2
Introduction
Democratism is framed within the democratic lexicon, but its defining feature is a longing for a new type of existence that has little to do with “rule by the people.” It is a comprehensive framework for understanding life and politics that has profoundly influenced the imaginations of elected and unelected officials of the most powerful governing bodies in America and major Western European nations and their colonial satellites (hereafter referred to simply as “the West”). Despite its undemocratic overtones, the ideology of democratism has become largely synonymous with democracy itself. Democratism’s vision, as the following chapters demonstrate, has much in common with the millenarian hopes of past and present religious sects in its visionary promises of an altogether new, democratic age. Like many other “isms,” democratism indicates much more than a type of rule. The task of this book is not to analyze the merits or demerits of democracy as such. Instead, it tries to characterize and define a phenomenon that was assumed by Edmund Burke in 1790 when he derided the “democratists who, when they are not on their guard, treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst, at the same time, they pretend to make them the depositories of all power.”1 Others have used the term to approximate at least some aspect of what I am here investigating.2 James Burnham uses “democratism” to describe an “ideological conception of democracy” in which “the technical problem of government is to provide institutions and procedures designed to translate as directly, accurately, and quickly as possible the opinion of the popular majority.”3 Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in his first book written under a pseudonym, occasionally uses the word “democratism” to denote the “democratic way of life” and also certain cultural and sociological phenomena of democracy, specifically its “totalitarian (all-embracing, all-controlling)” tendencies.4 Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, however, who emphasizes the “ochlocratic” or mob-rule impulse of democratism, and Burnham, who similarly sees in the ideology of democratism a dangerous tendency toward unmediated rule by the people, bring to light only what resides on the surface of democratism: an apparent morally or constitutionally questionable desire for direct rule by the people. One person who has used the word “democratism” with the awareness that it represents a larger view of life and politics is Claes G. Ryn. In America the Virtuous (2003), Ryn remarks, “At a time when the problems of democracy might seem to raise questions about its survival, a new ideology—which in one of its prominent aspects may be called democratism—puts great emphasis on democracy’s superiority and missionary task.” Ryn goes on to quote Allan Bloom, who acts as a representative of this democratist faith when he proclaims in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), “There is no intellectual ground remaining for any regime other than democracy.”5 Ryn, however, never sets himself the task of sorting out the meaning of democratism. This book seeks to define and illustrate this complex and often subtle ideology that rhetorically champions the will of the people but in practice cares little for popular rule.
The Visionary Element of Democratism
More than an elaborate philosophy or logic of a particular understanding of democracy, democratism functions at the level of the imagination as intuitions about morality, good and evil, human nature, the limits and possibilities of political programs, and other fundamental beliefs. Reasoned arguments, to be sure, support these assumptions, but these beliefs all hang together holistically at a deep imaginative level. Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), one of Rousseau’s harshest critics, argued, “A great multitude since [Rousseau’s] time must be reckoned among his followers, not because they have held certain ideas but because they have exhibited a similar quality of imagination.”6 According to Babbitt, the imagination is the primary faculty that guides our sense of what life is really like. Babbitt sees two kinds of imagination: the idyllic and the moral. Rousseau, according to Babbitt, exemplifies the idyllic imagination, the defining feature of which is the tendency to look toward some type of golden age, past or present, as one’s motivating vision. When Jefferson laments that “every form of government” could not be “so perfectly contrived that the will of the majority could always be obtained fairly and without impediment,” he is exhibiting the quintessential democratist tendency to long for a perfect, pure democracy.7 It is no coincidence that those who have adopted the logic of Rousseau’s general will and other aspects of the Social Contract—without necessarily having read anything that Rousseau wrote—also share to a great extent his impressions of human nature and many of his political conclusions.8 For the democratist, “true” democracy is always just around the corner, following the widespread observance of a new political program. This, of course, finds different expression in different thinkers, as the chapters of this book show, but one constant is an abiding dissatisfaction with democracy as it has been practiced historically and the expectation that with the widespread adoption of new social practices and programs, a new age of peace and equality will be possible.
