8

Conclusion

Imagining what sort of despotism might arise in the democratic age, the nineteenth-century historian and traveler in America Alexis de Tocqueville fears an “immense and tutelary power” that will rise to watch over “an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike” under the pretext of serving them.¹ The power of this class of overseers, Tocqueville says, “is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power, if like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood.” This powerful government will take shape, Tocqueville predicts, “in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.”² It will combine centralization with the illusion of popular government, made possible in part by the modern obsession with an abstract idea of equality. Having grown accustomed to conditions in which distinction of any kind is frowned upon, the people will become enervated, lose their will even to govern, and willingly cede their power to the political overclass that promises to rule in their name. Tocqueville sensed that democratic centralism would be accompanied by the trappings of democracy, comforting both the rulers and the ruled. Each person accepts the system “because he sees that it is not a man or a class but the people themselves that hold the end of the chain.”³ Only the pretense of popular rule remains at this late stage of democracy, but according to Tocqueville, the people are complicit in their own demise.

This book has approached the ideology of democratism from the perspective of the “schoolmasters” rather than the multitude. It has not offered an assessment of the extent to which the people have contributed to the rise of this version of democracy—a daunting task. But it is worth asking whether democracy as a form of government, especially of a certain kind, invariably tends toward the type of “administrative despotism” Tocqueville predicts and which this book has investigated. Democracy need not turn totalitarian in order for certain self-proclaimed democrats (with a lowercase “d”) to assume the position of overseer. Is Tocqueville correct that, having resigned their actual power, the people “console themselves for being in tutelage by thinking that they themselves have chosen their schoolmasters”? To what degree are the people complicit in abdicating authority in the democratist variant of democracy? That the participants in the Swiss study of deliberative democracy changed their minds in the direction of the study’s administrators indicates how easily people defer to those in positions of power, however small.⁴ Those who conducted the study would like us to believe that the participants changed their minds because the materials presented were the objective truth, but how can we be certain that this is the case, and that it was not the influence of propaganda that changed minds? Either way, this study is a microcosm of democratist assumptions: the people, on their own, are not up to the task of self-government. Without the “tutelage” of the democratists, to borrow Tocqueville’s aptly chosen word, they are ill-informed, unaware of their own best interests, prone to irrational thinking, and unconcerned with the common good. According to the democratist interpretation, real democracy is impossible, despite insistence that it is just around the corner. That is the real democratist paradox.

There is, however, another way to understand democracy. According to this other view, the people en masse are indeed ill-equipped to govern, but it is not because they are irrational or ignorant so much as that certain moral and cultural preconditions are needed for there to be good sense and an inclination for the common good. Moral exertion and deliberation guided by good motives rather than right reasoning in the abstract determines the people’s capability for self-government, and morality cannot be taught by experts but must be cultivated by individuals themselves within subsidiary institutions such as the family, local community, and intermediary religious and cultural groups. Figures such as Aristotle, Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville, Orestes Brownson, and Irving Babbitt are qualified supporters of popular government, but they do not claim to be “champions of the people” or to desire direct popular rule. They do not delude themselves about the multitude’s capacity for political sagacity. Their beliefs about the capabilities of the people to self-govern are more modest than those of their democratist counterparts. Yet because they do not expect the people to be something other than they are, they also do not believe that revolutionary change is necessary for a functioning democracy to be possible. Because thinkers in this alternate “democratic” tradition are not prone to triumphant proclamations about the sanctity or wisdom of the popular will, they are sometimes derided as elitist, especially by the democratists who fashion themselves the people’s real champions.

Paradoxically, supposedly elitist figures like Burke, Hamilton, Adams, and others in this line of thinking are democratic in a way that democratists are not. These thinkers, who have a more historically rooted, humbler conception of democracy, do not look to a vanguard of intellectual elites to galvanize the masses to a new way of life.⁵ Their historical conceptions of democracy, grounded in an awareness of humankind’s dual potentialities for good and evil, result in a political philosophy without pretensions for remaking society. Thinkers in this tradition have the modest aim of reform rather than revolution or transformation.

