Many are the happy hours you've spent with a book in one of the library's window seats, but this morning you come in an altered state of mind. Something happened during the night. To say that you had an actual visitation and not just a dream is out of the question in this day and age. If it was a dream, though, it was a forbidden one so stark that daylight can't dispel it. It placed you here in the library, not to read once again but to listen for the first time. Sure enough, you noticed a faint voice — a constant murmur that must have been present through all those edifying hours, gently buoying your mind as if it were a boat at anchor in a cove.
Somehow you knew (being in a dream) that to hear the voice clearly you must go to a certain shelf and take down a certain book. But no sooner had you taken down the book than the bookcase vanished, revealing a dark passage with one lighted patch of wall at the end. Of course you ventured in. As you approached that spot of light, you made out something hanging on the wall: another historic photograph like the ones in the library. It was of a man in a double-breasted suit smiling genially at the camera. Of course! Al Smith, the New York politician of the 1920s. And the voice — his, no doubt — was repeating his most famous words: "The only cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy." Fine-sounding words. They had never disturbed your reading mind, but now they brought out a long-suppressed question: "How, exactly, would that work?" By what ineluctable process would a demos rampant on a field of politics keep itself going straight? After all, the People are but people: a notoriously mixed lot. When Jimmy Carter promised America a government as good as its people, didn't even some of his supporters sigh?
Just then you looked down at the book you'd taken from the shelf and saw that it was Plato's Republic. Oh, gosh. What was it he said about democracy?
[assuming the character of Socrates in dialogue with Adeimantus] The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.
Yes, the natural order.
And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty?
As we might expect.
Oh, well, that's just Plato, you dreamed. How do you reason with someone who yearns for a philosopher king? We all know that more advanced thinkers have come down firmly on the side of democracy. The library must be full of examples.
So you hurried back up the passage and out — to your bedroom, where you awoke to find sunshine waffling between the warm light of hope and the cold light of day. And now, fortified by a resolute breakfast, here we are back in the library. Where to begin the search for a vindication of Al Smith? With Aristotle, perhaps?
Aristotle modifies the views of his teacher somewhat and introduces an emphasis on the state (polis), or community of citizens, which ought to be governed for the common good. Unfortunately for the ideal of democracy unbound, he concludes:
Now the corruptions attending each of these governments are these; a kingdom may degenerate into a tyranny, an aristocracy into an oligarchy, and a state into a democracy. Now a tyranny is a monarchy where the good of one man only is the object of government, an oligarchy considers only the rich, and a democracy only the poor; but neither of them have a common good in view.
Taking Plato and Aristotle together, it would seem that monarchy and democracy were two routes to tyranny, the second only more circuitous than the first.
Locke, whose name is inseparable from the concept of modern representative democracy, not only asserted the primacy of the people but held them to be the originators of government itself.
To avoid the disturbances and to curb the violators of the natural state, Locke declared, men enter "political or civil society." They leave the state of nature, band together in commonwealths, and appoint a government to act as a common judge over them and to protect their rights of life, liberty, and property. Thus government is freely created by the people to protect already existing rights. It derives its power from "the consent of the governed."
— J. Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition, 213
However, Locke set a test for participation that was more discriminating than it must have seemed to him.
He insisted ... that the test for participation in government was the possession, not of property, which he assumed all men should have, but of reason. It is this element in Locke's thought which made his work a seed bed for the democratic as well as the liberal movement of the times to come. The result of a belief in "common sense" was a belief in government by the common man.
— Ibid., 214
Locke imagined, and we liberals of "the times to come" long imagined, a demos whose common sense had advanced beyond self-satisfied folk wisdom to self-disciplined rationality. Especially in the twentieth century, we saw evidence of that advancement in the fruits of universal education. The problem is that we and Locke implicitly premised faith in democracy on certain mental powers and habits in the individual.
Locke insisted, and it is an important point, that man has no right to the exercise of his freedom until he attains the use of his reason; that is, until the child grows into the adult. Freedom without reason is mere license. As Locke put it, "lunatics and idiots are never set free from the government or their parents." Fortunately, most human beings are not lunatics or idiots, and "thus we are born free as we are born rational, not that we have actually the exercise of either; age, that brings one, brings with it the other, too."
