Democracy requires common ground on which all can stand, but that ground is sinking beneath our feet, and democracy may be going down the sinkhole with it… “You all start with the premise that democracy is some good. I don’t think it’s worth a darn. Churchill is right. The only thing to be said for [...]
Alexis de Tocqueville believed that Americans had cause to fear in their leaders, not “tyrants, but rather tutors.” Democratic individualism would cause men to pursue vulgar pleasures and material well-being. Such men would surrender their self-government and even their self-will, and society would eventually devolve into mere savagery. What should a democratic people fear in [...]
For the “hive” that is the democratic mindset, the very spirit of democracy pushes its adherents to surmount limits, and to behave as one man with the will of a god. Writing of France in 1790, Edmund Burke asked exactly how one might categorize the revolutionary government. Is it a monarchy of the democracy, a [...]
We Americans are no longer members of a consensual society, devoted to limited government and the rule of law. So, is the filibuster still a guardian of our freedoms?… After eight years of the most radical President in American history, our “fundamentally transformed” nation can no longer afford to allow use of the filibuster for [...]
The rule of democratic tyranny, Tocqueville held, “reduces each nation to nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd”… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Patrick Deneen as he traces Alexis de Tocqueville’s argument concerning the American tendency towards majoritarianism [...]
The current generation may always consider itself to be the wisest of all, but High Tory politics strives to avoid the perennial folly of this prejudice... “The next wave of American ‘conservatism’ is not likely to base its appeal on such unsuccessful slogans as the Constitution and free enterprise. Its leader will not be a [...]
In 2016 Americans are feeling anxious. It’s not that we are experiencing crises—we are neither in total war nor economic depression. Yet 2016 has forced us to rethink all we thought we knew. A Socialist made a credible run for the Democratic nomination and succeeded in moving the Democratic Party platform farther left than it [...]
Never has anyone ruled on this earth by basing his rule on any other thing than public opinion. In these words, Jose Ortega y Gassett, most famous for a book entitled Revolt of the Masses, affirmed the eternal truth and problem of rule by consent. Ortega y Gassett, a classical liberal theorist from Spain, spent [...]
The first task of the wise legislator in his effort to regulate emulation is to actively conduct the passion toward politically useful objects and thereby place the passion "on the side of virtue." Political Architecture: The Natural Order of the Many A full understanding of the passion for distinction requires that we look at man [...]
I was reminded recently of the ongoing debate over the nature of democracy. The occasion was my rereading of Claes Ryn’s Democracy and the Ethical Life. In this classic work Prof. Ryn criticizes those who insist that democracy is merely a means for discerning the will of the people. This view, he argues, leads naturally to the [...]
One day my fourteen-year-old daughter came home from her part-time job at the Goffstown New Hampshire Public Library and announced at dinner that she had volunteered me to serve as a Library Trustee. Two weeks later, I received a call from Mrs. Woodbury, the Town Clerk. She informed me that I could not run for [...]
How can the wealthiest people make democracies worse? Plato investigates the question in Book VIII of the Republic. Socrates suggests there that, in pursuit of more and more wealth, oligarchic citizens within the democracy will exploit the lower economic classes, even to the point of undermining their own oligarchic economic interests. In other words, the [...]
Liberty and equality are the uncontested “values” of the modern world. They have been paid lip service to by all the parties, including the Communists, who did so much to smother them in the course of the twentieth century (hence the ubiquitous “people’s republics” that brought untold misery to a third of the globe). Some have even argued that we [...]
Our responsibility is not to eliminate power, but to find ways to serve ends higher than its own appetites. Since there cannot be a right to rule, we’d best make sure that those who rule, rule well. There’s an old joke that goes, “The definition of a gentleman is someone who knows how to play [...]