Democratism versus Republicanism
The first more or less comprehensive elaboration of the major tenets of democratism can be found in Rousseau’s Social Contract. It celebrates a new type of “democracy” that has little in common with classical notions of popular sovereignty. While the Rousseauean kind of democracy may well have emerged from a genuine desire to reform society along more democratic, egalitarian lines, it puts forth a subtle new social and political hierarchy based not on birth, wealth, or religion but on conformity to the new understanding of democracy.
How does the democratist interpretation of democracy differ from, say, classical republicanism or republicanism of the American founding variety? These types of republicanism, after all, seem to share something in common with democratism.9 Like democratism, republicanism does not look to the hoi polloi as a source of responsible government. Both believe that an elite of some kind ought to “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.”10 But the difference between Madisonian republicanism and Jeffersonian democratism is, for one, belied by the fact that Jefferson, whom this book identifies as representative of many democratist tendencies, took strong issue with the Federalist interpretation of republicanism and was notoriously at odds with other framers, such as John Adams. Jefferson, too, considered himself a republican, but of a very different sort. He argued that genuine republicanism is “government by its citizens in mass, acting directly and personally, according to rules established by the majority,” and that the type of government codified in the U.S. Constitution did not meet that definition.11 Jefferson and other democratists claim that representatives must merely channel the people’s will rather than refine it or mix it with other aristocratic elements, as Madison, Adams, Hamilton, and others, following the classical thinkers, believed. However, as examples in this book demonstrate, democratism seeks to “refine” the popular will in subtle ways. Working to give expression to the people’s will as it ought to be, democratism relies on various institutional means and theoretical devices to silence oppositional voices, dismissing them, in one way or another, as “undemocratic.”
The difference between the democratist desire for a Rousseauean “legislator” of some sort to coax from the people its highest or general will and the desire of Madison and Hamilton, in the Federalist Papers, for example, to find institutional mechanisms to restrain majoritarian factions united against the common good, is not insubstantial. The former type of “republicanism,” if democratism may be called that, rests on a philosophical anthropology very different from that of the latter type of republicanism. The republicanism to which Madison, Adams, Aristotle, Cicero, and others gave qualified support is guided by the belief that human beings are very often attracted to evil. Institutions such as religion, the family, community, tradition, and social norms, at their best, curb selfish desires and mediate behaviors that would harm the common good. Democratism, on the other hand, believes that these institutions are part of the problem and must be replaced. In addition, according to the older type of republicanism, the people, especially acting en masse, are perpetually prone to making unwise decisions given the morally cleft nature of the human psyche. Therefore, an enlightened leadership class defined foremost by its moral superiority is needed to elevate the popular will toward its highest expression. These classically minded thinkers were open about their distrust of the unmitigated will of the majority, fearing fiery passions of the moment and self-serving interests. They believed that morally upstanding leaders must sway the people away from hasty, imprudent, or otherwise short-sighted decisions. Yet these figures did see a role for the popular will to exert its influence in governing. Even Aristotle was convinced that a government without at least the tacit support of its people could not survive. And a good government, Aristotle argued, would contain a prominent ingredient of popular rule.
Republicanism of the classical sort considered oratorical ability indispensable for statesmen to accomplish the task of elevating the populace toward the common good. Cicero, of course, is one of the prime examples of a republican translating oratorical acumen into political effectiveness. Jefferson was notoriously sheepish about public speaking, despite being a learned and highly capable writer, perhaps because he did not wish to place himself in this traditional republican camp. He and other democratists, beginning with Rousseau, associated effective oratory with demagoguery, assuming that flowery language was taking the place of superior reasoning. This is one of the reasons that in the Social Contract Rousseau forbade communication among citizens prior to their discerning the general will.12 To allow citizens to exchange ideas would be to permit those of keen rhetorical skills to sway the opinions of others unfairly and without merit.
