Today is the 80th anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt’s “economic bill of rights” speech. Here are some pieces I wrote on that buncombe:
RealClearHistory – January 6, 2023 – FDR’s Corrupt Concept of Freedom
FDR’s Worst Perversion of Freedom: The “Four Freedoms” Speech
Franklin Roosevelt did more than any other modern president to corrupt Americans’ understanding of freedom. Last week was the 75th anniversary of his 1944 speech calling for a second Bill of Rights to guarantee economic freedom to Americans. Nation magazine whooped up the anniversary, proclaiming that Democrats now have a “unique—and likely fleeting—opportunity to deliver where FDR fell short” with vast new government programs.
The 1944 speech, given as the tide in World War Two was finally turning, was a followup of his 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech which exploited Americans’ rising apprehensions tosee far more power for the government. Roosevelt promised citizens freedom of speech and freedom of worship and then, as if he was merely enumerating other self-evident rights, declared: “The third [freedom] is freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . . . anywhere in the world.” Proclaiming a goal of freedom from fear meant that government should fill the role in daily life previously filled by God and religion. Politicians are the biggest fearmongers, and “freedom from fear” would justify seizing new power in response to every bogus federal alarm.
FDR’s list was clearly intended as a “replacement set” of freedoms, since otherwise there would have been no reason to mention freedom of speech and worship, already guaranteed by the First Amendment. The “four freedoms” offered citizens no security from the State, since it completely ignored the rights guaranteed in the original Bill of Rights that restricted government power, including the Second Amendment (to keep and bear firearms), the Fourth Amendment (freedom from unreasonable search and seizure), the Fifth Amendment (due process, property rights, the right against self-incrimination), the Sixth Amendment (the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury), and the Eighth Amendment (protection against excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments).
And, while Roosevelt pretended to magnanimously recognize a right to freedom of speech, that did not include freedom to dissent: “A free nation has the right to expect full cooperation from all groups…. The best way of dealing with the few slackers or trouble makers in our midst is, first, to shame them by patriotic example, and, if that fails, to use the sovereignty of government to save government.” Roosevelt sounded like James Madison had simply forgotten the asterisk to the First Amendment about using “the sovereignty of government to save government.” FDR’s “new freedom” would justify suppressing anyone who balked at the political ruling class’s latest goals.
Regardless of its authoritarian overtones, FDR’s Four Freedoms doctrine quickly became enshrined, by Norman Rockwell and others, in American political mythology. President George H.W. Bush, speaking on the fiftieth anniversary of the Four Freedoms speech, called FDR “our greatest American political pragmatist” and praised him for having “brilliantly enunciated the 20th-century vision of our Founding Fathers’ commitment to individual liberty.” President Bill Clinton declared in October 1996, “In Franklin Roosevelt’s view, government should be the perfect public system for fostering and protecting the ‘Four Freedoms’ . . . Roosevelt . . . enumerated these freedoms not as abstract ideals but as goals toward which Americans—and caring people everywhere— could direct their most strenuous public efforts.” President George W. Bush invoked Roosevelt’s Four Freedom proclamation in Bush’s most fraudulent speech — his “Mission Accomplished” huff-and-strut aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003.
Three years later, in his 1944 State of the Union address , Roosevelt revealed that the original Bill of Rights had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” Roosevelt called for a “Second Bill of Rights,” and asserted that: “True individual freedom can’t exist without economic security.” And security, according to FDR, included “the right to a useful and remunerative job,” “decent home,” “good health,” and “good education.” Thus, if a government school failed to teach all fifth graders to read, the nonreaders would be considered oppressed (lawsuits over public school failures in Michigan and elsewhere against local and state governments have relied on similar claptrap). Similarly, if someone was in bad health, then that person would be considered as having been deprived of his freedom, and somehow it would be the government’s fault. Freedom thus required boundless control over health care.
