What of Democracy?

(An explanatory note.)

TO PUT in its right light and scientific context the technical word democracy is naturally our first task. Representative government as established in the United States is not synonymous with democracy. The Founding Fathers established a republic (res publica, politéia), not a democracy. And many of the Founders of the Constitution of this country have repeatedly emphasized this fact in so many words. Some of the best American minds have again and again called attention to this important fact and have protested loudly against the use of the term democracy for the fundamental laws of their country, which they respect and by which they abide.*

It is outside the scope of this book to investigate here the history of the popularization of the term democracy for the American Constitution or American ideals. We will merely consider it as a fact that there is not one, but that there are dozens of modern, popular interpretations of this expression. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of the population of the United States uses it to denote anything at random with which they agree in the realm of politics, social life, and economics. We will only quote a few examples:

Mr. Green, the millionaire, shakes hands with workers. He is “democratic.” (He is, as a matter of fact, demophil, but not democratic which latter word is derived from demos, the [common] people, and krátos, power.)

Mr. Gray protests against censorship as undemocratic. (Censorship may be illiberal — against freedom — but not necessarily against the majority.)

Mr. Black is against Negro lynching, denouncing it as undemocratic. (As soon as the majority of a township wants to hang a Negro this action is un-Christian, illegal, but certainly very democratic.)

Mr. Red extols the icebox and the shower as the pillar of our “democratic life.” (This is plain nonsense but of frequent occurrence.)

Finally one and the same thing can be considered to be democratic and undemocratic at the same time: for instance, the New Deal, Tuxedo Club, Presidential acts, prices of fur coats, British accents, China, Russia, England — all according to individual likes and dislikes. Communists call their creed “streamlined democracy” or “Twentieth-Century Americanism.”

We see, then, from the plurality of present-day connotations of democracy that it would be thoroughly unjustified to use the term “democracy” in any other sense than in the classical and universal one.* We may well agree that the mischief started by uneducated popularizers has already reached such proportions that a Hercules is needed to clean this Augian stable of popular misconceptions, false labels, and mispresented ideologies. Even some of the more intelligent writers have become a prey to popular pressure, and as modern intellectuals do not lead the masses any more, but follow them and subordinate their ideas and language to the demands of the market, the confusion has now reached its climax.

Before offering any further reasons regarding the deeper implications of the use and misuse of the term democracy we shall give some views on the American Constitution as expressed by the Founding Fathers and by distinguished modern writers. It will be seen that the classical and scientific meaning of that word remained unchanged for 2300 years, notwithstanding the scandalous ignorance displayed by editors, teachers, college professors, stump orators, and other irresponsible persons who are prominent in the public eye.

Thus the trend toward democracy in the modern age is deplored by Harry F. Atwood in his book Back to the Republic where he writes:

We have drifted from the republic toward democracy: from statesmanship to demagogism; from excellent to inferior service. It is an age of retrogressive tendencies.

J. Hampden Doherty in the Electoral System in the United States confirms similarly our opinion when he writes:

The tendency in this democratic age is to overlook the fact that the Fathers of the Constitution were not believers in the rule of the people, and it was not until after 1800 that manhood suffrage was adopted in any of the States.

Dealing with the current criticism of the Constitution at his time, Madison, in the Federalist, says:

It seems to owe its rise and prevalence chiefly to the confounding of a republic with a democracy, applying to the former reasonings drawn from the nature of the latter. The true distinction between these two forms was also adverted to on a former occasion. It is, that in a democracy, the people exercise the government in person: in a republic they administer it by their representatives (No. 14).

Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia, in his booklet Why Should We Change Our Form of Government? (New York, 1912), writes:

Aristotle has pointed out that democracy has many points of resemblance with tyranny. It was he who first told us how a democracy as well as a tyranny, may become a despotism.

It is just as easy for a majority to become a despot as for a monarch to become a tyrant. Even a tyrant may be benevolent, even a democratic despotism may be malevolent (pp. 29 and 30).

Hamilton, who held at the beginning certain monarchical views in order to exchange them later for aristocratic opinions, opposed the republic. Gouverneur Morris shrewdly said:

“. . . he confounded it with democratical government.” Morris, though he shared Hamilton’s dislike of democracy, thus early saw the confusion of republicanism with democracy that so long existed in men’s mind. — (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 7, 1937, p. 183.)

