personality, or personal wealth, it is a social system where leadership positions become a hotbed for sociopaths. Maslow’s self-actualizing man won’t have an interest in politics. But those stuck on the need for esteem are drawn to it like flies to dung.

With leadership in such dysfunctional hands, it is no wonder. “In comparison to the nineteenth century, the cognitive prowess of the political and intellectual elites and the quality of public education have declined,” Hoppe writes in Democracy.¹¹ “And the rates of crime, structural unemployment, welfare dependency, parasitism, negligence, recklessness, incivility, psychopathy, and hedonism have increased.”¹²

So while the electorate recognizes that they are electing, at best incompetents, and at worst crooks, the constant, naïve, pro-democracy mantra is that “we just need to elect the right people.” But, the “right people” aren’t (and won’t be) running for office. Instead, we will continue to have “the average American legislator [who] is not only an ass,” as Mencken wrote, “but also an oblique, sinister, depraved and knavish fellow. . .”¹³

Doug French (douglasinvegas@gmail.com) received his Masters degree in economics from the University of Nevada Las Vegas under Murray Rothbard with Professor Hoppe serving on his thesis committee. He, along with Deanna Forbush, was a benefactor for the publication of the second edition of Hoppe’s The Economics and Ethics of Private Property. French is the President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.

¹H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), pp. 114–15.

²Ibid., p. 115.

³Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., “Two Kinds of Competition,” LewRockwell.com (August 12, 2004).

⁴Mencken, Notes on Democracy, p. 115.

⁵H.L. Mencken, The Gist of Mencken: Quotations from America’s Critic, Mayo DuBasky, ed. (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990), p. 352; originally from H.L. Mencken, “Off Again, On Again,” Smart Set (March 1922), p. 50.

⁶Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God that Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001), p. 71.

⁷Ibid.

⁸See “Net Worth, 2007,” OpenSecrets.org <www.opensecrets.org/pfds/overview.php> (accessed December 15, 2008); also “Millionaires Fill US Congress Halls,” Agence France Presse <www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0630-05.htm> (June 30, 2004); Sean Loughlin and Robert Yoon, “Millionaires Populate U.S. Senate,” CNN.com <www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/06/13/senators.finances/ > (June 13, 2003).

⁹Charles Derber, The Pursuit of Attention: Power and Ego in Everyday Life, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. xxii.

¹⁰C. George Boeree, “Abraham Maslow,” www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/maslow.html (accessed December 15, 2008).

¹¹Hoppe, Democracy, p. 42.

¹²Ibid., p. 43.

¹³The Gist of Mencken, p. 423; originally from H.L. Mencken, “The Free Lance,” Baltimore Evening Sun (January 10, 1913).

25

An Epistemic Justification of Democracy?

David Gordon

In his great book Democracy—The God that Failed, Hans Hoppe argued that democracy leads to a growth in state power. In his view, the transition in European history from monarchy to democracy was a blow to liberty: “I [Hoppe] will explain the rapid growth in state power lamented by Mises and Rothbard as the systematic outcome of the democratic mindset, i.e., the (erroneous) belief in the efficiency and/or justice of public property and popular (majority) rule.”¹

This conclusion put Hoppe in polar opposition to the dominant opinion in contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy. In the mainstream, justifications for democracy abound. It is taken for granted that democracy, at least for modern Western political societies, is the only justifiable system of government. The question up for discussion is only how the justification is to be accomplished. I propose to examine a recent endeavor to justify democracy, one that has already won for its author considerable acclaim. David M. Estlund, in Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework² offers an “epistemic justification” for democracy. I shall endeavor to show that a crucial step in his argument fails.

Estlund wishes to show that democratic decision making has both authority and legitimacy:

By authority I [Estlund] will mean the moral power of one agent (emphasizing especially the state) to morally require or forbid actions by others through commands. . . . By legitimacy I will mean the moral permissibility of the state’s issuing and enforcing its commands owing to the process by which they were produced. (p. 2)

One way to show that the state has authority and legitimacy would be to claim that the rulers possess expert knowledge that others lack. The rulers know, e.g., how to run a complex economy and the proper foreign policy to adopt, while those not in authority lack such knowledge. (Such a claim would of course be risible in the actual world; but we are here concerned only with the structure of this particular argument, not the factual basis of its premise.)

As Estlund rightly recognizes, this argument cannot be accepted. Even if rulers did have superior knowledge, this would not suffice to generate an obligation by others to obey them.

It is important to see that authority does not simply follow from expertise. Even if we grant that there are better and worse political decisions (which I think we must), and that some people know better what should be done that others), it simply does not follow from their expertise that they have authority over us, or that they ought to. . . . You might be correct, but what makes you boss? (p. 3)

If expert knowledge does not ground authority and legitimacy, what does? One natural alternative would be to say that someone has authority over another only by consent. Unless people voluntarily have accepted the authority of the state, they stand under no obligation to obey its dictates. Libertarian anarchists would readily embrace this thesis, but Estlund is decidedly not of this persuasion. What then is he to do? If he rejects the necessity of consent, has he not committed himself to authoritarian rule? The question becomes more pressing because, as we have seen, he rejects the most natural basis for a claim to rule without consent, i.e., the superior knowledge of the rulers.

