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August 9, 2005

A True Doctrine of Democracy

Steph asked for my thoughts on a passage on governance from Nock's The Theory of Education in the United States. I'll quote the precursor and successor material as well, because it's necessary to understanding what Nock meant:

[O]ur system is professedly democratic. Let us see what this means. Here we find something more than a popular perversion of a philosophically sound doctrine, which is what we found in our examination of the idea of equality. Here we find something even stranger and more interesting, a perversion upon a perversion. Political theory of the eighteenth century was based upon the right of individual self-expression in politics; its essence was that those who vote, rule. Its chosen machinery was that of a republic, as affording the best power or purchase for the free expression of this right. As a mater of logic, when everybody votes, you have a democracy; the registration of democratic judgement is a mere matter of counting ballots. Thus a confusion of terms set in; a republic in which everybody voted was accepted as a democracy and was so styled, as it still is. This confusion persists, and the evidence of it is on every other page of many, I think the great majority, of serious writers. In fact, we may say that the terms republican and democratic have come to be regarded as synonymous. This is not greatly to be wondered at, because it is only lately that anything like a general sense of the unsoundness of eighteenth-century political theory has begun to prevail. The iron force of circumstance has finally made us aware that it is not, never was and never will be, those who vote that rule, but those who own; that you may extend the suffrage in a republic as far as you please without making any significant change in the actual rulership of the country. Republicanism does not, therefore, of itself even imply democracy. At the present time it is a matter of open and notorious knowledge that some monarchies are much more forward in democracy than some republics, even republics in which suffrage is universal. The antithesis of republicanism is monarchy, if you like, but monarchy is not the antithesis of democracy. The antithesis of democracy is absolutism; and absolutism may, and notoriously does, prevail under a republican régime as freely as under any other. Thus democracy is not a matter of an extension of the franchise, not a matter of the individual citizen's right of self-expression in politics, as the political philosophy of the eighteenth century regarded it. It is a matter of the diffusion of ownership; a true doctrine of democracy is a doctrine of public property.

(I typed this in from the book's text, so any typos are mine, not Nock's. The bold text is what Stephanie specifically wanted addressed.)

There are three key ideas in Nock's analysis: republic, democracy and rulership. There are three lesser ideas: monarchy, property/ownership and franchise.

A democracy, in its classical sense (which is the sense Nock is using), is a governing arrangement where all decisions are made by a vote of the whole body of citizens. A republic is a governing arrangement where some people act as agents for others, voting the interests of those they represent. As Nock notes, the current common use of "democracy" denotes any form of government in which everybody votes. (This has led to many of our fumbles in nation building abroad, as we attempt to set up voting before setting up governing institutions and other institutions necessary for a free society.)

The key around which Nock's point revolves is that of rulership: who makes the decisions in a society. In a republic, who will act as the agents, and how will they act? In general, one chooses an agent who both holds similar opinions to one's own, but can also represent those opinions well, so that they will hold sway. For that reason, the agent is generally better-educated, and thus generally more wealthy, than the average person. As the number of people represented by a particular agent rises, that agent must be relatively more educated, persuasive, capable and thus, because our economy is a free market where such merit is rewarded, more wealthy than an agent representing fewer people. Paupers do not generally get elected.

The paradox, of course, is that this means that the agents often represent their constituents in a titular sense, but have nothing particular in common with their constituents, except perhaps in broad philosophy. But the agent assumes that his acts are de facto in the interest of his constituents, and that frees the agent to act according to his own interests, which he does not see as differentiated from the interest of his constituents. (And since those agents are almost exclusively drawn from the most wealthy tier of society, Nock is correct that it is those who own who govern, because it is only those who own who are truly represented by their agents. Lobbyists and interest groups and the like merely reinforce the trend; even "grass roots" groups are controlled, at least eventually, by the wealthiest - because most capable - among the group, and further a wealth interest.) Thus the agents become a kind of non-hereditary meritocratic aristocracy, and an ossified republic can greatly resemble a constitutional monarchy. But still they are different, because even then the body of rulers in a republic is drawn from and disposed of by the people, and so the opposite of republic is not monarchy, but tyranny (which non-constitutional monarchies generally are).

By contrast, in a democracy, the people at large make all the decisions by vote or consensus. But this introduces its own problems. Of course the Founders feared both partisanship (which also plagues republics) and the tyranny of the majority (which also plagues republics whose agents represent the whole, rather than particular interests or sets of interests), and so were deeply suspicious of democracy, which has never been a long-successful system of government in any place. But there are other problems, too, in a democracy. For a democracy which allows its citizens to be judged by their merits develops a property-centric tendency as well. Those who are the best educated are also those who are generally the best at convincing others to a particular point of view: the shallow thinkers with passionate voices may lead some to a cause, but it is not their cause, but the cause of a deeper thinker who first led the shallow thinker. Thus those who have influence over the society are the ones who are capable of developing persuasive ideas, and communicating them effectively, whether directly or through surrogates. In a society where merit is allowed to produce differences, this inevitably leads to those who are influential also becoming wealthy, either due to their influence or because they also have merit in other useful areas. Since the wealthy are the influencers, the power in such a democracy concentrates in the hands of the propertied, leading to the situation of rulership by ownership.

In this sense, the communist critique of democracy and republic was correct, as Nock notes a little later in Theory of Education, and it really is true that power and wealth accrue together. But true democracy cannot exist where merit is allowed to differentiate members of society, because, as noted above, this produces a situation where decisions are made not by the whole, but by the moneyed elite which can educate themselves better, and can pay the costs associated with spreading their ideas through society. Thus a democracy where merit is allowed quickly devolves into an oligarchy, which itself may devolve into monarchy. To prevent this, a democracy must create equalities of outcome, rather than equalities of opportunity. If I am allowed to rise no higher, to do no more, to have no more than you, then my vote is of truly equal weight with yours. Thus a true democracy is indistinguishable from a true communism: as Nock notes, "a true doctrine of democracy is a doctrine of public property." In other words, true democracy and true communism are identical.

But it goes beyond this, because not only must wealth be equally distributed, so must talent and ability in a broad range of areas; otherwise, an elite will still form. True democracy is thus impossible, because it is self-evidently plain that people are not inherently equal in all ways, even if compelled to be as close to equal as possible. Harrison Bergeron demonstrated that principle quite dramatically: you must hobble the good and intelligent and graceful so that they are as base and unthinking and clumsy as the worst of us, because you cannot always elevate, but you can always destroy.

The antithesis of democracy is not absolutism, but individualism. To allow individuals to distinguish themselves is to extinguish democracy. Thus statism and communism are inherent to democracy, because overwhelming force is necessary in order to attain equality as nearly as possible. The wealthy must be taxed into poverty; the intelligent must be taught to be incurious and unthinking; the talented must be denigrated and the untalented praised. And it is the attempt to achieve these goals that is embodied in our educational system, and in our cultural assumptions of what is good as handed down by progressive opinion leaders, who have were ascendent from late in the nineteenth century to late in the twentieth. I suspect that the new ascendency of conservative thinkers, should it last, will be shown in the adoption of school choice plans, easing of restrictive homeschooling laws and a re-imposition of "traditional" schooling techniques like expecting kids to know the material, and failing those who don't.

Posted by jeff at August 9, 2005 4:52 PM

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