Democratist Theory of Leadership
Rousseau, Jefferson, and other democratists believe that human nature is generally good. The people, when given the right information, will usually choose what is in the best interest of the community. Political leaders need not be the moral superiors of the people, and indeed according to most democratists, political leaders historically have often been the moral inferiors of the people. What is needed for the realization of true democracy, according to democratism, is for a new leadership class to emerge that will help to open the eyes of the people to the true or rational course of action, which should be self-evident but is not always readily apparent. When they discuss the concept of leadership, democratists emphasize its technical aspects—improving and standardizing the education system, removing existing leadership, and redesigning institutions. Because the existing leadership class and old system is held to be the culprit in preventing the emergence of true democracy, much of democratism’s work entails the destruction of these institutions. The framers of the U.S. Constitution, to be sure, also believed that the right institutions could curb or shape the behavior of citizens, but most framers were not oriented by the normative belief in an idealized republic. Human nature, being what it is, will always thwart pursuit of the ideal. Instead, it is best to make do with certain givens, thinkers such as Hamilton and Adams—tracing their philosophical lineage back to Aristotle—believed. Many of them seemed to assume with Machiavelli that the statesman who looks to the ideal instead of the real will sooner bring about the ruin of his republic than the ideal city.
Quentin Skinner opens his Liberty before Liberalism with a quotation from Henry Parker, an influential member of the opposition to Charles I’s regime at the outset of the English Civil War in 1642. Parker argued that “ ‘the supreame judicature, as well in matters of State as matters of Law’ must lie with the two Houses of Parliament as representatives of the ultimately sovereign people. ‘The whole art of Soveraignty’ . . . depends on recognising ‘that power is but secondary and derivative in Princes. The fountaine and efficient cause is the people, so that the people’s elected representatives have a right to ‘judge of publike necessity without the King.’ ”13 Parker’s views on the legitimacy of the sovereignty of the people as mediated through Parliament represents a classical republican view, one characteristic of Hobbes’s pro-commonwealth adversaries and one that persists in the thought of the framers of the U.S. Constitution. This older understanding of republicanism did not call for the direct rule of the people as an abstract and undifferentiated body, as would be the case with the French revolutionaries, for example. Instead, Parker and others as diverse as Cicero, Locke, and John Adams gave qualified support to some form of representative government in the historical sense. That is, they took for granted that sovereignty rests with the really existing people through their actual, physical representatives in Parliament. But Rousseau adopts a decidedly different interpretation of popular sovereignty. He contends that the people are sovereign insofar as they represent the General Will, which at a deep and metaphysical level is identical with their own will. The people are to be represented not as various corporate bodies with diverse interests but as a single entity by the mystical Legislator.
Democratism and Absolutism
This new articulation of an ahistorical “democracy” (or “republic,” as Rousseau termed it) has become paradigmatic for democratic thinking and inaugurated an entirely new tradition of “democratic” thought that, paradoxically, resembles the thought of one of republicanism’s greatest adversaries. Hobbes famously articulates a new view of sovereignty in which the state as an abstract entity is sovereign. Recall that Hobbes argues in his Leviathan that the state “ ‘is One Person, of whose Acts a great Multitude . . . have made themselves every one the Author’ and that ‘he that carryeth this Person, is called soveraigne.’ ”14 “It is here, in short,” Skinner points out, “that we first encounter the unambiguous claim that the state is the name of an artificial person ‘carried’ or represented by those who wield sovereign power, and that their acts of representation are rendered legitimate by the fact that they are authorised by their own subjects.”15 There is a clear parallel with Rousseau’s General Will. Rousseau, too, contends that the multitude of people constitute one body and that they are “represented” by a Legislator—Hobbes’s sovereign.