A look back at democracy’s manifold expressions in history helps us to imagine what is really possible and what is probably chimeric. Paradoxically, the type of direct popular democracy that Rousseau, the French revolutionaries, and many democratists glorify appears to promote the variant of democracy that least values the actual will of the people. This plebiscitarian democracy tends toward the centralization of power because it treats citizens as one undifferentiated mass (think of the general will).⁶ If citizens represent a single body of interests, then one leader or small cadre of leaders can act as their representative, creating uniform policies to govern them. If, on the other hand, citizens’ interests are diverse, competing, and sometimes irreconcilable, then they must have representatives that can channel those interests in meaningful ways politically. The framers of the U.S. Constitution believed this to be the case, and so they advocated for a federated system of states that could protect different geographic and cultural interests; for a bicameral legislature to represent these interests at a more granular level; for an electoral college to give rural and less densely populated areas a voice in national politics; and for three competing branches of government to put additional checks on centralized power—all of this on the assumption that state and local governments would further respect the diverse interests of Americans. Jefferson believed that some of these mechanisms were drawbacks because they thwarted the direct and immediate will of the people, but this book’s examination of Jefferson suggests that his vision of direct democracy is less democratic than he imagined.

The U.S. Constitution is not a blueprint for Universal Democracy, but its components represent some ways of facilitating popular rule while trying to prevent too much centralization and the abuse of power. As Aristotle, Brownson, Heinrich Rommen, and others have pointed out, it is fruitless to try to determine the best government in the abstract. Aristotle stressed the role of contingency in assessing the merits of various constitutions: “One sort of constitution may be intrinsically preferable, but there is nothing to prevent another sort from being more suitable in the given case; and indeed this may often happen.”⁷ He took for granted that one state or person does not prescribe the way of life for another state. “We do not deliberate about all human affairs,” Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics. “[N]o Spartan, for instance, deliberates about how the Scythians might have the best political system. Rather, each group of human beings deliberates about the actions that they themselves can do.”⁸ It is best to try to work from certain givens, such as a people’s political predisposition, and also, at the most local level, to avoid sweeping claims about how distant peoples ought to live. This was also Brownson’s view. “Ordinarily the form of the government practicable for a nation is determined by the peculiar providential constitution of the territorial people,” Brownson says, “and a form of government that would be practicable and good in one country may be the reverse in another.”⁹ Furthermore, Aristotle argues that we ought to aim at a political order that does “not employ a standard of excellence above the reach of ordinary men, or a standard of education requiring exceptional endowments and equipment, or the standard of a constitution which attains an ideal height.”¹⁰ The idealism that is at the heart of democratism encourages the type of thinking that these figures wish to avoid: it is not shy about prescribing ways that other people ought to live; it tries to legislate from far away; it is universalist in its prescriptions; and it employs a standard of excellence that is not only above the reach of ordinary men and women but also likely outside of epistemic possibility in that it treats human beings as rational abstractions. At best, the defeat of this idealistic vision draws the dreamer into melancholic despair. At worst, it leads him or her into a mad but fruitless pursuit of the ideal. A romantic biopolarity is almost inevitable.

The ultimate emptiness of this democratic idealism is increasingly apparent today. Perhaps the desire to remove the statues of erstwhile democratic heroes such as Jefferson and Lincoln indicates growing awareness of the hollowness of abstract promises about “a new birth of freedom” and that “all men are created equal.” The democratist vision of democracy that has been foisted upon Westerners for centuries offers the tantalizing prospect of a new Earth and invites revolt against the existing order, but insofar as its vision is nebulous and unrealizable it is dangerous. Having been encouraged to believe that such abstract ideas of absolute freedom and equality are real possibilities, people begin to despair and grow angry. Many thought leaders have interpreted the rise of anti-Establishment political parties in the United States and Europe to mean that democracy is in peril. Another possibility is that it is not democracy as a form of government that is in danger but the democratist version of it, and hence the power of the democratists.