Today democracy is confused with liberalism,* freedom, and prosperity alike.

About the truly liberal-whiggish Fathers Ralph Adams Cram writes in his The End of Democracy (Boston, 1937, p. 20):

I apologize to the revered memory of Washington, Adams, Madison, Gerry, and all their fellows for attributing to them any intellectual commerce with democracy, for if they feared anything it was precisely this; whereby their prevision was highly justified. As Mr. Nock says: “One sometimes wonders how our Revolutionary forefathers would take it if they could hear some flatulent political thimblerigger charge them with having founded ‘the great and glorious democracy of the West.’” Of course, as we know now, they never intended to do anything of that sort.

And later he adds:

The Constitution of 1787 was, then, what may be called an aristocratic republican form of organic law with no salient democratic features.

Alexander Hamilton attacked democracy violently in his speeches on June 21, 1788, “On the Compromise of Constitution,” and in the Federal Convention on June 26, 1787. Democracy, so-called “Jeffersonian democracy,” was assailed in poetical form by such anonymous writers as Dr. Christopher Caustic in his “Democracy Unveiled or Tyranny Stripped of the Garb of Patriotism” (Boston, 1805). Yet Jefferson was no democrat in the current sense; he believed in the rule of the best, not in the rule of the masses. This is evident when he writes:

The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts and government of society. And indeed, it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed men for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government? — (Letter to John Adams, Oct. 28, 1814).

This belief in an elite is not very “democratic.” Sometimes Jefferson’s vocabulary was rather unfitting for “progressive” ears; this seems apparent when he deals with the possibility of a large urban proletariat in America which by destroying the agricultural character of the country would make even representative government unworkable. He wrote in the same letter quoted above:

Every one by his property, or by his satisfactory situation, is interested in the support of law and order. And such men may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves wholesome control over their public affairs, and a degree of freedom, which in the hands of the canaille of the cities of Europe, would be instantly perverted to the demolition and destruction of everything public.

This view is supplemented by a fear of an industrial development in the United States. He wrote on December 20, 1787, to Madison:

I think that our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural: and this will be as long as there are vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another as in the large cities of Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe. — (Both letters quoted from J. T. Adams Jeffersonian Principles and Hamiltonian Principles, Boston, 1932.)

His hatred against the urban masses can also be seen in other letters and essays:

The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. — (Volume I, p. 403, Writings of Jefferson, Washington edition.)

and:

I consider the class of artificers as the panderers of vice, and the instruments by which the liberties of a country are generally overturned. — (Volume I, p. 403.)

These are views which few medieval writers would have expressed with such crudity. They are certainly not the author’s and they are only quoted in order to exhort the reader to exercise greater discretion in alluding to the problem of Jeffersonian “democracy.”

Another author stressing the strictly nondemocratic character of the Constitution (and of historic America) is E. M. Burns who writes in his volume James Madison, Philosopher of the Constitution (New Brunswick, 1938):

Instead of defending the absolute sovereignty of the majority, Madison detested it so strongly that he sought in almost every conceivable way to prevent its exercise (page 63).

A good analysis of the American Constitution is also given by Andrew Cunningham MacLaughlin in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (New Series, Volume 22) under the title: “Democracy and Constitution.” As to the definitions he writes:

In any examination concerning the popular character of institutions we need to recognize the value and significance of words, and there is no more carelessly used [word] in the language than “democratic.” Democracy, as we use the word, may mean individualism, that is freedom from restraint, opportunity to do what one will without governmental encroachment or restriction; and, where individualism exists, the spirit of individualism and of individual self-reliance is apt to exist. But democracy may mean equality, and the spirit of equality may be quite contrary to the spirit of individualism, though it is possible that the two may go hand in hand. Again democracy may mean the right of the authority of the masses of the people to manage their own affairs and to make use of the government for their own interests. Democracy in this latter sense may be in absolute and complete conflict with individualism or even with equality. There is no reason for the coexistence of any two of these three principles which we commonly cover by the convenient word democracy or democratic (p. 296).

“Excusing” the Founding Fathers for their lack of what is scientific democracy he writes:

Just that kind of government [i.e., democracy] was not in accord with popular desire in 1787, the stirring watchword of American life was Liberty (p. 310).

And further he again states plainly:

It cannot be said that the Constitution of the United States has retarded the growth of democracy, but in the interest of historical accuracy it needs to be said that it did not establish democracy.