Rousseau’s Social Contract is not typically considered compatible with Hobbes’s Leviathan, for Rousseau stresses that the people are ultimately free and that the Legislator is merely a functionary serving the ontological role of bringing the popular will into existence. The people each follow their own will, Rousseau insists, which happens to coincide with the General Will when they obey their moral conscience. But Rousseau’s concept of an abstract state that the people author not by the fact of their historical existence, including ways of life, traditions, and constitutions, but by their existence as a metaphysical entity places Rousseau’s political philosophy alongside Hobbes’s. Both are ahistorical thinkers that posit an abstract, quasi-divine will over and above the people. Rousseau contends that the people are “as free as before” because they are merely following the will that is in their corporate interest; hence they could really desire no other. Yet Hobbes also insists that the people living even under absolute sovereignty are “free” so long as they are not physically impeded from exerting their will.16 Most twenty-first-century readers will react to this notion of liberty as Hobbes’s political adversaries did in his own time and consider such a definition narrow to the point of absurdity. But why should Rousseau’s understanding of liberty be any more reasonable? Rousseau insists that deep down, all people desire something he calls the General Will and to accept it is to be free. This unorthodox understanding of liberty could as easily be contested as Hobbes’s as being hollow. Hobbes admits that while people enjoy a natural liberty so long as they are physically unimpeded, as subjects they are not free because they are subject to the king’s will. But if Hobbes had said that the monarch, naturally having in mind the best interest of his subjects, renders his people free when they obey his benevolent will, would that have differed qualitatively from Rousseau’s proposition that citizens are “free” so long as their expressed wills align with the General Will? Rousseau’s infamous remark that some citizens may need to be “forced to be free” suggests that this comparison might not be an unfair one. Deploying the terminology of “liberty” and “equality” of classical republicanism, Rousseau is able to put a democratic veneer on what otherwise has remarkable kinship with Hobbes’s theory of absolutism. Hobbes may have had it right when he said, “The word ‘libertas’ can be inscribed in as large and ample characters as you want on the gates and turrets of any city whatsoever.”17 The power of abstract rhetoric over the imagination is evident in Rousseau’s theory of “democracy” that ends up justifying a Hobbesian form of absolute sovereignty.
Education and Human Nature
Democratism’s heavy use of abstract language helps to give many of its programs and theories the appearance of being commensurate with traditional notions of democracy and republicanism even when they are not. “Education” is one of the abstract terms that democratists often invoke. Without examining the tenets of the democratist understanding of what constitutes education, it might appear that democratism is in keeping with classical republicanism, which also stresses the need for an informed citizenry. Yet the democratist understanding of what constitutes a proper education is informed by a fundamentally different understanding of human nature. Democratism’s belief that the people are generally good leads to the idea that the people must only be awakened through some form of enlightenment to their true and rational interests. Then, it is assumed, they will elect leaders representing the policies that correspond with those interests. It is always assumed that the people’s best interests align with those valued by democratism. Politics is a matter of correct reasoning and judgment rather than a moral-ethical challenge, as it was for classical republicans. Classical republicanism held that education was important for soul-craft, which ultimately would affect the constitution of the polis. For Aristotle, for example, education was a training of the habits and cultivation of character (ēthikós) through right action. The Nicomachean Ethics is a treatise on education, specifically character formation and its relationship to political life. Democratism, too, believes that education is a prerequisite for a healthy polis, but unlike Aristotle, democratists do not believe that “none of the moral virtues [are] implanted in us by nature.”18 To the contrary, democratism tends to hold with Rousseau that man’s destructive passions “have alien causes,” and once those external sources of evil (bad institutions and traditions) are eliminated, a harmonious equilibrium can be restored.19 Peace and amity are the norm, disrupted by corrupt institutions and bad actors. Contrast Rousseau’s Émile with Aristotle’s Ethics. Rousseau’s lengthy meditation on education details the ways in which a tutor can elicit Émile’s inborn goodness and reasonability. The Émile is something of a microcosm of democratism. It assumes that the child is naturally good but requires coaching to bring out his “spontaneous” goodness.20 For republicans of the Rousseauean cast of mind, education takes on a distinctly romantic or Enlightenment flavor. Rousseau and Jefferson alike stressed the need for the people to be “sufficiently informed” in order to make wise choices, but while Rousseau emphasized the need to allow the impulses of the heart to flow unimpeded, Jefferson tended to stress the need for rational or scientific literacy among the population. This understanding of education, characteristic of democratism in general, more closely approximates Aristotle’s notion of the “intellectual virtues” and their formation. Unlike the moral virtues, which must be developed through action, intellectual virtues may be taught. Assuming that moral action derives primarily from right reasoning, democratism focuses almost exclusively on rational thinking in one form or another as the primary goal of education. In this way, democratists are able to give the impression that those who will be overseeing education—the democratists themselves, we must presume—are simply technical experts rather than an intellectual overclass.
Claiming that the people are, on the whole, naturally good, democratism generally avoids the topic of democratic leadership, which turns out to be at the crux of its philosophy. The tension between the democratist desire for direct popular rule and the belief that a leading class of elites must reorient the people is in part a product of its philosophical anthropology. Because democratism assumes that the people are inherently good, it must account for the perpetual deviations from the state of freedom and equality that it claims should be the norm. So public officials, institutions, and other sinister forces are blamed. “The people cannot assemble themselves,” Jefferson laments. “Their representation is unequal and vicious. Various checks are opposed to every legislative proposition. Factions get possession of the public councils. Bribery corrupts them. Personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents: and other impediments arise.”21 There is a strong conspiratorial element to democratism, as examples in the following chapters will show.
