The Vices of Democracy & Illiberalism of American Democrats

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Scott I'm Scott Schiff with the Atlas Society. We're pleased to have Atlas society senior scholar Richard Salzman with us today on the vices of democracy and illiberalism of american democrats. After Richard's opening comments, we'll take questions from you. So please request to speak if you have questions, and we'll try to get to as many of you as possible. Richard, great topic. [00:00:23] Speaker B: Thank you, Scott, and thanks, everyone, for joining. This is a part one of a really of a part two series. Before the election, I thought I would spend one session on the Democrats and democracy. I'm focusing mostly on the US, almost primarily on that. And next time in October, I'll focus on the Republicans. Now my setup and structure will be the same for each. I'm going to do a bit of talking about what I would call the topical aspect, in other words, the headlines we're seeing today. So more topical aspects of democracy and the Democrat party. Then I'm going to do a bit of historical, then I'm going to do philosophical. So the three parts are topical, historical, philosophical. Now, topically, just to put some things that might be obvious out on the table, I think what we have today is the two dominant parties in the United States, and I'm not going to do a comparative analysis here, Democrats versus Republicans or even democracy versus Republicanism. I want to do give each their due. And so it's more an issue of the comparative analysis will be how do these parties and how do their underlying principles compare to individual rights compared to the american system of government, compared to liberty, protection of individual rights, the kind of things that liberty loving, objectivist, conservative and others would care about. And so that's my analysis really the way I'm going to do it. Now let me start with some particulars about today. I would put the Democrat Party and Democrats generally today as having three main concerns or three main areas of influence. And as I say these, I think you'll immediately start remembering, if you know, the history, that there's a history to these three things as well. But what I wanted to do is set out where they stand today and then kind of develop the theme that the democratic party has not really changed as much as people think over the decade. Now let me see where, let me say where I, where I think they are today in almost without exception, and there's always going to be exceptions. There's going to be different types of Democrats along the spectrum. But I see the Democrat party and Democrats generally as in favor of and constantly pushing three types of state. The welfare state, what I call the lawfare state and the warfare state. So we got welfare, lawfare warfare. Let me tell you what I mean by each of these. The first one, I think, is very familiar to people. The welfare state. The Democratic Party in America for a long time, and at least going back to FDR with the new Deal, has been a big advocate of the welfare state. Now, the welfare state generally refers to the redistribution of income, the imposition of an aggressive graduated income tax, even something like central banking, where money is controlled by the government and it decides the value of money. And so it sounds more like an economic. And it is. It's largely an economic attitude about what government's role should be relative to the economy. Now, notice I mentioned FDR. FDR and the new deal, the origin of most of the welfare state today. Social Security was adopted in 1935. Many of the regulatory agencies, like the SEC, the FDIC, also from the thirties. Now, we can set aside for a moment that this was during the Great Depression. Who caused the Great Depression and why? But the point is, this was a program very radically new for America when prior to this, there was not a lot of government intervention in the economy and a redistribution of wealth. And the focus was definitely that it was not the promotion of wealth creation, but the redistribution of wealth from the richer to the middle and the poor. Now this didn't just start with FDR and end. We know that it extended into the 1960s with JFK and especially LBJ, with the Great Society, with so called great society program. What was that? The institution of Medicare, of Medicaid, of a range of even more expansion of the welfare state under LBJ. And on the third leg of this, again, I'm skipping over a lot here. I would add the Obama years and to some extent the Biden years here, the extension of Obamacare, the move still further into socialized medicine, or the move, for example, into nationalizing in 2010, all student loans. These are the kind of things that we become familiar with the welfare state. And again, it's not. Richard, did you mute yourself? [00:05:50] Speaker A: Yeah, you cut out. I don't show you. There you are. [00:05:55] Speaker B: Can you hear me still? What's the last thing you heard? [00:06:03] Speaker A: You talking about the welfare state. I should go back about 30 seconds. [00:06:08] Speaker B: Okay. LBJ in the sixties extended the welfare state as well. So it's not just FDR. It's not as if the republican party has not been accomplices to this. But the main proponents of extensions of the welfare state always had been the Democrat party, defending it vigorously, always trying to expand it into new realms. So that's one aspect, the welfare state, clearly in violation of individual rights, I would say clearly also in violation of the constitution, and certainly a trench on liberty. Now, the second one, and is more recent, I think, in people's minds, but this one's been around a while as well. What I call the lawfare state, it's really not welfare, but lawfare. It's the regulatory state. It's not the state redistributing wealth by taxation and spending and all these programs. It's the growth of the regulatory state, the so called Alphabet agencies. And there's, of course, thousands of them. What's unique about these is they're not set up as having a separation of powers. So the three branches of government that the constitution set up, executive, legislative, and judicial, are all combined, we know, in a place like the IR's, in a place like the FTC or the FDA or the FCC or the FAA, on and on. They have regulatory, they write rules, which is like legislation. They enforce them, which is like the executive, and they have some of their own budgets, so they can even pay for it. Now, this