In The Republic, Plato warned that excessive political freedom can eventually produce disorder and tyranny. More precisely, he argued that an insatiable demand for freedom ultimately produces chaos, and that angry citizens are tempted to embrace a strongman who promises to restore order. In other words, democracy is a paradox.
The problem is not freedom itself. Freedom is the indispensable foundation of a civilized society. The problem is that human beings have an uncanny ability to turn every good thing into something bad by carrying it beyond its rational limits.
Freedom without responsibility becomes license: Equality before the law becomes a demand for equality of results. Compassion becomes compulsory redistribution. Tolerance becomes surrender. Eventually, democracy deteriorates into a political free-for-all in which candidates compete to see who can offer voters the largest collection of benefits paid for by someone else. As H.L. Mencken put it, “Every election is a sort of advance auction of stolen goods.”
Ancient Athens provided Plato with a front-row seat to this spectacle. Its citizens enjoyed an extraordinary degree of political participation, but public policy increasingly became subject to passion, flattery, and the whims of the crowd. Demagogues learned that emotional appeals (known today as “vibes”) worked better than sober judgment.
More than two thousand years later, the French Revolution began with lofty promises of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but much like today’s Democratic Socialists, once the revolutionaries decided that no inherited institution, tradition, or moral restraint deserved respect, freedom quickly degenerated into mob rule.
The guillotine became the final arbiter of political disagreement. Yesterday’s revolutionary heroes became tomorrow’s enemies of the people. Thousands were executed—including the original leader of the Jacobin revolution, Robespierre—in the name of liberation. Exhausted by disorder and terror, the French eventually welcomed Napoleon Bonaparte, who crowned himself emperor. Freedom produced chaos and chaos ultimately produced a dictatorship.
The Weimar Republic followed a similar path after World War I. Germany was a democracy with political parties, civil liberties, elections, and one of the world’s most progressive constitutions, but it lacked stability. Economic collapse, hyperinflation, street violence, political extremism, and constant parliamentary turmoil ultimately destroyed public confidence and brought about chaos. Germans became less interested in abstract freedom and more interested in someone who could make the trains run on time, put food on their table, and restore national pride.
Thus, Adolf Hitler had no need to try to seize power via a military coup. Through propaganda, the Nazi Party simply exploited democratic institutions, elections, and public resentment. In one of the worst moves in political history, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany, which was permitted by the Weimar Constitution. Then, once in power, Hitler dismantled the entire democratic system and established a dictatorship. In other words, democracy had opened the door to its own executioner.
The United States is not immune to this syndrome. Politicians in both parties have learned that promising restraint is less rewarding than promising favors and handouts. Every group demands subsidies, protections, tax advantages, loan forgiveness, and unlimited government-guaranteed benefits. The national debt is someone else’s problem, preferably belonging to generations not yet born.
Meanwhile, freedom of speech is increasingly redefined as freedom from hearing anything offensive. Equality means not merely equal treatment under the law but equal outcomes enforced by the state. Each side wants to expand government power when it controls that power, then suddenly rediscovers constitutional restraint when the opposition takes control.
Thus, republics deteriorate not through a dramatic coup, but through an onslaught of popular demands that government “do something.” Each demand appears reasonable in isolation, but together these demands create an all-powerful state. The irony is delicious but deadly: People demand more government to protect their freedom, then discover that the government they created has become freedom’s greatest threat.
Plato’s warning was not that people should have no voice in government. It was that liberty divorced from discipline and morality contains the seeds of tyranny. The real safeguard of freedom is not democracy alone. It is democracy restrained by constitutional limits, respect for private property, personal responsibility, and the rule of law.
Without these restraints, the ballot box eventually becomes a weapon, and the politician who promises everything ultimately takes everything. Unlimited tolerance empowers the intolerant. John Adams warned that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
History has proven that Adams was correct. Democracy survives only when citizens understand that voting cannot create something from nothing and that a majority has no moral right to confiscate the property, silence the opinions, or abolish the liberties of a minority.
In simple terms, democracy is a giant paradox in that it guarantees freedom but it can survive only if it can prevent that freedom from being used to abolish democracy. And that, in turn, requires an informed citizenry exercising moral self-restraint.
Copyright © 2020 Robert Ringer
ROBERT RINGER is a New York Times #1 bestselling author who has appeared on numerous national radio and television shows, including The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, ABC Nightline, The Charlie Rose Show, as well as Fox News and Fox Business. To sign up for a free subscription to his mind-expanding daily insights, visit www.robertringer.com.
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