Modern Democracy and War

0:00The view of democracy as producing a peace-loving and stable regime has become a settled opinion of our time. The Olin Fellow, I suppose, of global democracy or something like that, Walter Burns, has insisted that democracies have never engaged in war with each other. This assertion has recently been changed to, I think, an equally suspect one, that democracies have not engaged in war with each other for about 150 years. A problematic statement at best, unfortunately by now this has acquired the status of a truism. Just about every day one reads in the newspaper admonitions that the United States is holding back the process of peace by not making the rest of the world democratic.

0:52A January 19th column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which I had the misfortune of reading by columnist Trudy Rubin, explained that America's choice at this point is either in creating a peaceful Russia or passively assisting in the triumph of neo-fascism throughout the world. Peace, Ms. Rubin explains, requires a vigorous interventionist foreign policy on the part of our government. There are a number of problems with such a statement. In fact, it would probably take me several hours to go into all of them. One of them, of course, is the idea that a self-described democracy is by definition peaceful.

1:40This is because self-described democracies declare themselves to be peaceful. and insist that any measure that they take is either peaceful or intended to produce world peace. If one engages in circular definitions and democracies obviously can never fight wars against each other and any measure that they take is intended to be peaceful in the long run. The same kind of argument of course was used I think in some cases to with success in the case of the Soviet Union, which for many years argued that socialism or Marxist socialism was by definition peaceful and that whenever the Soviet Union engaged in war with Baltic states or wherever else that, you know, cared to send its armies, that was done as a way of ensuring peace within the Soviet Union and spreading the penumber of peace beyond the Soviet Union to other countries that it would choose to liberate.

2:41In any case, the insistence by militant Democrats, and in Germany there are, I discovered, people who, like Jürgen Habermas, describe themselves as einsatzbereite Demokraten, militant Democrats, that the entire world be made to flatter their political conceits, is not exactly a passive stance. Last year, for example, self-proclaimed defenders of human rights and democracy in France formed The Appeal to Vigilance Committee to Marginalize Their Opposition This committee, which includes such progressive celebrities as Bernard-André Lévy, Jacques Guérida and Umberto Eco, complains that on the anniversary of the Jacobin ascendancy in revolutionary France, the extreme right was being allowed to make fun of the left's support of increased immigration into France from Africa and elsewhere in the Third World.

3:36According to the 40 intellectuals who signed on to this appeal to vigilance published in Le Monde on July 13th, 1993, quote, writers, publishers and those responsible for the written and audiovisual press are not sufficiently suspicious of these maneuvers to re-legitimate the right. The media, we are told, now provide a forum, at least in France or in the United States for the Critics of Human Rights and of Anti-Racist Public Education, and by, quote, this involuntary complicity threatened democracy, peace and human lives everywhere, unquote. On July 13th, 1993, Le Monde published its own editorial support for this appeal, noting the danger created, quote, by a world of ideas still under the sway of laissez-faire, by which they The Alliance between militant communists and neo-fascists throughout Europe benefits the chaos that reigns in Russia, the racist murders that are proliferating everywhere and the unforeseeable consequences of the war in the former Yugoslavia.

4:50In reading these calls to democratic vigilance, one should keep in mind that there is nothing undemocratic about them. The Jacobins of the French Revolution muzzled and threatened French citizens while asserting the iron necessity for emergency measures against the enemies at their gates, as well as against traitors within. The doctrine of human rights to which concerned French intellectuals are appealing has never been viewed as a purely national patrimony. Its exponents since 1789 have affirmed their universal proselytizing mission. Edmund Burke was correct to perceive a vast gulf between the historical chartered liberties of Englishmen and, quote, the armed doctrines of the French Revolution.

5:39Note well that the terror in revolutionary France killed far more than the 30,000 or so who died on the scaffold. Between March 1793 and July 1795, over 100,000 peasants from the Vendée and Brittany were were massacred by revolutionary armies for counterrevolutionary activities, ranging from reluctance to be conscripted into the Republican army to alleged support for priests who refused to swear unqualified allegiance to the revolutionary state. The French historians P. L. Chenoux and P. L. Seche have documented these massacres, which involved the wholesale drowning in the Loire River of women and children. While these acts of ideological intolerance were not unprecedented in Western history, certainly one can point back to the sad examples of the Inquisition, the Albigensian Crusade, and the sacking of Jewish and Byzantine settlements in the other Crusades, what stands out in the revolution is the killing of people on a truly mass scale in the name of democratic ideals.

