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SCHOLAR ISLAND |
DEMOCRACY
"Our constitution is called a democracy because it is in the hands not of the few but of the many. But the laws secure equal justice for all in their private disputes. As for social standing, our practice is that a citizen who has recognized ability in some field gets public preferment-it is a question of his abilities, not of his rank. As for poverty, our practice is that if a man can do good work for the community, humbleness of condition is no bar.....Open and friendly in our private intercourse, in our public conduct we keep strictly within the control of law.....we are obedient to those in authority and to the laws, more especially to those which offer protection to the oppressed."
Pericles
"It is impossible to discuss or criticize it....No one treats it with complete candor and sincerity."
-William Graham Sumner
PROTESTS RISE AROUND GLOBE AS FAITH IN THE VOTE WANES
Many Are Driven by Contempt of Political Class Headline The New York Times Sept 28,2011
"Our parents are grateful because they're voting," said Marta Solanas, 27, referring to older Spaniards' decades spent under the Franco dictatorship. "We're the first generation to say that voting is worthless."
"Voting is such a crude tool that half of the time you can't tell if you're voting against your own interests. Change can take years, worthless incumbents are hard to unseat, and elected officials continually ignore their own campaign promises. Voting has always been a confusing and nearly random user interface for the government machine. Luckily, thanks to the internet we have the means to fix our government's user interface."
-Scott Adams
"What If Government Were More Like an iPod?" Wall Street Journal Nov 5-6
"Science and democracy are based on the rejection of dogmatism."
-Dick Taverne
"Nor should we listen to those who say "The voice of the people is the voice of God," for the turbulence of the mob is always close to insanity."
Alcuin Of York 735-804
"Better than the assent of the crowd:
The dissent of one brave man"
-Sima Qian (145-90 BC) Records of the Grand Historian
"If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas."
-jean Cocteau
"It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people."
-Giordano Bruno (burned at the state 1600)
"The history of most countries has been that of majorities-mounted majorities, clad in iron, armed with death, treading down the tenfold more numerous minorities."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
"It is the minority that have....achieved all that is noble in the history of the world."
-John Bartholomew Gough
"Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business, and gives in the long run a net result of zero."
-Thomas Carlyle
"The tendencies of democracies are, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge, and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal."
-James Fennimore Cooper
"The whole dream of democracy is to elevate the proletarian to the level of the imbecility of the bourgeois."
-Paul Flemin
"The word Democracy occupied in 1831 the position which the word Socialism holds today in a similar connection. it was understood to mean something vaguely terrible which might "come" and would "come" if the respectable classes did not stand together.....something cataclysmic and all-pervading. If Democracy came, King and Lords would disappear, and old landmarks of all description would be swept away."
J.R.M. Butler 1914
"I painfully reflect that in almost every political controversy of the last fifty years the leisured classes, the educated classes, the wealthy classes, the titled classes, have been in the wrong, The common people-the toilers, the men of uncommon sense-these have been responsible for nearly all of the social reform measures which the world accepts today-"
Gladstone
"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."
-Thomas Jefferson
"In order to make a correct judgment upon the morals of crowds, one must take into consideration the fact that when individuals come together in a group all their individual inhibitions all away and all the cruel, brutal, and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as relics of primitive epoch, are stirred up to find free gratification."
-Sigmund Freud
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion."
-William Ralph Inge
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."
-Thomas Jefferson
"The legal assumption that the representative is chosen by the majority of voters forms the basis of our form of government. Many people blindly believe in its truth. Yet, the facts reveal something totally different. And these facts are available to anybody. Whoever took part in an election knows perfectly well (benisimo) that the representative is not elected by the voters but, as a rule, has himself elected by them. Or, if that sounds unpleasant, we shall say instead: his friends have him elected. In any case, a candidacy is always the work of a group of people united for a common purpose, an organized minority which fatally and inevitably forces its will upon the disorganized majority."
-Mosca
"In 1940 a team of social scientists studied the thinking of voters in Sandusky, Ohio to find out why they voted the way they did. The scientists found that people voted according to their income, religion age, occupation, and so on, following the pattern of their relatives, neighbors and friends. They did not vote on the basis of a detached, impartial weighing of the issues. "Dispassionate, rational voters," the survey concluded, "exist mainly in textbooks on civics, in the movies, and in the minds of some political idealists. In real life, they are few."
Rudolf Flesch
The Art of Clear Thinking
"...voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational-and vote accordingly"
Bryan Caplan
The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
"Although people often bemoan political apathy as if it were a grave social ill, it seems to me that this is just as it should be. Why should essentially powerless people want to engage in a humiliating farce designed to demonstrate the legitimacy of those who wield the power?"
-Dmitry Orlov
Reinventing collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects
"Complacent ignorance is the most lethal sickness of the soul."
-Plato
"The most decisive argument against democracy can be summed up in a few words: the higher cannot emanate from the lower, because the greater cannot come out of the less; this is an absolute mathematical certainty that nothing can gainsay."
-Rene Guenon
The crisis of the Modern World
"It is one of the world's most extraordinary social phenomena, that masses of voters vote very much like their elites. They demand very little for themselves."
