{"id":10822,"date":"2017-11-27T11:32:14","date_gmt":"2017-11-27T16:32:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=10822"},"modified":"2017-11-27T12:25:18","modified_gmt":"2017-11-27T17:25:18","slug":"democracy-versus-liberty-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/27\/democracy-versus-liberty-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Democracy versus Liberty"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Trump’s presidency is helping Americans recognize that voting is no\u00a0guarantee for individual liberty.\u00a0This is perhaps the most frequently forgotten lesson in politics.\u00a0 Many liberals were convinced that Obama’s election somehow made Americans’ constitutional rights safe, while many conservatives believed that Al Gore’s defeat in 2000 provided the same windfall.\u00a0 In reality, no president can be trusted with arbitrary power.<\/p>\n

This piece, a spinoff from Attention Deficit Democracy<\/a>, originally appeared in the Freeman<\/a>. Here are some of the punchier lines from the piece:<\/p>\n

*The more confused people\u2019s political thinking becomes, the easier it is for rulers to invoke democracy to destroy freedom<\/p>\n

*People are taught that, thanks to democracy, coercion is no longer dangerous because people can vote for who coerces them.<\/p>\n

*The notion that democracy automatically produces liberty hinges on the delusion that \u201cpeople are obeying themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

*People have long been encouraged to confuse self-government of themselves with majority rule over everyone.<\/p>\n

Democracy Versus Liberty<\/h1>\n
AUGUST\u00a0 2006 by JAMES BOVARD<\/a><\/h5>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014and a key reason why there are few leashes left on government power. As Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek observed in a 1976 speech, \u201cThe 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.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

People have long been encouraged to confuse self-government of their own lives with \u201cself-government\u201d via majority rule over everyone<\/strong>. Because abusive rule by foreigners or a king personified oppression, many presumed that rule by people of one\u2019s own nationality meant freedom. Boston pastor Benjamin Church proclaimed in 1773 that liberty was \u201cthe 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.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a> However, the rampages of state and local majorities during and after the American Revolution debunked this na\u00efve faith in majorities.<\/p>\n

Americans quickly recognized that liberty meant lack of coercion\u2014especially lack of government coercion. \u201cThe Restraint of Government is the True Liberty and Freedom of the People\u201d was a popular motto of the late 1700s.3<\/sup><\/a> John Phillip Reid, in his seminal work, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution<\/em>, observed that liberty in the eighteenth century was \u201clargely thought of as freedom from arbitrary government. . . . The less a law restrained the citizen, and the more it restrained government, the better the law.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a> This concept of freedom continued into the early part of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s favorite writers, declared in 1909, \u201cIndividual freedom is important, but more important still is the freedom of a whole people to dispose of its own destiny.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a> However, in practice, this means the \u201cfreedom of the whole people\u201d to dispose of individuals\u2019 rights, property, and lives.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cEach 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.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a> The general will is \u201cinfallible,\u201d and \u201cto express the general will is to express each man\u2019s real will.\u201d Rousseau taught that people need not fear a government animated by the general will because each citizen would be \u201cobeying only myself.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a> And because the people\u2019s 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\u2019s doctrines into temporary disrepute, but his intellectual contortions permeated subsequent thinking on democracy and government.<\/p>\n

Some U.S. presidents who have been most enthusiastic on seizing power have exonerated themselves by claiming that \u201cthe people did it.\u201d FDR declared in 1938, \u201cLet us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us,\u201d8<\/sup><\/a> and Bill Clinton declared in 1996 that \u201cThe Government is just the people, acting together. . . .\u201d9<\/sup><\/a> In his 1989 farewell address, Ronald Reagan asserted, \u201c \u2018We the People\u2019 tell the government what to do, it doesn\u2019t tell us. \u2018We the people\u2019 are the driver\u2014the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Invoking \u201cthe government is the people\u201d 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\u2019s victims are subconscious masochists and government is only fulfilling their secret wishes when it messes up their lives.<\/p>\n

