Democracy Is the Problem

[MJ]

[ARTICLE LINK]

May 13, 2025
Democracy Is the Problem
Americans have forgotten what their government is supposed to do - and it isn't to enforce any "will of the people"
Tom Mullen

A Wisconsin judge has been arrested for allegedly helping an illegal alien evade immigration authorities. The case has added gasoline to the fire blazing in the wake of several recent court rulings against the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport illegal aliens more expeditiously than customary due process procedures would allow.

The administration argues the judiciary is deliberately obstructing its attempt to execute the clear will of the people, expressed in the last election, to reverse the trend of mass illegal immigration into the United States. Its opponents argue the administration is violating established law and basic constitutional protections of individual rights, especially the Fifth Amendment guarantee that no one shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

Both sides accuse the other of being “a threat to our democracy.” This has been a mantra repeated about political opponents for many years now, by everyone from Nancy Pelosi to Tucker Carlson. Carlson railed against suppression of free speech as incompatible with “a democracy.” Democrats wailed that we must “save our democracy” from their Hitler-cartoon version of President Trump, even after he’d left office.

But to paraphrase a popular 20th century president, democracy is not the solution to our problems. Democracy is the problem.

If Americans should have learned one thing, it is to be suspicious of anything the media repeat over and over, through every medium. And what they’ve heard night and day for the past decade, from conservative and liberal media alike, is some form of the message “democracy is in danger.” They’ve heard it so much that they’ve forgotten what it is they should be desperate to protect. And it isn’t democracy.

Before the progressive era, the American political system was generally referred to as “republican” rather than “democratic.” This may seem purely semantic and to some extent it would be if the Constitution merely described a simple republic. In that case, representatives would be elected by popular vote and would generally be expected to do what those who elected them want them to do.

But the Constitution isn’t even that democratic. Once elected, the representatives are not permitted to do anything the people who elected them want. They are limited to a short list of powers they are authorized to exercise, regardless of the supposed “will of the people.”

To make doubly sure they do not go astray, the first ten amendments to the Constitution specify certain rights the government is especially prohibited from violating, again whether a majority of Americans seems to want it to or not.

The enumerated powers, the separation of powers among branches of the federal government and between the federal and state governments, the bicameral legislature, the Bill of Rights – they are all there to thwart the power of the majority, in other words, to protect us from democracy.

Thus, it seems odd that every politician, every media pundit, and even most citizens refer to the government the Constitution describes as “a democracy.” Certainly, it has democratic elements, particularly the election of legislators (originally only the House was elected democratically by the people). But most of the Constitution is dedicated to restraining the will of the majority.

This is more than an academic point. It speaks to a fundamental question that most Americans would answer incorrectly: what is the purpose of the government?

Those who have internalized the idea the American political system is “a democracy” would probably say its purpose was to do “the will of the people” or some such rot. And who can blame them? That’s all any American has heard for most of his or her life. But that’s incorrect.

Both of our founding documents say explicitly what the purpose of the government is and it’s not to do any supposed will of the people. Jefferson was more succinct in the Declaration of Independence. “To secure these rights governments are instituted among men,” the rights being those inalienable rights previously referred to, which include but are not limited to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

These rights belong to individuals, not the people as a whole. Jefferson was in this passage “channeling” John Locke, whom he often referred to as one of the three greatest men who ever lived and whose Second Treatise of Government Jefferson specifically cited as essential to understanding “the general principles of liberty and the rights of man in nature and in society.”

Based upon this clear statement of purpose, all of the anti-democratic elements in the Constitution make much more sense. Majority vote generally determines who will run the government but not what the government does. The latter is set in stone and only alterable by a deliberately cumbersome amendment process. What the government is intended to do is secure the rights of each individual it governs.

And as the essay Jefferson cites makes clear, all of these rights are ultimately property rights. They derive from the foundational right of self ownership and as Locke put it, the purpose of the government is “the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property. The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.”

Much ensuing confusion could have been avoided had the founders stuck with this elegant concept of property rather than breaking it up into myriad, mostly unenumerated rights. There would be no question of any “right to healthcare” if Americans understood they have a right to what they own and nothing more.