The Democratic Philosophy of History
Democratists imply that they can guide the people out of the quagmire of their broken democracies and to a new existence. The conviction that democratism’s own initiates ought to lead society toward its teleological end is bolstered by belief in a democratic philosophy of history. The idea that history is pointing toward its end in universal Democracy has assumed various guises apart from democratism—famously as American Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism—but it is also one of the hallmarks of democratism. Indeed this linear narrative of history has permeated a great deal of modern democratic thought. Even Alexis de Tocqueville, a “democrat” at odds in many other ways with democratism, asserted that “to wish to stop democracy [is] to struggle against God himself.”22 The “gradual development of equality of conditions” is “a providential fact,” Tocqueville stated in the introduction to Democracy in America. “It is universal, it is enduring, each day it escapes human power; all events, like all men, serve its development.”23 John Quincy Adams, similarly a democratic realist in other respects, declared in his famous “Speech on Independence Day” that the principles of the American Declaration of Independence are “the corner stone of a new fabric, destined to cover the surface of the globe.”24 The idea that democracy has been preordained not just as a political system but as a universal way of life is one that has held powerful sway over the modern Western imagination.
Democratists identified in this book, such as Woodrow Wilson, Jacques Maritain, and George W. Bush, adopt the Christian language of good and evil, light and darkness, and the providence of God to describe what they interpret as a world-historic battle for democracy. But the democratic philosophy of history need not take on overtly religious or millenarian language to describe what is essentially the same belief. Rousseau’s confidence in the existence of a General Will, Jefferson’s faith in the people, and John Rawls’s belief that through a “veil of ignorance” people will almost invariably arrive at some form of liberal democracy as politically normative, all evince an underlying faith in democracy as historically inevitable given the right conditions—which democratism proposes to facilitate. The language of “waves” of democracy and democratic “backsliding” indicate that for many, democracy is the norm and other political and social forms are outmoded, awaiting evolution. In ways more or less subtle, much of modern democratic theory rests on this philosophy of history.
A Foreign Policy of Democratic Imperialism
Among democratism’s foreign policy consequences is a tendency toward expansion and democratic imperialism. This comes into special focus in the chapters on Jefferson, Wilson, and war democratism. Oriented by the twin beliefs that politics can be ordered according to reason and that we are approaching the dawn of a new global democratic age, many democratists have called for the liberation of oppressed peoples in distant lands. Even the more sober-minded John Quincy Adams, again, reveals the modern democratist temptation to interpret history along progressive-democratic lines. The Declaration of Independence, he asserts, “was the first solemn declaration by a nation of the only legitimate foundation of civil government.”25 Echoes of this sentiment, which itself reflects the same basic assertion in the opening lines of Rousseau’s Social Contract—“[M]an is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”—may be found throughout the speeches and writings of many prominent Western democrats, regardless of partisan affiliation.26 The effect of delegitimizing other existing regimes is, as Babbitt points out, to promote a crusader mentality. In the case of revolutionary France, which had adopted the Rousseauean democratic imagination, “the will to power turned out to be stronger than the will to brotherhood,” Babbitt avers, “and what had begun as a humanitarian crusade ended in Napoleon and imperialistic aggression.”27 The final chapter of this book examines the blurred line between humanitarianism in the name of democracy and armed intervention. “[T]he idealism and the imperialism,” Babbitt proffered, “indeed, are in pretty direct ratio to one another.”28
An expansionist and imperialist foreign policy is not the only possible consequence of democratic idealism. At the domestic level, democratism tends to invite the desire for greater power and control over those viewed as resistant to its beliefs. Rousseau is clear about this in the Social Contract. In a particularly chilling passage, he declares that any person who transgresses the social contract becomes “a rebel and a traitor” and “ceases to be a member” of the contract. “In that case the preservation of the state is incompatible with his own. Thus one of the two must perish,” Rousseau says. “[W]hen the guilty party is put to death, it is less as a citizen than as an enemy.”29 He ceases even to be considered a “moral person” (personne morale), Rousseau says. While this may represent the extreme, Rousseau is merely taking democratism to its logical conclusion. Democratists profess the will of the people supreme but abstract from the notion of popular sovereignty an ahistorical ideal. They account for persons and groups in society that do not conform to the ideal as having abdicated their citizenship or status as full members of the democracy. It is assumed that those citizens who constitute the “real” people favor those same norms as the democratists themselves. Those who do not agree with the democratists are derided as “extreme,” “fundamentalist,” “authoritarian” or in some other way at the fringes. Jefferson referred to his enemies as “monocrats.” These people may be safely excluded from democratic society, paradoxically, in the name of democracy.30 This is particularly apparent during Wilson’s wartime presidency, especially when he deployed the Committee on Public Information to suppress civil liberties and control dissent, but it is also visible in subtler ways, for example, in deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy’s numerous procedures and careful framing of acceptable discussion implies its desire for certain normative outcomes and the attendant need to exclude persons who fail to observe protocol. These persons can simply be dismissed as enemies, uninterested in “open” and “genuine” democratic debate.