I say, too, is we didn't have any of these. Actually, in the beginning of the american system, we had only four cabinet agencies, state, treasury, war and justice, corresponding to legitimate government functions. Of course, now we have 16 cabinet agencies, but more than that, as I said, thousands of regulatory agencies. So this, too, again, not the Republicans, had nothing to do with this. But this is largely a function of Democrat theory, Democrat practice. It began significantly under Woodrow Wilson and World War one, but also extended heavily under FDR and elsewhere. So the whole concept of unelected officials writing laws and imposing them on people arbitrarily, even something like antitrust law, mandates, bans, decrees, executive orders, all these kind of things fall under the rubric, I would say, of lawfare, where the state is using law either to violate rights or in some cases, to alleviate the punishment of wrongdoers. So it's not only that it goes after people who are otherwise innocent, but it also is arbitrary in terms of who it's going to punish, who's actually breaking the laws. Now, I would include in this, by the way, and this is partly history, but a lot of violence either condoned or promoted. So now, this isn't quite from the regulatory agency, but a long history of, well, more recently, what do we hear? Defund the police. The police being an actual proper function of government. The idea of defund the police or get rid of bail or let people out of jail or raise the limit by which you can shoplift and get away with it. There is a not only under law fair, not only does there seem to be the democrat approach of promoting a heavy handed regulatory state, but also a kind of rule of lawlessness, a rule of lawlessness where there's a reluctance to actually uphold the law and in some cases to weaponize it and to use the law to go after political opponents. Again, they're not a monopoly on this. It's not as if the Republicans have never done this, but there's a long history of this, and we're seeing it today. I would just tick off a few more other examples. There is a mode, a movement to pack the court, to pack the Supreme Court that comes under law fair, very much unconstitutional. Very much of the view that these are not elected officials, they're not democratically elected officials. Therefore, they violate the principles of democracy. Animosity toward the electoral college, animosity toward the filibuster, which preserves an independent voice into, in the judiciary, animosity toward judicial review. That would be the idea of the Supreme Court judging whether laws are constitutional or not. These are all strong Democrat positions, and they're advanced on the grounds that they're not truly democratic. Sanctuary cities, the idea of whole cities not following the law, not following the federal law because they don't want to, because local democracy, you know, democratic spirit, goes against it. I could go on, but there's a lot of that kind of thing. Maybe the last one would be no borders or very loose borders. It's not really the welfare state. It's not really having anything to do with war. But again, it's along those lines that we're not going to uphold the law on the border. We're not going to process immigrants rationally. So I've talked about the welfare state, a very big democratic project for decades. I've talked about the lawfare state. Now the last one is the warfare state. This one might be a little more controversial because the Republicans of the other side seem to have a reputation for being hawkish and the other, and the Democrats seem to have a reputation for being dovish. Well, actually, the whole idea of the world being made safe for democracy as a foreign policy principle is totally democrat. It's totally wilsonian. It's how we got involved in world War one, which was not our fight, but the idea, make the world safer. Democracy or the US should be a policeman of the world or NATO, that US should extend its defensive umbrella to 32 other countries, certainly not in the constitution. There's nothing in the constitution that says the US should be providing national defense for other countries. I think in today's world more directly, the idea of wars that last forever, that there is perpetual war, that the US should defend Ukraine, that the principle should not be America first because that's too selfish, but America last, that America should get involved in wars for humanitarian reasons, for democratic reasons. Again, not that Republicans are pacifists and never get involved in bad wars, but just the principle and what we see today, I think that's what we're seeing. I think we're seeing a inclination of this party in particular and more and more, and it's just showing up more and more to be involved in wars and not even winning them. The disaster of coming out of Afghanistan more recently is just one example. So what have I done so far? I said I would do topical than historical than philosophical as quickly as I just did that. That's it for me on just doing the topical of where we stand today. Let me do now some historical because when you go back and look at the history of the Democrat party or the democracy in America, you'll see some of these made these same themes. And I don't think most people know this history. It really comes down to a hamiltonian vision, which is the republican one, and a jeffersonian one, which is the Democrat one. So now most people, if you know the history, the major Democrat figures since the founding run something like this. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Jefferson Davis, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Carter, Obama Biden. Now, I've left out some Democrats along the way, but anyone who knows these names know that for the most part, these were not substantially pro capitalist people. Thomas Jefferson, although a liberal, Thomas Jefferson, although absolutely crucial to the founding of America and the Declaration, was well known as someone who was suspicious of capitalism, suspicious of manufacturing, suspicious of commerce, suspicious of cities. He believed in physiocracy, the idea that all value is created by farmers, that anyone in any other sector was somewhat parasitical. Hence many of his battles with Hamilton, not just about politics, but about political economy, about what a proper economy was, and of course, moving away from Jefferson, just generally the Jeffersonian south, much more feudalistic, much more medievalist. Certainly slavery and racism was much more