Totalitarianism in Democracy; Tyranny by Committee
Dr.Lawrence A. Hunter Ph.D.
July 23, 2008
Princeton University professor emeritus Sheldon Wolin, viewed by many scholars as one of the deans of American political theorists and widely recognized as a liberal, argues in his recently published book Democracy Incorporated that the United States has evolved into a new political hybrid in which economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled, producing what he calls “inverted totalitarianism.” Wolin states the thesis of his book this way:
"It is possible for a form of totalitarianism, different from the classical one, to evolve from a putatively 'strong democracy' instead of a 'failed' one."
The term “totalitarianism” refers to a political system where the state regulates nearly every aspect of private life, a totally integrated form of social, cultural, political and economic organization that, according to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, “politicizes everything spiritual and human.” Today, the designation “totalitarian” usually is reserved for such despicable political systems as Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and North Korea.
This narrow restriction of the term, however, diverts attention from the fundamental premise of the American Founding Fathers, which Thomas Jefferson articulated in a letter to Edward Carrington in 1788: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” All political systems, including democracies, gravitate toward authoritarianism and eventually totalitarian control unless they are prevented from doing so. The natural order is for all governments to become despotic in pursuit of total control, and it is only through eternal vigilance of the people and proper constitutional design that even a strong democracy may be spared the fate of the aforementioned countries.
Yet, here is the conundrum, the great contradiction of democracy in America today: Despite the widespread agreement that government in 21st-century America is too large, people from all points on the political compass also expect government to solve their personal problems, guarantee them financial, employment and healthcare security, deliver an ever-increasing array of “public services,” enforce egalitarian precepts of fairness in institutions public and private, manage the economy, police the world and even control the global climate. How is it that Americans hold such contradictory views about government, complaining bitterly about its size, scope and reach while perversely encouraging politicians to grow it even bigger and more enveloping with each passing year?
French philosopher and author Alexis de Tocqueville untangled this contradiction while visiting the United States a half century after the founding of the Great American Experiment. In his classic work Democracy In America, de Tocqueville explained how and why the “natural progress of things” of which Jefferson spoke operates as a ratchet toward a new type of despotism in a democracy. De Tocqueville observed:
"It is in the nature of all governments to seek constantly to enlarge their sphere of action; hence it is almost impossible that such a government should not ultimately succeed, because it acts with a fixed principle and a constant will upon men whose position, ideas, and desires are constantly changing."
In a democracy, de Tocqueville contended, the electorate actually will facilitate the growth of government even though the vast majority of citizens desire just the opposite:
"Democratic eras are periods of experiment, innovation, and adventure. There is always a multitude of men engaged in difficult or novel undertakings, which they follow by themselves without shackling themselves to their fellows. Such persons will admit, as a general principle, that the public authority ought not to interfere in private concerns; but, by an exception to that rule, each of them craves its assistance in the particular concern on which he is engaged and seeks to draw upon the influence of the government for his own benefit, although he would restrict it on all other occasions. If a large number of men applies this particular exception to a great variety of different purposes, the sphere of the central power extends itself imperceptibly in all directions, although everyone wishes it to be circumscribed."
One-and-a-quarter centuries later, the Public-Choice School of economics emerged, beginning with Nobel Laureate J. Kenneth Arrow’s great work Social Choice and Individual Values and followed by the seminal work of James Buchanan (also a Nobel Laureate) and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent. Public-Choice scholars formalized the insights of De Tocqueville and the American Founding Fathers regarding the failure of majority rule to achieve the public interest (what they called the General Welfare) but instead to generate factions and rent seeking, which act as a political dynamo constantly inflating the size and reach of government and transforming government from a public trust into a special interest.
Again, de Tocqueville succinctly summarized the nature of the problem in a democracy, especially in a commercial democracy such as he found developing in America:
"Private life is so busy, so excited, so full of wishes and of work, that hardly any energy or leisure remains to each individual for public life...[that] men can never, without an effort, tear themselves from their private affairs to engage in public business…[Thus people abandon the public business] to the sole visible and permanent representative of the interests of the community; that is to say, to the state…The love of public tranquility is frequently the only passion which these nations retain [which] naturally disposes the members of the community constantly to give or to surrender additional rights to the central power."
This central authority, de Tocqueville lamented, becomes a velvet despotism in which:
"Power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild...For their [citizens’] happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?"
The result, de Tocqueville concluded, is emergence of an enervating Leviathan that:
"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
In what Wolin later would rediscover as “inverted totalitarianism,” government enacts and promulgates general, overarching and ambiguous rules that compel individuals, private organizations and businesses to seek permission before acting and to walk on egg shells lest they inadvertently and unknowingly violate the whims of their masters currently in control of the apparatus of government—a form of “self-regulation” not to be confused with true “self-government.” Citizens become, in effect, their own slave masters. Tyranny not by dictator but rather tyranny by committee.
Finally, de Tocqueville provided an explanation for the contradiction of democracy observed at the outset—the tendency of the people to voluntarily erect a parasitic Leviathan, an all powerful form of government he calls a “sole tutelary,” which eventually sucks them dry:
"[The people are] constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free...they strive to satisfy them both at once...they devise a sole, tutelary, an all-powerful form of government...they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians...they shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again."
After 232 years of this vicious dynamic at work, democracy in America faces a crisis of contradiction: The more obese government becomes, the more people demand of it; the more inept government proves itself to be at providing even the most basic public services, the more people clamor for government to do more; the more government regulation fails to solve the problems it was created to correct, the more collateral damage it wreaks and the more people bellow for it to regulate even more to solve the new problems it created trying to solve the original problems; the more government exhibits a corrupting and withering touch, the farther voters extend its reach to poke and pry into the interstices of people’s lives; the more power and money voters give government to pursue the general welfare, the more it uses them both to pursue its own special interests and oppress the people.
In short, the government thrives on the problems it creates. It becomes coprophagous, consuming its own excrement.
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