Why Democracy Has Such Staying Power

This article was originally publisehd by Finn Andreen at The Mises Institute. 

As has often been noted, “majority rule” in the political sense does not exist in the way it is presented by the dominant institutions of Western so-called “democracies.” The Western public’s resistance to criticism of “democracy” is, therefore, remarkable.

The staying power of representative democracy in the West can be explained as follows: Firstly, democracy is widely but uncritically seen as a progressive and enlightened political system that replaced monarchies, typically portrayed as retrograde and repressive. Secondly, despite the difficulty of “majority rule,” democracy can play a role of channeling public opinion in a politicized society. These two points are explained below.

Democracy as a Questionable Improvement to Monarchy

The dominant storyline is one that sees democracy as a moral improvement over monarchy. Governments today receive their legitimacy from the “will of the people” and no longer from the divine right of kings. However, this is a largely caricatural and counterfactual view, not least since elections and voting practices are not specific to “liberal democracies”; some were in use long before political representation was introduced.

The often-touted “will of the people” is the latest “political formula,” to use the phrase of Italian historian Gaetano Mosca, allowing the “organized minority” to justify its rule over a “disorganized and uninterested majority” in the secular era of individual rights. From this standpoint, there is no fundamental difference between democracy and monarchy.

As James Burnham summarized in The Machiavellians (1943):

The existence of a minority ruling class is, it must be stressed, a universal feature of all organized societies of which we have any record. It holds no matter what the social and political forms—whether the society is feudal or capitalist or slave or collectivist, monarchical or oligarchical or democratic, no matter what the constitutions and laws, no matter what the professions and beliefs.

Though it is commonplace today to compare democracy positively to monarchy, this becomes problematic when the yardstick is liberty. Economic and political freedom is not an obvious consequence of the right to vote, as should be clear in the West today. Liberty relates to the protection of private property and should be seen as inversely correlated with the size and power of the state.

Despite the flaws of monarchy, especially in its late absolutist expression, as a political system linking power with private land ownership, it had a natural inclination to protect property rights. With time, in particular, in the democratic era, the public domain has grown at the expense of private property. Not coincidentally, the growth of the modern regulatory state, financed by an explosion of money printing and taxation, began as societies became democratic.

In modern democracies, the differences between political parties have decreased with the centripetal pull of the political center. The electorate often votes for programs that it barely knows and which later are hardly implemented. Election fraud is widespread. All too often, campaign promises have little to do with actual policy. Rousseau may have only slightly exaggerated when he wrote in The Social Contract (1762) about British parliamentarism, that in between elections the “individual is a slave, he is nothing.”

This reality is starting to impinge on some in the West, as can be noted by mounting political tensions. But the illusion is generally so strong, not least among the well-educated, that most people seem, like in the “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” to be complicit in their own deception about democracy.

Democracy as a Conduit for Public Opinion

The importance of public opinion to political power was recognized by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century and then clearly expressed by Etienne de la Boétie in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1549). David Hume noted (1777) that, “It is…on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.”

Democracies thus take into account public opinion, but not so much because of their “democratic” nature, but because they are obliged to do so. But since democratic rulers draw their legitimacy from the “will of the people,” the management of public opinion is arguably even more important in “representative” political systems than in authoritarian regimes, as Noam Chomsky noted. As a result, democratic states will naturally be tempted to use propaganda, disinformation, and censorship, in order to obtain or maintain the people’s consent, as Aldous Huxley presciently recognized.

A strong and independent fourth estate is obviously crucial. As the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt noted, “discussion” and “openness” are prerequisites for a representative democracy not to slide towards authoritarianism. He explained that,

To discussion belong shared convictions as premises, the willingness to be persuaded, independence of party ties, freedom from selfish interests. Most people today would regard such disinterestedness as scarcely possible. But even this skepticism belongs to the crisis of parliamentarism.

Indeed, a democracy that fulfills these prerequisites, i.e. one that allows such conditions of transparency in society, is “scarcely possible” because it inevitably tends to become a victim of its own democratic success. The ruling minority, pressured by the inevitable political scrutiny and healthy criticism allowed by these conditions, would try to undermine those very conditions of “discussion” and “openness” that initially helped legitimize its rule. The attempted restrictions and control of social media platform content are examples of this today.

Yet unlike authoritarian regimes, the democratic process can allow the majority to publicly sanction or reward different political forces within the ruling minority, by acting as a conduit for public opinion. As Mosca explained: “the electoral function is a means by which certain political forces control and limit the action of others when it is exercised in good social conditions.” These “good social conditions” certainly include Carl Schmitt’s criteria above.

Ludwig von Mises also recognized this “social function” of democracy, “that form of political constitution which makes possible the adaptation of the government to the wishes of the governed without violent struggles.” Particularly in the politicized West, with its highly interventionist states, the democratic process can, when conditions allow it, act as a valve for the majority’s pent-up political dissatisfaction.

When the social conditions are unfavorable for this process to have much effect, then democracy as a political system starts being questioned and a political crisis ensues. This is arguably what is happening in the West today, as elections hardly bring political change and the Western financial globalist oligarchy tries to tighten its control of the international political agenda.

Despite the weaknesses of democracy, it nevertheless has significant staying power in the West for the reasons above. As this staying power seems to be currently eroding, it is as essential as ever to remind the public of the principles and benefits of freedom.