rampant compared to the more free labor, pro capitalist, manufacturing, urbanic north. Now, Andrew Jackson is often seen as a laissez faire. The party, by the way, was started in eight. Formerly the party was started in 1828 under Van Buren, and the jacksonian period, although limited in government at the time, was also continuing the idea of racism and slavery. And Jackson's particular edition was to try to exterminate the Indians. So the whole long history of the trail of tears and the mistreatment of Native Americans, if you want to call them that, is totally attributable to Andrew Jackson, not well known. Now, Jefferson Davis is an obvious one once you start moving up to the Civil War. Jefferson Davis, who was president of the Confederacy, the Democrats are on record, obviously, for starting the Civil War. I mean, that was the party that wanted to break away from the abolitionist north and establish and preserve their own slave states, Democrat through and through. We'll talk next month about how the republican party began as the abolitionist party on the other side, 1854. But there's no doubt, and again, I'm just kind of walking through the history here that these are Democrats. And to actually threaten the very existence of the american experiment, to have a party doing that is really quite remarkable. Now, I'm going to fast forward. There's some history more to convey here, but Woodrow Wilson, a major, quote, unquote, progressive Democrat president, gave us the federal income tax, the federal reserve, involvement in World War one, the resegregation of the military, and a whole bunch of other things, the promotion of eugenics. I mean, I could go on and on, but Wilson, you know, the turn of the century really is, is just continuing this tradition of doing things wholly unconstitutional. And, you know, obviously, they voted for him. He had two terms. For those of you interested in Wilson, Wilson was an academic. I believe he was the president of Princeton at one point, a professor, 1887, far before he took office. He has an essay called Socialism and Democracy. I'm not going to cite it here, but it's easy to find online. If you just look up socialism and democracy by the future president Woodrow Wilson, 1887, he basically says that democratic socialism is an ideal. He's resistant to state socialism, he's resistant to revolution, but he believes it should be adopted by vote. Now, I won't recount all what I said already about FDR and then LBJ and onward, but again, these are not, and these are giants. These aren't just marginal figures. These are giants within the Democrat party who brought America further and further toward the welfare state, the law, fair state, and the warfare state. It's simply undeniable. Now, I just want to take a quick detour here on the history and specifically focus on war. I mentioned the idea of the warfare state. It is really actually quite remarkable that if you go back and look at all the major wars in America, something like 90% of them were due to Democrats in the Democrat party. It's actually quite shocking. I'll go beyond the founding and just started in 1812. The fight with Britain was instigated by Jefferson and Madison. It was absolutely no reason for the US to be fighting with Britain in 1812. But for two years, the War of 1812 largely had to do with the US Democrats backing Napoleon. During the napoleonic wars, they backed Napoleon against Britain. And so Britain went to war second time in 30 years with they actually burned down part of the White House. I mean, to put this us in such a precarious state in 1812. And prior to that, by the way, they had completely defunded the military. So the war of 1812 wouldn't have happened without democrat influence. Now, even the war with Mexico in the mid century, in 1848 to 50, if you look, that was a Democrat project. Now, whether people agree or not with what happened in that case, it was the mexican american war, was a Democrat war. Obviously, the civil war was a Democrat war. I mean, in the sense of who started it and why. And what was the unjust reason that they started it and continued it again? Like fast forward. There are other wars in between, smaller ones, like the spanish american war, that was Teddy Roosevelt. But World War one was huge, totally due to Wilson. World War two was huge. FDR got us involved in that. The Korea War, 51 to 53 or so due to Truman. The Vietnam War, which lasted six, eight years. JFK and LBJ. I mean, Nixon was involved at the end, but he and Ford eventually got us out of it. Just remarkable. So, again, it's not like 100% of the cases of these wars, many of which were damaging to America, many of which were self sacrificial. I mean, Ayn Rand condemned us involvement in the Vietnam war not because she wasn't anti communist, but because she thought it was sacrificial. And this is a theme you do see when the Democrats get involved in war, just as an aside, but related to war, if you look at the history of conscription in the US of a military draft, it's been off and on and off and on. But it was begun in modern times by FDR. He did it even before Pearl Harbor, 1940. And if, you know, it wasn't repealed until 1973 by Nixon and Marty Anderson and other objectivists who influenced Nixon, Milton Friedman included. So even on that score, the idea of a warfare party that not only gets involved in a lot of wars that aren't to America's advantage, but on top of that, kidnaps and conscripts millions of Americans in the fight in the battle. Now I'm going to switch to. I said I would do topical, just a quick survey of where the Democrats are today. Then historical. That was very quick. Going through some history of the democrats on these various issues. Now I want to get, and finish up more with a little more philosophical, because it's one thing to say the Democrat party or this particular leader or these, the party elements are obviously political and not philosophical, but it is called the Democrat party. And the root of this is obviously democracy. And democracy is a particular form of government. I mean, it's not monarchy, it's not aristocracy, it's democracy. So the question is, what is democracy and how does that relate to not only individual rights and the american experiment and say, capitalism. The root of democracy is demos. Democracy comes from demos. And D e m o s means people. That's it. So democracy literally means a government of, by and for the people. The problem is, what kind of people? Are these informed people or are they ignorant people? Are