The notion that democracy automatically produces liberty hinges on the delusion that \u201cpeople are obeying themselves.\u201d<\/strong> But, as Freeman<\/em> editor Sheldon Richman commented, \u201cWhen 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?\u201d11<\/sup><\/a> People who exceed the speed limit are not \u201cself-ticketed.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014or, more likely, a majority of the minority who bothered to vote\u2014may have sanctioned such laws and government powers has nothing to do with the self-government by each citizen of his own life.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Praising Democracy to Unleash Government<\/h4>\n

The more vehemently a president equates democracy with freedom, the greater the danger he likely poses to Americans\u2019 rights.<\/strong> Abraham Lincoln was by far the most avid champion of democracy among nineteenth-century presidents\u2014and the president with the greatest visible contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.12<\/sup><\/a> 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 \u201cthat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

President Woodrow Wilson pioneered the democracy-as-salvation bosh.<\/strong> Yet his administration had the worst civil rights record since the Civil War\u2014imposing 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.13<\/sup><\/a> Wilson pushed conscription through Congress\u2014as if his goal of having \u201ca seat at the table\u201d at the postwar peace conferences entitled him to dispose of a hundred thousand American lives. Wilson \u2018s constant invocation of democracy shielded him against a popular backlash, at least until the fraud of the peace settlement became widely recognized.<\/p>\n

Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s 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 \u201ceven some of our own people may wonder whether democracy can match dictatorship in giving this generation the things it wants from government.\u201d FDR\u2019s 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, \u201cIn 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\u2019s government.\u201d When the Supreme Court found many of Roosevelt \u2018s power grabs unconstitutional, he announced plans to wreck the power of the Court by stacking it with new appointees\u2014showing his contempt for any limits on his power. \u201cFDR freedom\u201d meant presidential supremacy\u2014and nothing else.<\/p>\n

In his 1941 State of the Union address, FDR announced the \u201cfour freedoms\u201d\u2014\u201cfreedom of speech and expression\u2014everywhere in the world\u201d; \u201cfreedom of every person to worship God in his own way\u2014everywhere in the world\u201d; \u201cfreedom from want\u2014which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants\u2014everywhere in the world;\u201d and \u201cfreedom from fear\u2014which, 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\u2014anywhere in the world.\u201d FDR\u2019s 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\u2014\u201cfreedoms\u201d 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\u2019s bait and switch worked like a charm\u2014and was canonized into American folklore by Norman Rockwell and others.<\/p>\n

Complacent about Liberty<\/h4>\n

Freedom became increasingly bastardized in the decades after FDR.<\/strong> President Nixon, like most of his predecessors, encouraged Americans to be complacent about their liberty. In 1973, in his second inaugural address, he declared: \u201cLet 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.\u201d Americans later learned that, at the time of Nixon\u2019s 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, \u201cWhen the president does it that means that it is not illegal.\u201d Frost, somewhat dumbfounded, replied, \u201cBy definition?\u201d Nixon answered, \u201cExactly. Exactly.\u201d14<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

President Clinton openly scapegoated freedom for many problems caused by government (such as welfare programs). In a 1994 interview with MTV he declared, \u201cWhen 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\u2019s happened in America today is, too many people live in areas where there\u2019s no family structure, no community structure, and no work structure. And so there\u2019s a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there\u2019s too much personal freedom. When personal freedom\u2019s being abused, you have to move to limit it.\u201d15<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

But the Bill of Rights did not give freedom to Americans; instead, it was a solemn pledge by the government that it recognized and would not violate the pre-existing rights of individuals. The Bill of Rights was not \u201cradical\u201d according to the beliefs of Americans of that era; it codified rights both long recognized in English common law and purchased in blood during the Revolution. The Founding Fathers had difficulty getting the Constitution approved in many states not because it was \u201cradical\u201d in giving people rights\u2014but because it was perceived as concentrating too much power to violate rights within the federal government. Yet by painting freedom as a gift of the government, Clinton distracted people from recognizing the threat that any government\u2014democratic or otherwise\u2014poses to their rights.<\/p>\n

President George W. Bush uses freedom and democracy interchangeably, as if they were two sides of the same wooden nickel. Bush explained to a Dutch journalist in May 2005: \u201c Holland is a free country. It\u2019s a country where the people get to decide the policy. The Government just reflects the will of the people. That\u2019s what democracies are all about.\u201d16<\/sup><\/a> Later that day he was questioned by another Dutch journalist:<\/p>\n