— Ibid., 211-212
That abstract treatment of an important point supposes a universal process of maturation that brings generally satisfactory results: the ripening of basic mental competence into political competence and of reason into rationality. In life, though, results vary widely even among the mentally sound. (Those unfortunate people whom Locke excludes in such brutal terms are nevertheless members of the potential US electorate.) In America's civic culture, it's an article of faith that everyone of age is qualified to vote and that everyone must be encouraged to do so. To suggest that people should refrain from voting unless they've acquainted themselves with the stakes, the positions, and the personalities is to invite a sanctimonious rebuke. Like "The only cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy," "Everyone should exercise the precious right to vote" sounds fine. But how can it be a fine thing to submit vital choices to the judgement of people who are presumptively unprepared to judge? That wasn't what John Locke had in mind.
Unlike Locke, who recognized the people as the ultimate sovereign even in a constitutional monarchy such as England's, Montesquieu recognized no one entity as sovereign. He trusted only to the balancing of power against power; not just among political institutions, but also among elements of society and particularly between the aristocrats (of whom he was one) and the commoners.
In other words, the essence of Montesquieu's political philosophy is liberalism: the goal of the political order is to insure the moderation of power by the balance of powers, by the equilibrium of people, nobility, and king in the French or the English monarchy, or the equilibrium of the people and privileged, plebs and patriciate, in the Roman republic. These are different examples of the same fundamental conception of a heterogeneous and hierarchical society in which the moderation of political power requires the balance of powers.
— Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought 1 (trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver), 60
Montesquieu believed that the stability of a republic depended on the animating sentiment of civic virtue, which, as Aron explains, "is respect for law and the individual's dedication to the welfare of the group." A polity dependent on an overriding concern for the group as a whole, maintained by healthy rivalry between social strata, is one in which ever more democracy would be a destructive trend.
What specific political position did Montesquieu hold and what overall effect did his theories have? He was certainly not a democrat. The separation and balance of powers was opposed to democracy, and, in Montesquieu's scheme, social or political change could only come about through the concert and agreement of the three powers. He was, then, a liberal conservative or a conservative liberal, arguing in favor of a limited, balanced, constitutional government, i.e., government on the English model.
— Bronowski and Mazlish, 274
Voltaire and Rousseau are no help at all. Voltaire, who famously exalted freedom of speech, was downright contemptuous of democracy. He favored an enlightened monarchy. Rousseau praised direct democracy, which is feasible only in small city-states, while placing quaint restrictions on the representative democracy that interests us.
What we call democracy he calls elective aristocracy; this, he says, is the best of all governments, but it is not suitable to all countries. The climate must be neither very hot nor very cold; the produce must not exceed what is necessary, for, where it does, the evil of luxury is inevitable, and it is better that this evil should be confined to a monarch and his Court than diffused throughout the population. In virtue of these limitations, a large field is left for despotic government.
— Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 674
Well, then, what about the thinkers of the American Revolution? How would they have responded to Al Smith's applause line, those words that echo through our ancestral home? Isn't there a single, solitary one of them who unconditionally advocated democracy?
That would be Thomas Paine. He championed the principles of equality, liberty, and innate rights. As he detested monarchy and aristocracy, he advocated democracy. However, his advocacy followed from a belief in the natural rights of every human being that made democracy the obvious, unexamined, choice.
The system of representation provides for everything, and is the only system in which nations and governments can always appear in their proper character.
— Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part II, Chapter IV
Paine was much more an activist in the causes of American independence and human rights than a theorist of political systems. Though his writings are rich in the spirit of democracy, they're not the place to look for a projection of its tendencies and pitfalls in practice.
James Madison was convinced that the evils of democracy would destroy it in its unfiltered (direct) form, a system of majority rule in which "there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual," and that the cure was to filter democracy through the medium of enlightened representation.
The two great points of difference between a Democracy and a Republic are, first, the delegation of the Government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.
The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice, will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.
— Federalist No. 10
Even that cure takes a great deal for granted; and it has never, in living memory, been less granted than it is today.
Alexander Hamilton needed no prompting to acknowledge the evils of democracy. He would cure them with the firmly moderating influences of a strong executive and an influential aristocracy.
All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. Can a democratic assembly, who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good?
— Speech to the Constitutional Convention, June 18, 1787
John Adams was no more sanguine about democracy itself. In A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787-88), he stressed the need for a complex form of government with checks and balances in addition to representative democracy; which brings us back to Montesquieu's overriding concern. Thomas Jefferson, though strongly pro-democracy, brings us back to Locke's underlying concern:
Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.
— Letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787
Benjamin Franklin, in his telegraphic declaration of "[a] Republic, if you can keep it," acknowledged the fragility of even a constitutional representative democracy. His worry that such a republic would come to no good end echoes the pessimism of Plato, Aristotle, Voltaire, Hamilton, and John Adams — who wrote, late in life,
Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide.