The conflict between democracy and liberty to which A. C. MacLaughlin alluded was also well known by Calhoun who wrote in his famous Disquisition on Government (New York, 1853):

There is another error, not less great and dangerous, usually associated with the one which just has been considered. I refer to the opinion, that liberty and equality are so intrinsically united, that liberty cannot be perfect without perfect equality (p. 56).

and his attack against democratic majoritism becomes more concrete when he writes:

Liberty is little more than a mere name under all governments of the absolute form, including that of the numerical majority, and can only have a secure and durable existence under those of the concurrent or constitutional form (p. 60).

Returning to an earlier period we want to quote the opinions of John Adams, second president of the United States. In his famous work, A Defense of the Constitution of the United States of America (Volume III, new edition, London, 1794), he asserts that the following propositions can be proved to be true:

1. No democracy ever did or can exist.

2. If, however, it were admitted, for argument sake, that a democracy ever did or can exist, no such passion as a love of democracy stronger than self-love . . . ever did, or ever can, prevail in the minds of the citizens in general.

3. That if the citizens . . . preferred the public to his private interest . . . it would not be from . . . love of the democracy, but from reason, conscience, etc.

4. That no love of equality, at least since Adam’s fall, ever existed.

5. That no love of frugality ever existed as a passion, but always as a virtue.

6. That therefore the democracies of Montesquieu . . . are all mere fragments of his brain, and delusive imaginations.

7. That his passion of love of the democracy would be, in the members of the majority only a love of the majority. . . .

8. That his love of equality would not even be pretended toward the members of the minority but the semblance of it would only be kept up among the members of the majority. . . .

9. That in reality the word democracy signifies nothing more or less than a nation or people without any government at all. . . .

10. That every attentive reader may perceive that the notions of Montesquieu, concerning a democracy, are imaginations of his own derived from the contemplation of the reveries of Xenophon and of Plato, concerning equality of goods and community of wives and children, in their delirious ideas of a perfect commonwealth (pp. 493–495).

“Democracy” as an ideal of the Founding Fathers is equally denied by W. H. Hamilton and D. Adair in The Power to Govern (New York, 1937, p. 158). It must also be borne in mind that the protest against calling the Constitution democratic comes from historians of all groups, yet while Rightists praise lack of “democracy” in the Constitution, “Leftists” like Charles Beard* and H. Rugg are prone to condemn it outright.

We have already once cautioned the reader against the concept of “Jeffersonian democracy.” Thomas Jefferson never called himself a democrat and the word democrat is only mentioned once in the Monticello edition — as an accusation leveled against him by Hamilton. In his letter addressed to Washington on May 17, 1792, he called himself a “Republican Federalist,” and in his first inaugural address as President he said: “We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans.” When Andrew Jackson ran against John Q. Adams for the presidency in 1828 he was called by some of his followers (as both candidates were Republican) a “democratic-republican.” Van Buren called himself a Republican and the unfortunate label “democratic” was used again by F. Pierce in 1852. Since that time it became increasingly popular with some people. Others protested and go on protesting.

We have said before that it is difficult to find the exact reasons for the growing popularity of the word democracy and democratic taken from a dead language which is thoroughly nonunderstandable to 999 out of 1000 Americans. The decline of classical education in favor of progressive “self-realization” has favored the increased use of wrong labels. It is deplorable that even Catholics have become victims of this chaos in verbiage. They have naturally “their” democracy, the Leftists have “another one,”* and even Conservatives indulge in the worship of a thing called “democracy” with a thoroughly different content. The only way out would be to discard the label completely, restore it brutally to its pristine meaning, and to call the things hitherto covered by the label with their proper names.

There is something pathetic in seeing Americans almost daily besmirching unconsciously their ideals and their traditions — all thanks to a faulty education. The Founding Fathers would turn in their graves if they could hear themselves called “Democrats”; America indeed was never a democracy, and never will be . . . unless we make “democracy work,” and replace, within the framework of a “pure democracy,” our legislation by the Gallup Poll. Those who have been taught the wrong interpretation may ask their money back from the schools where they have wasted their adolescence. And the textbooks which preach a spurious democracy may still provide us with fuel in cold days to come.