Estlund extricates himself from this difficulty by denying that he wishes to dispense with consent altogether.

A traditional view says that there is no authority without consent. The state is not in a position to lay obligations on me unless I voluntarily and knowingly agree to their having this moral power. The main weakness of this approach is that it does not seem to account for the state’s authority over very many people, since most people never consent to the authority of the state.³ . . . [But] If there were some conditions that nullified non-consent, the result would be morally equivalent to consent . . . perhaps if the non-consent is morally wrong it should be without moral effect. (p. 9)

Estlund’s conclusion does not follow. Suppose that you need to consult some documents that I own in order to complete your dissertation. Let us stipulate that I bear you no ill will and that it would cost me nothing to allow you to consult the documents. We might even suppose that you offer me a generous fee if I allow you to examine them. Unfortunately for your work, I refuse you access to them on no better grounds than a whim. Clearly, I have acted badly: I ought not to have impeded your project without cause. It does not follow, though, that because I acted badly, you now may consult the documents, my wishes to the contrary notwithstanding. In like fashion, I suggest, it does not follow that if you failed to consent to a political decision when you ought to have, that your mistaken failure may be taken as equivalent to consent.

Let us put this point to one side and, arguendo, assume that Estlund’s project of rule without actual consent remains in the field. Under what conditions ought people to consent to political decisions? Estlund, one will not be surprised to learn, finds the answer in democracy. In a political community, choices on certain matters of concern to all must be made. Everyone in the community has a chance to have his say on these matters, and the deliberations of a democratic community are likely to arrive at good decisions more than randomly. In these circumstances, people ought to consent to the results, even if they find themselves in the minority.

One might at first sight think that Estlund has retreated to a position he has already rejected. He appeals to the likelihood of correct decisions; but has he not rightly acknowledged that correctness does not generate authority? “You might be correct, but what makes you boss?” (p. 3) Further, has he not set his standard very low? All that he asks of democracy is that it leads to good decisions more than randomly. If one appeals to the authority of knowledge, should one not demand more?

But Estlund has not in fact embraced what he previously dismissed. It is not the epistemic merits of democracy by themselves that result in the claim to authority; it is these merits combined with mass participation in decision making.

Democratically produced laws are legitimate and authoritative because they are produced by a procedure with a tendency to make correct decisions. It is not an infallible procedure, and there might even be more accurate procedures. But democracy is better than random and epistemically the best among those that are generally acceptable in the way that political legitimacy requires. (p. 8)

Estlund argues for his claim about democratic decision making in two stages. First, he contends that in an ideal system of democratic deliberation, decisions are likely to be right more than randomly. Second, even though actually existing democracy falls short of the ideal situation, it is still likely that it retains the required epistemic authority.

The principal failing of the argument lies in the first step. Estlund rightly calls attention to the advantages of deliberation and multiple points of view when one is trying to reach a decision. Has not Hayek taught us the advantages of dispersed knowledge, albeit his argument was for the free market rather than for democracy?

If we ask why it is that two heads are better than one, or why thinking together in a communicative way is epistemically better than thinking alone, one element that deserves more discussion is the dispersal of knowledge. The idea of dispersed knowledge is central to Hayek’s work on economic markets, and it is worth looking to his work for clues to how to use this idea to support the epistemic value of democracy. (p. 177)

Estlund has fallen into a glaring non sequitur. It seems entirely reasonable to say that deliberation that takes advantage of dispersed knowledge is better than decision that lacks this feature: in many cases, two heads are indeed better than one. But how does this in any way establish the conclusion that Estlund wants, i.e., that democratic decisions have a more than random chance of being right? From the fact that one method is better than another, nothing follows about whether either method is superior to chance.

There is a further problem with Estlund’s assertion. In order to know how “good” democratic decision-making is, one would need to compare particular democratic decisions with the correct decisions. But Estlund nowhere presents any independent criteria for the correctness of political decisions. Even if he were right, we would have no way of knowing this.

Estlund’s epistemic argument does not succeed. Given the sorry record of democracy that Hans Hoppe has abundantly documented, this failure was to be expected.⁴

David Gordon (dgordon@mises.com) is a Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the author of numerous books, including Resurrecting Marx, The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics, and An Introduction to Economic Reasoning, and editor of The Mises Review.

¹Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God that Failed (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001), p. xxiii. See my review in The Mises Review 8, no. 2 (Spring 2002).

²Princeton University Press, 2008. All subsequent references to this book will be by page numbers in parentheses in the text.

³Libertarians will not fail to note that for Estlund, it must turn out that the state is justified. Because strict consent fails to justify the state, it cannot be accepted as a criterion.

⁴Estlund never refers to Hoppe.

