Comments Elsewhere

Randall: What I’m calling democracy, the people as a group ruling the people as a group, and anarchy, each man ruling himself, are both possible interpretations of your broader definition of democracy. What I meant to say earlier was that while you’re looking on the bright side—calling true democracy what I call anarchy—what everybody else means when they say democracy is the other one.

Doss: I concur with Randall that a definition of democracy that necessarily overlaps with anarchy is too broad to be useful (i.e. it is not a connotation accepted by 95% of the people using the term).

I’ve been a bit unclear, so to clarify, I don’t think that “democracy” (“true” or otherwise) just means “each person ruling herself” or “anarchy.” What I think is that core democratic values (in particular popular sovereignty and political equality) strictly followed through, require a libertarian and, in the end, an anarchist society in order to flourish, because the only way you can end up with a polity of equals is ultimately through anarchy. I have no idea whether that end state is something appropriately called “true democracy” or “democracy” fully realized, or whether it’s something other than democracy.

What I’m arguing here is the more limited point that democratic values, as they are popularly understood, do entail a lot more robust protection of individual liberties and undermine the claims of elective oligarchies to govern “democratically.” You might object, “But look, democracy as almost everybody understands it just means elective oligarchy.” But I think that the problem here is that people are using the term confusedly: they use it in a way that appeals to certain values (like direct participation in political matters that affect you, sovereign individuals as the ultimate source of authority, political equality, etc.) while also applying it to institutions that (unbeknownst to them, because most people haven’t thought it through very carefully) betray those values.

If that’s true, there’s two different ways you could approach talk about “democracy” and “democratic” things. You could make it consistent by reducing the term to fit what it’s applied to: elective oligarchy under a mixed constitution. Or you could make it consistent by holding on to the more robust values, citing actual democratic historical precedents, and denying that the pretenders to democracy are what they are commonly claimed to be. If you do the former (which is what most libertarians do), then “democracy” is probably subject to most of the charges laid against it. If you do the latter, then whether or not it amounts to anarchism in the end, or amounts to something else, it’s susceptible to the charges commonly laid against it. Whether it’s susceptible to other charges is of course a further question.

As you mention, this may just boil down to an argument over whether to use the letters D-E-M-O-C-R-A-C-Y one way or the other, and if so maybe it’s not very important as long as we just make sure we understand each other. But I’m not sure that’s quite all there is in the debate. A lot of people happen to attach a great deal of rhetorical weight to the idea of “democracy” and “democratic” decision-making, and I think they have both good (individualist) and bad (tribalist) reasons for doing so; I think that challenging them to think harder about the concept, and dialectically encouraging them to favor their better instincts over their worse, may be worthwhile.

It may also be strategically useful as part of an argumentative and political strategy towards getting what we ultimately want: but that’s because I specifically think that encouraging an attitude of insolence towards professional politicians, enacting specific limits on their official powers in favor of greater popular control, and generally fostering more suspicion towards elites and more trust in ordinary people, is likely to get us closer to liberty than following the contrary strategies and hoping to educate the elites. (Because, roughly, most of the dangers to liberty right now are posed by arrogant self-appointed elites, and systematically undermining their claims to special authority and dignity is one of the best ways to deal with them.) Now, that’s a substantive, partly empirical claim about the predicament we’re in and likely to be in for the next several years, and I realize that I haven’t given my argument for it. But I do hope that it clears up a bit where I’m coming from.