THE TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY

THE THREAT IN THE UNITED STATES AND MEXICO

Mexico and the United States have tyrants at their gates, not because they are in danger of a military coup d’etat, which is the means most people think tyrannies access power, but through democratic means. The first elected a president who seems about to start acting as a tyrant, and the second is approaching elections between two parties that seem to be dominated by their extremists. While the two parties say they are salvaging democracy, they are sinking it by injecting divisionism and hatred in dark times. In the Republican Party, the edge of authoritarianism is wielded by the leader of the party; in the Democratic Party, it is wielded by extremists among their bases. In both cases, they want to capture power to nullify their rivals forever. One way or the other, they may destroy the American democracy.

Many people believe this is impossible. It is a common mistake to suppose that the protection against tyranny is embedded in democracy. It is not. It is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to keep societies free.

A democracy does not protect society from tyrannical rule if the majority of the population agrees or approves of the tyrant's actions. A society ruled by a majority can be as oppressive as any absolutist monarchy. This rule is easy to understand and memorize. Yet, people forget it or do not appreciate its importance. All the destructive tyrannies of the twentieth century rested on mobilizing the majority against a minority. Hitler, Chavez, Ortega, and many other minor tyrants escalated power through elections, and others, like Mussolini, were called by the appropriate democratic institutions to establish a government. Lenin and Mao were not elected or called but were very popular when they took over the government. Democracy did not deter them.

The fact that democracy alone cannot forever deter tyranny has been recognized ever since its invention. Aristotle said that democracy inevitably degenerates into despotism, and the Greeks and Romans experienced this transition. You need something additional to keep democracy alive.

THE RULE OF LAW AND THE RULE OF RIGHTS

Many people feel at ease because they think the rule of law is the true deterrent to tyranny. Yet, tyrants always control the three branches of government and can pass and change laws at will. The Rule of Law can be beneficial or malevolent depending upon the nature of the law it refers to.

Consider the Nuremberg Laws, created by the Nazis in 1935. These laws established clear criteria for the classification of the population as Jews and Aryans and specified the rights that should be taken away from the former depending on the percentage of Jewish blood in their veins. Courts scrupulously applied these laws, providing a perverse example of how the rule of law can be used for nefarious purposes.

The Nazis also issued laws legalizing the sequestration of freedom and other individual rights from the general German population. Less than two months after Hitler came to power, the Reichstag changed the current constitution with the Enabling Laws. These laws transferred legislative authority to the chancellor, consolidating all formal powers in the hands of Hitler. The Enabling Laws met all the formal requirements for a valid constitution modification, including approval from a two-thirds majority. From then on, the rule of law consisted of obeying Hitler’s arbitrary wishes.

Thus, the Nazis took good care of ruling in the name of the law. The Soviets also pretended to rule in the same legalistic way. All the current tyrants keep falsely independent legislative chambers and judicial institutions in place to claim to have the checks and balances in place even if everybody knows that they have all powers concentrated under their control.

Two Concepts of Law  

Of course, this sense of the law is a perversion of the classic Western concept of the Rule of Law. Most people would say that the Enabling and the Nuremberg Laws contradict our innate sense of right and wrong. As applied to different circumstances in life, that sense is what we call “natural law.” The belief in natural law as the legitimate guide of all legislation and the belief that law is whatever a body with authority to legislate enacts give life to two completely different conceptions of law.

Sophocles distinguished between these two kinds of law in a tragedy I have quoted frequently in these lines. He contrasted these two conceptions of the law in his tragedy Antigone. Creon, the ruler of Thebes, issues a proclamation commanding that the body of Polyneices, a rebel who had died in battle, should remain unburied. This meant that his soul could not proceed to his final resting place in the underworld. Polyneices’s sister, Antigone, defies the law by burying the body so that his soul could rest. Creon confronts Antigone. The following conversation takes place:

CREON: Now, tell me thou — not in many words, but briefly — knewest thou that an edict had forbidden this?

ANTIGONE: I knew it: could I help it? It was public.

CREON: And thou didst indeed dare to transgress that law?

ANTIGONE: Yes; for it was not Zeus that had published me that edict; not such are the laws set among men by the justice who dwells with the gods below; nor deemed I that thy decrees were of such force, that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of today or yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth.^[1]

The difference between Creon’s and Antigone’s conceptions of the law gives birth to the two kinds of society: Creon, who believes that laws are laws because they carry the will of the ruler, embodies the vertical principle, and Antigone, who believes that laws are legitimate only to the extent that they are based on the natural rights of the individual, embodies the horizontal principle.

These two conceptions of law gave birth to the two kinds of society. The belief that laws are laws because they carry the will of the ruler embodies the vertical principle, and the belief that laws are legitimate only to the extent that they are based on the individual's natural rights represents the horizontal.