they virtuous people or are they vicious people? Are they independent beings or they. Or are they kind of like sheeple? Did they have like a long range time horizon? Or are they more myopic? Are they living in a culture that is more paternalistic in the sense of it's run like a family or a collective? If so, the model is going to be that the citizens are like infants and that the rulers are the parents. So these are not, you know, grown individuals living their own lives. It's a. It's a political model which is oppressive and detrimental to individual rights and liberties. Interestingly, in the. Going back a little bit to the us constitution, there's only one mentioned of the political form of government actually in the constitution. People don't know this, but the Declaration of independence, for example, zero references to democracy. There's no call for democracy. It's not an advocacy of democracy. Same thing with the us constitution. No, the word does not appear in the us constitution. But in article four, section four, it says that this guarantees to every state in this union a republican form of government, unquote. So the only part of the us constitution that actually refers to form of government and then says it's going to be guaranteed is not a democratic form of government, but a republican form of government. By the way, I checked. In 1848, Marx's communist manifesto mentions democracy five times favorably. Five times favorably. In the sense of, yes, we will advocate revolt by the laborers, but we'll also advocate them using the democratic system to get socialism. And it is interesting that at the turn of the century. I'm talking about the last century, not this one. There was a advocacy for shifting from what was called revolutionary socialism to evolutionary socialism, mostly in Britain, by a guy named Edward Bernstein. So he advocated evolutionary social. What was the difference? The revolutionary one was but basically militant, and the idea that socialism would be achieved by violence, but the workers weren't really revolting, especially in the west. So the idea became, well, let's have evolutionary not by bullets, but by ballots, by voting, not by revolutionary means, by evolutionary means. And the progressives within the democratic party and elsewhere picked up on this, and the Brits definitely picked up on this. Fabian socialism, all the other that type. But especially after World War two, the British nationalized almost everything and moved towards socialism by vote, by democracy. So I wanted to mention these more philosophic aspects of it, because it definitely fuels the actual politics we see. It is partly the idea that all sovereignty and wisdom and morality exist in the majority among the populace. Hence populism, the idea that as an ism, the real source of legitimacy comes from the broader populace, not from quote unquote, elites, not from minorities, not from individuals. So this is very common within the democratic spirit or theory. More derogatory terms would be, this is just mob rule, or this is just the tyranny of the majority, the line of Tocqueville. And. And you can see why it would be this way. It's not necessarily democracy is not necessarily. In fact, you could argue that it's opposite of a liberal approach. And let me just quote from an Ayn Rand about this. And very interesting quote. Quote of democratic. This is Ayn Rand democratic, and its original meaning refers to unlimited majority rule. It's a social system in which one's work, one's property, one's mind, and one's life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster a vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose, unquote. Now, notice in another quote, how she relates it to collectivism. Quote, if we discard morality and substitute for it the collectivist doctrine of unlimited majority rule, if we accept the idea that a majority may do anything it pleases, and that anything done by a majority is right because it's done by a majority, this being the only standard of right and wrong, how are men to apply this in practice to their actual lives? Who is the majority in relation to each particular man? All other men are potential members of that majority, which may destroy him at its pleasure at any moment. Then each man and all men indeed become enemies, because each has to fear and suspect all. Each must try to rob and murder first before he is robbed and murdered, unquote. Now, on the positive side, Leonard Peacock, in his lectures on objectivism, says the following, quote, the american system is not a democracy. It's a constitutional republic. A democracy, if you attach meaning to the terms, is a system of unlimited majority rule. Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights. The majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. And in principle, the democratic government is all powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation. It is not a form of freedom. The founders Hamilton said, our disease is democracy. At the convention, Hamilton said, we are now forming a republican government. Liberty is found not in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much toward democracy, we shall soon shoot into monarchy. Unquote. John Adams, remember, quote, remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that didn't commit suicide, unquote. Madison in a pure democracy, there's nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual, unquote. Madison also, measures are too often decided not according to the rules of justice or the rights of the minority party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. Unquote. I wanted to say something more philosophical, cite a couple of things, and then stop even more deeply, I think, more deeply philosophical. I would put the whole history of this in a context of the following. Prior to the enlightenment, if you were to ask, what is the basis for government? What is the legitimacy for government? Why do they get to rule us? It was, if you know the divine right of kings, it was monarchies. But worse than that, it was monarchs who said, God tells me what to do, and I have a tie line to God. So the doctrine was called the divine right of kingdom. And interestingly, John Locke, in his treatise on government, everyone knows the second treatise on government, but the first treatise on government was Locke saying, divine right of kings is garbage. The divine right of kings is wrong. And he refuted it in spades. Well, then the second treatise was to build up from there. Well, if