How democracy in America is aiding the growth of oligarchy
Democracy is defined, most fundamentally, on two ideas — liberty and equality. Democracy, until the past 125 years, has been looked down upon as mobocracy, as being fundamentally unstable, and as being a non-viable form of governance. These accusations, however, have really fallen out of our modern mind because we have collapsed the ideas of self-governance and republicanism into the term democracy. The original Greek term δημοκρατία (demokratia) literally means the rule of the many, meaning that in a democratic form of government, the majority rules on all issues. Liberty and equality were defining operations of the regime — the masses, as citizens, had the liberty to participate in the ruling of their own affairs and had equal protection under the laws. Liberty and equality were as much obligations to participate and to be responsible for the collective choices as they were guaranteed benefits of citizenship.
In modern times, however, we have holistically abandoned the notion that liberty and equality are obligations. Instead, they are natural rights; they are the reasons we create government. They are entitlements to all conscious creatures through nature as a self-evident truth, and now, to all human beings as a birthright. What this transformation has fundamentally done is reduce political participation into a commodity which one can willfully choose to abandon at one’s leisure.
This same logic is deeply evident in much of our contemporary debates about race, about gender, about identity, about violence — that our pre-political rights are guaranteed and it is the purpose of the government to protect those rights. The debates today now center on how far we should use the powers of the state to protect the expression of rights in the social and economic sphere and no longer about making sure the government itself isn’t violating those rights. But the fundamental assumption is the same — these rights are entitlements to use as we see fit.
Combining these notions of democracy and rights’ entitlement is the foundation of the growing politically correct movement and it’s backlash, the Black Lives Matter movement and it’s backlash, the feminist movement and it’s backlash, identity politics and it’s backlash. When the fundamental assumption is that all people exist freely and equally and that autonomy is the only source of legitimacy for authority, combined with a belief that government is fundamentally predicated on the ability of the majority to change the laws as they see fit, we result in the mass anger and frustration that is plaguing our country. Our system of government was not designed to be a democracy. It was designed to a republic ruled by the ‘natural aristocracy’ — those whose talents and abilities garnered them honors and recognition in their community and facilitated the rise up the political landscape. As we have continued to democratize the system by breaking down Constitutional barriers and expanding enfranchisement, the majority has grown in power and prominence for a century. As we self-identify more and more as a democracy entitled to the protection of expressing our rights wherever and whenever we so choose, we have become frustrated by a Constitutional order which was designed to stop the very progress so ardently desired by most Americans today.
We are a democratic people who are insulated in the rhetoric and epistemology of individual rights with the political theory that government exists to protect the expression of those rights. But we have a government structure which is predicated not on protecting the expression of rights but on keeping the government from being able to suppress the expression of rights. The system is inherently designed to stop, not to progress. But since we understand individual rights as being near absolute and the expression of those rights, autonomy, as being the only legitimate source of authority, any system which stands in the way of the expression of the majority is anti-democratic and therefore is illegitimate.
The great sadness is that our system protects financial elites from being crushed by the desires of the majority but cannot address the opposite condition; a condition which has arisen simultaneously with the great democratization of America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The pressures which break down the political safeguards against majority tyranny are now being used to peddle minority oligarchy even as democracy takes more prominence in our national identity. As we become more free and equal politically, we are becoming less important politically and far more unequal economically. The anger that fueled both Bernie Sanders’s and Donald Trump’s campaigns was derived from this paradox. The entitlements which we proclaim as natural birthrights are both the foundation of the democratic and oligarchic tendencies in America today, both of which are utilizing the growing tide of democracy to push forward agendas which are not expansive of those entitlements holistically but are submissions to the power of the state as a means to push a particularized agenda — either on behalf of the wealthy oligarchs or on behalf of the poor democrats. The epistemology of natural rights combined with the expansion of democracy (drawn from the ardent belief in autonomy as the only form of legitimacy) undermines any notion of the common good because it facilitates the universalizing of private interest at the cost of the public interest. People across the political spectrum are deeply angry today because of a broken political system which no longer seeks out what is best for the whole but, even with the greatest of intentions, the yearning for democratic rule is always going to result in this conflict. Add to it the entitlements of rights and we have created a storm of political ideology which desires to use the state to perpetuate certain interests over others thus rendering us into the perpetual cycle of oligarchy vs democracy, a notion which Aristotle rightly identified as the central conflict in any self-governing political system.
