Democracies, wrote Aristotle, tend to be pulled in one direction: toward a vilification of everything involving merit, hierarchy, inequality, proportion, and worth.
The duty of a mature legislator and statesman, says Aristotle, is to spend much of his time pulling his country in the opposite direction from where the wind tends to blow in a democracy.
That means blocking legislation that undermines the ability of talented, qualified, and hardworking individuals to receive the benefit of their exertions in due proportion.
It is long possession of office which leads to the rise of tyrannies in oligarchies and democracies
There are three qualifications necessary for those who wish to serve in government: loyalty to the established constitution, a high degree of capacity for the duties of the office, and goodness of character and justice
Aristotle regards the "education of the citizens in the spirit of their constitution" as the greatest of all measures for ensuring the prosperity of all
For Aristotle the marrow in a democracy is its stable, productive, and virtuous middle class
Aristotle's Warning
"We know that the moment of greatest danger to a society is when it comes near realizing its most cherished dreams." - Eric Hoffer
From
its origins in Athens some 2,500 years ago, it has been obvious to some
astute observers that democracy, like all other forms of government,
carries with it a certain type of energy.
Barack Obama rode this unique
democratic energy into the White House.
He called it a
"righteous wind" and promised something rather vague that he called
"change."
To
many otherwise innocent American voters, "change" likely meant the
change from Bush-era recession to a vibrant new Obama-era prosperity.
But when candidate and President Obama began stirring up class warfare
against Wall Street, bankers, insurance companies, and the "rich," my
instincts led me to Aristotle, who saw and wrote about various populist
"demagogues" and their effect on democratic society many times during
his lifetime in Athens.
Aristotle's
observations are both sobering and chilling.
He watched and recorded
with scientific detachment the rise and fall of dozens of creatively
organized city-states in ancient Greece. His keen empirical eye
evaluated close to 160 different types of constitutions.
In other words,
Aristotle did his scholarly work each day in a living, breathing
political Petri dish of inestimable value to both ancient and modern
political philosophers.
For over a year, my copy of Aristotle's great work Politics
has lain open at the beginning of Book Five -- as if Aristotle is
imploring me once again to review a rather painful series of claims
about just where Barack Obama and the Democrats might be taking America.
Simply put, a righteous wind unshackled in a democracy will change our
way of life beyond recognition.
Trust Aristotle -- he's seen this
before.
Aristotle's
main purpose in Book Five is to identify the "causes of factional
conflict and constitutional change."
He's interested in how
constitutions that start out one way change into something different.
In
other words, Aristotle wants to know the causes of constitutional
change in order to discover the secrets of constitutional preservation:
"It is clear, to begin with, that to know the causes which destroy
constitutions is also to know the causes which ensure their
preservation."
Following
Aristotle through this section is both enlightening and, in light of
the many socialists who populate the modern Democratic Party,
exceedingly disturbing.
For the remaining conservatives in both
political parties who believe in "conserving" our brilliant
Constitution, however, Aristotle provides us with some rather priceless
knowledge in this regard.
First,
Aristotle recognizes that "tyranny grows out of the most immature type
of democracy."
An immature democracy is one in which demagogues and
other politicians fail to recognize the direction "to which [democracy]
tends."
This is a critical point that Aristotle devotes much energy
investigating.
Democracies,
says Aristotle, tend to be pulled in one direction: toward a
vilification of everything involving merit, hierarchy, inequality,
proportion, and worth.
For Aristotle, this type of democratic "energy"
actually begins at birth: "People are prone to think that the fact of
their all being equally free-born means that they are all absolutely
equal."
The duty of a mature legislator and statesman, says Aristotle, is to spend much of his time pulling his country in the opposite
direction from where the righteous wind tends to blow in a democracy.
That means blocking legislation that undermines the ability of talented,
qualified, and hardworking individuals to receive the benefit of their
exertions in due proportion.
On
the other hand, the easiest thing for a demagogue to do in a democracy
is to sweep up the populace with rhetoric about what people are owed in
life simply because they are equally born.
For the demagogue, the
easiest targets are those individuals who have achieved a higher and
wealthier position in society through their own efforts.
But the mature
statesman must recognize this and refrain from igniting democratic
energy with rhetoric about redistributing wealth:
In democracies the rich should be spared. Not only should their estates be safe from the threat of redistribution: the produce of the estates should be equally secure; and the practice of sharing it out, which has insensibly developed under some constitutions, should not be allowed.
Targeting
the rich and meritorious divides society and threatens to uproot the
very people who place a drag on democracy's excessive egalitarian
energy:
Demagogues are always dividing the city into two, and waging war against the rich. Their proper policy is the very reverse: they should always profess to be speaking in defense of the rich.