26

Democracy and Faits Accomplis

Robert Higgs

No institution of modern life commands as much veneration as democracy. It comes closer than anything else to being the supreme object of adoration in a global religion. Anyone who denies its righteousness and desirability soon finds himself a pariah. One may get away with denouncing motherhood and apple pie, but not with speaking ill of democracy, which is now the principal icon of political and social life throughout the world. Many people are atheists, but few are anti-democrats.

Worship of this particular political arrangement has emerged relatively recently, however, and in earlier ages political philosophers were more apt to condemn democracy than to praise it. Aristotle, whose views received great weight for millennia, did not recommend democracy highly. Along with many other criticisms of this type of government, he wrote in his Politics:

1313b: 32-41: The final form of democracy has characteristics of tyranny: women dominate in the household so that they can denounce their husbands, slaves lack discipline, and flatterers—demagogues—are held in honor. The people wish to be a monarch.

1295b: 39-1296a5: It is best for citizens in a city-state to possess a moderate amount of wealth because where some have a lot and some have none the result is the ultimate democracy or unmixed oligarchy. Tyranny can result from both these extremes. It is much less likely to spring from moderate systems of government.

1276a: 12-14: Some democracies, like tyrannies, rest on force and are not directed toward the common advantage.

1312b: 35-38: Ultimate democracy, like unmixed and final oligarchy, is really a tyranny divided [among a multitude of persons].¹

The founders of the United States of America had mixed views about democracy. Nearly all of them seem to have feared it more than they respected it. They recognized that concessions to fairly wide participation in politics might have to be made to placate the masses—who, after all, had served as cannon fodder in the recently concluded war of secession from the British Empire—but they designed a system in which voting would be hobbled and circumscribed, so that the common people would be kept from giving direct vent to their passions by seizing control of the government and using it to plunder the rich. The founders conspicuously feared “mob rule” and associated it with untrammeled democracy. All of the newly independent states required property-holding and other qualifications for voting, and, in practice, the franchise was limited in most places to a small minority of the population—a subset of the adult, white males. The Constitution of the United States does not contain the word democracy, although it stipulates certain protocols for the election of officials, and it relies instead on federalism and the separation of powers to preserve liberty.

Although democracy made giant ideological strides in the nineteenth century, a few writers had the courage to condemn it even well into the twentieth century. Among the most astute of them was Joseph A. Schumpeter. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, he posits as a point of departure for analysis the classical conception of democracy: “the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will.”² He then proceeds to demolish the pretension that this conception makes sense. “If we are to argue that the will of the citizens per se is a political factor entitled to respect,” Schumpeter argues, “it must first exist. That is to say, it must be something more than an indeterminate bundle of vague impulses loosely playing about given slogans and mistaken impressions.”³ Schumpeter calls attention to “the ordinary citizen’s ignorance and lack of judgment in matters of domestic and foreign policy” and adds, anticipating the rational ignorance concept of public choice theory, that “without the initiative that comes from immediate responsibility, ignorance will persist in the face of masses of information however complete and correct.”⁴

Moreover, “even if there were no political groups trying to influence him, the typical citizen would in political matters tend to yield to extrarational or irrational prejudice and impulse.” Matters are even worse once we recognize the “opportunities for groups with an ax to grind,” who “are able to fashion and, within very wide limits, even to create the will of the people,” leaving political analysts to ponder “not a genuine but a manufactured will” that is “the product and not the motive power of the political process.”⁵

Schumpeter conceded that, in the long run, the general public may come to hold a more perceptive view of the world and to reward or punish officeholders in its light when they cast their ballots, but this eventual adjustment itself has a fatal flaw, because history “consists of a succession of short-run situations that may alter the course of events for good:”⁶

If all the people can in the short run be “fooled” step by step into something they do not really want, and if this is not an exceptional case which we could afford to neglect, then no amount of retrospective common sense will alter the fact that in reality they neither raise nor decide issues but that the issues that shape their fate are normally raised and decided for them.⁷

Because “electorates normally do not control their political leaders in any way except by refusing to reelect them or the parliamentary majorities that support them,”⁸ the distinct possibility—nay, the great likelihood—exists that the voters will find themselves time after time concerned about a horse that has already fled the barn, never to be retrieved.

This bleak view of the political process under representative democracy becomes even bleaker once we recognize that office-seekers typically either speak in vague, emotion-laden generalities or simply lie about their intentions. After taking office, they may act in complete disregard of their campaign promises, trusting that when they run for reelection, they will be able to concoct a plausible excuse for their infidelity and betrayal of trust. Thus, the voters remain permanently immersed in a fog of disinformation, emotional manipulation, and bald-faced mendacity. No matter what a candidate promises, the voters have no means of holding him to those promises or of punishing his misbehavior until it may be too late to matter. In many cases, unfortunately, the officeholders’ decisions give rise to irreversible consequences—outcomes that cannot possibly be undone ex post.