Of course, this is true only if the Rule of Rights is respected, and this depends on people's values.^[2]

The Natural Law

Values, or their absence, shape societies independent of a person’s skin color, background, or geographical location. And values are the only standard that can be used to make absolute judgments about human behavior. Natural law is the only set of values that respond globally to the Golden Rule — do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Natural law was the only argument that could be used to condemn Nazi war criminals. Adolf Eichmann defended himself by arguing that he had obeyed orders when sending millions of people to their deaths in the concentration camps. According to German law, the orders were legitimate and valid. According to the natural law, they were not. This is the difference.

Thus, what distinguished the societies that succumbed to destructive regimes from those that did not was their values. The values prioritizing the Rule of Rights produced multi-dimensional societies, which adjusted better to the transformations of the Industrial Revolution, while those prioritizing the attainment and maintenance of a given outcome fell under the sway of destructive regimes. The former got their social cohesion from social interest, while the latter got it from the coercion of a tyrant. Societies have a choice between social interest and tyranny.

As I hope most readers have noted, the liberal democracies, those based on the Rule of Rights, did much better than the vertical regimes during the past adjustment to new times, those associated with the Industrial Revolution.

So, if you choose social interest and cohesion over the instantaneous but false solution to all problems by a tyrant, you will be losing in the long term—as those who followed communism and Nazi fascism learned in the twentieth century.

THE ULTIMATE DEFENSE AGAINST TYRANNY 

If flexible societies have the advantage in the long run, why do so many societies choose vertical, rigid forms of organization?

Vertical order is the most common because it is the easiest to obtain. Vertical order subordinates the diversity of a conglomerate to the will of a central decision-maker. It uses coercion to create uniformity out of diversity. Horizontal order is much more challenging because it does not create uniformity. Instead, it harmonizes the strains of diversity to produce a collective will, leaving diversity in place. Reducing the dispersion of diversity results in an acceptable range, which requires a solid basis of self-control on the part of the individuals — ultimately rooted in shared values of respect for the individual rights of everyone else. To have this self-control, they need social interest, a civic spirit.

Verticality is the only way to create social order when such self-control does not exist. Vertical societies depend on authoritarian structures, while horizontal ones depend on social cohesion. To be multidimensional, a society must include social cohesion among its values. Social cohesion, in turn, is interconnected with the Rule of Rights.

So, the essence of and precondition for liberal democracy is the existence of social interest. When it is present and manifest in the rule of rights, exercising self-interest becomes a boon for society. In its absence, people allow groups with stronger self-interest to take tyrannical control because self-interest becomes divisive and destructive without balancing social interests.

This is what is happening in the United States and Mexico. Most people do not see the danger or do not care because they think that the people whose rights will be denied are their opponents.

THE CHOICE  

Unfortunately, we live in cynical societies that believe only in concrete things and consider values such as justice and freedom abstract magnitudes that do not contribute to earning more money, gaining more power, enjoying more comforts, or sinking our enemies forever. Following these ideas, which they deem practical, many people choose the offers of prospective tyrants.

But choosing tyrants is the opposite of what is needed, not only because they destroy primary human values, freedom and other individual rights, but also because they increase society’s rigidity, putting them on the path of subsequent disasters—as happened with Nazi Germany, destroyed in a confrontation with the rest of the world the Nazis started, and communist Russia, which collapsed under the weight of its system’s sclerosis.

In the case of Mexico, the party in power has an enormous majority, enough to control the executive and legislative branches. They have used this majority to get control of the judicial branch. They are not showing any respect for the rights of the minorities that are needed to run a sustainable regime. In the United States, whoever wins the presidential elections will do it with a tiny majority. Yet, both parties want to make transcendental changes, which their opposition sees as stealing their country. None of them will be able to destroy their opposition or dent it significantly. Thus, the opposition is likely to come back to power and reverse the measures taken by the winner in these elections. Later on, the winner of this election will win again and reinstall the measures they initially took. And so on, in a chaotic way.

This is not how to manage a country, much less a superpower. Eventually, one of two solutions will emerge. First, the two parties must agree on the country's long-term path. Second, a bloody tyranny will be installed. Whoever wins should inaugurate the conversations in an agreement. Contrary to what many people think, the second option is very real.

--------

Manuel Hinds is a Fellow at The Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University. He shared the Manhattan Institute's 2010 Hayek Prize. He is the author of five books, the last in English being In Defense of Liberal Democracy. His website is manuelhinds.com  

---

^[1] Sophocles, Antigone, translated by R. C. Jebb. Available in http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/antigone.html

^[2] At this point, we must make a distinction between rights and entitlements. These two words are sometimes used synonymously. They are not. They are both promises by a government. But there are fundamental differences between them. Rights empower people to enjoy a certain measure of freedom, while entitlements establish a claim to have something. A right, for instance, promises the freedom to speak freely, while an entitlement is a claim on a government’s promise to guarantee house ownership for every family. When asserting that individual rights are essential for maintaining democracy, I refer to rights properly, not entitlements. If the Rule of Rights is applied, a majority cannot oppress a minority. This does not mean that providing a suitable environment for people to own their houses is not good. It is only that these acts should be part of government policies, not part of the Constitutions.