President of Freedom House Michael J. Abramowitz laments that “right-wing populists gained votes and parliamentary seats in France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria during 2017.” “While they were kept out of government in all but Austria,” Abramowitz says, “their success at the polls helped to weaken established parties on both the right and left.” These “right-wing populists,” according to Freedom House, are a source of the global democratic “crisis.”¹¹ For those who support the democratist interpretation of democracy, such as Abramowitz, it is entirely consistent to treat the results of popular elections as undemocratic. When contrary to democratism’s understanding of what constitutes democracy proper, these election results can be explained away as the work of “populist leaders” and other sinister forces rather than be treated as genuine expressions of the popular will—for good or ill. It may in fact be the case that unmediated popular sovereignty is dangerous, producing deluded and misinformed popular opinion—as history witnesses—but democratism does not criticize this dangerous possibility in democracy as a form of government. Instead, democratism proclaims the virtues of pure democracy and popular rule while at the same time pursuing a political vision that is decidedly undemocratic.

Interestingly, Jan-Werner Müller characterizes populism much as I have characterized democratism. Populism, he says, “is a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified—but . . . ultimately fictional—people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior.” He goes on to argue that populists are “always antipluralist: populists claim that they, and only they, represent the people” and that “[t]he populist core claim also implies that whoever does not really support populist parties might not be part of the proper people to begin with.”¹² Müller’s criticism seems to extend largely to the leaders of populist movements rather than the people themselves. These are some of the basic tenets of democratism outlined in this book. For Müller, however, populism is a uniquely modern phenomenon and one that he asserts is distinct from the Rousseauean conception of democracy that he takes to be a theory of genuine democracy. Rousseau’s general will “requires actual participation by citizens,” Müller asserts. “[T]he populist, on the other hand, can divine the proper will of the people on the basis of what it means, for instance, to be a ‘real American.’ ”¹³

Does not populism as Müller defines it perfectly describe Rousseau’s general will? If this modern populism is as Müller characterizes it, then it appears to be yet one more expression in a long line of democratist thinking. However, it may be that Müller and others who associate modern populist movements with “authoritarianism” and “simplistic” views are in fact playing the part of the democratist. Critics of populism tend to dismiss this modern phenomenon as a function of demagogues conspiring to take advantage of popular grievances. This gives the impression that populism is not really a democratic movement at all but the creature of a small coterie of power-seeking elites. Again, this way of disparaging popular sentiment is a quintessential component of democratism. Expressions of the popular will that do not conform to the democratist’s expectations are dismissed as false and not really representative of the people’s desires. But to indict the popular will as such would pose a very serious problem for the critics of populism. It would implicate the very system of government that allowed such views to find expression. The ideology of democratism is defined in part by an unwillingness to criticize democracy while being continually dissatisfied with actual outcomes. The purpose of mentioning populism here is not to evaluate it as a movement but to highlight the democratist assumptions of some of its critics. If what is called populism has found favor with a plurality or majority of people in the countries in which it has made appearances, as suggested by the success of its candidates at the ballot box, then to dismiss it as undemocratic or dangerous to democracy is, to say the least, paradoxical. These critics ought to consider whether it is democracy itself that is in fact the problem for them.

Jason Brennan represents the quintessential democratist viewpoint in Against Democracy, which argues that a knowledgeable elite ought to rule by “epistocracy.” Appropriately titled, this book hopes to see less participation in politics from the masses and the greater concentration of power in the hands of certain leaders. Brennan no doubt envisions himself among those with a greater say in politics. While the rest of Americans must be content to have legislation shaped by the people Brennan says are their betters. He hopes that rather than worry about politics, most people will simply continue to distract themselves with “football, NASCAR, tractor pulls, celebrity gossip, and trips to Applebee’s.” ^14,15 That Brennan’s bread and circuses should be some of the pastimes of the American heartland illustrates the smug contempt that many democratists hold for ordinary citizens. Those who might not be inclined to defer to the expertise of men such as Brennan are assumed to be backward and ignorant and standing in the way of the democratist paradise. The logic of democratism leads to Brennan’s conclusion that “when some citizens are morally unreasonable, ignorant, or incompetent about politics,” they ought to be disenfranchised in one way or another.¹⁶ Contrary to Brennan’s belief that his theory takes the opposite view of other democratic theorists, who call for greater political engagement and deliberation, his desire for an “epistocracy” is actually nearly identical to many popular democratic theories. It has simply taken deliberative democracy, for example, to its logical and practical conclusion. So many theories of democracy assume the ability of more or less hidden elites to discern the true popular will.