Garet Garrett had a similar vision of the uselessness of democracy as a means of making government accountable to the “will of the people” (or to anything else except the rulers’ own desires). Writing at mid-century, shortly after Schumpeter’s death, in an essay titled “Ex America,” Garrett posed the following hypothetical scenario:

Suppose a true image of the present world had been presented to them in 1900, the future as in a crystal ball, together with the question, “Do you want it?” No one can imagine that they would have said yes—that they could have been tempted by the comforts, the gadgets, the automobiles and all the fabulous satisfactions of midcentury existence, to accept the coils of octopean government, the dim-out of the individual, the atomic bomb, a life of sickening fear, the nightmare of extinction. Their answer would have been no, terrifically.⁹

Having set the scene, he asked: “Then how do you account for the fact that everything that has happened to change their world from what it was to what it is has taken place with their consent?” To which he added: “More accurately, first it happened and then they consented.”¹⁰

Garrett proceeded to list and to discuss briefly a series of cataclysmic, course-altering political events in the United States, including getting into World War I, launching the New Deal, getting into World War II, and joining the United Nations, noting that in each instance the people did not vote for the government’s action, yet “to all of this the people have consented, not beforehand but afterward.”¹¹

One might object at this point by asking, “What difference does it make whether the people consent beforehand or afterward, so long as they consent?” Indeed, Bruce Ackerman has written an entire book to argue precisely that the most profound constitutional changes in U.S. history occurred not when the people formally amended the Constitution, but when the government acted outside its constitutional authority in a crisis and later received electoral and judicial validation of its actions, and that these de facto constitutional revolutions deserve our approbation; indeed, they ought to serve as models for future constitutional revolutions.¹²

Ackerman’s view may be challenged by noting the frequency with which constitutional revolutionaries engineer the alleged ex post validation of their actions. People in power have the greatest ability to gerrymander the voting districts, bias the electoral rules, buy votes with taxpayers’ money, stuff the ballot boxes, and otherwise ensure that those in power—regardless of how they got there—remain in power. Similarly, people in power have the greatest ability to appoint new judges, alter judicial jurisdictions, and change the size or number of courts of appeal to ensure that those in power—regardless of how they got there—gain judicial vindication of their (heretofore unconstitutional) actions.¹³

Despite the force of the preceding objections, Ackerman might refuse to consider them a knockout blow to his thesis. Sooner or later, he might insist, the people will be able to vote against policies they find offensive, and judges will be able to overturn the constitutionality of laws that transcend the government’s true constitutional authority. The political winners can’t rig the game forever, so if the people and the judges never avail themselves of opportunities to express their aversion to the constitutional revolutionaries and their policies, we may presume that they actually approve of what has been done—in Garrett’s words, “first it happened and then they consented.”

In a sense, this interpretation may be correct, but I doubt that the sense I have in mind is one that Ackerman would welcome. If the people never avail themselves of the opportunity to overturn what was done initially without their consent, they may thereby reveal only that people who have been fed thin gruel for a long time get used to eating it and even come to consider it nutritious.¹⁴ In less metaphorical terms, my claim is that ideological change is often path-dependent: where a dominant ideology stands and where it is most likely to go in the future depend significantly on where it has been in the past.¹⁵

Bearing in mind this aspect of political, social, and economic dynamics, we may come to understand better how, for example, in each decisive episode in the great transformation of America’s political economy between 1900 and 1950, “first it happened and then they consented,” and afterward the people looked back on these episodes not so much with regret as with pride and a sense that the nation had overcome great challenges. Moreover, the people subsequently elevated to the pantheon of “greatness” the presidents who had taken it upon themselves to plunge the nation into these cauldrons and endowed them with sainthood in the Church of Democracy—thus, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and earlier, in the same mold, Abraham Lincoln.¹⁶

After World War I erupted in Europe in August 1914, the overwhelming majority of Americans preferred that their government remain neutral and not become engaged in the fighting. “Aversion to joining in the carnage,” writes Walter Karp, “was virtually unanimous.”¹⁷ President Wilson represented himself as striving above all to end the fighting and to resist the temptation to enter the war in reaction to various provocations by both warring sides. We may well doubt the sincerity of his avowals of neutrality, however. Thomas Fleming writes that “in an unguarded moment, Wilson confessed to a friend that he hoped for an Allied victory in the war but was not permitted by his public neutrality to say so.”¹⁸ There is no doubt, however, that the president and his election managers perceived that the best way for him to gain reelection in 1916 was by continuing to represent himself as a man of peace; hence, the campaign slogan “He kept us out of war.”

Yet, less than a month after beginning his second term, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war, resting his request on the astonishing ground that Americans had an absolute right to travel unmolested on the high seas on ships carrying munitions to a warring power. “Even after Wilson broke off relations with Germany in February 1917,” Karp writes, “an overwhelming majority of Americans still opposed entering the war. Even when the United States had already been at war for some months, a majority of Americans remained a sullen, silenced opposition, more profoundly alienated from their own government than any American majority has ever been before or since.”¹⁹ Karp concludes: “Representative government had failed them at every turn.”²⁰ Democracy in action?