Charles Lindblom
"This imposture, still very much alive, is the notion that America is an exemplary democracy instead of a cunning plutocracy strutting around in the garb of democracy."
-Patrice Greanville
"That the majority, who can neither think or follow, could select strong leaders who are conscientious is a fantastic idea-it is a subtle trick on the part of religion and capital to enslave the masses."
-William Robinson Leigh
"It may be true....that "you can't fool all the people all the time", but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country."
Will Durant
"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage."
-H.L. Mencken
"We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one-the one we use-which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at in politics."
-Mark Twain
"democracy is only a dream: It should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus and Heaven."
-H.L. Mencken
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
-Winston Churchill
"The average man is destitute of independence of opinion. He is not interested in contriving an opinion of his own, by study and reflection, but is only anxious to find out what his neighbor's opinion is and slavishly adopt it."
-Mark Twain
"Nothing so obstinately stand in the way of all sorts of progress as pride of opinion; while nothing is so foolish and baseless."
-J.G. Holland
"Americans and its political leaders, after two decades of failing to come together to solve big problems, seem to have lost faith in their ability to do so....A political system that expects failure doesn't try very hard to produce anything else."
-Gerald Selb WSJ journalist
"Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts, a free society dies or cannot be born."
-Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook
"Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses."
-H.L. Mencken
"At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves."
-Charles Bukowski
"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds..."
-Samuel Adams
"What remains of democracy is largely the right to choose among commodities. Business leaders have long explained the need to impose on the population a "philosophy of futility" and "lack of purpose in life," to "concentrate human attention on the more superficial things that comprise much of fashionable consumption. Deluged by such propaganda from infancy, people may then accept their meaningless and subordinate lives, and forget ridiculous ideas about managing their own affairs. They may abandon their fate to corporate managers and the PR industry and in the political realm, to the self-described "intelligent minorities" who serve and administer power."
Noam Chomsky
Hegemony Or Survival
"The masses, the majority, this damned, compact majority (are) what poison our spiritual sources and pollute the earth underfoot."
Henrik Ibsen
"We cannot possibly reconcile the principle of democracy, which means co-operation, with the principle of governmental omniscience under which everyone waits for an order before doing anything. That way lies loss of freedom , and dictatorship."
-Lewis H. Brown
"Democracy does not contain any force which will check the constant tendency to put more and more on the public payroll. The state is like a hive of bees in which the drones display, multiply and starve the workers so the idlers will consume the food and the workers will perish."
-Plato
"It is one of the strangest of vulgar ideas that a very wide suffrage could or would promote progress, new ideas, new discoveries, new inventions, new arts of life. The chances are that it will produce a mischievous form of conservatism."
Sir Henry Maine
"The doctrines of Europe," Jefferson wrote, "were that men in numerous associations cannot be restrained within the limits of order and justice, except by forces physical and moral wielded over them by authorities independent of their will. .....We (the founders of the new American democracy) believe that man was a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights, and with an innate sense of justice, and that he could be restrained from wrong, and protected in right, by moderate powers, confided to persons of his own choice and held to their duties by dependence on his own will." To post-Freudian ears, this kind of language seems touchingly quaint and ingenuous. Human beings are a good deal less rational and innately just than the optimists of the eighteenth century supposed. On the other hand they are neither so morally blind nor so hopelessly unreasonable as the pessimists of the twentieth would have us believe. In spite of the Id and the Unconscious, in spite of endemic neurosis and the prevalence of low IQ's, most men and women are probably decent enough and sensible enough to be trusted with the direction of their own destinies.
Democratic institutions are devices for reconciling social order with individual freedom and initiate, and for making the immediate power of a country's rulers subject to the ultimate power of the ruled. The fact that , in western Europe and America, these devices have worked, all things considered, not too badly is proof enough that the eighteenth -century optimists were not entirely wrong. Give a fair chance, human beings can govern themselves, and govern themselves better, though perhaps with less mechanical efficiency, than they can be governed by 'authorities independent of their will." Given a fair chance I repeat; for the fair chance is an indispensable prerequisite. No people that passes abruptly from a state of subservience under the rule of a despot to the completely unfamiliar state of political independence can be said to have a fair chance of making democratic institutions work. Again, no people in a precarious economic condition has a fair chance of being able to govern itself democratically. Liberalism flourishes in an atmosphere of prosperity and declines as declining prosperity makes it necessary for the government to intervene ever more frequently and drastically in the affairs of its subjects."
-Aldous Huxley
Brave New World Revisited
"Can we invent a better system? Perhaps. But this cannot happen if we are not allowed to utter the sentence "There may be a political system that is better than democracy." Today's political correctness does not allow one to say such things. The result of this prohibition will be an inevitable return to some kind of totalitarian rule-different from that of the emperors, the colonialists, or the landlords of the past, but not more just."
Haim Harai a theoretical physicist, is the former president of the Weizmann Institute of Science
"We must get rid of our arrogant assumption that it is the masses who can be led by the nose. As far as I can make out, the shoe is on the other foot. The only people who are really the dupes of their favorite newspapers are the intelligentsia. It is they who read leading articles: the poor read the sporting news, which is mostly true."
C.S. Lewis
"Direct election and universal suffrage, I consider to be greater guarantees of conservative action than any artificial electoral law."
