Freedom, not Democracy

The religion of "democracy" obscures what the United States is all about.

As the election looms, both sides claim to be defenders of “Democracy and Freedom.” I’ve heard this shibboleth bandied about mostly by the Left, but the Right uses it as well. Someone I know the other day said he was voting to “save Democracy and Freedom,” adding, “So I assume you know who I’m voting for.” I just nodded, because I held no such assumption. My general impression of this particular speaker led me to believe he was probably voting Democrat, but I couldn't be sure. If Kamala Harris was indeed his idea of saving those two iconic concepts, he would’ve been surprised to know that Donald Trump was my choice to save anything worth saving.

Its would seem from everyday discourse — the man-in-the-street chat that Heidegger called “Das Man” — that democracy and freedom go together like truth and beauty.

Not so. More aptly, we should say that they go together like language and literature. The English language has produced great literature, from Shakespeare to Joyce. It has also produced propaganda, pornography, and potboilers. Language is a tool, that’s all. It is a neutral venue for expression. The same holds true for democracy. It is no more than a mode of governance. Its central mechanism of voting can produce freedom, but it can also produce tyranny.

People forget that Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933 as the result of a democratic process. He was not directly elected, but Paul von Hindenburg, who appointed him, was the duly elected president at the time. Nothing in the democratic process stopped Hitler’s rise to power. On the other hand, you could say that the 2016 election of Donald Trump stopped — at least temporarily — the ascent of the Deep State, with its wars and oppression. The electoral process can work for evil or for good. It is merely a mode of governance.

Notice how, when someone the Left doesn't like is elected — Trump is the obvious example — then it is no longer democracy, it is “populism.” Populism is the word Lefties use to label democracy when it doesn't go their way.

But again, democracy is a mode of governance, that’s all. And as has been pointed out many times by others, the United States of America is not even a democracy. It is a republic. What’s the difference? In a democracy, the voting public may bring in any virtue or any infamy, depending on the will of the majority. In a republic, certain safeguards are established as the inviolable law of the land. The USA is a republic because several clauses in its Constitution guarantee, for example, the right to free speech and the right to bear arms. These may not be infringed, even if a manic majority demands it. That is why, in Benjamin Franklin’s famous response to a woman outside the Constitutional convention who asked him what kind of government the new nation would have, Franklin said: “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

We are on the edge of losing it. For when the right to free speech is violated in the name of curbing “hate speech” (whatever that is) and the right to bear arms is attacked by people who shift moral responsibility from human judgment to pieces of metal, the republic is in grave danger of collapsing into…

Democracy. Which when stripped down to its essentials amounts to — Franklin again — “two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner.”

If democracy is not the All-Good, Universally Desirable, Godlike state that fools think it is, what does constitute a desirable a condition?

Freedom, or liberty. (The two are generally treated as identical, though technically “freedom” is the existential condition, while “liberty” is the political condition mirroring the existential. We’ll stick with “freedom.”)

It is freedom that the Founding Fathers sought to bequeath to us, not “democracy.” The right to free speech is freedom, the right to assemble is freedom, the right to bear arms is freedom, the right to trial by jury is freedom. None of these has anything to do with “democracy” and in fact all of them could be eliminated by democracy if the population voted to abolish them.

Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Madison and the others chose a republic over a democracy for good reason, but other modes of governance are capable of granting freedom as well. It is little understood that the French Revolution of 1789 was not only not about gaining freedom, but that its democratic ideals actually stopped freedom in its tracks. King Louis XVI was known as “the defender of liberty,” because he favored the French merchants whose motto was “laissez-nous faire,” from which we get the term, “laissez-faire,” or free market. Monarchy is a mode of governance that, like democracy, can go in any direction, though it depends on the will of a monarch instead of the will of “the people.” In this case, the king favored freedom. He was not the tyrant he has been made out to be.

But when the democratically oriented majority took over, Paris flowed with blood as thousands went to the guillotine (including Louis XVI and his queen) and thousands more died in prison, “guilty” of exercising their freedom to own property or criticize the revolution. In 1793-94 France, democracy triumphed over freedom.

“Democracy” has become a religion. People get huffy when you question its status, as if you are spitting on the pope. But it is in fact nothing more than a channel for whatever comes down the electoral pike. All too often, what comes down is contrary to truth and harmful to freedom. That is clearly the case now.

With the “Democrat” party producing war, censorship, and inflation, the current choice is not a matter of which side truly champions “democracy and freedom.” The choice is between democracy, with its runaway implementation of state power, on the one hand, and freedom of the individual — the freedom that once made America great and could make it great again — on the other.

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