Probably no single event of the past century has been such a prodigious source of evils as the U.S. entry into World War I and the Versailles Treaty that U.S. entry made possible. The conquests of Bolshevism, Nazism, and Fascism and the manifold catastrophes known collectively as World War II, not to mention endless troubles in the Middle East, arguably, may be traced directly to this source.²¹ In the United States, World War I prompted the government to embrace what contemporaries called “war socialism” (though it was, in more precise language, “war fascism” for the most part), which provided blueprints for an immense variety of government interventions in the economy and society, many of which continue to impoverish Americans and to crush their liberties ninety years later.²² The war could have such extreme and enduring consequences because it had also brought about abrupt ideological changes: many Americans became convinced by their perception of the wartime controls that the government was capable of successfully engaging in socio-economic engineering on a wide front. Thus, the war put the final nail into the coffin of nineteenth-century liberalism, at least in the eyes of the major political players. As Bernard Baruch, the wartime head of the War Industries Board, declared, “We helped inter the extreme dogmas of laissez-faire, which had for so long molded American economic and political thought.”²³

Democracy’s next colossal failure in the United States occurred in 1932. By the time of the presidential election in November, the country had experienced more than three years of worsening economic performance: falling output, rising unemployment, increasing numbers of business failures, and growing numbers of homes and businesses lost to foreclosure or to seizure for failure to pay taxes. Not without plausible reasons, people blamed President Herbert Hoover for these dreadful developments and gave Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic challenger, the benefit of the doubt.

Roosevelt campaigned on a platform that the old Grover Cleveland-style Democrats of the nineteenth century might have endorsed comfortably. As Jesse Walker summarizes it:

The very first plank calls for “an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagance to accomplish a saving of not less than twenty-five per cent in the cost of the Federal Government.” (It also asks “the states to make a zealous effort to achieve a proportionate result.”) Subsequent planks demand a balanced budget, a low tariff, the repeal of Prohibition, “a sound currency to be preserved at all hazards,” “no interference in the internal affairs of other nations,” and “the removal of government from all fields of private enterprise except where necessary to develop public works and natural resources in the common interest.” The document concludes with a quote from Andrew Jackson: “equal rights to all; special privilege to none.”²⁴

Having made these promises, Roosevelt swept to a lopsided victory at the polls.

Yet, the merest child knows that his New Deal, a huge hodgepodge of domestic interventions, controls, subsidies, taxes, threats, seizures, and other troublemaking amounted to nearly the exact opposite of what he had promised the voters during the campaign.

So what, we may hear Professor Ackerman asking offstage; didn’t the people endorse these actions by reelecting Roosevelt with an even greater margin of victory in 1936? Yes, of course, they did. But, by that time, the president and his party had turned the federal government into a vast vote-buying apparatus that covered the entire country and penetrated every county, town, and village. As John T. Flynn described the situation:

Roosevelt’s billions, adroitly used, had broken down every political machine in America. The patronage they once lived on and the local money they once had to disburse to help the poor was trivial compared to the vast floods of money Roosevelt controlled. And no political boss could compete with him in any county in America in the distribution of money and jobs.²⁵

Nor was this garden-variety political corruption the worst of it. Far more significant in the long run was the loss of faith in the free market among the masses and the boost given to ideological support for economic fascism. Owing to the Great Depression and the New Deal, later generations would live in chronic fear of economic privation and rest their hopes for security in a fervent belief that if the economy turned down, the government could and would rescue them. The Employment Act of 1946 codified this public dependency. Rugged individualism, to the extent that it had ever really existed, died a cruel death at the hands of the New Deal—precisely the opposite of what Roosevelt had promised when he first campaigned for the presidency. Democracy in action?

Roosevelt was still in office when the next great travesty of democracy occurred, in 1940. War between the great powers had resumed in Europe, as everyone had expected it eventually would after the Versailles Treaty was signed in 1919. Just as the great majority of Americans had wished to keep away from the fighting in 1914, so a great majority again wanted nothing to do with the European bloodletting. Roosevelt, as the leader of the small minority that favored going to war—to save the British and (dare we conjecture?) to permit him to achieve the “greatness” that only wartime leadership brings—had to play his cards carefully. For two years, mendacity would be his major political device, as he sought to maneuver Germany and Japan into an “incident” so inflammatory that it would shock the public into supporting U.S. entry into the war.²⁶

Roosevelt’s vaulting ambition fed his quest for reelection to an unprecedented third term. Given the massive public opposition to war—opposition, that is, to the very objective whose attainment he sought above all others—the president, who had already begun to involve the country in the war in discreet ways, lifted his dishonesty to a higher level as the election approached. In a campaign speech at Boston on October 30, 1940, he declared bluntly: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” As David M. Kennedy notes, “Conspicuously, Roosevelt omitted the qualifying phrase that he had used on previous occasions: ‘except in case of attack.’“²⁷ Relying on this seemingly frank promise, the electorate returned Roosevelt to office for another term.