For the democratist, we all can be united in the embrace of the general will—or democratism’s interpretation of it. “We are all Georgians,” Senator John McCain declared when wishing to defend Georgia against Russian aggression; a few years later he declared, “We are all Ukrainians.”¹⁷ Or consider David Brook’s assertion that “we are all neoconservatives” and Jefferson’s proclamation that “we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”¹⁸ For the democratist, there are no genuine and meaningful differences among people. All of “our values” are finally reconcilable in the values that democratism holds to be true. Democratism leaves little room for diversity with regard to worldview and other important matters. The “shared recognition of universal rights” demands unquestioning acceptance, lest one be considered extreme, Fascist, or, in the language of yesteryear, “an enemy of the people.”¹⁹ Claiming an exclusive right to arbitrate what is reasonable and informed and what is ignorant or “hateful,” democratism establishes the criteria for knowledge itself through its command over language and therefore thought. It is an all-encompassing ruling ideology. “[W]hat is essential,” Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor insists, “is that all may be together” in it.²⁰

Like the Grand Inquisitor, democratists hope to relieve humanity of the great and “dreadful” burden of freedom and history through elaborate social planning and reorganization.²¹ In an attempt to circumvent the human proclivity for selfishness and evil, thinkers such as Rousseau, Maritain, Rawls, Brennan, and many others devise political systems that are supposed to circumvent that facet of human nature that has heretofore made perpetual peace and fraternity impossible: our fallenness. They assume that with the right rational planning and through the proper rational engagement of citizens, the gears of the democratic machine can finally be set in motion. Yet as the democratists “condescend to detailed considerations” of actual political affairs, in the words of Bertrand Russell, many of them discover with Rousseau that “the old problems of eluding tyranny remain.”²² And so they devise ever more elaborate ways of trying to get around the old problem of human nature. It soon becomes apparent that much of the institutional edifice that the democratists try to replace has reappeared in new forms in their own political schemes, from civil religion to a newly stratified society along different, ideological lines.

The foreign policy of democratism puts into particularly sharp relief the democratist’s need for power in order to enact the vision. Woodrow Wilson foresaw and pioneered a foreign policy that, beginning with him, would not necessarily respect the desires of the American public and would justify military actions in terms of “liberation” and furthering democracy abroad. Constitutional scholar Louis Fisher lists the many instances in which the Hamiltonian idea that “unity is conducive to energy” was used to justify actions that “resulted in great harm to the nation and its constitutional system” and often gave tremendous power to the executive: “Harry Truman’s decision to go North in Korea, resulting in intervention by the Chinese and a costly stalemate; Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War; Richard Nixon’s Watergate; Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra; George W. Bush going to war against Iraq on the basis of six false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; and Barack Obama using military force to remove Muammar Qaddafi from office, turning Libya into a failed state and a breeding ground for terrorists.”²³ All of these instances, with the exception of Nixon’s actions, were motivated by the democratist desire to liberate a foreign people and resulted in vast new presidential powers that, according to Fisher, had not been constitutionally delegated. Wilson was especially aware of the role of foreign policy in expanding executive power. C. Eric Schulzke points out that in the 1900 edition of Congressional Government, “[Wilson] notes that ‘when foreign affairs play a prominent role’ in the nation’s affairs, the Executive ‘must of necessity be its guide.’ This ‘new leadership,’ will have a ‘very far-reaching effect on our whole method of government.’ ”²⁴ All of the wars or “military actions” after World War II aimed at foreign liberation resulted in an extraordinary increase in power for U.S. presidents.²⁵ But of the countries listed above, how many were better off after U.S. intervention?

Stephen M. Walt argues that the foreign policy establishment is deeply committed to perpetuating the status quo of liberal hegemony—a consequence of the democratist ideology—because it stands to gain financially and politically.²⁶ He writes, “A more restrained foreign policy would give the entire foreign policy community less to do, reduce its status and prominence, decrease the importance of teaching foreign policy in graduate schools, and might even lead some prominent philanthropies to devote less money to these topics. In this sense, liberal hegemony and unceasing global activism constitute a full-employment strategy for the entire foreign policy community.”²⁷ I would extend this logic to an assessment of democratism in general. Those who uphold the ideology tend to cry loudest for more power to the people but in practice demand power and resources for themselves. They have much to gain by perpetuating their understanding of democracy, which requires, first and foremost, that they be given the reins of power.