Roosevelt also declared that liberty requires “the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.” In other words, government should inflate food prices high enough to keep the nation’s least efficient farmer behind his mule and plow. But FDR-style freedom also required unlimited federal control over every farmer. At that point, USDA was dictating to every wheat farmer exactly how many acres of the grain they could grow. An Indiana farmer exceeded his quota to grow wheat to feed to his hogs. The Roosevelt administration hounded him all the way to the Supreme Court, claiming it needed a free hand to “suppress … a public evil.” And what was the “public evil”? Wheat surpluses and uppity farmers who failed to kowtow to every USDA bureaucrat.
FDR also proclaimed “the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition.” Here was another new freedom that could be secured only by giving bureaucrats unlimited control of the private sector. Two years earlier, Congress enacted the Emergency Price Control Act, which created an Office of Price Administration with sweeping power to set or strike down prices in practically any industry. The act contained no substantive guidelines for the administrator’s decisions but merely required prices that “in his judgment will be generally fair and equitable.” When the Supreme Court upheld the law in 1944, Justice Owen Roberts bitterly dissented that “it is plain that this Act creates personal government by a petty tyrant instead of government by law.” Roberts scoffed at the court’s rubber-stamping of the law as a “solemn farce” because the law was written so that “the courts are unable to say that the Administrator has exceeded the discretion vested in him.”
Pundits and progressives who are whooping up Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights almost always ignore perhaps the biggest surprise in that speech. While Roosevelt spoke gaudily of new rights, he scooped George Orwell’s 1984 by revealing that slavery was freedom – or at least “close enough for government work.” FDR urged Congress to enact a “national service law— which for the duration of the war . . . will make available for war production or for any other essential services every able-bodied adult in this Nation.” FDR invoked the “eternally just principle of ‘fair for one, fair for all’” to justify destroying the freedom of every worker in the nation. He promised that this proposal, described in his official papers as a Universal Conscription Act, would be a “unifying moral force” and “a means by which every man and woman can find that inner satisfaction which comes from making the fullest possible contribution to victory.” Presumably, the less freedom people had, the more satisfied they’d become. And anyone who did not feel liberated by federal commands was a bastard who deserved all the misery officialdom heaped upon them.
H.L. Mencken wisely observed, “One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.” Americans are still suffering because Franklin Roosevelt’s freedom bunkum was not immediately laughed off the national stage. Any politician who seeks more power today to bestow more freedom in the distant future deserves all the ridicule Americans can heave his way.
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From the February 2011 issue of the Future of Freedom Foundation’s Freedom Daily –
Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” Fraud
by James Bovard
President Obama has succeeded in seizing new power over health care and other swaths of American lives in part because previous presidents muddied Americans’ understanding of freedom.
Most of the past century’s debates over the meaning of liberty have featured one politician after another who promised people true freedom, if only they would submit to increased government power. In the process, politicians have been generously shrinking people’s individual liberty.
The clearest political turning point in the American understanding of freedom came during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. He often invoked freedom, but almost always as a pretext for increasing government power. He proclaimed in 1933, “We have all suffered in the past from individualism run wild.” Naturally, the corrective was to allow government to run wild.
Roosevelt declared in a 1934 fireside chat, “I am not for a return of that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few.” Politicians such as Roosevelt began by telling people that control of their own lives was a mirage; thus, they lost nothing when government took over.
In his renomination acceptance speech at the 1936 Democratic Party convention, Roosevelt declared that “the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties … created a new despotism…. The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor — these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship.” But if wages were completely dictated by the “industrial dictatorship” — why were pay rates higher in the United States than anywhere else in the world, and why had pay rates increased rapidly in the decades before 1929? Roosevelt never considered limiting government intervention to safeguarding individual choice; instead, he favored multiplying power to impose “government-knows-best” dictates on work hours, wages, and contracts.
New improved freedom
On January 6, 1941, he gave his famous “Four Freedoms” speech, promising citizens freedom of speech, freedom of worship — and then he got creative: “The third [freedom] is freedom from want … everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear … anywhere in the world.” Proclaiming a goal of freedom from fear meant that the government henceforth must fill the role in daily life previously filled by God and religion. His list was clearly intended as a “replacement set” of freedoms, since otherwise there would have been no reason to mention freedom of speech and worship, already protected by the First Amendment.