Bismarck
"The people are that part of the state which does not know what it wants."
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
"The taste of democracy becomes a bitter taste when the fullness of democracy is denied."
Max Lerner
"Nowhere do citizens appear so insignificant as in a democratic nation."
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America
"How many Americans realize that their country is not a democracy but an oligarchy, and owes a good deal of its stability to that fact?
Ernest Dimnet
The Art of Thinking
"Of all tyrannies a country can suffer, the worst is the tyranny of the majority."
William R. Inge (1860-1954)
"Envy is the basis of democracy."
Bertrand Russell
"We talk sometimes as if democracy were the natural human condition, as if any deviation from it is a crime to be punished or a disease to be cured. That is not true. Democracy, or what we call democracy nowadays, is the parochial custom of the English-speaking peoples for the conduct of their public affairs, which may or may not be suitable for others."
-Bernard Lewis
"Capitalism doesn't necessarily lead toward democracy at all. The one thing that you can say is that capitalism is going to relentlessly produce inequality of income and eventually that is going to become incompatible with democracy."
-Bruce R. Scott (economist at Harvard)
"The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom among us-is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact liberal majority…..
The majority has might-unfortunately-but right it is not. Right-are I and a few others. The minority is always right…..
I have a mind to make a revolution against the lie that the majority is in the possession of truth. What kind of truths are those around which the majority usually gathers? They are truths that have become so old that they are on the way toward becoming shaky. But once a truth has become that old, it is also on the way toward becoming a lie…..A normally constituted truth lives, let us say, as a rule seventeen or eighteen years; at most twenty, rarely more. But such aged truths are always exceedingly thin. Nevertheless it is only at that stage that the majority makes their acquaintance….All these majority truths….are rather like rancid, spoiled….hams. And that is the source of the moral scurvy that rages all around us."
-Ibsen
An Enemy of the People
"Who forms the majority in any country? I think we'd all have to agree that the fools are in a terrifying, overwhelming majority all over the world! But in the name of God it can't be right that the fools should rule the wise!.....The majority has the power, unfortunately.....but the majority is not right! The ones who are right are a few isolated individuals like me! The minority is always right."
-Ibsen
An Enemy of the People
"It is no bad thing that our politicians are fools. We mortals all famously are. And the theory of democracy is that we can rule ourselves. If exceptionally wise and able men were required to run our democratic system, we'd have a lot of explaining to do to the other fools around the world, from Zimbabwe to North Korea, upon whom we are always urging democratic institutions. Anyway, the history of kingdoms, oligarchies, and dictatorships indicate that ordinary fools do a pretty good job in politics, comparatively."
P.J. O'Rourke Atlantic Monthly Nov 2002
"Governments called democracies are by no means all ethically right by our standards, and none is free of many ethically bad aspects. Yet an ethically good state, one based on the fact of personal responsibility by each of its members and organized to promote the acquisition, dissemination, and acceptance of truth in all fields, to maintain the integrity and dignity of every individual, and to enable maximum possible realization of personal capacities-such a government would necessarily be a democracy."
-George Gaylord Simpson
The Meaning of Evolution
"Even today, people still believe that democracies are more peaceful than other forms of government. The United States of America maintains that her form of democracy is so important to the peace and prosperity of the world, she not only invites other nations to join her, she insists. And yet the point has hardly ever been serious addressed and never proven.
What we do know is that since democracy has become widespread, there has been little letup in the incidence of war and probably an increase in its violence. Unlike the subjects of a tyrant or a monarch, the citizens of a democratic regime are more fully and readily engaged in wartime. When people feel threatened, or feel that they have a stake in the conflict, they are more inclined to devote their energy and resources to victory. Popular newspapers and television work them up to violence easily. Give them the right line of guff and they are prepared to hand over their wallets as well as their lives. France was able to finance 83.5 percent of its wartime expenditures by borrowing. Offering national defense bonds in small denominations. France succeeded says Hew Strachan, in "mobilizing the wealth of the public."
-Bill Bonner
Empire of Debt
"Democracy passes into despotism."
Plato (429-347 B.C.)
STOCKHOLM, Sweden-Some of the world’s poorest and most chaotic countries, such as Albania and Angola, have voter turnout rates that far exceed many developed democracies like the United States."
Jim Heintz (associated Press)
"Let us show ourselves Americans by showing that we do not want to go off in separate camps or grounds by ourselves, but that we want to co-operate with all other classes and all other groups in a common enterprise which is to release the spirits of the world from bondage-that is the meaning of democracy."
-Woodrow Wilson
"The Soviet Union had a single, entrenched, systemically corrupt political party, which held a monopoly on power. The US has two entrenched, systemically corrupt political parties, whose positions are often indistinguishable and which together hold a monopoly on power. In either case, there is, or was, a single governing elite, but in the United States it organizes itself into opposing teams to make its stranglehold on power seem more sportsmanlike. It is certainly more sporting to have two capitalist parties go at each other than just having the one communist party to vote for. The things they fight over in public are generally symbolic little tokens of social policy, chosen for ease of public posturing. The communist part offered just one bitter pill. The two capitalist parties offer a choice of two placebos. The latest innovation is the photo finish election, where each party pre-purchases exactly 50 percent of the vote through largely symmetrical allocation of campaign resources and the result is pulled out of statistical noise, like a rabbit out of a hat. It is a tribute to the intelligence of the American people that so few of them bother to vote."