In return, of course, they found themselves being pushed farther and farther toward open U.S. belligerency, until finally the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor gave the president what he, his chief subordinates, and his closest supporters had been seeking from the start: declared engagement in the greatest armed conflict of all time. Democracy in action?

By the time it ended, Americans had suffered more than a million casualties, including more than 400,000 servicemen’s deaths, and four years of economic fascism on the home front, with extensive controls and government takeovers that dwarfed those of any comparable episode in the United States before or since. Moreover, the entire world had been altered, as the Soviet Union, America’s wartime ally, now stood astride all of eastern Europe and much of central Europe, too, as far west as Czechoslovakia, so that when the violence ended in 1945, only a tense pseudo-peace took its place, and the world was condemned to live in fear of nuclear annihilation indefinitely.

For this dismal result, we may credit the democratic system that put Franklin D. Roosevelt and his party in power and allowed them to make the United States the decisive factor in the war’s outcome. Without America’s active involvement in the war, the British might have been forced to sue for peace, and the Germans and the Soviets might have bled one another to death—a grisly outcome, to be sure, but would it have been any worse than what actually happened? We cannot know, of course; history is not ours to rerun, like a controlled experiment with reset conditions. Yet, we can scarcely deny that the devastated world of 1945, with 50 million dead, tens of millions left sick, wounded, or homeless, and a murderous Communist dictator in control of half of Europe, was scarcely what most Americans sought to bring about when they cast their votes for Roosevelt in 1940.

Democracy has always had its critics. No one claims that it is a perfect system for choosing political leaders or for putting in place the policies and laws the public prefers. Obviously, when individual preferences differ, no one political outcome can please everybody, and the “tyranny of the majority” stands as a constant menace to the lives, liberties, and property of unpopular minorities. Yet, most people continue to insist that democracy, with all its faults, offers to best institutional arrangement for making rulers accountable to the people. So long as elections continue to be held, the possibility always remains of “throwing the rascals out.”

What has not been widely recognized, however, is the problem of faits accomplis. Once elected rulers have taken office, the democratic system provides little or no effective means for the people to bring them to heel short of the next election. The great problem is that, by that time, it may be impossible to reverse the outcomes the rulers have brought about. Wilson was not elected in 1916 to plunge the nation into the Great War. Roosevelt was not elected in 1932 to impose the New Deal on the country. Nor was he elected in 1940 to maneuver the United States into the greatest war of all time. Yet, in each case, the president did the opposite of what he had promised to do, and the people were left with no recourse. The world of 1919, the United States of 1936, and the world of 1945— each was so massively, so irrevocably altered from the preceding status quo that any genuine restoration of the previous conditions was unimaginable. Like it or not, people were to a great extent simply stuck with what the deceitful politicians had done.

Worse, owing to “ideological learning,” many people who initially had not desired these changes did approve of them in the circumstances in which they later found themselves—circumstances that they had in no way chosen, not even indirectly, but into which they had been forcibly shoved by the ruling decision-makers. Contemplating this situation, one readily recalls Goethe’s dictum that “none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

Still worse, an altered ideological context then sets the stage from which a society may be propelled even further from the course it initially preferred during the next round of democratic choice, unconstrained decisions by elected officials, and the resulting faits accomplis. If people believe that democracy is a means by which ordinary people may ensure that they exercise some control over their own societal fate, they are fooling themselves. If the persons elected to office have a free hand to act as they please, then the sense that they are truly accountable to the electorate is an illusion. It comes closer to the truth to say that the people are completely at the mercy of the officials they have elected.

“Democracy,” wrote H.L. Mencken, “may be a self-limiting disease, as civilization itself seems to be. There are thumping paradoxes in its philosophy, and some of them have a suicidal smack.”²⁸ Whether it will prove suicidal for its adherents, only time will tell, but we might note that, so far, only the United States of America, whose leaders and people tout their country as the greatest of all democracies, has employed nuclear weapons in war. It is not inconceivable that Woodrow Wilson’s war to make the world safe for democracy, owing to the train of consequences it set in motion, may ultimately make the world safe for democracy, to be sure, but not safe for mankind.

Robert Higgs (RHiggs2377@aol.com) is a Senior Fellow in Political Economy for the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy.

¹Thomas R. Martin, with Neel Smith and Jennifer F. Stuart, “Democracy in the Politics of Aristotle,” in Demos· Classical Athenian Democracy· a Stoa Publication (July 26, 2003). Available at: http://www.stoa.org/projects/demos/article_aristotle_democracy?page=2&greekEncoding=.

²Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), p. 250.

³Ibid., p. 253.

⁴Ibid., pp. 261, 262.

⁵Ibid., p. 263. For a recent study that grapples with this problem, see Robert Higgs and Anthony Kilduff, “Public Opinion: A Powerful Predictor of U.S. Defense Spending,” in Robert Higgs, Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 195–207.

