As we approach another election cycle, during which we will be peppered with calls by politicians to take government action because that is what the “people” want, it is important to recall that the “will of the people” has no moral value at all.
Anyone who closely watched the recent bipartisan congressional hearings on the Tiananmen Square massacre ought to have noticed this salient problem with the Orwellian mutilation of language appearing over and over again in the remarks of American academicians brought in as witnesses. “Democracy” was always cited as the virtue desired, and “freedom” was never mentioned at all.
“Democracy” and “freedom” have almost no connection to each other. Democracy can be and often has been horribly evil and utterly totalitarian. Hitler came to power by democratic means, and by 1940, he was democratically the most popular German leader in history. One factor staying the hand of German generals who wanted to end Hitler’s rule was their recognition of how genuinely most Germans respected and admired him.
Mao, like Stalin, was passionately loved by most of his countrymen when he died (and by countless American leftists who eulogized his murderous legacy), and both of these ghastly creatures would have won elections in their realms by landslides.
In our own history, the oppression of blacks in the South was popular among the majority of the people in those states, and it was this fact that made it so hard to bring civil rights to blacks in the South. Those who considered “democracy” a vital good, like FDR or Woodrow Wilson, pandered shamelessly to white supremacists, upon whose support they won the Democratic Party nomination, the presidential election, and control of Congress.
Democracy has only one single virtue: it creates uncertainty about who will have power after the next election. The counterpart of democracy in our legal system is the jury, which was intended to provide disinterested jury verdicts. When jurors are selected at random from a large enough population, then their verdicts are not predicted by the self-interest of the jurors, except for a general interest in seeing justice done.
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See Also:
(1) Around the world, democracy is fighting back in a big way