Dmitry Orlov
Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects
"When all prerogatives of birth and fortune have been abolished, when ever profession is open to everyone....an ambitious man may think it is easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he has been called to no common destiny. But this is a delusion which experience quickly corrects. When inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention. But when everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed.....That is the reason for the strange melancholy often haunting inhabitants of democracies in the midst of abundance and of that disgust with life sometimes gripping them even in calm and easy circumstances. In France, we are worried about increasing rate of suicides. In America, suicide is rare, but I am told that madness is commoner than anywhere else."
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America (1835)
"Cerda's approach to he railroad craze reflected his trademark combination of seny and rauxa. On the one hand, his technical specifications for the layout of the tracks were as detailed and pragmatic as anything else in his senyish plan. On the other hand, his vision of a locomotive future were as exalted as those of he most rauxa-ish utopian. "Railroads and electric telegraphs will harmonize language, weights, measures, and currency," he wrote. "They will destroy ancient hatreds between nations and secure the supremacy of universal peace, sweeping away class antagonism....They will give rise to the harmony needed between the different classes within society." Cabet maintained only that the trains would haul in democracy; in Cerda's future world, the trains were a democracy of sorts. Decades before the invention of the modern automobile, he planned his city around the vision of a locomotive that "might penetrate into a twin, circulate through every neighborhood, cut through ever street block, approach every house, and even enter the houses!" The ability to move around quickly within the city was more that an gesture toward economic efficiency; it was a question of personal liberty."
_Mathew Stewart
Monturiol's Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted To Save The World
"Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned to do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, * the politicians and their propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors. "both parties," we were told in 1956 by the editor of a leading business journal, "will merchandize their candidates and issues by the same methods that business has developed to sell goods. These include scientific selection of appeals and planned repetition....Radio spot announcements and ads will repeat phrases with a planned intensity. billboards will push slogans of proven power.....candidates need, in addition to rich voices and good diction. to be able to look 'sincerely' at the TV camera."
-Aldous Huxley *1958 Brave New World Revisited
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Article: "America’s Ignorant Voters" by Michael Shudson….WQ Spring 2000
‘This year’s election is sure to bring more lamentations about voter apathy. No less striking is the appalling political ignorance of the American electorate."
Article: "Democracy Without Farmers" by Victor Davis Hanson..WQ Spring 2000
"The intellectual tyranny of the majority may be as harassing as the political tyranny of monarchs; already, in some American states, more than a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. This democratic suspicion of individuality is a result of the theory of equality; since all men are equal a count of noses must establish any truth, and sanctify any custom. Not only is democracy a result of the machine age, and not only does it rule through "machines"; it holds in itself the potentiality of the most terrible machine of all, a vast weight of ignorant compulsion ostracizing difference, crushing the exceptional mind, and discouraging untraditional excellence."
Will Durant
The Mansions of philosophy
"In a democracy, a majority can only turn against the government by first admitting to themselves that they were mistaken in formerly thinking well of their chosen leaders, which is difficult and unpleasant."
Bertrand Russell
1938
"The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority."
C.S. Lewis
"A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands...will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished."
John Stuart Mill
1819
"A government founded upon anything but liberty and justice cannot stand. All the wrecks on either side of the stream of time, all the wrecks of the great cities, and all the nations that have passed away-all are a warning that no nation founded upon injustice can stand. From the sand-enshrouded Egypt, from the marble wilderness of Athens, and From every fallen crumbling stone of the once mighty Rome, comes a wail as it were, the cry that no nation founded upon injustice can permanently stand."
Robert G. Ingersoll
"Let the people think they govern and they will be governed."
-William Penn
"When the people rule, they must be rendered happy, or they will overturn the state."
-Alexis De Tocqueville
"Democracy without education means hypocrisy without limitation; it means the degradation of statesmanship into politics; it means the expensive maintenance, in addition to the real ruling class, of a large parasitic class of politicians whose function it is to serve the rulers and deceive the ruled; it has made all public life a server of corruption which poisons the breath of heaven.
Will Durant 1929
"The true supporters of government are the weak and the uninformed and not the wise."
William Godwin
Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its influence on Morals and Happiness
"A successful U.S. presidency campaign requires a minimum of 50 million dollars, senator ships 20 million, representatives 2 million. Through big business advertising-placement control of the most powerful media, money can buy and now has bought control of the U.S.A. political system once designed for democracy."
Buckminister Fuller (aren't these figures quaint.?.ed)
1968
"Apparently it is not democracy alone that is a failure; it is ourselves. We forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. We thought there was power in numbers, and we found only mediocrity. The larger the number of voters, the more ordinary must be the man or the qualities that will appeal to them. We do not demand greatness or foresight in our elected officials, but only bare-toothed oratory and something this side of starvation. According to Bacon, "the ancient politicians said of democracies that 'the people were like the sea, and the orators like the wind. ' " Indeed we do not much care who governs us; we hardly realize that we are being governed, just as we think we pay no Taxes because we pay them through the landlord of the tariff. To the poor all things are weather."