Democratism and Democratic Legitimacy
It should be noted that it is not the intention of this book to suggest that the unmitigated will of the majority ought to be politically normative but rather to investigate a phenomenon that appears to be more elaborate and systematic than simply the hypocrisy of a few powerful actors. There is an unmistakable pattern among some of the most well-known “democrats” of the modern age vocally championing the will of people while at the same time working to undermine that will, whether consciously or otherwise. These so-called democrats are reluctant to admit openly that they do not wish to translate the popular will into legislation and instead hope to find ways for their own beliefs to become instituted. The comparison of the beliefs and actions of numerous of these figures reveals a common theoretical commitment to democracy but not the desire for its actual practice. It is important to investigate this phenomenon in order to understand the extent to which it is democratic, as it claims to be. Are the people, as they are historically constituted, actually sovereign? Or are they sovereign only in the abstract, pawns in an imagined dialectic of democratic history? If it is shown that there is very little deference to the popular will in democratism, then on what does this ideology base its legitimacy? These are important questions because Rousseau and those who have taken up his ideas in the intervening centuries claim to be advancing the only possible legitimate theory of politics. They also claim that it is democratic.
At the heart of the implicit or explicit philosophy of each of the thinkers examined in this book is an underlying belief in the rationality of political life. The challenge of politics for democratists (and many others) is foremost technical and material, to be solved through a new politico-economic architectonics and an attendant education program that would promote rationality and hence an ability to appreciate the new system. As will become clear through examples in the following chapters, the elements of managerialism and scientism often result in authoritarianism of varying degree. It may be subtle, but the desire for strict control over institutional mechanisms and so-called democratic procedures stems from a desire to control the outcome, which, it is assumed, will be rational and just. If the outcome—egalitarian democracy—is just, then the means of arriving at that outcome ought not be impeded, according to those who hold this view. If indeed there exists a general will that “is always right and always tends toward the public utility,” then it follows that those who refuse to obey the procedures or who otherwise find themselves at odds with what has been deemed to be the “general will” may be considered enemies and “violator[s] of the compact.”31 It turns out that in the democratist version of democracy there may be many people—perhaps even a majority—who cannot be counted as citizens but must instead be regarded as “incurables,” to borrow the language of Jefferson.32
Implications for the Future
Democratism is expansive in its ambitions and expects that, sooner or later, the world will embrace democracy. While the electorate in America has tired of endless wars of liberation, it is open for debate whether those in power could once more drum up support for the “right” war of liberation. Or perhaps the elites will begin to conduct wars for democracy in superstitious ways, by proxy or by launching “color revolutions,” for example. If democratism does not manifest as an actual democratic crusade, it will nonetheless wait in expectation for the “dominoes” of democracy to fall around the globe. Democratists also use tactics other than war, such as economic sanctions and trade incentives, for example, to encourage states to follow the political lead of the leading democratic nations. Orienting and guiding these specific foreign policy tactics is, again, the democratist philosophy of history, which expects democracy to sweep the globe as a matter of course. Western nations that use wealth and political clout to try to sway other nations toward democracy do so in part because of an underlying assumption that these coercive actions will move a nation incrementally closer to the democratic ideal. It comes as a great surprise when Western nations’ overtures in the name of democracy fail or are rebuffed. It is especially troubling and perplexing to democratists when seemingly democratic nations turn away from democracy and Western norms associated with it. The very language used to describe this phenomenon, “democratic backsliding,” reveals the progressive-democratic philosophy of history that undergirds it. Nations are assumed to be traveling backward in time when they turn away from the democratic way of life—however real or illusory it may have been in that nation in the first place.
