Democracy's Little Mendacities

It is usually around election times that we are instructed in the high theory of democracy.

We are instructed that the right to vote is “the sacred right of a democratic people,” a right that many people died to preserve. We are instructed that only in a democracy is the will of the people fully expressed and honored. And we are instructed that government, in a democracy, is an institution that empowers the people.

These notions are mendacities masquerading as high-minded, lofty thought.

There is nothing sacred about the right to vote, except to those who have rejected God and now turn to the government for mercy and grace.

Many Americans, indeed, have died in wars. But they didn’t die to preserve the right to vote. Most died because they were conscripted by the government to fight in wars against people who posed no threat whatsoever to our right to vote.

This does not detract from the honor and courage of the men who fought and died for the country. No doubt most of them believed they were fighting for the principle on which this country was founded. But that principle was liberty, not democracy.

Liberty and democracy are not the same. Where there is liberty, there can be no tyranny, but tyrants have rarely found democracy to be much of an obstacle. Even in the U.S. If any two US presidents qualify as tyrants, Lincoln and F. D. Roosevelt would be the two — the very two that most Americans regard as the nation’s greatest presidents.

Popular thinking has it that a democracy is ultimately governed by the will of the people. Governed by mob rule would be more accurate. For there is no such thing as “the will of the people.”

A person has a will. A person chooses and acts. But “the people” is an abstraction. “The people” is not a separate being with a will of its own, a separate being that chooses and acts on its own behalf.

What is meant by “the will of the people,” of course, is the consent of the majority (a notion only slightly less obscure than “the will of the people”). But what makes the consent of the majority a worthy standard? Is the majority always right? Should the majority get what they want?

Suppose a majority of people want to string up a man because they don’t like his skin color. Should they get their way? Isn’t that what honoring the will of the people would require? And, if the will of the people is to be honored, wouldn’t this grotesque majority be justified in forcing the man to spring for the rope?

In a democracy, government does, indeed, empower the people. It empowers them to be parasites.

Government is an inherently parasitic institution. It finances itself through its power to tax – that is, its power to take money from people by force.

Democracy empowers people to grab hold of that power and use it for their own particular benefit. And grab hold they do.

The democratic arrangement of power is different from other arrangements but no less parasitic: money dispensed by government to some must first be taken by government from others. In fact, the democratic arrangement is more parasitic, for now, any one can get in on the act.

Government becomes the middleman, the parasitic intermediary, in the democratic arrangement, and the politicians and bureaucrats who run the operation secure a good buck at it. Their work is called public service.

Recent presidential campaigns show how people, empowered by democracy, assert themselves. The standard criterion many voters use to evaluate a candidates is: What is he going to do for me? The candidates know this is the standard criterion, which is why they grovel and pander and fall all over themselves to persuade “working families” and “all Americans” that the goods they want will be delivered.

And on election day, the people descend on the polls like hungry tapeworms digging their way through a host.

November 22, 2000

Don Matthews is a columnist for the Brunswick (Ga.) News.