Voltaire preferred monarchy to democracy, on the ground that in a monarchy it was only necessary to educate one man; in a democracy you must educate millions, and the grave-digger gets them all before you can educate ten per cent of them. We realize what pranks the birth-rate plays with our theories and our arguments. The minority acquire education, and have small families, the majority have no time for education, and have large families; nearly all of each generation are brought up in homes where the income is too small to provide the luxury of knowledge. Hence the perennial futility of political liberalism"
Will Durant
The Mansions of philosophy 1929
"Only by the growth and exercise of individual conscience does the man earn or deserve his rights". Democracy is the opposite of Totalitarianism, communism, fascism, or Mobocracy. but democracy is constantly in danger from mobocracy-the rising tide of as yet unqualified herd instinct. mechanized mediocrity. The conditioned mind instead of the enlightened mind."
Taliesin Mag 26,1953
"The minority is always right."
Henrik Ibsen
"WE’d all like to vote for the best man, but he’s never a candidate."
Kin Hubbard
"Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark, and neither laws nor monuments, neither battleships nor public libraries, nor great newspapers nor booming stock; neither mechanical invention nor political adroitness, nor churches nor universities nor civil service examinations can save us from degeneration if the inner mystery be lost. That mystery…consists in nothing but two common habits, two inveterate habits carried into public life-habits more precious, perhaps, than any that the human expression, yet habits more precious, perhaps, than any that the human race has gained…One of them is the habit of trained and disciplined good temper toward the opposite party when it fairly wins its innings….The other is that of fierce and merciless resentment toward everyman or set of men who break the public peace."
William James
"The difference between a slave and a citizen is that a slave is subject to his master and a citizen to the laws. It may happen that the master is very gentle and the laws very harsh; that changes nothing. Everything lies in the distance between caprice and rule."
Simone ‘Weil
"A democracy is a government in the hands of men of low birth, no property, and vulgar employments."
Aristotle
"I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance."
Thomas Carlyle
"Democracy…is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike."
Plato
"There never was democracy that did not commit suicide."
John Adams
"Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated."
G.K. Chesterton
"Democracy is also a form of religion; it is the worship of jackals by jackasses."
H.L. Mencken
""Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious that aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and, when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty…
John Quincy Adams
"Real democracy will exist only when every man is, in his own proper self, a King – when the ordinary has become extraordinary, the humdrum been dissolved in glamour, when mortals step into the enchanted glass or its visions step down to join us."
Tom Nairn
The Enchanted Glass
Radius Books
"Democracy has never been and never can be so desirable as aristocracy or monarchy, but while it lasts, is more bloody than either. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide."
John Adams 1815
"We are a republic. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of democracy."
Alexander Hamilton
"Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the right to property; and have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
James Madison
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire and at last the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
-H.L. Mencken
"Whatever may be truly said about the good sense of a democracy during a great crisis, at ordinary times it does not bring the best men to the top."
William R. Inge
"There is no rational stopping place, once the logic of democracy is accepted, short of the United States of the World."
Lewis Mumford
"Who forms the majority in any country? I think we’d all have to agree that the fools are in a terrifying, overwhelming majority all over the world! But in the name of God it can’t be right that the fools should rule the wise!
Ibsen
An Enemy of the People (1882)
"Majorities must recognize that minorities have rights which ought not to be extinguished and they must remember that history can be written as the record of the follies of the majority."
-Lindsay Rogers
"The theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
H.L. Mencken
"Democracy is not about being a damn spectator against the backdrop of tap-dancing politicians swinging in the winds of expediency."
Ron Dellums Congressman
"Give me a break! The primary! That ridiculous exercise in democracy? Democracy is a sham now, Max. Why don’t we start by admitting that. You want to know what democracy is here, that state of the art? Being allowed which brand of razor blade it’s best to cut your heart with – that’s democracy."
W.D. Wetherell
The Wisest Man in America
"…For their happiness, such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and 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 al the care of thinking and the trouble of living thus it every day renders the free exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent, it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself."
Alexis de Tocqueville
A citizen may have an original, valid, and true political idea, one which might even have had every chance of success with his fellow citizens. But if he does not have the millions necessary to elaborate it the length and breadth of the country, it counts for nothing. The American democracy is no longer in its youth, when propaganda consisted of one man speaking directly to other men."Jacques Ellis
"Nowhere do citizens appear so insignificant as in a democratic nation."
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America
"Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people."
Oscar Wilde
"As societies grow decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."
-Gore Vidal
"Envy is the basis of democracy."
Bertrand Russell
"What are leaders for? Why do we need leaders in a free country? I would answer that the leader’s function is to help determine, in any crisis, which of our possible selves will act."
Lyman Bryson
"Democracy was instituted or strengthened in substantial degree by the need for a large navy of relatively poor but free citizens, who were paid for their shop duty by the state. The democratic reforms of Periclean Athens…shifted the domestic political and military balance of power toward the poor and the navy…(At) the height of democratic government trireme rowers were full citizens. With 170 rowers in each of at least 200 ships, no fewer than 30,000 supporters of democracy (were present), generally from the lower classes."
