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Why America's Founders Didn't Want a Democracy
In his book "Liberty in Peril," Randall
Holcombe challenges the presumption that liberty and democracy are
complementary.
Book Review by Gary M.
Galles
December 17, 2019
When I took
history and government in school, many critical issues were misrepresented,
given short shrift, or even ignored entirely. And those lacunae undermined my
ability to adequately understand many things. Randall Holcombe’s new book, Liberty
in Peril: Democracy and Power in American History,
fills in some very substantial gaps, particularly with regard to American
constitutionalism and how it has morphed from protecting liberty to advancing
democracy at the expense of liberty. It does so with a host of novel and
important insights rather than the disinterest generated by the books I
suffered through in school.
The Role of Government
Holcombe gets right to the main point:
The role of government as
[America’s founders] saw it, was to protect the rights of individuals, and the
biggest threat to individual liberty was the government itself. So they
designed a government with constitutionally limited powers, constrained to
carry out only those activities specifically allowed by the Constitution. This
book describes how the fundamental principle underlying American government has
been transformed from protecting individual liberty to carrying out the will of
the people, as revealed by a democratic decision-making process. (p. xxii)
Holcombe begins by laying out the case that “the Founders
had no intention of creating a democracy, in the sense of a government that
would be guided by popular opinion,” (p. 5) in sharp contrast to current
“understanding.” And what makes the transformation from a central focus on
liberty to a central focus on democracy that routinely invades liberty
particularly significant is that
the powers embodied in America’s
twenty-first-century democratic government are those that eighteenth-century
Americans revolted against to escape. (p. 7)
Since I do not have the space to dissect all of the issues
in Liberty in Peril, I would like to highlight a few particularly
noteworthy things.
Holcombe starts with John Locke, which is a common place to
start for those interested in advancing liberty. But he also calls attention to
Cato’s Letters, which was one
of the most influential—but now almost completely ignored—influences leading to
the birth of the American Revolution. I have long been struck by how many of
the insights our founders are credited with that actually trace back there (see
the first major chapter of my book Lines of Liberty), and I
echo Holcombe’s invitation for more people to discover it.
Are Liberty and Democracy Complementary?
Liberty in Peril challenges the typical current
presumption that liberty and democracy are complementary.
The principle of liberty suggests
that first and foremost, the government’s role is to protect the rights of
individuals. The principle of democracy suggests that collective decisions are
made according to the will of the majority…The greater the allowable scope of
democracy in government, the greater the threat to liberty…In particular, the
ascendency of the concept of democracy threatens the survival of the free
market economy, which is an extension of the Founders’ views on liberty. (pp.
14-15)
This is reflected in the changing nature of elections.
At one time, elections might have
been viewed as a method of selecting competent people to undertake a job with
constitutionally-specified limits. With the extension of democracy, elections
became referendums on public policy. (p. 20)
Consensus vs. Democracy
The book also challenges commonly held presumptions that our
Founders wanted democracy. But while “the Founders wanted those in charge of
government’s operations to be selected by a democratic process,” they “also
wanted to insulate those who ran the government from direct influence by its citizens”
because “[b]y insulating political decision-makers from directs accountability
to citizens, the government would be in a better position to adhere to its
constitutionally-mandated limits.” (p. 15)
“Thus, the Constitution created a limited government
designed to protect liberty, not to foster democracy.” (p. 16) But the United
States “consistently has moved toward more democracy, and the unintended side
effect has been a reduction in liberty.” (p. 25)
Holcombe lays out issues of consensus versus democracy, with
consensus illustrated by market systems in which all those whose property
rights are involved agree to transactions, (p. 29) but in government, “a group
is able to undertake more extensive collective action if it requires less
consensus to act.” (p. 30) And the slippery slope is that
[t]he more citizens want to further
national goals through government action, the less consensus they will demand
in the collective decision-making process. (p. 33)
An In-Depth Study of the Constitution
Another notable aspect of Liberty in Peril is how far
beyond the typical discussion of constitutional issues it goes, substantially
expanding readers’ understanding in intriguing ways. For instance, how many
Americans know of the Iroquois Constitution, which focused on unanimity? How
many are aware of the Albany Plan of Union, drawn up in 1754, or how it was
influenced by the Iroquois Constitution? How many know that a “clear chain of
constitutional evolution proceeds from the Albany Plan of Union to the Articles
of Confederation to the Constitution of the United States”? (p. 43)
How many have noticed that “when compared with the Articles
of Confederation, the Constitution clearly less constraining than the document
it supplanted…the Constitution did not limit the powers of government; it
expanded them”? (p. 48) Yet,
[w]hile the authors of the
Constitution did deliberately expand the powers of the federal government, they
just as deliberately tried to prevent the creation of a democratic government.
