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Democracy Is Caesar, Too!

by Michael S. Rozeff

Our current Presidents statements about democracy are typical: one has liberty and one has the

free exercise of ones rights when one can cast a vote for ones leader. In that is consent. In thatis no coercion. In that is freedom. He may even believe this. At least he says so. And even if hedoes not believe this, it is the ruling orthodoxy. Its commonly believed that elections are the

basic girders of liberty.

Democratic leaders worldwide claim that they cannot do simply anything with their powers, evenas they do just about anything. They claim that they are constrained by constitutions, by the

invisible wires of consent, and sometimes by the internal checks and balances of their owngovernments. Such constraints as exist dont prevent governments from becoming half or more

of their economies.

The conventional wisdom is that if we combine free elections with these constitutionalconstraints, we obtain liberty. Be happy, then, citizens! You are free!

This notion of liberty is as sadly deficient and defective as it is false. What difference does it

make to be told one must buy health insurance or be searched at an airport or pay taxes tosupport invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan or pay taxes to support the production of ethanol if the

power behind these commands is a dictator, an elected premier, a parliament, or a legislature?Coercion is coercion, whatever its source. If one person or a majority of your neighbors or their

representatives coerce you, does the source of this coercion determine whether or not you haveyour liberty? Do elections and your capacity to cast a vote eliminate the coercion?

Democracy no less exercises power against rights or liberty than does any other form of

government in which the Person is violated, chained, intruded upon, threatened, made to pay,robbed, constrained, and forced to obey commands against his will. Why write Person rather

than person? It is to emphasize the prime importance of the Person in connection with liberty. Itis the Person in you that is the locus of your free will, the will to act, and the will to create. That

which crushes this freedom of the Person, as does democracy, is that which enslaves. Voting ismerely one possible action of a Person. A voter is a political concept, not a Person. Likewise, a

citizen is a political concept, not a Person. A Person is a real creative being.

In the conventional view of democracy, there is always a People. The term People doesntmean just any collection of persons or people, but a collection that somehow sets itself apart or

that others think is set apart by some recognizable and shared characteristics. In his brief remarkson Egypt, President Obama used the phrases people of Egypt and Egyptian people thirteen

times. Democracy and the People are linked inextricably. His rhetoric reflected that.

But emphatically the People is not at all the same as the Persons who comprise it. Each Person isunique. The People connected to the concept of democracy is, like voter and citizen, at bottom a

political concept. Even if the Persons who comprise the People are connected by common bondsof language, or religion, or culture, or ethnicity, each of them as Persons still maintains

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irreducibly unique aspects of Personality, consciousness, creativity, and free will. What makesthem a People is something else that is labeled as political when taken in conjunction with

government by democracy. Democracy connects to a People but it is coercive power usedagainst Persons. Which matters more, you as a Person or you as part of a People?

Obama does not set himself apart from other politians past and present, here and around theworld, in having extraordinarily limited aspirations for the Egyptian people or any people. Hisaspirations for them, as were his predecessors, are that they have democracy, which is linked to

the People. Then all will be well. This is both a limited and false vision. The reason is that itignores Persons.

Freedom of the Person does not mean freedom of the People to have a democracy. Freedom of

the Person opposes dramatically the coercion and thus enslavement present in every democracyon earth. Freedom of the Person means an unhampered capacity to develop ones Personality

through action and creativity. Freedom of the Person is immeasurably distant from casting a voteperiodically for a government whose powers invariably find very wide scope and boundaries

even when constitutionally limited. Freedom of the Person and Freedom of all Persons, eventhose comprising a People, is not freedom of the People to have a democracy.

Why does the Egyptian people or any People need or want democracy or any coercive

government anyway? All such governments suppress freedom of Persons. Why not go straightfor the freedom of Persons? Does any person aspire to democracy? Who is it who aspires to

vote? Isnt the most basic aspiration of any Person to be a Person, which is to say, to be free toexercise and develop ones capacities? Democracy and voting are, at best, means to this deeper

end. Any persons and people may aspire to democracy as a means to improve their lot, but let uskeep in firm view that ones development is found at the personal level, not as a voter or citizen.

The aspirations of human beings go far deeper and/or should go far deeper than becomingpolitical animals or even politically democratic or politically republican animals.

The existing answer as to why people choose government was given by James Madison in The

Federalist No. 10: Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union,none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the

violence of faction. The People are actually disunited politically, Madison says, even thoughthey are a People. They form factions. They fight with one another. The answer to this, in

Madisons view, is to have a government of this (disunited) People that unites them and thatstops the fighting. The People will unite enough to create a politics by which they sublimate their

conflicts and transfer them into the arena of elections, constitutions, and political control. Somewill rule all, and all will select that some by an agreed upon means. They will agree to abide by

the consequences. The blood will no longer flow in the streets.

Madisons answer is a close relative to that of Hobbes, differing only in the nature of thesovereign. But the idea that there must be a sovereign is present in both. Can a Union be well

constructed? The history of the United States provides little encouragement. The more powerthat a Union is given to break and control the violence of faction, the more it can turn that

power against Persons. The factions may stop bleeding each other directly. Instead they willbleed each other through the instrument of government, and the government will bleed everyone.

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Let the current champions and advocates of democracy at least admit that coercion is undeniably

part of the overrated democratic fabric or solution, if you will, to the problem of factions thatMadison raised. Let us at least see clearly the immorality and injustice that is built into such a

system. Let us see that democracy is inherently anti-Person and therefore anti-freedom. Let us

not be fooled by fraudulent rhetoric that supposes that democracy is the highest form of humanorganization or that human civilization will have reached its zenith and final form when the earthis blanketed with democracies.

Was Madison even correct that democracy ameliorated factional conflicts? The American Civil

War or War Between the States not only shows the coercion at the heart of the Americandemocracy but it shows that democracy only ameliorates conflicts insofar as the factions already

choose not to fight. In other words, democracy, in its many forms, might arise as an outcome of akind of peace process among interests; but it cannot be peacefully sustained without that

cooperation of interests and factions.

Democracy does not itself cause peace to break out. It reflects a degree of peace alreadysubscribed to by factions. That degree is a highly imperfect degree because coercion lies at the

heart of the system, and that coercion overrides the freedom of Persons in order to maintain aparticular political system.

That imperfection cannot be stressed enough. In practice, the coercion has incalculable and

widespread negative effects by suppressing the freedom of Persons and enslaving them. In this ishidden death. In this is a hidden means of destroying life and creativity. In many instances, the

death becomes all too tangible and visible when the democracy engages its population in warfareof a great scope that could not be possible unless the People had come together under one

government and allowed it to amass the massive resources to carry out such fighting, as in thetotal warfare of the twentieth century. In the last few decades, we discover that, in the name of

democracy, these amassed resources are turned in the most brutal fashion against Peoples ofother lands.

Democracy doesnt make factional conflicts disappear. Peace doesnt break out because we

change from being Persons into citizens or voters. Government is not the conveyor of peace.Caesar doesnt bring peace. He always brings the sword. Government is not the solution to

power. It is itself power. The conflicts among people do not disappear with a constitution, orwith checks and balances, or with votes.

Democracy is anti-Person and anti-freedom. Democracy is the sword. Democracy is pro-

enslavement. Democracy is Caesar, too.