Bruce Russett
"In a section of Democracy in America entitled "What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear," Tocqueville envisioned a "species of oppression" that would be "unlike anything that ever before existed in the world," a rule by "guardians" rather than tyrants. Although Tocqueville wrote chiefly of the changing powers of state governments, his comments are equally relevant to expansion of the U.S. central government. he foresaw citizens submitting to "an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon it-self alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. "Anticipating the nature of such power more than a hundred years before it became evident in American law, Tocqueville painted a now familiar picture:
That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. it would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood....For their 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?
Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.
Tocqueville clearly foresaw the diminution of the human sprit that would attend such expansion of government. Government would first bind people up in rules:
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 nations is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people." (Tocqueville)
Charlotte A. Twight
Dependent on D.C.
Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War
"The best of constitutions and preventive laws will be powerless against the steadily increasing pressures of overpopulation and of the over organization imposed by growing numbers and advancing technology. The constitutions will not be abrogated and the good laws will remain on the statute book; but these liberal forms will merely serve to mask and adorn a profoundly illiberal substance. Given unchecked overpopulation and over-organization, we may expect to see in the democratic countries a reversal of the process which transformed England into a democracy, while retaining all the outward forms of a monarchy. under the relentless thrust of accelerating overpopulation and increasing over organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms--elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest--will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days, Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial--but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."
Aldous Huxley
Brave New World Revisited (1958)
"Orwell and Waugh would have agreed that today "the elementary rules" of common sense are virtually ignored by political and opinion leaders. The urgent issues in most people's lives are peripheral to the concerns of our decision makers. In the United States the political system has been so perverted to inflate new class influence that both political parties have become controlled by extremists. The average American sees shouting heads on television and has little interest in or connection to whatever they're fighting about. elections are won or lost by a few fervent factions in a few swing states. The consent of the governed has become in many ways a hollow phrase."
-David Lebedoff
The Same man: George Orwell & Evelyn Waugh: in Love and War
"Curiously, as magicians know, the more intelligent the viewer, the more easily he may be fooled. For the less imaginative and less theoretical know that a rabbit may not be produced from any hat which did not previously contain a rabbit; that wealth can accrue neither to an individual nor to a society not committed to the production of wealth, and that no organization may be made more efficient by adding to its bulk."
-David Mamet
The Secret Knowledge
"Left to itself or led by its tribunes, the multitude never founded anything. The multitude looks over its shoulder; it forms no traditions, achieves no continuity of ideas, has no thought which could acquire the force of law....To the multitude politics means only intrigue; government empty promises and brute force, justice vindictiveness, and liberty the freedom to set up idols which, on the morrow, it overthrows. The advent of the Democracy ushers in a period of retrogression which would bring the nation and the state to ruin, if it did not avoid that fate by putting the revolution into reverse."
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"The people, by the very reason of their inferiority and distress, will always compose the army of liberty and progress....But by reason of their ignorance, the primitiveness of their instincts, the urgency of their needs and the impatience of their wishes, they incline to summary forms of authority. What the people seek is not legal guarantees of which they have no conception and no opinion of their power; not a careful balance of forces or combination of civil devices....They seek a leader whose word they trust, whose intentions are known to them, and whom they believe devoted to their interests; to him they give unlimited authority and irresistible power. The people, esteeming right what the leader deems expedient, care nothing for forms, see no use in imposing limitations and conditions on the tenants of power. Suspicious, prompt to calumniate, incapable of methodical discussion, all they have faith in is the will of a man, their hope is in him, their trust in his creatures....They expect nothing and hope for nothing from the only principles which could save them; they do not have the religion of ideas."
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Book: "Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: His Revolutionary Life, Mind & Works" by Edward Hyams
"For all I know, democracy may be a self-limiting disease, as civilization itself seems to be. There are thumping paradoxes in its philosophy, and some of them have a suicidal smack. It offers John Doe a means to rise above his place beside Richard Roe, and then, by making Roe his equal, it takes away the chief usufructs of the rising. I here attempt no pretty logical gymnastics: the history of democratic states is a history of disingenuous efforts to get rid of the second half of that dilemma. There is not only the natural yearning of Doe to use and enjoy the superiority that he has won; there is also the natural tendency of Roe, as an inferior man, to acknowledge it. Democracy, in fact, is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theoretical abhorrence of them. The baron has departed, but in his place stand the grand goblin, the supreme worthy archon, the sovereign grand commander. Democratic man is quite unable to think of himself as a free individual; he must belong to a group, or shake with fear and loneliness-and the group, of course, must have its leaders. It would be hard to find a country in which such brummagem serene highnesses are revered with more passionate devotion than they get in the United States..."
H.L. Mencken
A Glance Ahead from Notes on Democracy,1926)
"With exceptions so rare that they are regarded as miracles and freaks of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular-not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the it will work well and prove itself but whether the active, talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people."
-Walter Lippmann 1955
"At first it was sheer instinct that dissuaded me from casting my ballot. I listened to the performance promises of the various candidates and the more I listened the more confused I became. They seemed to me to be so contradictory, so vague, so devoid of principle, that I could not bring myself in favor of one or the other. Particularly was I impressed by the candidates' evaluations of one another. Neither one had a good word to say of his opponent, and each was of the opinion that the other fellow was not the kind of man to whom the affairs of state could be safely entrusted. Now, I reasoned, these fellows were politicians, and as such should be better acquainted with their respective qualifications for office than I could be; it was their business to know such things. Therefore, I had to believe candidate A when he said that candidate B was untrustworthy, as I had to believe candidate B when he said the same of candidate A. In the circumstances, how could I vote for either? Judging by their respective evaluations of each other's qualification, I was bound to make the wrong decision whichever way I voted."