it's not the divine right of kings, what is the legitimate purpose of government? And he said, and the founders believed it as well, that its sole function was to protect individual rights to life, liberty, and property. And if it didn't do that, Locke said, you get to revolt against it. It's an agent of our right to self defense and our right to these important things, life, liberty, and property. Well, think about this. You could say that when the divine right of kings, which was vox day, voice of goddess, was replaced in the enlightenment, it was the voice of reason. It was no longer the voice of God. It wasn't Vox day, it was vox intellectia. Except that was a counter revolution. The philosophers out there will know that the enlightenment didn't last long. There was a counter enlightenment, and the counter enlightenment basically said, we have thrown out God, but now we're going to throw out reason as well. Now what's left? What is left as a form of justifying government now? And the answer was the voice of the people, the consent of the governed. And there we are. We're all the way back to democracy as the ideal, the collective, not God, but the societal collective, if you will. So instead of deity, it's society. Instead of genuflecting before God, we're now genuflecting before public opinion polls and majority rule, whatever the hell they say. Just as an arbitrary God would command whatever he wants, so also with society, and in between what was left behind, which is the only legitimate way of doing it, voice of reason, vox and talentia, although it animated the structure and the building of the Constitution. And that's one of the things we're still benefiting from. The reason the constitutional protections of individual rights are being eroded is that we've had many, many, many decades now of what amounts to a democratic, demos, populist, societal, collectivist view of legitimacy, and it's absolutely incompatible with liberty. So a lot of people not knowing this history and distinguishing between them, think that democracy and liberty go together, but they're actually antithetical. And when we hear today concerns about threats to democracy, it is in many ways kind of paradoxical. Because if what they mean is we fear autocracy, we fear that democracy is going to give way to autocracy, to tyrants, well, the answer is that is exactly what democracy tends toward. But it's not a republican or democrat thing, party in terms of party. It's where mob rule ends up. It ends up in tyrannical rule. So I'll stop there and draw a line because I'm about 35 minutes in and take questions, and again next month I'll go through this similar kind of structure with the Republicans, namely, what are they saying today? What was their history? How does it relate to republicanism? [00:34:08] Speaker A: Great, great stuff. I want to open it up. If you want to request to speak, you're welcome to. I've got some questions of my own. You know, you brought up demos, I'm curious how much of the kind of enlightenment love of democracy and what followed. Did that come from just trying to imitate the Greeks? [00:34:30] Speaker B: Yes. Well, you could say imitate the Greeks, but the. But the lawgivers, the framers, the ones who actually put together the us constitution, were very much against athenian democracy. I mentioned, I quoted some of those great framers, and some of them are from the federalist papers and elsewhere. If you go through the federalist papers, which were the ones that argued for ratifying and adopting the us constitution, every mention of democracy in the federalist paper is critical. There isn't one case where Madison, Jay or Hamilton are referring to democracy in a positive way. And so in the case of Athens, for example, the most famous example is they put Socrates to death. Why? By vote. Why? Because he was allegedly what? Poisoning the minds of the youth, turning them into skeptics and sophists, making them semi atheists. So if you read Plato's dialogues, when he goes through how Socrates is isolated and then condemned and then ostracized, and then he commits suicide, Plato, although a authoritarian, you know, also said, well, democracy can kill people, too. So the founders knew this. So, Scott, I think if what you're asking is did the enlightenment leverage off of the love of and remembrance of and reminiscence of democracy in Athens, I think it was respectful and interested in the idea that that wasn't done, monarchy. But they were. No, they were not fooled into thinking that it was liberal, that it was necessarily liberal, and not only was it illiberal, in the case of Socrates, the founders also were very much interested in durability. They didn't like the idea that even if liberal, that a government wouldn't last very long. So one of the things they were playing with was the idea of a mixed constitution. And this does relate to democratic principles and democracy. The mixed constitution, which Aristotle wrote about, which later in the roman period, Polybius wrote about, which Montesquieu knew something about, as did Blackstone, Hamilton and others. The view there was, if you were pure democracy, you would become illiberal and then look for a strong man amid the chaos and end up in tyranny. And so they had this view that it was unsustainable. But if you mixed different methods, now, think of this, the us case. The executive branch is kind of like a monarchy, and the legislative branch is kind of like a democracy, and the judicial branch is kind of like an aristocracy. So their view was, if you had different types of government within the same government, and then there were checks and balances. You know, and separation of powers, all the things we learn, you know, hopefully in civics class. And then on top of that, if you have a federalist system where there's a check, you know, from the state and local governments. See, their whole view was, what can we do to avoid anarchy and to create government? But the government that did not fly off into autocracy or authoritarianism. And it's obviously not a full fledged case for democracy. It's a case for this mixed system, which is durable and more likely to preserve liberalism. [00:38:05] Speaker A: Great. You mentioned some of the historical figures. I'm curious. I know there's an amendment where, you know, we started electing senators instead of them just being appointed from the state government. Was that a. Yeah. Was that a big turning point? [00:38:22] Speaker B: Maybe. [00:38:22] Speaker A: What were a few other