Publisher’s note: The eve of the Fourth of July seems like the perfect occasion for a history lesson on American independence, and there’s no better person to provide this than Ray Lyman.
“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.”
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49 percent . . . The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
“Democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security and the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.”
There has never been a nation that has so championed a cause as the United States has in the cause of democracy for the past 100 years. It has been an accepted idea in American foreign policy since the Wilsonian era that the creation of democratic states at the expense of monarchies, autocracies, corporate dictatorships, and military rulers will promote international stability, economic prosperity, and individual liberty. To achieve this “noble” end, we have undermined sovereign governments; focused our diplomatic and intelligence resources; spent untold billions of dollars; sacrificed the lives of thousands of our best soldiers, sailors, and airmen; and gone to war with sometimes the most idealistic of intentions, at least on the surface.
On April 2, 1917, President Wilson went to Congress and asked for a declaration of war against Imperial Germany to make the world safe for democracy. Wilson spoke to Congress with great satisfaction about the recent abdication of Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II and the likelihood that the world’s largest country would now be on the path toward democracy, making all the Allied powers democratic republics or constitutional monarchies of one sort or another. The fact that all the major Allied nations (Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Russia, and Japan) were also empires with hundreds of millions of colonial subjects did not seem to bother Wilson very much. Congress obliged Wilson by giving him his declaration of war after four days of debate with overwhelming majorities in both houses.
Democracy as a political ideology has not always been so universally favored by our national elites or the citizenry. The Founding Fathers of the republic at Philadelphia were absolutely horrified by the concept of one-man/one-vote and determined that the nascent nation they were forging would not die from it as other republics had in the past. As children of Enlightenment, they were all students of classical history and knew well the tragic fates of Athenian and Roman democracies as both fell prey to demagogues and lost their liberties to tyrants.
The Constitution as conceived and written by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton contained democratic features, such as a House of Representatives elected by popular franchise, but it was far more a blueprint for limited government that provided for the election of a senate by state legislatures and a president by the electoral college, and set clear limits on the power of that elected government through a system of checks and balances. Those checks and balances, notably through the Supreme Court (thanks to Chief Justice John Marshall), worked to keep both the legislative and the executive branches from becoming too powerful, and this all worked more or less as intended for the first 150 years or so of our national existence.
The great move to democracy started with the growth of the Trans-Appalachian West after the War of 1812. On the Western frontier — and the frontier at that time was the land beyond the coastal plain to the Mississippi River — democracy was synonymous with equality, and the national government was needed to build the canals and roads that would connect the Western states and territories with the East and provide the military force, when necessary, to deal with any Indian tribes that might be reluctant to surrender their hunting grounds and move on across the next river. The election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 gave an enormous boost to this democratic fervor, and Jackson’s vibrant new political party, the Democratic Party, embraced the common man of the era and offered the land-hungry people of the West an expansionist policy of Manifest Destiny, which would carry the nation to the Pacific in only a single generation.
Few would argue with this populist vision of equality and expansion. An Illinois Congressman named Abraham Lincoln was one, but it cost him his seat and sent him home to practice business law. No one expected that in the 1850s he would re-emerge on the national stage as the leader of a new political party that would successfully challenge the Jacksonian Democrats for power on their own home ground.
The defeat of the Confederacy and the destruction of its plantation ruling class in 1865 seemed to the majority in the North to be the ultimate triumph of democracy and equality over elitism and autocracy. The franchise would soon be expanded to include millions of former slaves to join the millions of new immigrants pouring into the country from Ireland and eastern and southern Europe. Woman’s suffrage would follow in 1920 with the ratifications of the 19th Amendment.
While the Civil War and Reconstruction expanded the power of the national government as never before, liberty did not suffer all that much, and most people still lived out their lives with their only contact with federal authority being the post office. Property rights remained sacrosanct, and what a man earned through his own labor or entrepreneurial endeavors was all his to do with as he chose. It would have seemed inconceivable in 1900 that your fellow citizens could vote to take away a portion of your wealth for the public good. Twelve years later, as the Progressive era of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson reached its high-water mark, it seemed like a very reasonable idea, and in 1913 the progressive income tax became a part of the U.S. Constitution as the 16th Amendment.
