Democracy

One of the advantages of democracy, from the governmental point of view, is that it makes the average citizen easier to deceive, since he regards the government as his government.

High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by ...

In order to crush all opposing forces and to facilitate the perfecting of the totalitarian machinery, it became necessary to step up the process of centralization. This alone is able to foster uniformity and egalitarianism, and to ensure swift execution of governmental orders.

Psychologically, rule stemming from a person considered superior is less oppressive than coercion exercised by equals—not to mention that exercised by those felt to be inferior.

Since the victory of Lucerne the dogma of popular sovereignty and the omnipotence of democracy has become the practical basis of our public institutions. I don’t doubt that this ideology is going to proceed to all, even its most extreme conclusions, if the conditions of Europe permit it and if great catastrophes do not lead the people back to the true foundations of a sound political life. Yet complete democracy is the end of everything good. Republics have the most to fear from it. I tremble at the thought of its expansion, not on account of property, but because democracy ...

But alas! the rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level, is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride, and submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last traces of these remarkable myrmidons.

Democracy, indeed, has no enthusiasm for the exceptional, and where she cannot deny or remove it, she hates it from the bottom of her heart. Herself a monstrous product of mediocre brains and their envy, democracy can use as tools only mediocre men, and the pushing place-hunters give her all desired guarantees of sympathy. Yet it must be admitted that a new spirit, coming from below, gets hold of the masses so that they, driven by dark instincts, are looking again for the exceptional. But herein they may be surprisingly badly advised, and take a fancy to a Boulanger!

We, who hold a different belief--we, who regard the democratic movement, not only as a degenerating form of political organization, but as equivalent to a degenerating, a waning type of man, as involving his mediocrising and depreciation: where have WE to fix our hopes?

For to win a crowd is not so great a trick; one only needs some talent, a certain dose of untruth and a little acquaintance with the human passions.

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for lunch.

The Emperors possessed, it is true, an immense and unchecked power which allowed them to gratify all their whimsical tastes and to employ for that purpose the whole strength of the state. They frequently abused that power arbitrarily to deprive their subjects of property or life; their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the greater number; it was fixed to some few main objects and neglected the rest; it was violent but its range was limited. But it would seem that, if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, ...

After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it ...

Those who are called elites are not members of noble families, dwelling in castles isolated on hills above the peasantry, and living apart from the society over which they domineer. Rather, they and their institutions are the fetid carbuncles sprung from the carcass of modern populist society. They are the green crud which has formed along the top of the stagnant swamp of the hyper-democratic state.

When a democracy which is thirsting for freedom has evil cupbearers presiding over the feast, and has drunk too deeply of the strong wine of freedom, then, unless her rulers are very amenable and give a plentiful draught, she calls them to account and punishes them, and says that they are cursed oligarchs.

The democratic idea favours the nurturing of a human type prepared for slavery in the most subtle sense of the term. Every democracy is at one and the same time an involuntary establishment for the breeding of tyrants, taking the word in all its connotations, including those of a spiritual nature.

Of this I am certain, that in a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority, whenever strong divisions prevail in that kind of polity, as they often must; and that oppression of the minority will extend to far greater numbers, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single sceptre. In such a popular persecution, individual sufferers are in a much more deplorable condition than in any other. Under a cruel prince they have the balmy compassion of ...

There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud.

Yet since democracy cannot relinquish its egalitarian heritage, the jealousy, envy and insecurity of the voting masses tend to give new impetus to the egalitarian mania as well as to ever increasing demands for “social security” and other forms of “economic democracy.” These cravings and desires result in specific measures, and thus we see finally a bureaucratic totalitarianism restricting personal liberties.

. . . in our own day, no fact is more incontestable and conspicuous than the love of democracy for authoritative regulation. . . . The expansion of the authority and the multiplication of the functions of the State in other fields, and especially in the field of social regulation, is an equally apparent accompaniment of modern democracy. This increase of state power means a multiplication of restrictions imposed upon the various forms of human action. It means an increase of bureaucracy, of the number and power of state officials. It means also a constant increase of taxation, which is ...

The over-all degeneration of man down to what today appears to the socialist dolts and flatheads as their “man of the future”-as their ideal-this degeneration and diminution of man into the perfect herd animal, this animalization of man into the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims, is possible, there is no doubt of it.

This incessant creation of restrictive laws and regulations, surrounding the pettiest actions of existence with the most complicated formalities, inevitably has for its result the confining within narrower and narrower limits of the sphere in which the citizen may move freely. Victims of the delusion that equality and liberty are the better assured by the multiplication of laws, nations daily consent to put up with trammels increasingly burdensome. They do not accept this legislation with impunity. Accustomed to put up with every yoke, they soon end by desiring servitude, and lose all spontaneousness and energy. They are then no more ...

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob.

When the ranks of society are unequal, and men unlike each other in condition, there are some individuals invested with all the power of superior intelligence, learning, and enlightenment, whilst the multitude is sunk in ignorance and prejudice. Men living at these aristocratic periods are therefore naturally induced to shape their opinions by the superior standard of a person or a class of persons, whilst they are averse to recognize the infallibility of the mass of the people. The contrary takes place in ages of equality. The nearer the citizens are drawn to the common level of an equal and ...

The actual modern mass-man is, in fact, a primitive who has slipped through the wings on to the age-old stage of civilisation.