Roosevelt’s list of new freedoms liberated government while making a pretense of liberating the citizen. It offered citizens no security from the state, since it completely ignored the rights protected by the Second Amendment (the right to keep and bear firearms), the Fourth Amendment (freedom from unreasonable search and seizure), the Fifth Amendment (due process, property rights, the right against self-incrimination), the Sixth Amendment (the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury), and the Eighth Amendment (protection against excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishments). Roosevelt’s revised freedoms also ignored the Ninth Amendment, which specifies that the listing of “certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” as well as the Tenth Amendment, which specified that “powers not delegated” to the federal government are reserved to the states or to the people.
And, even though Roosevelt included freedom of speech in his new, improved list of progressive freedoms, he added,
A free nation has the right to expect full cooperation from all groups…. … We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests….
The best way of dealing with the few slackers or troublemakers in our midst is, first, to shame them by patriotic example, and, if that fails, to use the sovereignty of government to save government.
Thus, the “new freedom” required that government have power to suppress any group not actively supporting the government’s goals. (The United States was still at peace at the time of Roosevelt’s speech.) The expansions of freedoms in the list were promised to the whole world — primarily people who did not vote in U.S. elections — while the implicit contractions of previously sanctified freedoms would affect only Americans.
Roosevelt elaborated on his concept of freedom in his 1944 State of the Union address. He declared that the original Bill of Rights had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” He called for a “Second Bill of Rights,” and asserted, “True individual freedom can’t exist without economic security.” And security, according to Roosevelt, included “the right to a useful and remunerative job,” “decent home,” “good health,” and “good education.” Thus, if a government school did not teach all fifth-graders to read, the nonreaders would be considered oppressed. Or, if someone was in bad health, then that person would be considered as having been deprived of his freedom, and somehow it would be seen as the government’s fault. Roosevelt also declared that liberty requires “the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living” — a nonsensical concept that would require setting food prices high enough to keep the nation’s least efficient farmer behind his mule and plow.
Roosevelt clarified the necessary underpinnings of his new freedom when, in the same speech, he called for Congress to enact a “national service law — which for the duration of the war … will make available for war production or for any other essential services every able-bodied adult in this Nation.” He promised that this proposal, described in his official papers as a Universal Conscription Act, would be a “unifying moral force” and “a means by which every man and woman can find that inner satisfaction which comes from making the fullest possible contribution to victory.” Presumably, the less freedom people had, the more satisfaction they would enjoy.
Commenting on foreign policy, Roosevelt praised Soviet Russia as one of the “freedom-loving Nations” and stressed that Marshal Stalin was “thoroughly conversant with the provisions of our Constitution.” Roosevelt’s concept of freedom required people to blindly trust their leaders — a trust he greatly abused. He also denounced those Americans with “suspicious souls” who feared that he had “made ‘commitments’ for the future which might pledge this Nation to secret treaties” at the summit of Allied leaders in Tehran the previous month. But at that summit, he had secretly agreed to allow Stalin to move the Soviet border far to the West — thus consigning millions of Poles to life under direct Soviet rule. (Roosevelt and Stalin used roughly the same dividing line that Hitler and Stalin had used in 1939 to divide Poland into Nazi and Soviet spheres.)
Praise for increased power
Though Roosevelt continually seized power long after he gave the Four Freedoms speech, that oration is the one that is most frequently invoked by subsequent presidents to sanctify their own power grabs. President George H.W. Bush, speaking on the 50th anniversary of the Four Freedoms speech, called Roosevelt “our greatest American political pragmatist” and praised him for having “brilliantly enunciated the 20th-century vision of our Founding Fathers’ commitment to individual liberty.” The elder Bush loved to invoke the Four Freedoms speech in his appeals to vastly expand the federal war on drug users.