6:45This democratic potential for destruction was already known in the eighteenth century. The Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume cited it in making a case against democracy as the most sanguinary of all forms of government and in favor of the British constitutional monarchy. Hume alleged all the bloody adventures of ancient self-described democracies, and in this argument might have been following another anti-democratic skeptic, Thomas Hobbes, for neither Hume nor Hobbes was impressed by the Greek democratic experience. Obviously and not a read Edith Hamilton on Athenian democracy, and Hobbes who translated Thucydides' histories of the Peloponnesian War attributed the defeat of Athens in that struggle to its democratic defect, combining instability with relentless imperialism. Certainly the Federalist founders of the American Republic were deeply suspicious of a highly centralized state bottomed depended upon the majority will.

7:46Distributed national power, entrusting the franchise to property state legislators, dual federalism, and the making of the defense of life and property the justification for the Constitution, all pointed not to a democratic, but to a conservative liberal worldview. Popular government would be allowed, but with suitable checks on its expression. None of the conditions that offended 18th century Democrats like Rousseau and Robsbierre occasioned and concern for the American Founding Fathers. Social inequality, rather social leveling, forceful administrative centralization, a politically enforced civic religion, all of these features, one might say, of Jacobin democracy did not belong to the American dispensation set up in the 1780s. For the radical elements among the founding generation, grouped around by Thomas Jefferson, the term democracy did in fact have a positive connotation, but one suggesting liberty and localism. No matter how much Jefferson celebrated the French Revolution, no matter how foolishly he eulogized the so-called reforms of the Revolution, it was not the centralized government of the Jacobins appealing to the general will, but communities of craftsmen

9:04in Yeoman Farmers, on which the Virginia planter based his democratic hopes. As late as the 1830s, the French visitor to America, Alexis de Tocqueville, drew a critical distinction between American and European notions of democracy. It was in small towns run by local gentry and intrusive pecsnefs that one saw government In Europe, by contrast, it was the centralizing militaristic vision of Jacob and France that held sway among self-identified democratic enthusiasts and revolutionaries, particularly in Tuckville's own country. If democracy would triumph as the inevitable wave that Tuckville took it to be in the mid-1830s, The unanswered question became which form would prove stronger, American localism or French Jacobinism?

10:05By now, there is no question that the second form of democracy has prevailed, as a globalist bellicose ideology representing the ambitions of a well-organized political class and its journalistic adjuncts. There are many reasons for this development, and this conference features scholars who who have laid out, and will lay out, most of the reasons. Economic, administrative, and geopolitical causes have all played a role in turning Tocqueville's America as a hothouse of local self-government into the aggressive behemoth, spouting therapeutic bromides that all of us have come to recognize as the perfected version of American democracy. In this PV, perfected version, real self-government has been supplanted by electoral inclusiveness, so that every deadbeat is urged to vote as a testimony to the expansiveness of our system.

11:02Democracy is equated with the extension of special rights, like holding days of rage, as evidence of a public commitment to egalitarianism. A class of public administrators, judges and We as career officers decide how we live and die in a society that tax-paying citizens can do less and less to influence. We no longer even determine who should be allowed to enter the country and become a citizen, since the demand for such control is itself seen as undemocratic. Only neo-fascists, as our journalists now tell us, would try to restrict immigration or oppose open borders with third-world countries. A self-restricted political community, the class thus Paul Venn makes clear, is the mark of ancient and medieval democracies and republics.

11:48A government's denial to its citizens of their right to limit citizenship on any grounds they see fit indicates, according to Venn, not a democratic but an imperial order. Order, a supranational sovereignty in which the ruler or ruling class allows anyone born or found in that territory to become a subject, not a citizen, but a subject. These remarks are not intended as an endorsement of a return to a racially homogeneous ancient politics. I shall leave it to Sam Francis to make that case. Rather, I'm trying to determine in what sense contemporary America is or is not democratic. The typical neoconservative response to my unseemly questioning would be to say that we are democratic because we place neither gender nor racial nor ethnic restrictions on voting, because we redistribute earnings, and finally because in our truly inspired moments we work to make the entire world safe for democracy.

12:48In any case, the response would continue, America is a liberal democracy, and as such are such committed to parliamentary government, human rights and open citizenship, political features that were unknown in ancient, bigoted, collectivist democracies. This particular argument is basic to an 1100 page study dealing with ancient and modern republics by the Straussian Paul Reye. I generally agree with the distinction that Reye draws up to a point. That is, too much has been made of the fascination of 18th century republicans with Greek and Roman popular government. Obviously there were liberal individualist concerns in Thomas Jefferson and James Madison that were lacking in ancient republic rhetoric and practice. Madison's idea of an extended republic balanced by material interests suggests the application of a new science of politics.