⁶Ibid., p. 264; emphasis added.

⁷Ibid.

⁸Ibid., p. 272.

⁹Garet Garrett, Ex America: The 50th Anniversary of The People’s Pottage, Introduction by Bruce Ramsey (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Press, 2004), p. 70.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹Ibid., p. 72.

¹²Bruce Ackerman, We the People 2: Transformations (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).

¹³Robert Higgs, “On Ackerman’s Justification of Irregular Constitutional Change: Is Any Vice You Get Away With a Virtue?” Constitutional Political Economy 10 (November 1999): 375–83.

¹⁴For visual representation of this phenomenon, nothing can surpass the Spartan regimen depicted in early scenes of the splendid film Babbette’s Feast (1987).

¹⁵Robert Higgs, “The Complex Course of Ideological Change,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 67 (October 2008): 547–65.

¹⁶Robert Higgs, “Great Presidents?” in Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society (Oakland, Calif.: The Independent Institute, 2004), pp. 53–56.

¹⁷Walter Karp, The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic (1890–1920) (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 169.

¹⁸Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 75.

¹⁹Karp, The Politics of War, p. 169.

²⁰Ibid., p. 324.

²¹Among recent sources, see, for example, Jim Powell, Wilson’s War: How Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin & World War II (New York: Crown Forum, 2005); and Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World (New York: Crown, 2008).

²²Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

²³Bernard M. Baruch, Baruch: The Public Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 74.

²⁴Jesse Walker, “The New Franklin Roosevelts: Don’t Count on a Candidate’s Campaign Stances to Tell You How He’ll Behave in Office,” Reason Online, April 10, 2008, at http://www.reason.com/news/show/125921.html.

²⁵John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Books, 1949), p. 65.

²⁶Among the many sources relevant to this maneuvering, see the recent works by Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: Free Press, 2000); Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War: F.D.R. and the War within World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001); and George Victor, The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2007).

²⁷David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 463.

²⁸H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Knopf, 1949), p. 157.

27

Against the Primacy of Politics—Against the Overestimation of Majority Principle

Robert Nef

Much as one may admire the clear-sightedness of Greco-Roman political philosophy and especially Aristotle, one should not shy away from fundamental criticism. It has had a pervasive and toxic influence on the history of political thought.

ATHENS—ON THE BACK OF AN ARMY OF SLAVES

For Aristotle, democracy was a decayed form of that “rule by the many” that he called a polity. So the career of the term “democracy,” which is generally regarded nowadays as positive, began with radical criticism. Aristotle accurately identified and described the potential of the principle of majority rule to degenerate. His Politics is a plea for a mixed constitution. He differentiates between rule by one, few or many. All three forms of government can be basically positive if they “rule with a view to the common profit” and fail if they serve only to benefit the one or the few or the many. Aristotle regards it as possible for the many to rule virtuously, but he considers it unlikely. His reasoning is entirely empirical:

For while it is possible for one or a few to be outstandingly virtuous, it is difficult for a larger number to be accomplished in every virtue, but it can be so in military virtue in particular. That is precisely why the class of defensive soldiers, the ones who possess the weapons, has the most authority in this constitution.

Deviations from these are tyranny from kingship, oligarchy from aristocracy, and democracy from polity. For tyranny is rule by one person for the benefit of the monarch, oligarchy is for the benefit of the rich, and democracy is for the benefit of the poor. But none is for their common profit.¹

Although Aristotle showed himself to be a shrewd observer of his contemporaries when he defined man as a political animal (zoon politikon), in my opinion he prepared the way for a devastating overestimation of political, and a momentous underestimation of private, economic and civil society. For aristocrats like himself and Plato before him, and for many leisured aesthetes who came after him, homo oeconomicus—the farmer, the tradesman, the service provider and the merchant—was nothing but a philistine. These people—on the back of an army of slaves and other disenfranchised persons—concerned themselves with such banal activities as making a living. In continental Europe, this kind of division of labor between economics and politics has led to a widespread contempt for homo oeconomicus and for the economy as such, in both the broad and narrow sense of the word.

The intellectual preference for homo politicus over homo oeconomicus is alive and well. The “primacy of politics,” as a fundamental principle of a grey-haired generation of believers in co-determination and grassroots democracy, still haunts the literature of social sciences.

APPENZELL AS THE COUNTERPART OF ANCIENT ATHENS

Direct democracy as embodied in the Appenzell “Landsgemeinde” differs markedly from the democracy of the Athenians.² In Athens, the popular assemblies were convened three or four times a month and those who attended received a per diem payment. The assembly of the people controlled the civil service, supervised the state-regulated distribution of grain, decided whether to go to war or make peace, passed verdicts in cases of treason, ostracized citizens considered a danger to the state, listened to petitions, and selected the key functionaries for military matters, for whom war then became crucial to their survival. The Council of 500 met practically every day! The Convention, which was established during the French Revolution and became the model for many contemporary parliamentary systems, took many of its ideas from this system. In this way, politics itself becomes the disease that it is supposed to cure.