The need for control and a desire to overturn existing regimes—foreign and domestic—suggests that democratist idealism is tied to a lust for power, which is fueled by feelings of righteousness. The U.S. debacle in the Middle East exemplifies the consequences of a foreign policy motivated by “moral clarity” and natural-right thinking. The conviction that these nations with no experience of anything resembling Western-style democracy could be led by outsiders to such an existence was, as Brooks conceded, childish.²⁸ Leo Strauss writes that for those who believe in classical natural right, “agreement may produce peace but it cannot produce truth.”²⁹ This is one of the tensions that animates democratism. Feelings of righteousness both create and undermine the desire for global democratic peace. Wilson’s words upon American entrance into the First World War put this dimension of democratism in sharp relief: “Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.”³⁰ Indeed the crux of democratism seems to be the belief that “right is more precious than peace.”³¹ With the advance of military technology and especially drone-use, the increasingly abstract nature of war has made this lofty ideal easier and easier to proclaim.

Democratism’s claim that force—even “procedural norms” as a type of coercive force—will bring about liberation raises disturbing questions about its deeper motives. Recall Jefferson’s words about the birth pangs of freedom: “Rivers of blood must yet flow . . . yet the object is worth rivers of blood, and years of desolation.”³² There is no price too steep for the idealist. The French man of letters Anatole France (1844–1924) observes that the idealist may be “led to the most savage ferocity by the tenderest optimism.”³³ Beginning with a vision of glorious new possibilities for humanity, the idealist sooner or later comes to believe that the people he envisions benefiting from his ideas are the very ones who stand in the way of its realization. “[W]hen one starts with the supposition that men are naturally good and virtuous, one inevitably ends by wishing to kill them all,” France said.³⁴

Robespierre embodies this idea. He cherished Rousseau’s ideas and helped to inaugurate a new era of politics in which the interpretation of democracy of the Social Contract would prevail among political elites in Western nations. It is easy now to dismiss Robespierre as a caricature, extreme, a fanatical revolutionary little connected with actual democracy, but he believed that he was helping the democratic cause by suppressing what he saw as its enemies. Historian Colin Jones documents the twenty-four hours leading up to Robespierre’s public execution: “In the Constituent Assembly between 1789 and 1791, [Robespierre] fearlessly championed the people, fought for individual rather than a property franchise, argued a powerful case for freedom of expression, championed religious toleration, demanded humane judicial reforms, including the abolition of the death penalty, and joined the anti-colonialist cause (which has culminated in the abolition of slavery in February 1794). He made major contributions to debates on the 1793 Constitution, the world’s most democratic charter (though currently on hold).”³⁵ Robespierre genuinely believed that he embodied the people, declaring “Je suis [du] peuple.”³⁶ He may actually have hoped to bring about a better existence for ordinary people.

Robespierre “is painfully sincere in all his words and actions,” Jones says, “offering an exemplary model of high-minded action in the style of his great idol, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the arch-apostle of moral transparency.”³⁷ However, Robespierre’s belief in terror as a means to democracy clearly undermined his intentions. “Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue,” he declared just five months before his own public execution at the hands of the terror he had helped to unleash and justify.³⁸ His logic, though alarming in its nakedness, conveys the general logic of democratism. In the democratist worldview, virtue and violence are easily reconcilable. The former often necessitates the latter. The ideal of Democracy, or liberté, égalité, fraternité, is imagined to be so noble and pure, universal in the goodness it will bestow on humanity, that even violence can be used in its pursuit. Bound up with this idea is the power that must be given the idealist. This is on display in Robespierre’s handling of parliamentary procedure: “If one of his own points of order is rejected, [Robespierre] may retort with verbal violence, invoking the loftiest principles and his own emotional disarray at being challenged so stridently, that the speaker has to give way.”³⁹ The idealist fathoms that his or her own path to the regeneration of society is the sole one and demands extraordinary power in its name.