historical turning points? [00:38:26] Speaker B: That's a perfect. That's a very good example of what happened during the progressive era, which was the debt was largely pushed by Democrats roughly 1890 to 1910, 1920, or so called the progressive era. Yes. And the push there was for direct election of senators, a very much democratic move. Direct election. In other words, the more that people directly vote for either issues or representatives, that's much more democratic. The way the founders had set it up is they said you can vote for your House of Representatives person every two years directly. But the senators, and only 100 of them. Right. Only two per state would be elected by the state legislatures. So see how that's one step removed from the voters? It would be like today if the North Carolina legislature picked the senator from North Carolina that served in Washington. Well, the Democrat purists of that period said, that's too elitist. That's not directly answering to the whims and wishes of the. Of the populace. So the constitution was changed to allow for that. And now another example of this, you could say, is any kind of push for universal suffrage. So when did women get the right to vote on the federal level in the US? 1920. So not surprisingly, during the progressive era. Now, in today's context, you don't have to come out against women voting. But for that context, 100 years ago, their view was not, let's have women vote because they'll be liberal. I mean, liberal in the good sense that they'll uphold liberty. The view was whatever people want, and we're excluding half the people. So they should get a voice as well, even if that voice asks for the welfare state. And studies have actually shown that women lean in the direction of less liberal, more authoritarian, more paternalistic, more welfarist government. And. But the progressives had no problem with that. Again, their standard was not preserve liberty. Their standard was whatever the majority wants. So those are just two examples. A more recent example that might interest you is primaries, political primaries. There weren't any political primaries until the seventies. So the candidates were maybe early. Yeah, but around that time. So the candidates like FDR and Coolidge and even all the way up to JFK were chosen by party leaders. And they made, and it sounds elitist, right? It sounds like they're doing it in a smoke filled room and they're not asking the general popular. But their view was, let's judge the man's character, track record, experience, make sure they're not extremists on the outside of the spec, make sure they can win the general election. And that's how the elections occurred. Well, the Democrat spirit and the Democrat push within the country came up with the idea of primaries. So now the idea was the candidates will be elected in primaries. We're all used to this now, right? There's primaries. And what happens, you have the democratic primary, then you have the republican primary. And what tends that? You're just speaking to part of the country and, you know, and the Democrats say, pick Bernie Sanders. Why? Cause that whole part of the spectrum leans left, right, and they don't even care whether Bernie Sanders can win the general election or not. Right. And then the other side might pick, you know, just fill in the blank, an extreme within their party. So by the time you get the general election, you get two candidates who, you know, they're either not moderate or they're so far apart, the election result is a toss up. It's much more chaotic. But from the democratic standpoint, you know, their view is it's much more reflective of the general will. It's this rousseauian argument of whatever the people want, the people should get. And it, by the way, is not accidental that just as demos means people and democracy means rule by people, when you get things like demagogues, demagoguery, it's appealing to people's worse base prejudices and emotions. That's the essence of what demagoguery is. You're not appealing to their reason, you're appealing to them as people. And since it's this big agglomerated mass of, well, what is the people? And they can engage in groupthink, and they can engage in conspiracy, conspiracy theories. There's a tendency, even if you don't believe it, that the leaders manipulate the emotions, the prejudices, the bigotries of people just to get their vote. So that's another very nasty aspect to this kind of governance. And frankly one more I'll mention which is very common now is propaganda. There was a famous american public intellectual called William Lippmann who in the 1920s wrote a book called Public Opinion. And in that book he came up with this amazing phrase called the manufacturing of consent, which kind of sounds weird, doesn't it? Consent is supposed to be just ask people what they want and they agree. And his view was no, you have to manufacture it, you have to fabricate it, you have to shape it. Because if as a leader you have a certain goal in mind, you can't just passively ask people what they want, even though that sounds democratic. It was a combination of the Democrats saying I know that my legitimacy comes from the vote, but I also need to manipulate the vote. I need to if possible, bamboozle people into voting for things that are really against their interests and for my interest. And following upon that there's a fellow named Edward Bernays who really should read B e r n a Y S. He wrote an essay in 1947 called Engineering Consent. Same kind of attitude. You see the idea if consent is the rubber stamp, but we don't always get our way, we're going to need to engineer this. We're going to have to maybe control the media, maybe control academia, maybe control the arts and entertainment and Hollywood to shape the minds of this mass that we want for our legitimacy. He had written by the way, a book called Propaganda. This is still Bernays in 1928. Just you can find it online propaganda, 1928, same kind of attitude. And Goebbels in Nazi Germany loved the book, absolutely loved the book and used it as a way to manipulate the Weimar mind. And if you know anyone who knows the history that in the lead up to Hitler they voted the nazi party into office among other parties. So just as in Venezuela, democracy led to tyranny. It did so in Weimar Germany. But this aspect of it of trying to influence public minds because your criteria is majority rule, is a very interesting connection. Because when people think of censorship or the government trying to control social