In the last two decades of the 19th century, the United States became the wealthiest nation on the face of the Earth, surpassing Britain and Germany in steel production, connecting the entire country by rail, and taking the first steps to putting America on wheels with an oil and gas boom that made us the world’s leading energy producer until the 1950s. The natural result of this was that some Americans became fabulously wealthy and lived ostentatious lives that attracted resentment from those at the bottom of the economic ladder, and even many of those not at the bottom. Populist politicians emerged on the national scene who told the voters that the rich were rich only because they possessed what they had stolen from the common man. The message was compelling: “You are poor because the 1 percent are rich; so the wealth of the rich should be spread around, and that will create a more equitable society for everybody. You are entitled to another man’s wealth, and the very word entitlement means it is your right to a share of that wealth.”
In this populist worldview, the very wealthy had gained their millions and their property by taking more than their fair share of wealth, earning the title of robber barons from the newspapers of that period. This is a widespread viewpoint that has persisted until the present day, and is the raison d’etre of the Occupy Wall Street movement that still lingers in some of our urban public parks. Many quite reasonable people, probably a majority, accept the idea that the wealthiest 1 or even 10 percent of income earners should be compelled to pay the greatest share of the tax burden in the name of fairness. Fairness and equality trump liberty and property rights for millions of the young, those dependent on government handouts, the less-educated immigrants, the public sector union members, cultural liberals, and the lower classes. This viewpoint is reinforced through the school textbooks, progressive teachers, the mainstream media, and the popular culture of films and television. Indeed to even question this viewpoint is to risk being accused of selfishness, greed, not having a heart, and quite possibly fascism. Heretics are always punished in a democracy, since the majority can always outvote and marginalize them.
Aside from the loss of individual liberty, the problem with wealth distribution and equality through democracy is that it is fiscally unsustainable. There are simply not enough wealthy people to tax, and the taxing of wealth producers means that there will be less wealth generated. As Ronald Reagan used to say, the more you tax something, the less of it there will be, and the more you subsidize something the more of it there will be. Not only will wealthy people do whatever they need to do to shelter as much of their income as possible, but they will not make investments if the risk — and investing is always about taking risks — is not commensurate with the reward. This risk-reward factor affects the wealth of every investor, and the investor class in America adds up to about 100 million people, only a tiny percenatge of whom might be considered wealthy. Make no mistake — when you punish the rich, even just the super rich, you are punishing everybody with financial assets and ensuring that there will be fewer jobs in the marketplace.
The entitlement culture that wealth distribution creates has no end and the costs to pay for entitlements increase geometrically and infinitely. It may have seemed compassionate to create the food stamp program back in 1968 to end hunger in America. LBJ in his pursuit of the Great Society assured us that America, after all, could easily afford a few hundred million a year to feed the starving children of the poor, but the road to hell is paved with such good intentions. Now one is seven Americans receive food stamps, and the budget for the program has increased to $78 billion for fiscal year 2011. That one, relatively small-scale federal program eats more revenue than the annual cost of the war in Afghanistan before the 2010 surge. There are many more virtually untouchable and increasingly expensive programs, with Social Security and Medicare being the crown jewels of entitlement spending. The unfunded liabilities of these programs exceed $100 trillion, an amount equal to seven years’ gross national product and the expense of waging World War II, adjusted for inflation, approximately 130 times over.
There is no possible way to meet these financial commitments, and there is no other nation or international organization with either the assets or the desire to bail us out. The unfunded liabilities will at some point take us into national bankruptcy, and when that happens, democracy will not survive. People do not surrender entitlements, which are accepted as rights, without taking to the streets and looking for politicians on the far right and far left who can give them someone to blame. This is happening today in Greece and elsewhere in Europe as entitlements are cut in the face of fiscal bankruptcy and forced austerity in order to remain inside the Euro Zone. It is the fatal flaw of democracy and the reason the Founders feared that it would become the secular religion and death knell of our republic.