13:39From recent studies of Misesian social thought, it seems to me that no word for Mises or no words for Mises were so disagreeable except for socialists as organic and communal. As a liberal, asserts Mises in Gemeinschaft, one must be committed to a scientific approach to life that maximizes the prosperity of the individual. Societies that have focused on preserving the past or maintaining a cultural heritage, Mises argued, have been unable to achieve that goal. This is a modernist liberal view. The defense of democracy made by Mises is typically liberal. And by liberal, by the way, I do not mean, you know, in accord with the views of the New York Times. I mean 19th century liberal. I mean classical liberal. Democratic regimes can minimize internal tensions because we are led to believe, according to Mises, that the majority is allowed to vote and elect political leaders.

14:35Once this electoral process occurs, Mises hoped, liberal norms and parliamentary procedures can be counted on to keep society tranquil and economically productive. Though Mises knew, quote, that socialist demagogues draw instant crowds in today's democracies, unquote, you found nothing in the democratic principle that requires this situation. Democracy for Mises and for Hayek means popular elections, but not the automatic right to change liberal rules. Clearly, Mises did not understand the operation of modern liberal democracy, particularly as practiced in the US. The democratic principle has indeed led towards social democracy with the fully bureaucratized society that Mises feared. Democracy has not meant mere electoral procedures combined with 19th century liberal safeguards of life and property, but a perpetual administrative intrusion into the lives of progressively disempowered citizens.

15:35One reason for this problem, I would submit, is that liberal democracy is a dangerous mixed regime, which upholds neither liberal freedom nor democratic self-rule. It is, if you will, the hegemonic ideology of the American political class, and as such invoked to justify the seizure of power by public administrators, privileged corporate interests, Social Therapists and Mediocrats, the dissociation of liberalism from property rights in a limited franchise and the divorce between American democracy in any meaningful exercise of self-rule are not accidental. They belong to the strategy of manipulation practiced by those who have benefited from the reconstruction of liberalism and democracy.

16:25And essential to the liberal democratic regime that has enveloped America since the progressive in the present of era is an expansionist imperative fueled by what Edmund Burke called our doctrine. By this pan-interventionist doctrine, it is seen as insensitive or relativist for the U.S. government and its subjects, not citizens but subjects, to concern themselves with everyone else's human rights. By now, human rights have become the rhetorical pretext for governmental inroads at home and abroad. Not everyone is equally authorized to distill or apply these rights. Journalists, administrators, experts, and the sensitizing spokespersons for designated victims are presumed to have a privileged understanding of this arcane wisdom.

17:12Thus, American intervention in Somalia took place after the media and black civil rights leaders stressed the urgent need for sending American forces into that troubled area. The president consulted, or at least I learned this from CBS News, with an undersecretary for human rights before dispatching to Somalia American lives and treasured. Even now, the mediocrats and journalists are belaboring the president with demands to expand NATO, to micromanage the internal politics of Russia, and to do something decisive, in the words of Peter Jennings, something decisive, in Bosnia and Haiti. Human rights require all these entanglements and more, including the punishment of the Chinese government for not conforming to the democratic values of American journalists.

17:59Though many of the same journalists had gushed ecstatically over the murderous Chinese regime of Mao Zedong, they have now become newly sensitized to the restraints on intellectual freedom imposed by Mao's successors. These successors, bear in mind, are far less socialistic than Mao. And this may in fact be the problems we're now learning that the Chinese are suffering from the perils of an uncontrolled or increasingly uncontrolled economy. And journalists expect this to do something about this. They want the American government to show the same displeasure that they feel. The Chinese government must be fundamentally reformed. In the words of A.M. Rosenthal and George Will, The Chinese government must be made civilized, presumably like the denizens of New York City.

18:47Allow me, however, to introduce one limiting situation to the pan-interventionist impulse that I have discussed in my paper. It is one that is clearly present, I think, in the conduct and perhaps thinking of the present administration. Despite the unremitting campaign by many of our syndicated journalists to push the United States into military and financial commitments abroad, and yet even despite the Jacobin transformation of American democracy, it may be argued that American foreign entanglements have become fewer and less dramatic since the end of the Cold War. Despite journalistic and media pressures, Clinton has gone slow in committing American forces to the Bosnian conflict. He has also withdrawn armies from Somalia.

19:33of Somalia, and except for enforcing an embargo, he has done little so far to meddle in Haiti. It may even be suggested that the present administration bears the New Left isolationist legacy, though Warren Christopher lectures the Chinese on democracy, our government takes no action, or I should say our government, his government takes no action against the regime that Rosenthal and Will and other human rights mavens have condemned as inhuman. Proposals are made against North Korea for developing atomic weapons, but again the Clinton administration does not deploy military forces or express its displeasure in an alarmist fashion. While moralizing and appeals to global democracy come natural to this administration, as he did of course to the Republican administrations that preceded it, such gestures are usually not preludes to more interventionist efforts.