A marked contrast is provided by the political system of the two Appenzells, which have managed to compete peacefully for centuries with politically comparable but religiously and culturally differing ways of governing and living.

This political system, which was practiced consistently for more than five hundred years, was in fact direct democracy. This refutes all assertions, including those of Aristotle, that rule by the many must collapse eventually under the weight of its internal deficiencies because it would inevitably lead to exploitation of the minority of rich citizens by the majority of the non-rich.

At the “Landsgemeinde,” a kind of open-air general assembly, elections were held and laws passed—or thrown out if there was no consensus. The chief magistrate, who was mandated by the people to act in a part-time capacity as head of the government, was entrusted for one year with the state seal with which contracts were officially sealed and was required to render public account to the effect that any action taken had been “for the good of the country.”

All posts in government and the judiciary were—and in some cases still are—part-time, unsalaried, and restricted to one year. There is no such thing as a professional politician; politics is merely a part of the function of each citizen. Those in positions of responsibility were elected and dismissed directly by the people. Their powers were always severely restricted. These involved, in particular, foreign policy, the legal system, and cantonal road construction. There was almost nothing to distribute apart from burdens. The decision to embark on a military campaign was taken by those who then made up the army. This co-identity of those taking the decision with those who had to implement it is crucial, especially in the area of military service where the collective demands that the individual put his life in jeopardy. In this case, Aristotle got it right. Where it is a matter of choosing war or peace—a fundamental political question—the many, who bear the consequences of the decision, are in fact more competent to decide than the few who may benefit from it.

This is the essential difference between the slave-owners and politicking idlers of Athens and the hard-working small farmers of Appenzell, who not only labored on their own land but also formed the militia that protected it. The importance of public and private issues—res publica and res privata—was fundamentally different.

Generally the minimum consensus was found at the “Landsgemeinde” through the procedures of direct democracy, often with very substantial majorities. Sometimes the assemblies would end in dispute, but although all those present were armed, the disputes did not lead to bloodshed. For one day in the year, each man was a zoon politikon. The other 364 days belonged to the “Häämetli” (i.e., the home farm), its private economy, the community of one’s family, and the locally anchored culture. In summary, therefore, the process of building consensus within a democracy on the basis of the principle of majority rule is possible if it is limited in terms of scope, timeframe, and finance to the smallest possible portion of the life of a civil society, and if co-determination remains the exception to the rule of self-determination.

The practice of direct democracy in the two Appenzells has been presented here in a simplified and—admittedly—idealized way. It is regrettable that the open assembly, which had been an institution in Canton Appenzell Ausserrhoden, an industrialized area since the 19th century, was discontinued about ten years ago. However, it proved possible to retain the militia principle and the relatively lean political apparatus.

Without the instinctual distrust of all kinds of power, the principle of majority rule is in danger of doing away with that creative dissidence on which majorities too have to rely over the longer term. In the final analysis, protection for minorities protects the majority from collective stupefaction, but a great deal of nonsense is also propagated on the back of protection for minorities. It is often used to introduce group privileges of all kinds. We must not lose sight of the fact that, as Ayn Rand observed, the most important minority is the individual.

SELF-DETERMINATION IS BETTER THAN CO-DETERMINATION

Co-determination in accordance with the principle of majority rule is not an end in itself. It enjoys a subsidiary position vis-à-vis acts of individual self-determination. I remind readers of the priority enjoyed by the “home farm” over the wider community in Appenzell, namely 364 to 1. The burden of proof, as regards long-term practicability and common benefit, is borne by those who want to replace personal autonomy based on the principle of self-determination with collective autonomy based on the principle of majority rule.

One should not make it too easy for them to provide this proof before the intellectual forum that assesses political power in theory at first and then also in practice. Despite Alcuin’s and Lichtenberg’s formulation (vox populi vox Dei), and consonant with Hans Hoppe, the principle of majority rule is “a god that is none.”³

The compulsion to do good and, above all, the compulsion to do what the majority holds to be good, turns diversity into uniformity and has a destructive impact on the community overall. Every creative community is based on peaceful competition, and if the principle of majority rule is misused to get rid of unpopular alternative solutions, it degenerates into rule by those populists who happen to have the ear of the majority at the time.

Robert Nef (robertnef@bluewin.ch) is Chairman of the Liberales Institut in Zurich, a classical liberal think tank. This chapter is extracted from an address he gave on 28 June 2008 in Freiburg (Breisgau, Germany) on the occasion of receiving the Hayek Medal from the Friedrich A. von Hayek Gesellschaft.

¹Aristotle, Politics, C.D.C. Reeve, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), Book III, chap. 7, 1279a39–1279b8.

²Karl Mittermaier and Meinhard Mair, Demokratie, Geschichte Einer Politischen Idee von Platon bis Heute [Democracy, the History of a Political Idea from Plato to Today] (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1995).

³See Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God that Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001).