Democracy’s Damndest Defamation

by James Bovard , September 4, 2024

In a democracy, people automatically become liable for whatever the government inflicts upon them. Many of the most deadly errors of contemporary political thinking stem from the notion that in a democracy the government is the people and vice versa, so there is scant reason to distinguish between the two—or to worry about protecting citizens from the government.

In 1798, President John Adams pushed through Congress the Alien and Sedition Acts, which empowered Adams to suppress free speech and imprison without trial any critic of the federal government. When the citizens of Westmoreland County, Virginia petitioned Adams with complaints, he responded by denouncing the citizens: “The declaration that Our People are hostile to a government made by themselves, for themselves, and conducted by themselves, is an insult.” Adams’ response to the people of Westmoreland County—few of whom had voted for him—was the classic trick of a would-be democratic tyrant. He declaimed that people were obliged to submit to oppression because the chief executive had been duly elected by other voters.

On September 4, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson declared, “In the last analysis, my fellow countrymen, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their government.” Wilson had campaigned for reelection three years earlier bragging that he had kept the country out of World War I. But shortly after he started his second term, he submitted to Congress a declaration of war against Germany. Were the people responsible for President Wilson’s 1916 peace promises or his 1917 declaration of war? How can they be responsible for both? Wilson campaigned for the presidency in 1912 as a progressive. Shortly after he took office, mass firings of black federal employees occurred. The chief federal revenue collector in Georgia announced, “There are no Government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro’s place is in the cornfield.” How were voters who opposed Jim Crow laws responsible for Wilson’s racist purge?

On July 8, 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt declared, “Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a president and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.” When Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936, he never mentioned his plan (revealed in early 1937) to pack the nation’s highest court with new appointees to rubber-stamp his decrees. Yet, because he won in 1936, he effectively implied that the citizenry were somehow bound to accept all of his power grabs as if they themselves had willed them.

On October 28, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared, “Government is not an enemy of the people. Government is the people themselves.” But it wasn’t “the people” who deceived themselves regarding the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. It wasn’t “the people” who went to the voting booths the following week based on Johnson’s signals to keep the United States out of another land war in Asia—even though Johnson was already preparing to massively escalate the conflict.

On October 7, 1996, President Bill Clinton declared, “The Government is just the people, acting together—just the people acting together.” But, was it “the people” who invited wealthy businessmen to give $50,000 to the Democratic National Committee to come to White House coffee klatches? Was it “the people” who approved a plan to rent out the Lincoln bedroom for $100,000 a night? Was it “the people” who approved sending FBI tanks to spray toxic and flammable gas leading to the fiery Waco finale that left eighty civilians dead?

On April 3, 2013, President Barack Obama, championing new bans on gun ownership, declared that since America is a democracy, people had no reason to fear “the government is going to come take my guns. The government is us. These officials are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place.” But Obama scorned the Constitution to create a new presidential prerogative to assassinate (without trial) any American who the U.S. government secretly labels a terrorist suspect. Obama ravaged the Fourth Amendment by vastly expanding illegal federal surveillance of private citizens. And he sought to dismiss the uproar from Edward Snowden’s revelations by ludicrously claiming that “there is no spying” on Americans.

On October 23, 2015, Obama hit the same “us” theme at a Democratic fundraiser: “Our system only works when we realize that government is not some alien thing; government is not some conspiracy or plot; it’s not something to oppress you. Government is us in a democracy.” But it was not private citizens who, during Obama’s reign, issued more than half a million pages of proposed and final regulations and notices in the Federal Register; made more than ten million administrative rulings; tacitly took control of more than five hundred million acres by designating them “national monuments”; and bombed seven foreign nations.

On March 11, 2021, President Joe Biden proclaimed, “We need to remember, the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us. All of us. We the people.” Biden spoken in a Capitol building that was surrounded by high barbed wire and thousands of National Guard soldiers. Average citizens had long since been banished from the so-called Temple of Democracy. Six months later, Biden decreed that eighty-four million American adults working for private companies must get COVID vaccines even though the White House knew the shots failed to prevent infections or transmission. The president derided vaccine skeptics as murderers who only wanted “the freedom to kill you with my COVID.” The Supreme Court struck down that policy and many other Biden decrees as illegal or unconstitutional.

The “people = government” doctrine is political infantilism, a ploy to shift the guilt for every federal crime onto every victim of the government. This is the political version of the doctrine of original sin; it assumes that a person is born politically damned with the weight of all of the past and future sins of his government upon his head. This doctrine makes sense only if we assume citizens are masochists who secretly wish to have their lives blighted. Do citizens’ unspoken wishes animate each restriction inflicted upon them? But drivers who exceed speed limits are not “self-ticketed” and travelers who get accosted by Transportation Security Administration agents at airports are not self-molested.

The notion that “the people are the government” is one of the biggest slanders that the average citizen will endure in his lifetime. And it is even more ludicrous nowadays after Washington dropped an Iron Curtain around itself. Every year, the federal government slaps a “secret” label on trillions of pages of information—enough to fill twenty million filing cabinets. Federal classification regimes permit only 1% of the populace to learn some of the endlessly multiplying government secrets. But the other 99% can be “trusted” to pay off the federal government’s $35 trillion debt.

To confuse the government with the people razes barriers against political invasions of private lives. The further government power extends, the broader swath more of people’s lives fall under bureaucratic thumbs. Yet politicians talk as if citizens are as free when they email Congress pleading for relief as when they use their own property.

“Government is us” exemplifies how all of the prevailing illusions on democracy are biased in favor of blind submission. That doctrine is simply another dose of campaign snake oil to keep rubes paying and obeying. Democracy will perish unless citizens speedily get better political bullshit radars.