media or the media itself, the mainstream media being in the pocket of government, that is not unrelated to democracy. It's not unrelated to this emphasis on our legitimacy comes from public opinion. Yeah, it's interesting, Richard, what you were saying about this idea that the electorate is too unsophisticated to know what's good for them. So we need to manufacture consent. And then at the very same time you get people like Galbraith saying that it is these evil companies, that is manufacturing demand, right? Yes. So they're critical of this shibboleth of companies manufacturing demand while promoting the idea of manufacturing consent. But the common through line is that both imply a distrust of people's ability to use their own reason to determine what's best for them. Yeah, that's a really good connection because Jennifer also, Bernays actually started on Madison Avenue. He was famously known for glamorizing cigarette smoking by getting placements in movies and things like that too, and especially to have women smoke. And it worked in the 1920s and stuff. So it worked. And it's interesting. I think what they concluded was, well, if Madison Avenue and capitalism can do this, then why not just transfer that into the political realm? And in many ways it's ingenious. In many ways it's brilliant. Except the, except the difference is, you know, one side is just trying, you know, selling cigarettes or soap, you know, or cars or deodorant, but when you're selling Nazism or when you're selling the New Deal or when you're selling and trying to whip up interest in going to war, I mean, this is, these are much more consequential. Right. But what you say there is very interesting because, yes, Galbraith and a bunch of others, they, they were, they had like a foot in both camps. They were aware of this power of persuasion, even if it meant manipulation on the commercial side, so to speak. But then they transferred it to the political side. Great. [00:48:28] Speaker A: Speaking of founders, David Kelly is here with us. You'll have go ahead. [00:48:35] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Scott. And Richard, just a comment. That's an amazing amount of contemporary analysis and history in a very short span of time. I'm, as usual, awestruck by your knowledge of history. [00:48:56] Speaker B: Thank you. Dana. [00:48:58] Speaker C: I have a question, actually an observation and then a question. I don't begin to know as much as you do about the american history, but I remember an article by, I believe it was a political scientist, Martin diamond, in 1776 on the second anniversary of the declaration. There an important essay on the declaration and the Constitution. And the main theme was how liberal freedom became. Liberal freedom and democracy were the two values that the founders wanted to have working at somehow in the new America. But they were, as you pointed out, they were very leery about democracy, given its history. But diamond traces the sequence over, over time of the move from the primacy of liberty to the primacy of democracy. And I just cite that as a reference. I don't know if you're aware of it. I expect so. But it's an interesting, interesting piece of work and a short essay, but very powerful, my mind. [00:50:25] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you for that, David, because I know the name but not the essay. And I'll read it, but it does sound very similar to other writings and books. And I'll name just one or two of them of exactly this concern that they're in conflict. The idea of liberalism and democracy and some of the ways they put it is sometimes they'll put it as one's individualistic and one's collectivistic. The individualistic one would be, people have individual rights. Leave them alone. That's the liberal argument. But the democracy argument, since it relies on majority rule, it necessarily is more collectivist. It basically says, if 51% agree, they get to subjugate the other 49%, and that's the end of the story, you know, and it's also right. It's also interesting because the founder, when you think of the constitution, the Bill of rights are basically a complete veto over what the government can do. [00:51:24] Speaker C: Exactly. [00:51:25] Speaker B: And so you might say, well, I'm going to win the local election, and I'll win if it's 51% to 49%. Right. But you're just picking your Rep. And to change the constitution, they have, like, a super majority. It's either two thirds or three quarters. So notice how the hurdle rate is getting higher because the state bigger, the stakes are bigger. And one way of looking at the Bill of rights is it's 100% absolute in the sense of saying, Congress shall pass no law, you know, abridging freedom of speech and religion and stuff like that. So it's not. So they're basically saying, this is off limits. It's not open to vote. [00:52:05] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:52:06] Speaker B: And that becomes very interesting because there are many books now, and one just came out by a guy at. I think he's at Berkeley. There are many books now where the Democrat theorist from the university is basically anti constitution or anti supreme court, because it's not democratic enough. [00:52:26] Speaker C: Right. [00:52:27] Speaker B: In particular, there's a guy, there's a law theorist and professor called Erwin Chemerinsky, and his textbook has been used in law schools for decades. And he just came out with a book last week called no democracy lasts forever, how the Constitution threatens the United States. And a decade ago, he wrote a book called the Case against the Supreme Court. Perhaps the most famous in academia is a guy named Robert Dahl. Dahl. And in 2003, he wrote a book called how democratic is the US Constitution? And his answer is, it's not. It's. It's not democratic. At all. Therefore, we need to chip away at it. So. So notice their standard is. Their standard is democracy. And anything that gets away in the way of that, which would be the rule of law, constitutional limits, Scotus, you know, all those kind of. They have to be eroded or set aside or put aside or denounced or disdained and ridiculed. I know in my case, I have a colleague at Duke, Nancy McLean, in the history department, who wrote a book in 2018, very controversial, called democracy in chains. Now, what did she mean by chains? The chains were the constitution. So she's literally saying the constitution is enslaving us, chaining us, not allowing the general will to express itself and do whatever it