Q. How do you define freedom?<\/p>\n

The President. Freedom, democracy?<\/p>\n

Q. Freedom as such.<\/p>\n

The President. Well, I view freedom as where government doesn\u2019t dictate. Government is responsive to the needs of people. . . . That\u2019s what freedom\u2014government is of the people. We say \u2018\u2018of the people, by the people, and for the people.\u201d And a free society is one if the people don\u2019t like what is going on, they can get new leaders. . . . That\u2019s free society, society responsive to people.17<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

And as long as government claims to respond to the people, the people are free, no matter how much the government abuses them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bush Freedom hinges on government as the savior of freedom. Debates over the Patriot Act provided further opportunity for degrading the American vocabulary. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft titled the August 2003 launch speech of his national Patriot Act promotion tour \u201cSecuring Our Liberty: How America Is Winning the War on Terror.\u201d Earlier in 2003 Ashcroft characterized Justice Department antiterrorist deliberations this way: \u201cEvery 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.\u201d18<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Ashcroft\u2019s successor, Alberto Gonzales, used the same rhetoric to sanctify the Patriot Act: \u201cCongress did a good job in striking the appropriate balance between protecting our country and securing our liberties.\u201d19<\/sup><\/a> The Patriot Act authorized confiscations of travelers\u2019 money (in violation of a Supreme Court ruling), the use of new surveillance software that could vacuum up millions of people\u2019s e-mails without a search warrant, nationwide \u201croving wiretaps,\u201d and seizing library, bookstore, and other business and financial records based solely on subpoenas issued by FBI field offices on the flimsiest of pretexts.20<\/sup><\/a> After the Patriot Act was signed, there was a hundredfold increase in the number of emergency spying warrants issued solely on the Attorney General\u2019s command\u2014and later rubber-stamped by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.21<\/sup><\/a> But all the violations of Americans\u2019 rights and liberties by federal agents are irrelevant because the proclaimed intent of the Patriot Act is to \u201csecure liberty.\u201d There is no freedom without security, and no security without absolute power.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Intellectuals Join In<\/h4>\n

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 \u201ca constitutional amendment making any federal or state court decision subject to being overruled by a majority vote of each House of Congress.\u201d Bork appealed to \u201cour most precious freedom, the freedom to govern ourselves democratically.\u201d22<\/sup><\/a> According to this view, the greatest danger to freedom is having frustrated legislators.<\/p>\n

What are the mechanics by which majority-mandated shackles liberate the individual?<\/strong> 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\u2014so 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The fiction of majority rule has become a license to impose nearly unlimited controls on the majority and everybody else.<\/strong> The doctrine of \u201cmajority rule equals freedom\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The more confused people\u2019s thinking becomes, the easier it is for rulers to invoke democracy to destroy freedom.<\/strong> The issue is not simply Lincoln \u2018s, Roosevelt\u2019s, Clinton\u2019s or Bush\u2019s absurd statements on freedom but a cultural\u2013intellectual 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.<\/p>\n

It is better that government be representative than nonrepresentative. But it is more important that governments respect people\u2019s rights than fulfill some people\u2019s 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, \u201cThe 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.\u201d23<\/sup><\/a> The existence of democracy does not change the meaning of individual liberty. A person is free or not free, regardless of how many people approve his fetters.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/strong>. The only way to claim that democracy automatically protects liberty is to say that the only freedom that matters is \u201cfreedom for the government to rule in the name of the people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reconciling Democracy with Liberty<\/h4>\n

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.<\/strong> 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\u2014however grudging\u2014on all other differences.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWhenever majority rule is unnecessarily substituted for individual choice, democracy is in conflict with individual freedom,\u201d wrote Italian professor Bruno Leoni in his 1961 classic, Freedom and the Law<\/em>.24<\/sup><\/a> 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s lies don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