It is not just here that democracy may be failing. The democracy we have encouraged and fostered around the world has not turned out at all as we intended it would. In Russia, it has returned anti-American former KGB thug Vladimir Putin to the presidency of his strongman-loving country. In the Middle East, democracy has given us a Hamas terrorist government in Gaza, pro-Iranian Shiite control of the Iraqi legislature, a Muslim Brotherhood president in Egypt, a government that puts to death Christian converts for the crime of apostasy in Afghanistan, and an Islamic government in once-secular, military-ruled Turkey. In Latin America, it has elected Castroite anti-Americans Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and Evo Morales as heads of state. In Europe democracy has elected socialist Francois Hollande to the presidency of France and rising numbers of far-left socialist and radical right parliamentarians in Greece, Italy, and Spain, and reached the point where entire countries, once significant powers, insist on receiving entitlements from their more frugal and industrious neighbors. It will not last.
Western-style democracy has a dim future if current trends continue. It will certainly not be the model that emerging nations will want to emulate after the national bankruptcies, civil unrest, and loss of power and influence of these democracies coming in the next 20 years. The nations that are most likely to thrive in the 21st century are those that embrace free market economics and maintain a strong sense of nationalism based on a common ethnicity, religion, culture, or history. The nations I believe are headed for long-term decline will be those that try to make equality an achievable goal and lose their nationalism in favor of a multicultural Balkanization. The emerging nations in Europe, Asia, and the Americas will likely choose the former as their model with Chinese authoritarian capitalism as the leading example of a successful rising state for decades to come.
On a positive note, liberty will survive as long as free markets and property rights are protected. Conversely, liberty will always disappear when they are not protected. That is most important function of any state, aside from national defense. The rest can be dispensed with and the state will still survive and prosper. It may be that the very definition of citizenship will change and that some day full citizenship with the privilege of the franchise will be limited to those who have earned it by either serving in the military or paying say a minimum of 20 or 30 percent of their annual income in income taxes. That was how the legendary science fiction author Robert Heinlein predicted the future of republican societies, that they would evolve to a point where the noncontributing and apathetic majority of the population would opt out of politics and allow the republic to be run and protected by those who had earned the right to be citizens.
The great historians of our civilization, Will and Ariel Durant, wrote in their classic book The Lessons of History that “to check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed.” The Durants understood that when revolutionary societies embrace democratic equality as the leading virtue, as did France under Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety in 1792, Russia under Lenin in 1917, and China under the ideological madness of Mao Zedong, personal freedom is always subordinated to the regulatory and police powers of the state in order to create that monstrous proletarian democracy of equals. It never really produces equality, just another kind of privileged elite in the Orwellian animal farm, and the end result is tyranny of the most oppressive sort.
The alternative to the democracy of the French Revolution is the kind of limited-government, constitutional republic founded in Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787. That is the only form of government in which liberty can really prosper and find a permanent home. Liberty and inequality go hand in hand for the simple reason that in a republic free individuals are never equal, except possibly in the sight of the Almighty, and no attempt can be made to produce equality without limiting liberty. It is highly unlikely that the United States has the kind of electorate today that would vote to return to that original vision of the Founders. Indeed the very idea of such a government would be repugnant to Americans reared on MTV, the modern welfare state, and a mindless popular culture under the historically ignorant presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
As an optimist, however, I am inclined to believe that there are enough traditionalist Americans out there to save some part of that old constitutional republic. Democracy will probably not succeed in the long term; it never has in the past. The endless quest for equality and fairness will also fail, but the financial and social costs of that failure may impoverish the nation that was once the wealthiest and most solvent on the planet, producing half the world’s GDP in the year of my birth at the dawn of the Eisenhower era. What comes after that, only time will tell, and this turbulent century with so many looming shadows is still young.
Ray Lyman worked for Paladin Press for more than 20 years, and one of the functions he so ably filled was chief historian. In the days before Google, Ray was our go-to guy on any historical question. Through this column, Ray is simply resuming that role.