One might argue that James Madison expanded the purpose of the government in his preamble to the Constitution, perhaps because he was a Federalist frustrated by the results of the constitutional convention. However, an examination of the preamble indicates it describes the same purpose for government as the Declaration.

“To form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” are all simply the means securing of individual rights.

Many proponents of an expanded role for government point to the words “general welfare” as containing this expansion. But they don’t.

We know this because the man who wrote them said they don’t. “General welfare” is merely the state in which the rights of every individual are protected equally. It certainly can’t describe a state in which the welfare of some people, including a majority of the people, is improved at the expense of others. In that case the welfare would no longer be “general.”

Former President Barack Obama famously said, “elections have consequences,” sentiment conservatives generally agree with even if they don’t agree with Obama on much else. But they’re wrong. Elections aren’t supposed to have consequences, at least not the kind both Obama and Trump voters believe they should have.

Again, elections aren’t supposed to determine what the government does. They only determine who does them. What the government is supposed to do is secure the rights of each individual. Period.

This misunderstanding has been reinforced by all sorts of false dichotomies presented to the American public over the past century. During the Cold War, the national security state mobilized against communism and did its best to regiment the public likewise. Now, communism is an economic system and it’s antithesis would be capitalism, or whatever alternative word one prefers for a laissez faire free market.

But that’s not the dichotomy Americans were presented with. The national security state presented it as a conflict between communism and democracy. Why? Because most of the cold warriors were socialists themselves and weren’t interested in free markets, laissez faire or otherwise. So they presented the conflict as between authoritarianism and majority rule. But that doesn’t really work.

There is no fundamental conflict between democracy and communism or democracy and authoritarianism. The Constitution recognizes the capacity for democratic rule to be authoritarian, which is the whole reason for the “checks and balances” and Bill of Rights. And the only economic system compatible with the Constitution, in its purpose and limits on power, is a laissez faire free market.

More recently, during the Biden administration, when critics of Covid mandates or other government overreach were being censored, conservative pundits like Carlson constantly repeated words to the effect “you can’t have a democracy without free speech.”

Again, this is a false dichotomy. Free speech is not an element of democracy. The First Amendment explicitly says free speech shall be protected from the democratically elected Congress. It recognizes democracy is a direct threat to free speech. Free speech, like all the rights in the first ten amendments, is an individual right the Constitution seeks to protect, regardless of the will of the majority.

The latest false dichotomy is between Trump and democracy. The political and media narrative is that Trump is a dictator who poses a threat to “our democracy,” which can only survive if his authoritarian impulses are successfully resisted. His verbal attacks on the judiciary and alleged flouting of due process rights is presented as examples of the threat to democracy he represents.

But the judiciary has nothing to do with democracy. The judicial branch was designed with judges appointed for life as a check on democracy. The Fifth Amendment was similarly written to ensure the democratically elected president does not violate the individual rights of accused people, regardless of the wishes of the mob.

In fact, if any “will of the majority” can ever truly be gleaned from an election, it is that a clear majority wants Trump to curtail illegal immigration. He is arguing from that position, using all the spurious arguments of the past century, including that the president is the only official of the government “elected by the whole people,” a concept Teddy Roosevelt popularized, on the premise that the purpose of the government was to do the will of the majority, rather than protect the rights of individuals.

The progressives are hoisted on their own petard in some respects on this point. But to make matters even more confusing, curbing illegal immigration under current conditions, in which taxpayers are forced to subsidize them in the short term and live under whatever government they create with their or their descendants’ votes in  the future, does protect the rights of individuals.

Had the original American system been left intact, its purpose to protect individual rights and its powers limit thusly, it wouldn’t really matter who chose to enter the country or whom they may vote for. But the systematic destruction of those limits on government power, all of which was done in the name of the government more effectively “doing the will of the people” rather than protecting the rights of individuals, had led to a situation where every new person who enters the country for more than a brief visit, legally or illegally, represents a threat to our rights.

Democracy is the problem.