The Most Dangerous Democratic Delusion

by James Bovard, October 30, 2024

Democracy is a system of government under which the people are automatically liable for whatever the rulers inflict 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, so there is scant reason to worry about protecting citizens from the government.

Throughout western history, tyrants and would-be tyrants have sought to browbeat the citizens into obedience by telling them that they are only obeying themselves — regardless of how much the citizens disagree with the government’s edicts. Thomas Hobbes explained in 1652:

Because every subject is by this institution the author of all the actions, and judgments of the sovereign instituted; it follows, that whatsoever he doth, it can be no injury to any of his subjects; nor ought he to be by any of them accused of injustice. But by this Institution of a commonwealth, every particular man is author of all the sovereign doth; and consequently he that complaineth of injury from his sovereign, complained of that whereof he himself is author.

Hobbes sought civil peace by imposing an almost unlimited duty of submission via the sham that people are responsible for whatever government does to them: thus, government can never do the people wrong: thus, people never have a right to resist the government. Unfortunately, Hobbes’s canard has become standard equipment in the rhetorical armory of many rulers of democratic states.

A long history of abuses

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 in 1798 complaining of the acts, President Adams 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’s response to the people of Westmoreland County — few of whom had voted for Adams — was the classic trick of a would-be democratic tyrant. Virginia had been unwilling to ratify the Constitution until a Bill of Rights had been added to safeguard free speech, among other rights.

Yet even though Adams openly suppressed free speech, he still claimed a right to not only the citizen’s abject obedience but also a right to be above criticism for suppressing their freedom. Kentucky and Virginia enacted resolutions declaring the sedition act null and void; the Kentucky resolution observed that the doctrine “that the general government is the exclusive judge of the extent of the powers delegated to it [is] nothing short of despotism; since the discretion of those who administer the government, and not the Constitution, would be the measure of their powers.”

President Theodore Roosevelt, speaking in Asheville, North Carolina, on September 9, 1902, proclaimed: “The government is us; we are the government, you and I.” Yet, at the time, Roosevelt was using the American military to brutally crush a rebellion in the Philippines, which had been conquered by the United States and declared an American territory a few years before. Roosevelt explained that the “constitution does not follow the flag” — the American army therefore had no duty to respect the rights of the Filipino people.

President Woodrow Wilson declared in 1919: “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; then, 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 unexpected racist purge? And how could people have been responsible for Wilson’s pervasive suppression of civil liberties — as well as his pious promises to respect the Constitution? As Harvard professor Irving Babbitt observed in 1924, “Wilson, in the pursuit of his scheme for world service, was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power.”

President Franklin Roosevelt declared in 1938, “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 first ran for the presidency in 1932, he promised to balance the federal budget — and then later touted his endless deficit spending as a panacea for all the nation’s economic woes. 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 citizens were somehow bound to accept all of his power grabs as if they themselves had willed them. Likewise, were citizens responsible for FDR’s 1940 reelection campaign boasts about keeping America out of World War Two — or were they to blame of his secret machinations to drag the United States into that war the following year?

President Lyndon Johnson declared on October 28, 1964: “Government is not an enemy of the people. Government is the people themselves.” Yet it wasn’t “the people” of Arkansas or Oklahoma who had lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident to create a pretext to commence bombing a foreign nation. It wasn’t “the people” of Montana or Vermont who deceived the nation about the Vietnam War strategy and pointlessly sent tens of thousands of Americans to their death. It wasn’t “the people” of Georgia or Kentucky who launched covert FBI COINTELPRO operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy activists’ marriages, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, and anti-war organizations.

President Bill Clinton declared on October 7, 1996, “The Government is just the people, acting together — just the people acting together.” But was it “the people” who authorized the FBI to send in tanks with toxic gas to demolish the Branch Davidians’ home in 1993? 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 ordered FBI agents to illegally deliver over 900 confidential files on Republicans to the White House? Was it “the people” who ordered 71 days of bombing of Serbia because its government failed to kowtow to U.S. government demands?

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.” So everyone is personally to blame for Biden’s deficit spending and the Federal Reserve deluge of new money that destroyed 20 percent of the value of the dollar? Is every American to blame for the Disinformation Governance Board and other censorship schemes concocted to suppress any criticism of the Biden regime? Is each citizen to blame for Biden’s illegal mandate dictating that more than 80 million American adults working for private companies must get injected with the COVID vaccine — despite the federal coverup of the vaccine’s harmful side effects? (The Supreme Court smacked down that Biden decree.) Were all Americans to blame for Biden’s FBI targeting conservative Catholics who preferred to hear the Latin-language version of the mass, claiming they were potentially violent extremists? Were all citizens to blame for federal agencies’ illegally surveilling hundreds of thousands of Americans in recent years — according to the government’s own confession?

“We” are not “the government”

The notion that the people is the government is political infantilism — an agreement to pretend that the citizens’ wishes animate each restriction or exaction inflicted upon him. This doctrine essentially makes masochism the driving force of political life — assuming that if government is beating the citizens, they must want to be beaten, and thus they have no right to complain.

Despots seek to make people think that they are ruling themselves when the government seeks to engineer obedience to its dictates. But is a mother governing herself when she is arrested for the crime of possessing a pistol in her own home in some District of Columbia neighborhood where police have long since ceased providing minimum safety? Is the citizen governing himself when he is arrested for converting a garage into a playroom in for his children without a permit from the local zoning authority? 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.

If the people are the government, then should some specific private citizen be held personably blameworthy for each incomprehensible paragraph of a Federal Register notice, for each abusive IRS tax audit, and for each property seizure from an innocent owner by a zealous Justice Department attorney seeking “good numbers” for his district? The notion that “you are the government” is simply a way to shift the guilt for every crime by the government onto every victim of government. This makes as little sense as holding each “widow and orphan” owner of a single share of a company’s stock fully liable for crimes secretly committed by the corporate management — and assuming that the actual corporate directors were blameless since they were merely following the unspoken will of the individual shareholders.

If the citizen is the government, why is there a stark distinction in federal law between the class of private citizen and government employee — with far harsher penalties for any person who shoves, threatens, or kills a federal employee than a private citizen? Why is it perfectly acceptable and routine procedure for government employees to lie to citizens but a federal crime for citizens to lie to the government?

The notion that “the people are the government” is one of the biggest slanders that the average citizen will endure in his lifetime. To presume that any specific private citizen must be held responsible for all the cabals and conspiracies engaged in by all the bureaucrats and politicians is absurd. 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.

A democratic government will still be a government — which is more important than it being a democracy. Freedom consists of more than a mere choice of political masters. Once it becomes stark that “the people” cannot control Big Government, then the democratic sheen of Leviathan is gone and all that is left is … Leviathan. The most important issue is not whether the government rules in the name of the majority but how the government rules — whether its power is limited or unlimited. The more power government acquires, the more likely democracy will self-destruct.

James Bovard is a policy advisor to The Future of Freedom Foundation and is the author of the ebook Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty, published by FFF, his new book, Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty, and nine other books.

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