wants. So from the democratic side, both theory and politics, there's this constant haranguing against constitutional limits, which is the alternative, of course, that America is a constitutionally limited republic that should respect individual rights. The constant refrain from the other side is to tear this down so the people can get whatever they wish. And on top of that, if you can, of course, convince the people to wish for socialism, for the welfare state, for the law, fair state, for the warfare state, the combination of the two is absolutely lethal. [00:54:40] Speaker A: Maybe the worst example in history I can think of, at least in us history, was popular sovereignty by Stephen Douglas. [00:54:49] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:54:49] Speaker A: Where everyone just started moving in to determine whether it's going to be a free, free state or slave state. I mean, right? [00:54:56] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:54:56] Speaker A: Can that just, you know, unlimited democracy in its extreme form just cause even polarization? Or is it just the moral issue was going to lead to that anyway? [00:55:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it depends on the context. One refrain you hear from sometimes is democracy ain't so bad. And relying on the popular will is so bad if the people are intelligent, you know, and if they're informed. And plenty of studies have shown, you know, that the. That the average iq and just emotional maturity of, say, the colonial period or early 18 hundreds, these were much more educated. They were from the enlightenment, right? Or they were from Britain. They were much more educated and informed people and the classics and stuff like that. So in a way, at the time, you could say, well, if we're relying more on popular sovereignty, it doesn't show as detrimental yet, because there's still smart people out there. But what if after. But what if after decades of, I don't know, public schools or bad teaching methods or, you know, throw off phonics or have post modernism, you see what I'm saying? If that's all happening alongside a growing universality of voting, what you have, you start with very few people can vote, but they're very smart, and it ends up with everyone can vote. And there's a whole bunch of idiotic people. Not just idiotic people, vicious, envious people. It's this two pronged combination, Scott, that I find very interesting. And maybe, and maybe this is why people have a leftover kind of residual approval for democracy, but they're forgetting how much the popular mind has deteriorated in terms of intelligence and foresight and things like that. I think it's also quite interesting that the more the popular will asks government to do literally in a totalitarian way, it literally becomes epistemologically impossible for people to judge what the government is doing. In other words, if it was just involved with the courts, police and national defense, which is the legitimate functions, people understand that, right? But if it also has an agriculture department and an energy department and a telecommunications department, and you hear these debates, and people just, their minds just freeze, overdose. But they have voted for this. So they've simultaneously voted for government to be involved in every possible sector and aspect of their lives, then they're supposed to become smart enough to know whether have socialized medicine or not or central banking or not, or interest rate. You see what I mean? You see how impossible it becomes. And this is what I think the founders meant by democracy. Commit suicide. It is literally unsustainable. [00:58:00] Speaker A: Richard, can I just go ahead. [00:58:02] Speaker C: Yeah, I wanted to ask a question, Richard, and this is maybe too big of a question here, so I just mention it. And from an objectivist standpoint, I think our political philosophy indicates we start with individual rights, and then the question is how to protect them, how to institute a government that respects rights but also protects them. [00:58:26] Speaker B: Right. [00:58:27] Speaker C: And, but that involves, you know, choosing people in to put in office and choosing very concrete issues about, you know, military, defense, police reports and so forth. And does democracy have any role within a. A truly constitutional, limited government perspective? [00:58:55] Speaker B: Yes. I think the answer is yes. But it's the, it's more minor issues. Like, you know, the way I put it is, you know, when I put it, when I'm talking to students, that they'll say, just to distinguish, I'll say pure democracy would be you're voting on every issue and majority wins. And that seems kind of bizarre, you know, is that true of. Is that true of a same sex marriage? Is that true of everything? Like the California referendum system, when you think of it, issues on ballots is very, quote, democratic. Right. But you can vote away people's rights. Now, when it gets to the level of okay. We're not voting on issues. We're voting for people who will vote on issues. Okay, those are representatives. Right? And that's a level. Okay, now we're getting more protected. Right, David? And then the next level would be, we're not voting on issues. We're voting for people who vote on issues. But those people can only vote. Those representatives can only vote on certain issues. You know what I mean? Like, they can't vote on the right to free speech. So, see, as you move up that ladder, so to speak, you're getting more and more protection. And it's, again, it's not like there's no voting. It's not like you don't even use simple majority rule. It's that the simple majority rule is for more mechanical, administrative things. But when it, when it moves into the realm of rights, now, it's unanimous. You unanimously cannot touch my rights, no matter what the rep believes. That's the idea, I think. I hope that answers right. [01:00:26] Speaker C: Okay. [01:00:27] Speaker B: Thank you. [01:00:28] Speaker A: Great. [01:00:28] Speaker B: Thanks, David. [01:00:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's a great way to end things. I look forward to the next two installments of this. Thank you so much, Richard, and for Jag and David and everyone who joined us. If you enjoyed this or any of our other materials, please consider making a tax deductible donation at Atlas Society, and we'll look forward to seeing you at the next one. [01:00:52] Speaker B: Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, everyone.