. . . we have besides as the common expression, in part of the ideas of the French Revolution and in part of the demands of modern reform movements, what is called democracy, that is, an ideology merged from a thousand different sources and highly differentiated according to the various layers of her supporters, yet in one respect invariable; that for it the power of the state over the individual can never be sufficient. As a result the boundary lines between state and society are obliterated, and the state is expected to carry out all tasks which society might possibly ...

All despotisms have an uncanny and superior intuition for that which maintains human independence and dignity, and it is curious to see our radicals pontificating just like our Prince-President. It is equally strange to observe realistic teaching everywhere serving to choke under a compilation of “facts” the freedom to examine applied to moral problems. Materialism is the auxiliary doctrine of every tyranny, be it that of a single man or of the masses. To crush the spiritual, moral, general human being, if I may say so, by turning him into a specialist; to create no longer complete human beings, but ...

Democracy is based upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argue it to pieces. ~ Henry Louis Mencken

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be liberty. ~ Fisher Ames

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.

Democracy, will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes, and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure and every one of these will soon mold itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues, and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit, and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few. ~ John Adams

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.

Democracy, a delightful form of government, anarchic and motley, assigning a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. ~ Henry Louis Mencken

It is probable that “democracy” is the most original form of “organized” society. One could well imagine that if seven out of ten cavemen wanted to do a thing collectively in one way and the three others decided differently, the majority of these cavemen (assuming that they are of about equal bodily strength) could force the rest to accept their decision. The rule of majorities, in combination with the employment of brutal force, is likely to be the most primitive form of government in the development of mankind.

And without divine help, said Adeimantus, they will go on for ever making and mending their laws and their lives in the hope of attaining perfection.

The great political superstition of the past was the divine right of kings The great political superstition of the present is the divine right of parliaments. The oil of anointing seems unawares to have dripped from the head of the one on to the heads of the many, and given sacredness to them also and to their decrees.

The paternalistic state with its infinity of governmental regulations and social services is the Anglo-Saxon equivalent which may become a collective despotism which destroys human liberty and spiritual initiative as effectively as any Communist or Nazi terrorism.

[ First published in The Reader for June 10, 1865 .] A Hindoo, who, before beginning his day’s work, salaams to a bit of plastic clay, out of which, in a few moments, he has extemporized a god in his own image, is an object of amazement to the European. We read with surprise bordering on scepticism of worship done by machinery, and of prayers which owe their supposed efficacy to the motion given by the wind to the papers they are written on. When told how certain of the Orientals, if displeased with their wooden deities, take them down ...

There is an idolatry which, instead of carving the object of its worship out of dead matter, takes humanity for its raw material, and expects, by moulding a mass of this humanity into a particular form, to give it powers or properties quite different from those it had before it was moulded. In the one case as in the other, the raw material is, as much as may be, disguised. There are decorative appliances by which the savage helps himself to think that he has something more than wood before him; and the citizen gives to the political agencies he ...

Kelvil May I ask, Lord Illingworth, if you regard the House of Lords as a better institution than the House of Commons? Lord Illingworth A much better institution, of course. We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.

A tendency to democracy does not mean a tendency to parliamentary government, or even a tendency towards greater liberty. On the contrary, strong arguments may be adduced, both from history and from the nature of things, to show that democracy may often prove the direct opposite of liberty. In ancient Rome the old aristocratic republic was gradually transformed into a democracy, and it then passed speedily into an imperial despotism. In France a corresponding change has more than once taken place. A despotism resting on a plebiscite is quite as natural a form of democracy as a republic, and some ...

The secular state is not content to rule in limited areas but tends to expand into every aspect of our lives and to demand total obedience. These tendencies are manifest throughout Western culture.

The average man finds himself with “ideas” in his head, but he lacks the faculty of ideation. He has no conception even of the rare atmosphere in which ideas live. He wishes to have opinions, but is unwilling to accept the conditions and presuppositions that underlie all opinion. Hence his ideas are in effect nothing more than appetites in words, some- thing like musical romanzas.

Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief

. . . because of this ignorance of the primitiveness of their instincts, of the urgency of their needs, of the impatience of their desires, the people show a preference towards summary forms of authority. The thing they are looking for is not legal guarantees, of which they do not have any idea and whose power they do not understand; they do not care for intricate mechanisms or for checks and balances for which, on their own account, they have no use; it is a boss in whose word they confide, a leader whose intentions are known to the people ...

The wealthy man, who, blasé though he may be, has no occupation in life but to chase along the highway of happiness, the man nurtured in luxury, and habituated from early youth to being obeyed by others, the man, finally, who has no profession other than elegance, is bound at all times to have a facial expression of a very special kind. Dandyism is an ill-defined social attitude as strange as dueling; it goes back a long way, since Caesar, Catilina, Alcibiades provide us with brilliant examples of it; it is very widespread, since Chateaubriand found examples of it in ...

The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.

Their authority is a thing blind, deaf, hideous, grotesque, tragic, amusing, serious, and obscene. It is impossible for the artist to live with the People. All despots bribe. The people bribe and brutalise. Who told them to exercise authority? They were made to live, to listen, and to love. Someone has done them a great wrong. They have marred themselves by imitation of their inferiors. They have taken the sceptre of the Prince. How should they use it? They have taken the triple tiara of the Pope. How should they carry its burden? They are as a clown whose heart ...