(p. 52)
How many are aware of what the Confederate Constitution
tells us about the US Constitution and the drift from its principles since its
adoption, especially because “the problems that the authors of the Confederate
Constitution actually did address were overwhelmingly associated with the use
of legislative powers to impose costs on the general public to provide benefits
to narrow constituencies”? (p. 107)
The Constitution often is portrayed
as a document that limits the power of the federal government and guarantees
the liberty of its citizens…When compared to the Articles of Confederation, the
Constitution places less constraint on the federal government and allows those
who run the government more discretion and autonomy and less accountability.
The adoption of the Constitution enhanced the powers of government and laid the
foundation for two centuries of government growth. (pp. 66-67)
The Elitist Constitution
Holcombe’s section on “The Elitist Constitution” is
fascinating. It lays out the case for why “[t]he Constitution devised
democratic processes for collective decision-making, but the Founders had no
intention of designing a government that would respond to the will of the
majority,” (p. 70) as illustrated by the fact that citizens “had almost no
direct input into the federal government as the Constitution was originally written
and ratified.” (p. 70)
The section on the Electoral College is even more striking,
as it stands in sharp variance from the presumptions behind almost the entire
current debate over the National Popular Vote compact:
[A]t the time the Constitution was
written the Founders anticipated that in most cases no candidate would receive
votes from a majority of the electors. The Founders reasoned that most electors
would vote for one candidate from their own states…and it would be unlikely
that voting along state lines would produce any candidate with a majority of
the votes. (p. 75)
Consequently,
The Founders envisioned that in
most cases the president would end up being chosen by the House of
Representatives from the list of the top-five electoral vote
recipients…Furthermore, there was no indication that the number of electoral
votes received should carry any weight besides creating a list of the top five
candidates…The process was not intended to be democratic. (p. 76)
I found the issues discussed above to be of particular
interest. But there is far more in the book to learn from, and often be
surprised by, in comparison to what history courses usually teach.
America's Evolution Away From Founding Values
Such issues include the evolution of parties, the influence
of Andrew Jackson, who “fought for democracy, but, ironically, the result of
making the nation’s government more democratic has been to expand the scope and
power of government in response to popular demands for govern programs,” (p.
91) which “the Founders foresaw and tried to guard against by limiting the role
of democracy in their new government,” (p. 91), the War Between the States
(“the single most important event in the transformation of American
government,” (p. 93) including the elimination of state succession as a real
possibility, the Reconstruction Era amendments, the origins of interest group
politics, the evolution of federal regulatory power, the evolution of the
incentives of civil servants, the Sixteenth Amendment (income tax) as “a
response to the demand for a larger federal government,” (p. 149) a different
take on the 1920s, in which “[f]ar from representing a retreat from
progressivism, the 1920s extended the now-established orthodoxy, (p. 154) added
insight into the New Deal and the courts, Social Security as the “one New Deal
program for the responsibility for fundamentally transforming the historical,
constitutional role of the federal government,” (p. 175) how “The Great Society
represents the ultimate triumph of democracy, because for the first time a
major expansion in the scope of government was based on the demands of the
electorate, with no extenuation circumstances” (p. 205), and far more.
In sum, there are very many good reasons to recommend Liberty
in Peril. In it, Randall Holcombe provides not just a powerful and
insightful look into crucial aspects of America’s evolution away from the
principles of the revolution that created it but also an important warning:
Unfortunately, many Americans do not appear to fully understand these dangers as they continue to push the foundations of their government away from liberty and toward democracy. (p. 225)
++++++++++++++++++++
Blog Editor: Rather than
capitulate to Facebook censorship by abandoning the platform, I choose to post
and share until the Leftist censors ban me. Recently, the Facebook censorship
tactic I’ve experienced is a couple of Group shares then jailed under the false
accusation of posting too fast. So I ask those that read this, to combat
censorship by sharing blog and Facebook posts with your friends or Groups you
belong to.
___________________________
Gary M.
Galles is a
professor of economics at Pepperdine University. His recent books include Faulty
Premises, Faulty Policies (2014) and Apostle of Peace (2013). He
is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.
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