Democracy, cont.

In the entry, “The root problem is not liberalism, but democracy,” Randy writes:

If you put together your comment, “If evil is the rejection of the good, leftism is the political expression of evil,” with Alexis Zarkov’s remarks on democracy and mob rule, it is clear that evil will eventually prevail in a pure democracy. Just as there are fewer people with high intelligence than with average intelligence, there are fewer people with virtue than without virtue. When majority rule prevails, and when the majority is that of the entire population rather than the natural (virtuous) aristocracy, the result will be the collapse of that society. The non-virtuous majority will use their vote to express their inherently evil (sinful) nature. The Founding Fathers knew this well, which was why they rejected democracy as mob rule and put in place a system in which the will of the people was prevented from operating directly but was mediated through deliberative bodies and checks and balances. This is why the left hates traditional America. Such a system based on virtue does not allow them to express their evil. This is also why the Republicans are such dismal failures. They refuse to challenge the underlying, evil assumptions of leftism.

LA replies:

It’s a complicated issue. On one hand, the left wants the “will of the people”—the “99 percent”—to prevail; on the other hand the left seeks to suppress democracy and to rule through unelected elites. And conservatives generally oppose both those tendencies. So, is the left “democratic,” or the right? Is the left anti-democratic and elitist, or the right?

Too large a question to be addressed at the moment. But the clue to the answer would be: the original American system is multilayered and transcendent (i.e., more than the sum of its parts), rooted in the people’s sovereignty at the bottom and arched by the constitutional order at the top, and the left wants to destroy all of it, in all its aspects.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 25, 2011 12:54 PM | Send