This protest against the use of the word democracy is not a mere pedantic fight against a technical term. “Democracy” should be discarded as quickly as possible from our vocabulary; it should only be used in its classical connotation. The reason for such a reform lies in the world-wide implications of technical terms. America is not a democracy. We are not fighting for democracy. We fight for liberty. America not only fights for its own survival, for its own liberty, but also for liberty abroad. Human dignity can never be preserved without liberty. Liberty is therefore a real good, a precious good worth while to be redeemed by blood.

Yet by calling this great struggle a fight for democracy, we are implying a fight for a political ideal which is not ours and which even in some of its journalistic-popular connotations is shared by only a tiny minority of our allies. Russia may be a democracy according to St. Thomas, but it is no democracy according to popular conception (confounding it with liberal popular representation). Perhaps it matters little in the case of Russia which momentarily is our military, not our ideological ally. But India, China, Greece, Serbia, Austria . . . are these “democracies,” in the popular or classical sense? Does Europe nourish a nostalgia for either form of democracy? Or is there not rather the world over a desperate craving for liberty, personal liberty, group liberty, national liberty, religious liberty? Are we not rather going to win the world over to our side by appealing to the unquenched thirst of liberty without which, as we have said, there can be no realization of human dignity and personality?

One must be very blind not to be aware that the term “democratic” is very sparingly used in the great enunciations of our time. It appears sometimes in proclamations and speeches of the President calculated for home consumption, as a concession to the mass mind, but in the great, programmatic speeches, in the Atlantic Charter, in the outlines of the Four Freedoms, “democracy” figures nowhere — and rightly so. The Wilsonian blunders will not be repeated. The crime to proclaim that the world should be made safe for democracy against which the Founding Fathers had violently protested will not take place again. The artificial fostering of allegedly American ideas belongs to the past. America of today and tomorrow will help other nations to live, to breathe, to be themselves again, to find their own forms and their own destinies free from the fetters of foreign occupation, of demagogues and mystagogues, of quislings and paid traitors. E pluribus unum, the constructive principle of federation, In God We Trust, the recognition of God’s limitless fatherhood — these two watchwords, together with that of Liberty, should be our creed, not that spurious label democracy which our American forebears despised and execrated.

Yet in spite of all these considerations, in order not to increase the already existing chaos, we have made a compromise with the existing misuse and abuse of the word democracy. The issue is furthermore complicated by the fact that a large political party in the United States calls itself “Democratic.”

In order to denote the classical interpretation of democracy as well as its cultural concomitant we have chosen to use the word ochlocracy and — as its adjective — ochlocratic.* The Greeks used this expression strictly in the sense of mob rule, regardless whether these mobs created majorities or minorities. The selection is not a very happy one, and the reader is reminded that we understand under “mob” not the “lower classes,” but just the vast masses of inferior people which can be found everywhere; these products of a soulless culture and civilization who in their terrifying mediocrity are neither fish nor flesh, have neither face nor expression, neither wisdom nor knowledge, piety nor enthusiasm, faith nor charity, hatred nor love, those who go neither with the angels nor the devils and because of their lukewarmness will be spat out by our Lord on the day of reckoning.

A few times we have used for the cultural and sociological phenomena of democracy the word democratism. This expression puts stress on the totalitarian (all-embracing, all-controlling) tendencies of democracy as an ism. The reason we did not stick more closely to that term lies in the fact that its adjective form, “democratic,” is highly unaesthetic from a phonetic point of view.

(The Museum of Modern Art of New York presented, in a photographic exhibition in 1941, a picture of a crowded beach on Long Island during a summer holiday. Its title was significantly enough “democratism.”)

With the word “democracy” and “democratic” we will ironically denote one or the other of the current popular misconceptions styled democracy by its advocates.

Valid ideals, on the other hand, which are used under the misnomer democracy can easily be called with some other, more fitting, name. Some of the so-called “democratic” institutions are just plainly republican, Catholic, Christian, decent, traditional, American, fair, conventional.

In the linguistic usage of the Left, “democratic” denotes much more frequently highly negative values. Everybody is acquainted with the real meaning of such expressions as “making democracy work in the classroom” which just stands for lack of discipline, or “democratizing literature” which means plain trash. “Democracy in the factory” may mean either striking or strike breaking, according to the advocate.