-Frank Chodorov
On Underwriting an Evil
"They say that people who don't vote can't complain about the outcome. But they also say that if your candidate didn't win, you can't complain because that's being a sore loser. you also can't complain if the guy you voted for does something you don't like. Hey, you voted for him, didn't you? You can't win. The game is rigged."
-Gregory Bresiger
End of the Mandate
"When we express a preference politically, we do so precisely because we intend to bind others to our will. Political voting is the legal method we have adopted and extolled for obtaining monopolies of power. Political voting is nothing more than the assumption that might makes right. There is a presumption that any decision wanted by the majority of those expressing a preference must be desirable, and the inference even goes so far as to presume that anyone who differs from the majority view is wrong or possibly immoral."
-Robert LeFevre
Abstain from Beans
"The best of constitutions and preventive Laws will be powerless against the steadily increasing pressures of overpopulation and of the over organization imposed by growing numbers and advancing technology. the constitutions will not be abrogated and the good Laws will remain on the statute books but these Liberal forms will merely serve to mask and adorn a profoundly illiberal substance. Given unchecked overpopulation and over-organization, we may expect to see in the democratic countries a reversal of the process which transformed England into a democracy, while retaining all the outward forms of a monarchy. Under the relentless thrust of accelerating overpopulation and increasing overorganization, and by means of every more effective methods of mind-manipulation, and by means of every more effective methods of mind-manipulation, and the means of evechangeing their nature the quaint old forms-elections, parliaments, Supreme courts and all the unrest-will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the tradition names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial-but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwick Ian sense. meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulations will quietly run the show as they see fit."
-Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Brave New World Revisited 1958
"History does not support the hypothesis that electoral politics might lead to a freer society. There is no case of which I am aware where electoral politics has reduced the size and scope of government in a fundamental or lasting sense."
-John Pugsley
An Argument in Defense of the Invisible Hand
"What is democracy?-an aristocracy of blackguards."
-Lord Byron
"The idea that the United States might be able to bomb Iran into democracy sounds increasingly absurd in the wake of the debacle in Iraq. For Iranians, though, it has a special, tragic irony. All of them know, as many Americans do not, that democracy was taking root in Iran when the United States intervened to suppress it in 1953. Given this historical fact, Iranians may be pardoned for considering it passing strange that Americans now propose to be their liberators. They are painfully aware that the United States helped create the oppressive theocracy under which they now live."
-Stephen Kinzer
All The Shah's Men: An American coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
"The kind of oppression that threatens democratic peoples does not in any way resemble what preceded it. .....I want to imagine what aspect despotism could take on in the world; I see an innumerable crowd of men, similar to one another and equal, who gyrate unceasingly in order to obtain small and vulgar pleasures for themselves with which they fill their souls. Each one of them, isolated at some remove from the others, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his personal friends constitute the entire human species for him: as for the remainder of his fellow citizens, their right next to them, but he doesn't see them; he touches them and doesn't feel them; he exists only within and for himself, and, although he still has a family, one may at the least say he no longer has a country. Above all these men rises an immense tutelary power that alone assures their enjoyment and watches over their fate. it i absolute, elaborate, regular, calculating, and mile. it would be like paternal power, if-like it-its goal was to prepare men for virile maturity; but, on the contrary, it seeks only to limit the irrevocably to childhood; it likes its citizens to be happy, as long as they dream of nothing other than being happy."
-Alexis de Tocqueville
"Perhaps the biggest big idea to gather speed during the last millennium was that we humans might govern ourselves. but no one really meant it.
What was really meant in most places was that we would elect people to govern us and sporadically renew or revoke their contracts. it was enough. There was no practicable way to involve all of us, all the time..."
-Anand giridharadas
"Athens; on the Net
New York Times September 13,2009
"As shocking as it is to conservative Republicans that Senator John McCain was funded by George Soros, it should be equally shocking to progressive democrats that the Obama administration has top-dollar connections to Wall street, which included major contributions from Wall Street firms and banks to Senator Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.
OpenSecrets.org reported that of the top twenty campaign contributors to the 2008 Obama campaign, five were Wall street firms and banks, including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan chase, UBSAG, and Morgan Stanley. Through bundling individual contributions from employees and others affiliated with the firm, these Wall Street firms and banks contributed approximately $500,000 or more to the Obama presidential campaign. Goldman Sachs was Obama's second-largest campaign contributor, right behind the University of California at the top of the list; Goldman Sachs contributed nearly $1 million to the campaign."
-Jerome R. Corsi, PH.D.
America For Sale
"Democracy Has in fact done Western Nations few favors in recent years. It has not kept them from Embarking on Foolish Wars. It has not restrained them from Suicidal Economic Blunders..."
Peter Hitchens article "Democracy Delusion" The American Conservative May 2010
"Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich-that is the democracy of capitalistic society."