President Clinton declared in October 1996,
In Franklin Roosevelt’s view, government should be the perfect public system for fostering and protecting the “Four Freedoms”…. Roosevelt … enumerated these freedoms not as abstract ideals but as goals toward which Americans — and caring people everywhere — could direct their most strenuous public efforts.
In other speeches, Clinton made it clear that the government needed vastly more power to give Americans “freedom from fear” (except for fear of the government).
Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech provides a push-button invocation for any U.S. president who wants to sound as though he cares about liberty. President George W. Bush invoked Roosevelt in perhaps his most fraudulent speech — his “Mission Accomplished” strut aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003:
Our commitment to liberty is America’s tradition — declared at our founding; affirmed in Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms; asserted in the Truman Doctrine and in Ronald Reagan’s challenge to an evil empire…. When freedom takes hold, men and women turn to the peaceful pursuit of a better life. American values and American interests lead in the same direction: We stand for human liberty.
And any Iraqi or Afghan who refused to submit to the Bush-definition of freedom automatically forfeited his right to live.
Bush also invoked Roosevelt in his November 2003 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy celebrating its 20 years of interfering with foreign elections: “The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country. From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms … America has put our power at the service of principle. We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history.”
Bush had a great belief in freedom in the abstract, as long as no one tried to meddle with his boundless power. For Bush to be invoking freedom — after he suspended habeas corpus, authorized torture, and destroyed much of Americans’ privacy — was typical of the shenanigans that politicians have long gotten away with in this country.
Bush again invoked Roosevelt in a March 2005 speech to the National Defense University, trying to vindicate his war on terror as part of “a consistent theme of American strategy — from [President Wilson’s] Fourteen Points, to the Four Freedoms, to the Marshall plan, to the Reagan Doctrine…. We are confident that the desire for freedom, even when repressed for generations, is present in every human heart.”
Bush may have given this particular speech to a military audience because the officers knew that they could not laugh outloud at his absurdities without wrecking their careers. Unfortunately, Americans are still paying a price because Franklin Roosevelt’s freedom demagoguery was not laughed off the national stage decades ago.
H.L. Mencken wisely observed, “One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.” Any politician who seeks more power now to give people more freedom at some distant future point deserves all the derision Americans can heap upon him. Citizens should not tolerate any president who invokes freedom as he tramples the Bill of Rights.
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003)
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Democracy vs. Liberty (February 2007)
If a foreign power took over the United States and dictated that American citizens surrender 40 percent of their income, required them to submit to tens of thousands of different commands (many of which were effectively kept secret from them), prohibited many of them from using their land, and denied many the chance to find work, there would be little dispute that the people were being tyrannized. Yet the main difference between the current reality and the foreign-invasion scenario is the democratic forms by which government power is now sanctified.
There are few more dangerous errors in political thinking than to equate democracy with liberty. Unfortunately, this is one of the most widespread errors in America—and a key reason why there are few leashes left on government power. As Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek observed in a 1976 speech, “The magic word democracy has become so all-powerful that all the inherited limitations on government power are breaking down before it. . . . It is unlimited democracy, not just democracy, which is the problem today.”
People have long been encouraged to confuse self-government of their own lives with “self-government” via majority rule over everyone. Because abusive rule by foreigners or a king personified oppression, many presumed that rule by people of one’s own nationality meant freedom. Boston pastor Benjamin Church proclaimed in 1773 that liberty was “the happiness of living under laws of our own making. Therefore, the liberty of the people is exactly proportioned to the share the body of the people have in the legislature.” However, the rampages of state and local majorities during and after the American Revolution debunked this naïve faith in majorities.
Americans quickly recognized that liberty meant lack of coercion—especially lack of government coercion. “The Restraint of Government is the True Liberty and Freedom of the People” was a popular motto of the late 1700s. John Phillip Reid, in his seminal work, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, observed that liberty in the eighteenth century was “largely thought of as freedom from arbitrary government. . . . The less a law restrained the citizen, and the more it restrained government, the better the law.” This concept of freedom continued into the early part of
the twentieth century.