On the other hand, the type of imagination that Babbitt calls “moral” is fundamentally humble. It considers the practical steps required to achieve the goals of liberty and equality. It asks what, concretely, is the goal, and at what cost. It considers whether a particular vision is an actual possibility given the circumscribed nature of human existence, or whether the goal is simply a lofty abstraction. The moral imagination is cultivated through an awareness of history and rejects idealism as a dangerous invitation to violence and coercion. It looks to past events to furnish examples of future possibilities. This type of imagination results in an understanding of politics in general and democracy in particular that is modest in its ambitions. It eschews grand theories and systems promising to ameliorate the human condition and to solve once and for all the historical challenge of politics. Its foreign policy is limited in aim, always having in mind the complexity of foreign cultures and the law of unintended consequences.

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, was alarmed by the metaphysical speculation and ahistoricism that seemed to have become dominant in philosophy. Seeming to anticipate the dangerous consequence of such abstract theorizing for politics, especially in his home country, Croce says that practical action informed by a philosophy that is “outside and above history” “may be noble at least in its intention, or ignoble; it may want to ‘réorganiser la société,’ as with August Comte, or it may want to revolutionize and rationalize society, as with Karl Marx, or it may want to use its means to keep the people quiet and servile, as with other philosophers: but the incongruity is always the same.”⁴⁰ The incongruity, that is, between the ideal and existing reality. For the idealist, reality must be made to conform to the vision, however painful it might be. Croce seems to have it right that ahistorical philosophies claiming to address issues of “supreme” importance over other “minor” and particular concerns often serve the interests of those who would be the “directors and reformers of society and the State.”⁴¹ His belief is not unlike that of Russell, who saw in the idea of a general will an empty abstraction made to order for abuse.

Hailing the voice of the people, democratists actually look to an enlightened elite not to lead the people to the best version of themselves but to encourage their own views from the people, which almost always means requiring the people to abandon their historically evolved practices. Claes G. Ryn, who puts forth a historical, constitutional view of democracy, argues against this type of democratist elitism. “Truly cosmopolitan thinkers or leaders who see disturbing weaknesses in a people that they would like to see changed would not demand that the people abandon their historical heritage for a wholly different way of life assumed to be inherently superior. Fruitful, authentic change can only result from the particular society trying to be more fully itself, by living up to and in the process also revising its own highest standards.”⁴² Ryn argues that for a rationalistic and ahistorical thinker like the democratist “[t]o call upon a people to discard what made them what they are and to insist on a supposedly superior uni-culture is to rob them of a source of identity and self-respect. A people cannot genuinely reform without building on its own strengths, without in a sense, being itself. Imposing on it an allegedly universal culture inimical to its traditions can produce only mechanical, inorganic change.”⁴³

Some may respond that while certain democratists may seem to advocate a “uni-culture” through their uncompromising insistence on their interpretation of democracy, surely others, such as the deliberative democracy theorists, for example, are not guilty of this. It is true that deliberative democracy seems to allow communities to find their own norms through dialogue, but, as this book has shown, the deliberative theorists’ parameters for acceptable discussion have already determined the culture that is acceptable: some variant of secular, neoliberal culture. Deliberative democracy has come up repeatedly in this book because it demonstrates that democratism can assume different forms, some of which are subtle and democratic in appearance. That the theories of Rawls and Habermas are more subtle than others in advancing a particular normative vision, one favoring a kind of proceduralism, does not place them outside the democratist tradition.

Proclaiming that the voice of the people is supreme—something that has become de rigueur for those seeking political power in the democratic age—helps to create the impression that the actions of the democratists are always democratic. The Rousseauean concept of the general will, which set democratism on its general course, also makes “possible the mystic identification of a leader with his people, which has no need of confirmation by so mundane an apparatus as the ballot-box,” as Russell remarked.⁴⁴ Claiming to speak on behalf of the general will, democratism has been a source of great influence for its purveyors. Because its representatives claim that they alone represent the voice of the people, democratism discourages discussion that would call into question its actions and motives. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” in the words of George W. Bush.⁴⁵