-Lenin
"What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily self-seeking politicians."
-W. Somerset Maugham
"We have no more a real democracy in the world today. Democracy in politics has in no country led to democracy in its economic life. We still have autocracy in industry as firmly seated on its throne as theocratic kings ruling in the name of a god, or aristocracy ruling by military power; and the forces represented by these twain, superseded by the autocrats of industry, have become the allies of the power which took their place of pride. Religion and rank...are most often the courtiers of Mammon and support him on his throne."
-George W. Russell Irish poet
"The Anglicism "democracy," for many Afghans, has become synonymous with unprecedented corruption, moral decay, and hypocrisy; it is another one of the plagues that the West has brought to this country....."
-Matthieu Aikins "Disappearing Ink: Afghanistan's sham democracy" Harpers Mag Jan 2011 letter from Kabul
"Congress functions as competing armies, determined to dominate or destroy."
-Mickey Eduais
How to Turn Democrats into Americans The Atlantic June/Aug 2011
"....The definition of the modern democracy might be this: state control that stops short of impeding your freedom to create wealth, and that maintains certain civil-liberties safeguards-for those who do not step out of the mainstream. The difference, then, between the countries that fall roughly into the "authoritarian" camp, such as Singapore, China, Russia, and the UAE, and those that pride themselves on their "democratic" values, such as India, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United Sates, may just be one of degree. I have not sought to equate them, but to point out common characteristics. Even in the United Kingdom and France, where surveillance is on the rise, most individuals continue to enjoy considerable day-to-day freedoms. In the United States, for all the self-censorship in the early Bush years, for all the narrowness of the mainstream political debate, critical media self-evidently do not face anything like the sanctions of their counterparts in Singapore, Russia, and China."
John Kampfner
Freedom For Sale
"The aristocrat, Plato, was more hostile than Aristotle to democracy, whose end stages he described in terms which have a curiously modern ring:
Those who obey the rules.....it reviles as willing slaves and men of naught, but it commends and honors in public and private rulers who resemble subjects and subjects who are like rulers....The father habitually tries to resemble the child and is afraid of his sons, and the son likens himself to the father and feels no awe or fear of his parents....and the resident alien feels himself equal to the citizen and the citizen to him, and the foreigner like-wise....The teacher in such case fears and fawns upon the pupils, and the pupils pay no heed to the teacher or to their overseers either. And in general the young ape their elders and vie with them in speech and action, while the old, accommodating themselves to the young, are full of pleasantry and graciousness, imitating the young for fear they may be thought disagreeable and authoritative...and I almost forgot to mention the spirit of freedom and equal rights in the relations of men to women and women to men."
Republic trans, Shorey, VIII, 562-64
"The man of educated sensibilities, whether conservative or radical, pays a big price for the blessings of democracy in widest commonalty spread. His room and his pullman berth must be over-heated, his collars over-starched, his drink over-iced, his soup over-peppered, his food over-sweetened, the political oratory he hears over-eloquent, the after-dinner speeches over-humorous, his radio overburdened with trivial vulgarities, his college allegiance over-weighted with loyalties to the football team, his Sunday newspaper oversized, his fiction over-sexed, his religion over-theologized or sensationalized. He is compelled to spell, punctuate, and employ synonyms in subservience to the taste or caprice of type-setters and proofreaders or the quorum of the faculty. False sentiment releases bandits on parole to make the streets unsafe for him, and false sentimentality spoils the potentially glorious art of the moving pictures. he is forced to stare at hideous, blatant advertisements from Washington to New York, on the outer lake-front drive of Chicago, and on ever scenic road which he is taxed to construct from Florida to California. His sleep is broken by the loud-speaker in the neighboring flat."
-Paul Shorey "American Loyalties," 1932
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Book: Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich...by Kevin Phillips
Book: "Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do" by Andrew Gelman, David Park, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi, and Jeronimo Cortina
Book: "Electronic Elections: The Perils and Promises of Digital Democracy" by R. Michael Alvarez and Thad E. Hall
Book: "Bad For Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People" by Dana D. Nelson
Book: "The Hidden Costs of Clean Election Reform" by Frederic Charles Schaffer
Book: "American Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism" by anatol Lieven
Book: "The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World" by Larry Diamond
Book: "Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy" by Lewis H. Lapham
Book: "What Would Jefferson Do? A return to Democracy" by Thom Harmann
Book: "The Uncivil War: How a New Elite is Destroying Our Democracy" by David Lebedoff
Book: "The Right To Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States" by Alexander Keysssar
Book: "Dissenting Electorate: Those Who Refuse to Vote and the Legitimacy of Their Opposition" ed by Carl Wainer
Book: "Dependent on D.C." by Charlotte A. Twight
Book: "The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy" by Noreena Hertz
Book: "The Vanishing Voter: Public Involvement in an Age of Uncertainty" by Thomas E. Patterson
Book: "The Unfinished Journey, 508 BC to AD 1993" ed by John Dunn
Book: "What Life Was Like At The Dawn Of Democracy: Classical Athens, 525-322 B.C." by the eds of Time-Life Book
Book: "Sneaking Into The Flying Circus: How the Media Turn Our Presidential Campaigns into Freak Shows" by Alexandra Peolosi
© 2007
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