But as time passed, enthusiasm for government power returned and different concepts of freedom arose to again vindicate awarding unlimited power to the majority. Progressive Herbert Croly, one of President Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite writers, declared in 1909, “Individual freedom is important, but more important still is the freedom of a whole people to dispose of its own destiny.” However, in practice, this means the “freedom of the whole people” to dispose of individuals’ rights, property, and lives.
This confusion has prospered in part because, throughout Western history, tyrants and tyrant apologists have sought to browbeat citizens into obedience by telling them that they are only obeying themselves. The eighteenth-century French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau used this bait and switch to sanctify democracy. Rousseau wrote:“Each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody…. Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.” The general will is “infallible,” and “to express the general will is to express each man’s real will.” Rousseau taught that people need not fear a government animated by the general will because each citizen would be “obeying only myself.” And because the people’s will would actuate government, the classical warnings on the danger of government power became null and void. The horrors of the French Revolution cast Rousseau’s doctrines into temporary disrepute, but his intellectual contortions permeated subsequent thinking on democracy and government.
Some U.S. presidents who have been most enthusiastic on seizing power have exonerated themselves by claiming that “the people did it.” FDR declared in 1938, “Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us,” and Bill Clinton declared in 1996 that “The Government is just the people, acting together….” In his 1989 farewell address, Ronald Reagan asserted, “ ‘We the People’ tell the government what to do, it doesn’t tell us. ‘We the people’ are the driver—the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast.” But the American people did not choose to drive into Beirut and get hundreds of Marines blown up, or choose to run up the largest budget deficits in American history, or provide thousands of antitank weapons to Ayatollah Khomeni, or have a slew of top political appointees either lie or get caught in conflicts of interest or other abuses of power or ethical quandaries between 1981 and 1988.
Invoking “the government is the people” is one of the easiest ways for a politician to shirk responsibility for his actions. This doctrine makes sense only if one assumes that government’s victims are subconscious masochists and government is only fulfilling their secret wishes when it messes up their lives.
The notion that democracy automatically produces liberty hinges on the delusion that “people are obeying themselves.” But, as Freeman editor Sheldon Richman commented, “When you rushed to finish your income tax return at the last minute on April 15, were you in fear of yourself and your fellow Americans or the IRS?” People who exceed the speed limit are not “self-ticketed.” People who fail to recycle their beer bottles are not self-fined, as if the recycling police were a mere apparition of a guilty conscience.
Is a citizen governing herself when she is arrested for possessing a handgun in her own home for self-defense in a crime-ridden District of Columbia neighborhood where police long since ceased providing minimum protection? Is a 20-year-old citizen governing himself when he is arrested in his own home by police for drinking a beer? The fact that a majority—or, more likely, a majority of the minority who bothered to vote—may have sanctioned such laws and government powers has nothing to do with the self-government by each citizen of his own life.
Yet by assuring people that they are the government, this makes all the coercion, all the expropriation, all the intrusive searches, all the prison sentences for victimless crimes irrelevant. At least for the theoreticians and apologists of democracy.
Praising Democracy to Unleash Government
The more vehemently a president equates democracy with freedom, the greater the danger he likely poses to Americans’ rights. Abraham Lincoln was by far the most avid champion of democracy among nineteenth-century presidents—and the president with the greatest visible contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He swayed people to view national unity as the ultimate test of the essence of freedom. That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly closed hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed “that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
President Woodrow Wilson pioneered the democracy-as-salvation bosh. Yet his administration had the worst civil rights record since the Civil War—imposing Jim Crow restrictions on federal employees that resulted in the mass firing of black civil servants. After taking the nation into World War I, Wilson rammed a Sedition Act through Congress that empowered the feds to imprison anyone who muttered a kind word for the Kaiser. Wilson pushed conscription through Congress—as if his goal of having “a seat at the table” at the postwar peace conferences entitled him to dispose of a hundred thousand American lives. Wilson’s constant invocation of democracy shielded him against a popular backlash, at least until the fraud of the peace settlement became widely recognized.
Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency was the clearest turning point in the American understanding of freedom. In a 1937 speech on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, FDR declared that “even some of our own people may wonder whether democracy can match dictatorship in giving this generation the things it wants from government.” FDR’s comment was part of his attack on those who opposed his seizure of power over property, wages, and contracts. Earlier that year, in his second inaugural address, he bragged, “In these last four years, we have made the exercise of all power more democratic; for we have begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public’s government.” When the Supreme Court found many of Roosevelt’s power grabs unconstitutional, he announced plans to wreck the power of the Court by stacking it with new appointees—showing his contempt for any limits on his power. “FDR freedom” meant presidential supremacy—and nothing else.
In his 1941 State of the Union address, FDR announced the “four freedoms”—“freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world”; “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world”; “freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world;” and “freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.” FDR’s revised freedoms ignored most of all the specific limitations on government power contained in the Bill of Rights. Now, instead of a liberty for each to live his own life and go his own way, Roosevelt offered freedom from fear and freedom from want— “freedoms” that require omnipresent government surveillance and perpetual government intervention.
Roosevelt perennially invoked freedom as a pretext to increase government power. His promises of freedom for the entire world distracted attention from how his administration was subjugating Americans. Partly because Americans in the 1930s and early 1940s were less politically astute than those of the Founding era, FDR’s bait and switch worked like a charm—and was canonized into American folklore by Norman Rockwell and others.
Complacent about Liberty
Freedom became increasingly bastardized in the decades after FDR. President Nixon, like most of his predecessors, encouraged Americans to be complacent about their liberty. In 1973, in his second inaugural address, he declared:“Let us be proud that our system has produced and provided more freedom and more abundance, more widely shared, than any other system in the history of the world.”Americans later learned that, at the time of Nixon’s statement, the FBI was involved in a massive campaign to suppress opposition to the government and to the Vietnam War, and Nixon himself was involved in obstructing the investigation of the Watergate break-in and related crimes. But Nixon may not have seen such actions as a violation of liberty because, as he explained to interviewer David Frost in 1977, “When the president does it that means that it is not illegal.” Frost, somewhat dumbfounded, replied,“By definition?” Nixon answered,“Exactly. Exactly.”
President Clinton openly scapegoated freedom for many problems caused by government (such as welfare programs). In a 1994 interview with MTV he declared, “When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly….What’s happened in America today is, too many people live in areas where there’s no family structure, no community structure, and no work structure. And so there’s a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there’s too much personal freedom. When personal freedom’s being abused, you have to move to limit it.”
President George W. Bush uses freedom and democracy as if they were two sides of the same wooden nickel. Bush explained to a Dutch journalist in surveillance software that could vacuum up millions of May 2005: “Holland is a free country. It’s a country people’s e-mails without a search warrant, nationwide where the people get to decide the policy. The Government just reflects the will of the people. That’s what democracies are all about.”
Later that day he was questioned by another Dutch journalist:
Q. How do you define freedom?
The President. Freedom, democracy?
Q. Freedom as such.
The President. Well, I view freedom as where government doesn’t dictate. Government is responsive to the needs of people….That’s what freedom—government is of the people. We say ‘‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’’ And a free society is one if the people don’t like what is going on, they can get new leaders. . . . That’s free society, society responsive to people.
And as long as government claims to respond to the people, the people are free, no matter how much the government abuses them.
Bush Freedom hinges on government as the savior of freedom. Debates over the Patriot Act provided further opportunity for degrading the American vocabulary. Attorney General John Ashcroft titled the August 2003 launch speech of his national Patriot Act promotion tour “Securing Our Liberty: How America is Winning the War on Terror.” Earlier in 2003, Ashcroft characterized Justice Department antiterrorist deliberations this way: “Every day we are asking each other, what can we do to be more successful in securing the freedoms of America and sustaining the liberty, the tolerance, the human dignity that America represents.” Ashcroft’s successor as Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, used the same rhetoric to sanctify the Patriot Act: “Congress did a good job in striking the appropriate balance between protecting our country and securing our liberties.”