[Portions of this article were adapted from my 2006 book, Attention Deficit Democracy<\/strong><\/a>]<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. <\/a>Friedrich A. Hayek, The Essence of Hayek (Palo Alto, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1984), p. 352.<\/li>\n
  2. <\/a>Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic , 1776\u20131787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 24.<\/li>\n
  3. <\/a>John Phillip Reid, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 65.<\/li>\n
  4. <\/a>Ibid., pp. 65, 114.<\/li>\n
  5. <\/a>Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1993 [1909]), p. 442.<\/li>\n
  6. <\/a>Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (New York: Dutton, 1950), p. 14.<\/li>\n
  7. <\/a>Ibid., p. 87.<\/li>\n
  8. <\/a>The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 (New York: Macmillan, 1942), p. 489 (emphasis added).<\/li>\n
  9. <\/a>\u201cRemarks to Business Leaders in Stamford , Connecticut ,\u201d Public Papers of the Presidents, October 7, 1996, p. 1999.<\/li>\n
  10. <\/a>\u201cFarewell Address to the Nation,\u201d Public Papers of the Presidents, January 11, 1989, p. 53.<\/li>\n
  11. <\/a>Sheldon Richman, \u201cGovernment Is Not \u2018Us\u2019,\u201d Future of Freedom Foundation, June 2, 2004.<\/li>\n
  12. <\/a>See Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), and Thomas DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln (New York: Random House, 2003).<\/li>\n
  13. <\/a>Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory ( New York : Basic Books, 2003), p. 382.<\/li>\n
  14. <\/a>\u201cNixon\u2019s Views on Presidential Power: Excerpts from an Interview with David Frost,\u201d www.landmarkcases.org\/nixon\/_nixonview.html.<\/li>\n
  15. <\/a>\u201cRemarks by the President in MTV\u2019s \u2018Enough is Enough\u2019 Forum on Crime,\u201d Office of the Press Secretary, White House, April 19, 1994.<\/li>\n
  16. <\/a>\u201cInterview with Dutch TV NOS,\u201d Public Papers of the Presidents, May 5, 2005.<\/li>\n
  17. <\/a>\u201cInterview with Foreign Print Journalists,\u201d in ibid.<\/li>\n
  18. <\/a>Gene R. Nichol, \u201cAshcroft Wants Even More,\u201d Raleigh News and Observer, February 20, 2003.<\/li>\n
  19. <\/a>\u201cConversation with U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; Preview of President Bush\u2019s Speech\u2014Part 1,\u201d Charlie Rose Show Transcripts, June 27, 2005.<\/li>\n
  20. <\/a>Ibid., pp. 145\u201346, 137\u201340.<\/li>\n
  21. <\/a>Ibid., p. 144.<\/li>\n
  22. <\/a>Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 115, 117.<\/li>\n
  23. <\/a>Gary Doherty and Tim Gray, \u201cHerbert Spencer and the Relations Between Economic and Political Liberty ,\u201d History of Political Thought, Autumn 1993, p. 475.<\/li>\n
  24. <\/a>Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Press, 1991 [1961]), p. 131.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Thanks to Pixabay<\/a> for the royalty free flag image.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Trump’s presidency is helping Americans recognize that voting is no\u00a0guarantee for individual liberty.\u00a0This is perhaps the most frequently forgotten lesson in politics.\u00a0 Many liberals were convinced that Obama’s election somehow made Americans’ constitutional rights safe, while many conservatives believed that Al Gore’s defeat in 2000 provided the same windfall.\u00a0 In reality, no president can be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11029,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1247,446,22,426,542,247,1245,52,750,504,405,137,280,1250,159,1249,1246,33,927,1248,93,1040],"class_list":["post-10822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-alberto-gonzales","tag-american-revolution","tag-attention-deficit-democracy","tag-bill-clinton","tag-bill-of-rights","tag-civil-war","tag-david-frost","tag-democracy","tag-founding-fathers","tag-franklin-roosevelt","tag-friedrich-hayek","tag-george-w-bush","tag-gun-control","tag-herbert-spencer","tag-liberty","tag-magic","tag-mtv","tag-patriot-act","tag-richard-nixon","tag-robert-bork","tag-rousseau","tag-woodrow-wilson"],"yoast_head":"\nDemocracy versus Liberty - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Democracy is no guarantee of liberty. People can vote to enchain themselves and others as easily as they vote to restrain their rulers.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/27\/democracy-versus-liberty-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Democracy versus Liberty - James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Democracy is no guarantee of liberty. 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