20:24Nonetheless, all of this may change if a Republican administration gets back into power and chooses The major difference, I would submit, between left and right, if there is any major difference at all, and Tom Fleming and I were debating, we were discussing this a lot last night, and working feverishly to come up with some difference between left and between the respectable left and the respectable right, There is one difference. Within the political class, I would argue that it is this, that the left wishes to extend Jacobin democracy at home, while the right, in quotation, hopes to spread it everywhere else. Thus the left accelerates the managerial, therapeutic domination of American society through anti-discrimination, dictumological, redistributionist programs. The right, by contrast, considers domestic reform to have been already accomplished and seeks to export the PV, the perfected version of American democracy, everywhere else.

21:23Now, there is no reason to believe that this present division of interest will spare us permanently from New Jacket and Crusades for Democracy, but at least in the near term, the national government does seem to be resisting foreign adventure, and though it may eventually be pressured into overrunning Haiti, I believe that Clinton does not want to be seen any longer or even avoided as a commander in chief. There are too many problems about his own past that will begin to surface. For all of the reasons I have therefore given, I think that the end of the Cold War has brought a lull, if not permanent end, to the military march of American global democracy.

22:12I shall go on to answer any questions, yes? Your last comments, I think all disagreement with, have gotten me up to this century at least. The Democrats have always been the ones who get us to do major entanglement. To a degree you thought the parties are very little different, but at least if we're going to have a country that's run this way, I believe the Republicans seem to be able to manage this pool better, to not get us into a weak position where we've gone into student wars.

23:10Indeed, in the 50s and 60s, the Republican Party becomes the more militantly anti-communist and the more activist anti-communist party. The Democrats still bear, if you will, the legacy of the new left, which was isolationist, anti-war, and I think that this is having an effect on the present administration. Now, you may in fact be right, you know, and I don't claim to be a futurologist. It could be that the Democratic Party will be pushed by its own left wing, if one wishes to include people like Anthony Lewis, into taking a very interventionist stand as long as it doesn't have to confront Communists anymore. But at least for the time being, I mean, the Republican Party remains the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and Elliott Abrams. The Democratic Party, I think, to some extent, still carries the anti-war legacy of the 1970s.

24:00Yes? What about what happened in the combat? We certainly helped push them into a final setting in the name of democracy. I do not approve, obviously, what happened in South Africa, but there were no military forces committed, and although the United States did observe a stupid embargo, it was also being carried up by other countries. I think that American entanglement in South Africa was limited. I also think, by the way, that the South African government could have held on a lot longer than it did. I think it was the clerk and the elements of the national party around him that decided to give in, to concede everything to the other side for various, I suppose, for various political and even theological reasons.

25:00But I don't think the United States took very much of an interventionist role there. I mean, we basically did what other countries were doing. Mr. Singleton. The real legacy of the new left, God, is not in isolation, at least in those of us in the social world. The opposite of what you've heard, by the one world is where the United States shouldn't go through the world, which is doing it in the direction of the United Nations. And we have to intervene, the United States, by the UN, for any of us to go ahead and conclude this discussion. We've got a real commander in chief.

25:42to give power over to the United Nations because the new left was at least globalist in the sense that it did not believe in American national identity or American national sovereignty. But I think, in addition, that there's a certain allergy against military things. I mean, a hatred of armies, a hatred of uniforms. I mean, all the things with which Clinton has now had to make some sort of peace. But I think that it is this repugnance for the military, Repugnance for the Military Tradition, which has remained part of that legacy. On the other hand, I think, as I said, it may be possible that, you know, the desire to remake the rest of the world, now that we've remade the United States, may prove irresistible, you know, in the case of the Democratic Party in the end.

26:29For the time being, I do see this new leftist legacy and the allergy to things military remaining operative. Yes, Joe? You know, it strikes me, Paul, that Franklin Roosevelt has defined liberal conservative in the popular sense for our time. If you are a liberal, you favor the federal government discerning unprecedented power domestically. If you're a conservative, you want federal power asserted abroad. If you're a liberal, you want it asserted domestically. If you want both, you're a moderate.

27:16I agree entirely with your observation, but I can only respond rhetorically. Are there any other questions? Do you think that Trenton's attitude towards the military and so forth, turning command over the UN and so forth, may simply be his propensity to always wanting to be able to blind somebody else?

28:11I think it's also a function of his personality, and he wants to go to blame somebody else, but I think in addition to that, he feels extremely unhappy having to pose as a military leader, given his past, and if his power can be vested in the UN, then the military action will be less associated with his own past actions as a draft dodger.

28:41Thank you very much.