After the Patriot Act was signed, there was a hundredfold increase in the number of emergency spying warrants issued solely on the Attorney General’s command—and later rubber-stamped by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But all the violations of Americans’ rights and liberties by federal agents are irrelevant because the proclaimed intent of the Patriot Act is to “secure liberty.” There is no freedom without security, and no security without absolute power.
Intellectuals Join In
It is not only politicians who seek to confuse people about the reality of liberty. Intellectuals who should know better join in the circus shell game. Former federal judge and Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1996 called for “a constitutional amendment making any federal or state court decision subject to being overruled by a majority vote of each House of Congress.” Bork appealed to “our most precious freedom, the freedom to govern ourselves democratically.” According to this view, the greatest danger to freedom is having frustrated legislators.
What are the mechanics by which majority-mandated shackles liberate the individual? How does a shackle supported by 51 percent of the populace affect an individual differently from one endorsed by a mere 49 percent? Is the secret to democracy some law of inverse political gravity—so that the more people who support imposing a shackle, the less it weighs? Are citizens obliged to pretend that any restriction favored by the majority is not a restraint but instead a badge of freedom? Shackles are shackles are shackles, regardless of what rhetorical holy water they are blessed with.
People are taught that, thanks to democracy, coercion is no longer dangerous because people get to vote on who coerces them. Because people are permitted a role in choosing who will be in charge of the penal code, they are free. Being permitted to vote for politicians who enact unjust, oppressive new laws magically converts the stripes on prison shirts into emblems of freedom. But it takes more than voting to make coercion benign.
The fiction of majority rule has become a license to impose nearly unlimited controls on the majority and everybody else. The doctrine of “majority rule equals freedom” is custom-made to turn mobs of voters into spoiled children with a divine right to plunder the candy store. The only way to equate submission to majority-sanctioned decrees with individual freedom is to assume that individuals have no right to live in any way that displeases the majority.
The more confused people’s thinking becomes, the easier it is for rulers to invoke democracy to destroy freedom. The issue is not simply Lincoln’s, Roosevelt’s, Clinton’s or Bush’s absurd statements on freedom but a cultural–intellectual smog in which politicians have unlimited leeway to redefine freedom. If politicians can redefine freedom at their whim, then they can raze limits on their own power.
It is better that government be representative than nonrepresentative. But it is more important that governments respect people’s rights than fulfill some people’s wishes to oppress other people. The rules that a person must obey are more important than the identity of the nominal rulers. Herbert Spencer wrote in 1857, “The liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or not, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.” The existence of democracy does not change the meaning of individual lib
erty. A person is free or not free, regardless of how many people approve his fetters.
The Founding Fathers fought for a government that would respect their rights, not for a government that would allow them to forcibly micromanage the lives of their fellow citizens. The only way to claim that democracy automatically protects liberty is to say that the only freedom that matters is “freedom for the government to rule in the name of the people.”
Reconciling Democracy with Liberty
The scope of majority rule should be limited to those issues and areas in which common standards must prevail to preserve public peace. Democracy is a relatively good method for reaching agreement on a system of roads, but is a lousy method for dictating where each citizen must go. Democracy can be a good method for reaching agreement on standards of weights and measurements used in commerce, but is a poor method for dictating wages and prices. Democracy should be a system of government based on common agreement on issues that must be agreed upon, and tolerance—however
grudging—on all other differences.
“Whenever majority rule is unnecessarily substituted for individual choice, democracy is in conflict with individual freedom,” wrote Italian professor Bruno Leoni in his 1961 classic, Freedom and the Law. Majority rule is a means not an end. There is nothing superior in majorities running (or thinking they run) a government compared to an individual running his own life. Collective rule will always be inferior to the self-rule of a citizen in his own life.
The fact that democratic governments violate liberty does not prove that democracy is uniquely or inherently evil. This is simply what governments do. In the same way that a political candidate’s lies don’t create a presumption that his opponent is honest, the fact that democracies routinely violate rights and liberties creates no presumption that other forms of government would not be worse.
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