Catholics are unfortunately inclined to speak of “democracy as we mean it,” yet there are in America about a hundred different types of “democracy,” each held to be “real democracy, democracy as it was meant by the Founding Fathers, democracy as we all (?) understand it.” But the Founding Fathers, although they had very clear and concise ideas, wanted personally no democracy, and the only way out of the chaos is to go back like good children to the giants of the past, be they theologians like St. Thomas, philosophers like Plato, or statesmen like the authors of the Federalist. Confusion of words and meanings leads to the confusion of minds, and the confusion of minds breeds upheavals and revolution, as a well-known American once rightly pointed out.

Europe which alone has produced great democratic upheavals (the French, Russian, and German revolutions) is today in a far more immediate danger to fall a victim to mass-madness than America ever was. Not in vain has the knife of the guillotine glittered in Paris and not in in Philadelphia. Naturally there are also democratic tendencies in America but these are not by their very nature American. America always stood for liberty and personal worth, ideals incompatible with classical and scientific democracy and democratism.

It is almost in the strictly classical sense of the Greek word ochlocracy, to which reference has just been made, that the United States Army Military Manual* defines democracy in Section IX, Lesson 9, on “Representative Government.” Having first described autocracy as resulting in “arbitrariness, tyranny, and oppression,” it goes on to what it considers the opposite extreme:

Democracy:

A government of the masses.

Authority derived through mass meetings or any other form of “direct” expression.

Results in mobocracy.

Attitude toward property is communistic — negating property rights.

Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it be based upon deliberation or government by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences.

Results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy (p. 91).

In the passage that follows, the United States Army Military Manual strongly contrasts the three forms of government: autocracy, democracy, and “representative government — the American experiment,” describing the last named as “the golden mean between autocracy and democracy.” It reads:

Autocracy declares the divine right of kings; its authority cannot be questioned; its powers are arbitrarily or unjustly administered.

Democracy is the “direct” rule of the people and has been repeatedly tried without success.

Our Constitutional fathers, familiar with the strength and weakness of both autocracy and democracy, with fixed principles definitely in mind, defined a representative republican form of government. They “made a very marked distinction between a republic and a democracy . . . and said repeatedly and emphatically that they had founded a republic.”

Madison, in the Federalist, emphasized the fact that this government was a republic and not a democracy, the Constitution makers having considered both an autocracy and a democracy as undesirable forms of government while “a republic . . . promises the cure for which we are seeking” (p. 92).

While many may consider the government established by the Founding Fathers as a constitutional democracy, it is clear that no such idea entered into the mind of those from whom Americans derive their form of government, nor did these men give coloring to such an interpretation by their own actions.*

As a test of the sincerity of their attitude toward human liberty, the question of slavery naturally enters into consideration here. The disestablishment of it was not accomplished at once, but was definitely aimed at by the Founding Fathers, and steps in that direction were taken progressively. Charles Carroll led the way by actually introducing into the Maryland Legislature a motion for its complete abolition, but this was premature. George Washington at his death freed all his slaves, as did also others of the Founding Fathers. Nothing, however, could be more convincing than the Constitutional clause demanding that after twenty years (in 1808) the slave trade was to be abolished. In the northern colonies this took place at an early date. Such measures, of course, in no way implied a desire for any other form of government than that of a Representative Republic.

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* See the letter of Mr. William S. Bennet, prominently displayed in the New York Times, Apr. 5, 1942.

* Apart from the fact that we rather borrow our terminology from the Fathers of the Constitution than from radio commentators or the speakers at women’s clubs.

* About its confusion with liberty see the text concerning liberalism.

* Charles A. and Mary R. Beard wrote: “As was said afterwards, the founders of the Republic in general, whether Federalist or Republican, feared democracy more than they feared original sin.” (America in Midpassage, New York, 1939, Vol. III, p. 922.) About the use of the word democratic between 1865 and the close of the century, see p. 923 of the same book.

* Mob democracy is, needless to say, nearest to the concepts of St. Thomas. Thus by a play of circumstances their terminology is more accurate than that of some lowbrow Catholics.

* The expression democracy in the notes, Appendix I, as used by American and foreign authorities, has its classical, standard meaning and is equivalent to the term ochlocracy in the text.

*Military Manual published in 1928 and in use for the succeeding four years. (TM 2000–25)

* Cf. Stringfellow Barr’s article “Ourselves Again” in Tomorrow, Oct., 1942. Condensed reprint in the Catholic Digest, Nov., 1942. This essay of the president of St. John’s, Annapolis, not only evaluates democracy correctly, but also gives an outline of Hitler’s democratic background.