If the ideology of democratism continues to replace the older understanding of democracy as rule by the people, then we can expect the concentration of greater and greater power in the ruling classes. That may include elected or unelected political officials or more nebulous but arguably more powerful interests, such as those that control our news and means of communication—the so-called Tech Giants and the corporate media. The proclaimed need for these bodies to have greater control, including over ideas, will invariably be couched in the language of protecting democracy. Because the democratic lexicon has been integral to the perpetuation of what, in many ways, is democracy’s opposite, there is the risk that the original and literal meaning of democracy will no longer have significance or legitimacy, a trend already occurring. The traditional understanding of “rule by the people” will be derided as illegitimate—whether it goes by the negative “populist” or anything else—when the popular will does not align with the interests of the most powerful, albeit minority, interests. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the growing divide between the desires of popular majorities and those of powerful minority interests is untenable.
It is impossible to predict the ways in which this could manifest, but social and political unrest is a near certainty as democratism’s lofty ideals clash with the reality of an increasingly oligarchic pseudo-democracy. Powerful minority interests will govern by administrative fiat, a method that Wilson pioneered, as emergencies, real or imagined—national security, environmental, public health, etc.—are invoked as urgent justification for circumventing the electorate. In this way, powerful elites and their chosen experts can claim to be acting in the name of democracy without actually observing its traditional practices. We can expect this trend to continue as the fissures grow between the concrete desires and ways of life of popular majorities and the competing desires and expectations of the ruling elite—elites who are perceived by many to be out of touch with the needs of ordinary people. Recently this discontent has found expression, for example, on the left in the form of international Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and on the right in the protest against the results of the American presidential election at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In an interesting turn of events, members of the left-wing BLM organization have marched alongside conservatives to protest COVID-19 vaccination mandates, which both groups contend is unconstitutional. These, alongside other indicators, such as the rise of Donald Trump at the expense of the Republican Party in America and the rise of other populist leaders in European nations, suggest that discontent has reached a critical mass and new political organizations are forming to try to cope with it.
A Democratic Spring in Democratic Nations?
Is a Western or American “democratic spring” unthinkable? It would seem ironic, but it is probably not outside of the realm of possibility for a democratic uprising of some kind to take place in a country in which a substantial portion of the electorate believes that democracy exists in name only. Jefferson’s late fall from grace, with the removal of his statues and the discontinuation of the public observance of his birthday in his home county in Virginia, is yet another sign of America’s waning faith in democracy. If it becomes clear that “our democracy” is merely an ideological projection, supported by abstractions and dreamy imaginings rather than actual practices, we can expect civil unrest to worsen. Prerevolutionary France in fact paid less in taxes than England during the same period, but gross inequities in the French tax system fomented indignation among the French peasants, who were forced to pay considerable sums while the nobles and clergy were largely exempt from taxation. The standard of living may be very high for most Westerners, but many nonetheless have noticed the formation of what appears to be a new caste system, headed by public officials who profit tremendously from their position in power. Sensing that a different set of rules applies to powerful and well-connected politicians and a wealthy elite—who at the same time proclaim everyone equal—voters are becoming cynical. Many have questioned the integrity of elections in nations once thought to be immune to the type of electoral manipulation that plagues countries of the third world. How to square democratic leaders’ vocal proclamations that all are created equal and that the will of the people is supreme with an apparent political reality that includes a prominent ingredient of oligarchy? This book argues that this phenomenon is neither new nor limited to a handful of political elites but spans the modern era going back to the eighteenth century, cutting across nations, political parties, professions, and religious denominations. To understand the ideology of democratism is to understand this paradox and to be able to see with greater clarity otherwise perplexing political trends.