[This article further develops the theme I introduced in the article “Why speak of faction and demagoguery?”]
“For, lo, the wicked bend their bow. They make ready their arrow upon the string that they may privily shoot at the upright in heart. If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” — Psalm 11:2-3
“[W]e have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. — John Adams, Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 11 October 1798, in Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William Hull (New York, 1848), pp 265-6.
“[We] are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” — Justice William O. Douglas, Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306, 313, 72 S.Ct. 679, 683, 96 L.Ed. 954 (1952)
America’s founders hoped that the Constitution they devised for our government of, by and for the people would avoid the devolution into licentiousness, strife and tyranny that had previously overtaken unalloyed “democratic” governments, on those few occasions when they endured long enough to be considered as such. They pinned this hope on what Madison called the “scheme of representation” (Federalist #10), in which the responsibility for leadership depends upon the people, who exercise it in periodic elections structured to exercise and strengthen their disposition and capacity to bear it conscientiously. As Founders like Adams understood, popularly elected representational government depends for its success on the character of the people.
The dissolution of constitutional government Adams anticipated is now taking place in the United States. It is, as Adams foretold, the product of what are, in other respects, symptoms of our great material success as a people. That success has spawned an elitist faction, addicted to the perquisites of wealth and power, and self-righteously contemptuous of morality and religion. On account of this contempt, successful members of this faction, abusing their privileged positions of authority, power and influence in every profession and walk of life, are working systematically to undermine the character of the American people. They assiduously flatter and encourage the selfish and unnatural fears, conceits and passions of individuals, until their preoccupation with the vain identity rooted in these sentiments becomes the cause for which, as citizens, people organize themselves for political action.
This impolitic preoccupation first discredits and then subverts the constitutional government that entrusts sovereign authority to the citizen body of the people, until at length it is simply overthrown. For, by abusing sovereign power to enforce their own selfish and unnatural conceits and passions, the people abandon the just aim for which that power exists, which is to preserve the good that by right all humans share and are supposed to represent and preserve. That common good; that proper aim and end of human sovereignty, is the existence, perpetuation and proper contentment of the nature all human beings have in common. By abandoning the essential aim of human sovereignty, the people prove themselves unfit to possess it.
As we Americans are now beginning to learn this unfitness soon becomes apparent. In command of the power of government, vice and selfishness abuse it to force natural conscience (i.e., the disposition to do what is right according to the specifically human provisions of “the laws of nature and of Nature’s God”) to submit to the dictates of inordinate and preternaturally selfish passions. As this happens, government is transposed from its proper basis in respect for unalienable rights, to a basis in respect of power sufficient to force submission to unconscionable wrongs.
As America’s Founders accurately predicted, the political focal point for this transposition is “demagoguery,” whereby articulate members of the elitist faction rouse, and pander to, the strong, destructive fears and passions of the people in order to use the force they generate to destroy the foundations of the authority by which the people govern themselves. In this way the people are transformed from citizens of conscience, who are and of right ought to be free, into subjects of passion, bound and determined to vent their whims regardless of conscience. As such they are ready to be misled, manipulated and ensnared; easy prey for the would-be tyrants who are always working to re-enslave mankind.
The typical strategy of mobocractic demagoguery involves becoming the focal point for some fearful or angry passion of the people. Thus focused for effect upon the demagogue, the force of that passion is then vented in a way that contradicts the premises of the people’s just claim to self-government. In the American experience, this has often involved rousing a mobocractic frenzy against some individual or group identified as the source of threat or opposition. In the heedless exercise of power that results from this frenzy, the people discard the constitutional constraints that distinguish the right exercise of sovereignty from the willful assertion that “might makes right” by which the few have routinely justified their tyrannies.
But when the fumes of passion dissipate, the still, small voice of conscience produces its momentous effect. Brought to shame by their abuse of sovereign power, people are all too readily disposed to surrender responsibility for it. When those who claim to be their betters step forward willing to relieve them of that responsibility, they are all too readily disposed to give it up. And so, almost with gratitude, they surrender the liberty they have abused, which now stinks with the residual effects of their angrily self-righteous surrender to viciousness and crime.
Would-be tyrants, deploying the strategy of mobocractic demagoguery have appeared now and then on the America scene, often enjoying some success at the state and local level (particularly in large urban areas). Obama and Donald Trump, who seem to fit the mold, have now appeared at the national level. (Some might say that Andrew Jackson and FDR did so before them, but though both of them sought energetically to push the power of their office to its limits, they neither acted nor proposed to act, as if the exigencies or passions of the moment simply superseded those limits.) But these new demagogues appear in the context of a wholesale corruption of the American political process that transcends their significance as individuals.
For in the elitist faction’s phony partisan politics, demagoguery is no longer a characteristic of this of that American politician. It is the working premise of the whole political sham in which they participate. People of good will are no longer asked to choose, as among equals, those who best represent beneficial union their good will makes possible. They are manipulatively compelled to choose, from among those who claim to be their superiors (in material wealth or power) the one who promises most successfully to rouse and exploit their most selfish and enslaving fear, desire or pride. Thus what ought to be the politics of rightful liberty becomes instead the strategy deployed in ongoing and successful campaign to overthrow it. Caveant electores! Let the voters beware.