Democracy vs. Liberty? A Misleading Debate

There is a problem with the traditional opposition between democracy and liberty. It consists in what authors assume to be individual liberty; it is strictly a bourgeoisie notion. When the government threatens liberty in this sense, by the arbitrary use of power over someone, the person in its individuality is not the thing being threatened, but a particular type of individual: the entrepreneur who dedicates his time to business and the objective of accumulating wealth for himself.

When the goal of the political and intellectual agenda of liberalism is to defend individual liberty, what is being defended is the form of life of a particular social class, because isolated individuals are not the ones threatened, but their social conditions as privileged members of the capitalist society. This is what individual liberty really implies in Modern Times since the French Revolution.

I don’t mean to say that the individual person is not threatened, because that’s what’s actually taking place. What I’m saying is that this threat to the individual is not intentioned at his individuality, at the uniqueness of his person, but is intentioned at his person as member of a social class. Liberalism portrays these rights as rights of everyone, but usually only the kind of people that want to live the bourgeoisie lifestyle really benefit from this notion and really care about its principles. People outside the benefits of a bourgeoisie lifestyle rarely get any concrete good. In this sense, Liberalism is an ideology that aims at making people believe that its principles also benefit them, when it is not.

The question now goes, why is the bourgeoisie the one really threatened by the power of politics and government? Let us begin from here: the central problem for the modern revolution is property, and not as Hanna Arendt thought: the establishment of liberty. One of the main objectives of the French Jacobinism (bourgeoisie ideology in its radical and uncompromising form) was expropriating the first owner of property in France: the Catholic Church. In Mexico, Benito Juarez’ Liberal-Jacobin revolution sought exactly the same thing. The secularization of state and society was part of this agenda seeking to expropriate the Church, at the same time it abolished the ideological edifice that preserved its moral authority. Modern science (and rationalism) came to support radical liberals in this aspect; it was their ideological weapon in the struggle between the rising bourgeoisie and the decadent Catholic clergy. The clergy was one of the Ancient Regime’s ruling classes; and revolutions are the overthrown of past ruling classes and the establishment of a new ruling class.

Having the entrepreneur bourgeois become the main character of the new regime of individual liberties, being himself the more skillful in exploiting this regime of liberties, to enrich himself, to participate in politics and in the production of scientific knowledge that served to sustain his own privileges, he became the next target of the modern revolutionary movement. Here we understand why democracy is not a threat to the liberty of individuals as such, but to individuals as members of a particular social class: the privileged in the redistribution of Church’s property through market mechanisms. The individuals belonging to the proletariat class, who extracted little benefit from the new regime of individual liberties, but the promise of increasing their consumer capacity and nothing more, could not understand democracy but as the capture of political power to move their own class agenda. This is where Marx kicked in.

Worse still was the ideological mechanism that tried to convince people that the new regime of bourgeois liberties also favored members of a class of workers that became more and more proletarianized. Having taken from them the safety zone offered by religion, the new status quo was one of increasing alienation.

But, alienation from what? From the lifestyle the industrial revolution and modernity was, and is destroying: family, clan, agrarian community, church, professional guild, etc. I.e. an alienation from the lifestyle that consisted of charity, reciprocity and friendship, supplanted by the lifestyle of a producer and consumer of manufactured goods. The former was a moral life and the latter lacked any morality whatsoever, except the ethos of the self-made man, unconcerned about the suffering of others.

The regime of individual liberties left them to their own luck, without them being able to enjoy fully the immense wealth that the bourgeois society constantly reproduced. It was totally natural that the revolution became to be understood, since then, as the expropriation of the property of the bourgeois class.

Presenting our initial problem, then, as a dilemma between democracy and individual liberty is misleading, because that individual liberty is not a privilege or right of isolated individual understood as citizens. It was never that way. It really consists of a regime of liberties that privilege the class (and race) who owns capital. The defense of the individual is the ideological surface of the dominance of that class (and race); that is, the modern ideology of the oligarchic regime of which Aristotle speaks in his Politics.

Democracy, on the other hand, is not the historic triumph of all over the oligarchy. It consists of the triumph of the proletarianized masses that, through messianic leadership, oppress the bourgeoisie, which does not cease to exist. It’s not as is usually believed, that the Rousseaunian democracy oppresses the individual. It oppresses concrete individuals as belonging to a social class, in the same way the Liberal oligarchy defended the liberty of some by oppressing the proletarianized majority.

But democracy does not free the proletariat from their pauper state. Instead it enthrones this pauperization, it mystifies it, it deifies it. The proletariat does not come out of its poverty, does not stops being ignorant. Instead, democracy is the rule of the poor, of the ignorant, of the meager, against the government of the old privileged, of the propertied, of the educated: us!

With this I conceptually defend the traditional notions Plato, Aristotle and Polybius had of democracy and oligarchy. The regime of individual liberties is no less arbitrary because it respects isolated individuals. It leaves enormous masses of individuals to their own luck, in a market system that really favors the bourgeoisie. Democracy does not achieve a contrary positive effect. Contrariwise, it’s the majoritarianism regime that idolized being poor, ignorant and pauper, without taking the people out of poverty. The people are seduced by the messianic leadership that aims at plunder, humiliate and reduce the bourgeois class. None of the two regimes present a comfortable solution for both classes, because we are not all proletariat, nor the regime of individual liberties favors us all.

Madison’s republicanism, instead, offers a different solution. By not starting from the liberty of isolated individuals, his model does not favor a strict bourgeoisie oligarchy. And by not starting from mass democracy, his model does not favor messianic leadership that leads to the tyranny of the majority. He starts from the principle that we are all members of groups, and that it’s through group and collective identity that we participate in politics. Our identities are determined by race, religion, social class, etc., and not by the uniqueness of our personality. We, as individuals, choose the group identity that we want to mediate between us and the government. The result is the fragmentation of society in a plurality of minorities (and not in an “infinite” number of unique personalities). This prevents the absolute dominance of a proletarianized majority by avoiding the formation of a unitary class conscience. But it also avoids the dominance of a bourgeoisie oligarchy by avoiding abandoning individuals to their own luck.

The great problem of individualist bourgeoisie Liberalism is that inevitably puts a proletarianized majority side by side with a privileged minority. With Madisonian democracy this does not happens, because the formation of minority group identities fragments both social classes, and even permits communion between bourgeois and proletarians across other group identities like religion, region and race.

Democracy is no longer an egalitarian regime, nor an individualist one (both are sides of the same coin), but a regime of group equality, as representation favors this spontaneous “corporative” vision of society.

The different group interests contrast and win relative majorities as temporary and not permanent coalitions. Hence most individuals enjoy being part of the majority in some topics, but have to bear being minority on other issues. The democratic principle of the rule of the majority is never broken, but it prevents tyranny by obstructing severely the possibility of a permanent coalition out of potential tyrannical majorities. It also avoids the absolute dominance of a minority economically privileged because it has a broken conscience itself. Their different members will sometimes win, when they form part of the majority, and will sometimes lose, when they form part of the minority.

In few words, the regime consisting of the equilibrium between masses and elites that Aristotle calls politeia, without threatening individual liberties, but at the same time permitting the rule of the majority in the form of minority coalitions, is not Tocqueville’s or Stuart Mill’s Liberalism, not the collectivism of Rousseau or Marx. Madisonian democracy the true Aristotelian politeia, or the Polybean republic. And it is in Madisonian pluralism where we find a more genuine form of democracy.