Despite rhetorical posturing, democratism aims not for direct democracy, as its proponents claim, but for directed democracy of a particular type. The word “democracy” and corresponding language about freedom and equality have provided cover for what are actually undemocratic sentiments, actions, and ideas and have helped democratism to escape notice as a comprehensive ideology with hugely ambitious, transformative goals. This ideology has exerted enormous influence and explains a great deal about modern political developments in the West. This book has sought to illustrate and explain the nature of democratism by analyzing in depth the thought, rhetoric, and actions of prominent philosophers, politicians, religious, intellectuals, and politicians who exemplify it. Through an extended examination of the ideas, assumptions, and subtleties in the political philosophies of representative figures, this work has tried to demonstrate that to the other great political “isms” must be added another of equal scope and internal coherence: democratism. Previously understood as a regime type among others with, at best, limited potential for good in the concrete, the idea of democracy has here been transformed in the imagination and thought of many prominent Western intellectuals into an ideal for a new way of life. Guided by this hypostatized, idealistic notion of democracy, many have pursued and continue to pursue legislation and foreign and domestic policies that promise to liberate, equalize, and democratize. Indistinguishable from a dream of equality and togetherness, democratism conveys a vision of liberation from constraints and injustices, a new existence that it promises is just around the corner. Additional “surges,” greater organization, increased “awareness,” and more education are supposed finally to bring about “true” democracy. With its “assurance of things hoped for and conviction of things not seen,” democratism has all the earmarks of a type of faith.⁴⁶

One of the great ironies of the modern democratic age is that while democracy has been given pride of place among regime types for the first time in history—in no small part due to the legacy of Rousseau—democracy’s most outspoken advocates and theorists focus on ways dramatically to alter or circumvent the popular will. Many thinkers before the democratic age who are by no means “democrats” in the modern sense of the term were arguably more interested than democratists in letting the beliefs of the actual population exert real political influence. Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas are but three representatives of an older Western tradition of political philosophy who come to mind. They knew the weaknesses and limitations of human beings, not least those of the common people, and yet, as champions of what they regarded as the common good, they thought it proper for government to respect and accommodate the interest of the masses rather than the other way around. By putting forth the idea that human beings are inherently good and have an unlimited capacity to rule themselves wisely and as equals, many “democrats” have laid the groundwork for and advanced a concentration of power that monarchs of old never could have dreamed possible.

One of the effects of democratism has been to build into actual democratic societies a chronic distrust of current practices and beliefs as well as a barely concealed contempt for actual popular opinions that do not conform to democratist notions of the Good. It is suggestive of a glaring deficiency, a far-reaching solipsism, in the contemporary academy that the many dubious and yet highly influential beliefs that this book has identified and connected have not previously been brought into the open for critical examination. A certain myopia has protected the ideology of democratism from uncomfortable scrutiny.

The findings of this book are, admittedly, disturbing, even astounding. It has been amply demonstrated that the political mind of the Western world has been decisively imprinted by an ideology that in the name of democracy undermines actual popular rule, that contains a very large amount of chimerical idealistic dreaming, engages in more or less conscious intellectual deception, and includes a heavy ingredient of arrogance. Democratism’s claim to moral and intellectual superiority reveals remarkable conceit. Democratists are not content to recommend limited reforms of existing democracies; this is partly because they are deeply uncomfortable with the diversity of beliefs and ways of life that are a part of genuinely pluralistic, democratic societies. They feel the need to turn to abstract theory, in which complexity, uncertainty, and human fallibility give way to neat and satisfying formulas. Having their own abstract, idealistic vision, democratists set aside as largely irrelevant the historical experience and concrete, particular circumstances that otherwise inform the people’s thinking that they are trying to transform.

At the very end of this study it seems proper to try to pinpoint what might be the most characteristic or defining aspect of democratism. That this ideology contains a blend of modern abstract rationalism and romantic dreaming has been shown, and this paradoxical mixture accounts for its predominant moral-intellectual dynamic. But perhaps the most telling attribute of democratism is its more or less hidden elitism—the belief of democratists that they possess special knowledge about the true way to conduct politics and can speak authoritatively about how to transform society. Supremely confident in their own interpretation of Right, democratists do not hesitate to make sweeping proclamations about the ways in which society must change. In this philosophy are all of the seeds of modern, democratic tyranny.