If you would be so charitable with your time as to truly contemplate this piece (perhaps at length), I would sincerely like to impress upon you something of the most extreme importance in political thought.
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The area I would like to explore is the deepest levels of political utility – perhaps even metaphysical.
I intend to demonstrate to you that there are two fundamentally divergent, incompatible, mutually exclusive, and outright warring views – presuppositions, really – about why politics?
Our founders – the original ones, not the refounders of the progressive era, nor their contemporaries of the civil rights era – built for us a “republic, if [we] can keep it.” Yet all we hear today is “Democracy!” What explains this, and what’s the difference, anyway?
To understand that, we must take a brief detour to the philosophy of Hobbes, who described the nature of human relations as a power game, wherein all human interaction can be broken down into a struggle between persons with different interests seeking to impose their will on the other. In his mind, there is no mutually beneficial relationship – just complicated webs of deceits that, when the individual stands triggered, the builder may pounce to consume a foe and express his will – his libido dominandi, or “will do dominate.”
Politics, when viewed through this lens, becomes likewise a complicated game of wielding power to dominate and impose one’s will. This is at the very heart of the concept, and near-worship of, Democracy. You see, Democracy is little more than the expression of a collective libido dominandi and the attempted legitimization of the subjugation of a minority.
After all, in a pure democracy, there are no limits to what the majority can do to you or to me, so long as there is consensus. This consensus, in turn, becomes the mechanism by which people mitigate the natural guilt that comes from being a tyrant – they spread the blame so thinly through democratic consensus that they feel little at all.
This is not the way our founders saw politics. For them, there was something above the concept of domination, and the act of tyranny itself, was not looked upon kindly. The “thing” above it we can simply refer to as “the good,” and a groundbreaking attempt to capture a portion of it on parchment can be found in the Bill of Rights (including the various state versions).
For those who view the natural state of affairs in human relations as sometimes unfortunate and unkind but nevertheless strive for something better – an ethic – democracy itself becomes little more than the least terrible of options. It is certainly nothing to be worshipped. Democracy will, unattended by an ethic and concept of “the good,” always degenerate into two wolves and a sheep deciding on lunch.
The founder’s concept was based on a difficult and perhaps impossible question, “how do we secure the rights of men in perpetuity?”
These rights were rights to be free from tyranny in all forms: in their person, papers, effects, conscience, associations, religion, bodily integrity, use of arms, commerce, and so on.
They were not rights to things, such as food, clothing, housing, and healthcare – you cannot have a positive right to a thing without making a man into a slave on your behalf and unleashing the furious violence of government in the process. Those who would worship at the altar of Democracy, and harbor the libido dominandi against their fellow citizens, are the enemy of a republic.
I plead with you, do not view government as a tool of domination to impose your selfish will. View government as an imperfect and inherently dangerous device with which we can imperfectly strive for an ethical vision – the ethical vision of the founders: the inherent, God-given, inseverable, incontrovertible, incorruptible, and unimpeachable natural rights of man.
Mike Belcher is a candidate for State Representative for Carrol County, District 4, out of Wakefield, NH, and can be found at www.MikeBelcher4NH.com