By
defending the rich, the statesman establishes much-needed ballast
against the tendency in democracy to introduce "radical legislation" and
"systems of equal ownership" that invariably make it a "worse
constitution."
And although for Aristotle the marrow in a democracy is
its stable, productive, and virtuous middle class, the rich must survive
as well if the constitution is to survive.
Second, Aristotle argues that without term limits, demagogues have a much better chance of harming the constitution:
Those who hold office with a short tenure can hardly do as much harm as those who have a long tenure; and it is long possession of office which leads to the rise of tyrannies in oligarchies and democracies. Those who make a bid for tyranny are either the [demagogues] or else the holders of the main offices who have held them for a long period.
One need only mention one name as an example in this regard: Nancy Pelosi.
Third,
Aristotle regards the "education of the citizens in the spirit of their
constitution" as the greatest of all measures for ensuring the
stability of the regime:
There is no advantage in the best of laws, even when they are sanctioned by general civic consent, if the citizens themselves have not been attuned, by force of habit and the influence of teaching, to the right constitutional temper.
In
other words, if the academic environment in a democracy betrays
hostility toward its founding philosophy, then the citizens at some
point will need to brace themselves for a major constitutional
transformation.
While guest-lecturing to a senior class of business and
economics majors at a local college recently, I was surprised to learn
that no one in the class of thirty-five had ever read the Federalist
Papers, John Locke, or even Adam Smith.
About
forty years ago, Ayn Rand watched as student radicals began
"establishing ideological beachheads" on college campuses "for a
full-scale advance of all the statist-collectivist forces against the
remnants of capitalism in America."
Their mission -- "ideological
control of America's universities" -- was reinforced by cowardice and
compromise among the conservative faculty and administrators. Echoing
Aristotle, Rand observed:
If the universities -- the supposed citadels of reason, knowledge, scholarship, civilization -- can be made to surrender to the rule of brute force, the rest of the country is cooked.
Fourth,
Aristotle made the interesting observation that when your enemies are
"close at hand," you have an equally good chance of preserving your
constitution as when your enemies are far away.
He says that when the
defenders of a constitution are anxious about their more proximate
enemies, they tend to watch over their constitution "like sentinels on
night-duty."
Ronald
Reagan left office a hero among most conservatives in 1988 for his
"victory" over the forces of international socialism.
A mere twenty
years later, we have the most hard-left, socialist-leaning political
faction in American history reshaping the nation at will.
I think that
what Aristotle is saying here is that had Reagan and other conservative
politicians spent more time "creating anxieties" about the legions of
hard leftists in our own backyard, then we'd have a better chance of
preserving individual freedom and limited government today.
Finally,
Aristotle argues that there are three qualifications necessary for
those who wish to serve in government: loyalty to the established
constitution, a high degree of capacity for the duties of the office,
and goodness of character and justice in the particular form which suits
the nature of "[the] constitution."
Back in 2001, Barack Obama noted
that during the fight for civil rights, the Warren Court didn't "break
free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding
Fathers in the Constitution."
The Warren Court, in other words,
interpreted the Constitution the same way in which the Founders did --
as a document that assigns negative, not positive liberties to state and
federal government.
In Obama's words:
[The Constitution] says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you [negative liberty]. But it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf [positive liberty].
It's
difficult to say how many present-day Democrat politicians embrace the
"negative liberty" wishes of our brilliant Founding Fathers.
Without
this "loyalty" to the spirit of limited government, their chances of
having the kind of character that embraces self-reliance, competition,
and initiative are quite slim.
And without these two essential
qualifications, Aristotle's third requirement seems moot: "a high degree
of capacity for the duties of the office."
Looking
back over the last forty or fifty years in America, it seems quite
obvious that we have been failing to heed Aristotle's warning.
In short,
with an unshackled righteous wind behind it, our democracy approaches
the dangerous moment Eric Hoffer warned us about: "near realizing its
most cherished dreams."
Alexis
de Tocqueville warned that although democratic communities "have a
natural taste for freedom," their passion for equality is "ardent,
insatiable, incessant, and invincible." And nothing, says Tocqueville,
can compete with a force of that magnitude:
All men and all powers seeking to cope with this irresistible passion will be overthrown and destroyed by it. In our age freedom cannot be established without it, and despotism itself cannot reign without its support.
If
Americans fail this November to send packing the growing number of
congressional Democrats with a statist-collectivist vision for America,
then the country, as Ayn Rand predicted years ago, may well be cooked.
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