— Letter to John Taylor, December 17th, 1814
Most of the "democratic thinkers" had higher hopes than that. Still, with all but Paine the focus was on finding a basis for good government; not on idealizing the demos.
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We of the present-day Democratic Party, and Americans to the left of that party, have settled into the habit of idealizing the demos. It came most naturally to those on the far left — the certified Left — where ideology was wont to express itself in posters of rosy-cheeked workers striding into the dawn with sledgehammers and spades on their shoulders. It has come consequently to liberal Democrats, for whom the Left, despite its philosopher-king tendencies in practice, remains custodian of the shrine to popular sovereignty. Whatever one's position on this or that policy, one can hardly afford to be a Democrat and yet appear unsound on the subject of democracy.
So, in the age of Trump, prominent Democrats warn that American democracy is in danger. The boy Donald, in his ultimate tantrum, upends the rule of law; destroys the balance of power between the Executive and Congress; mocks the sentiment of civic virtue; slashes the sinews of the republic — and yet the Democratic response revolves around concern for democracy. That's ironic, considering that it was "more democracy" that gave us President Donald J. Trump.
In 2016, less than fifty years had passed since the advent of the modern US presidential primary election. There had been primary elections of one kind or another in various parts of the country since the late nineteenth century, but by the middle of the twentieth century the selection of presidential nominees by the major parties had come to be more tightly controlled by delegates to the national conventions; and thus by deal-brokering party leaders. After street protests against the Democratic convention (and a brutal response by the Chicago police) in 1968, the Democratic Party acted to make the nominating process more democratic by means of binding primary elections and caucuses. The Republican Party followed suit in the 1970s. Note that the convention delegates became bound by the primary results.
Donald Trump ran for president in the election of 2016. He entered the race with the status of an eccentric political neophite, a crass libertine, and a flailing businessman. He shouldn't have stood a chance. However, he was known to millions by his long-running performance, playing himself, on a "reality" television show (which is to say a roughly-planned show on which his character was always assured of making a masterful impression). He then succeeded in dominating the Republican candidate debates with his disruptive brashness. To voters who looked no further, he had the appeal of a self-confident businessman who would "shake things up" in Washington and thrash their perceived enemies for them. His popularity snowballed in the primary elections until there was nothing left to broker at the convention. He'd smashed his way into the Republican Party and seized its nomination while its leaders looked on helplessly. Then it was on to the general election of 2016, where democracy would still have avoided a pratfall but for the electoral college system. In 2024, democracy had everything its own way and actually made Donald Trump the winner of the popular vote. Just imagine a plausible alternative to all this in a world of brokered conventions: eight years under a President Jeb Bush and then, probably, the election of a Democrat. There'd have been a lot for Democrats to dislike during the Republican years, but there'd have been no need for an elderly Joe Biden to emerge in 2020 as the only electable Democrat with the fate of the republic hanging in the balance. It wouldn't have been hanging in the balance. There'd have been no gutting of executive departments, no attempt to discredit the rule of law, no demagoguery leading toward incitement of violence against Congress. The discontent of the demos might have grown, but it wouldn't have brought us to where we are now, in August 2025: a state that's even worse for the demos than for the rich and well born.
Worse for the demos — if only the demos knew. As John Stuart Mill remarks in On Liberty,
Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without comments to bring out their meaning. The whole strength and value, then, of human judgment, depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand. In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind.
One might preface that by noting that no fact can tell its own story if its very existence remains unknown. We must inform ourselves before we can function as the kind of person Mill is counting on: one "whose judgment is really deserving of confidence"; and that's if we bring rationality to the task as Locke expected. At least economic facts do eventually make themselves known, even to the least inquiring among us. As for comments to bring out their meaning, rest assured that some will be supplied by Donald Trump. He's certain to blame the effects of his own incompetence and malfeasance on others. It remains to be seen whether his ersatz truth will crowd out the genuine kind in the minds of enough Americans to serve his purposes. If history is a reliable guide, it will fall short at last. Trump will lose favor. Then the discontent of the demos will grow again while its collective mind turns over in its sleep.
American Democrats, left-wing populists, and democratic romantics have kept a secret for so long that it now comes down from generation to generation as the forgotten grain of sand inside a pearl of received wisdom; the pearl being recognition of popular sovereignty, and the secret being that such a sovereign won't prove much wiser or more virtuous than a hereditary monarch. Granted that we the people are entitled to have our way, it doesn't follow that our way will be good for us. We're a sovereign in need of help. To the extent that we accept help in the forms of gatekeeping, power-balancing, and enlightened mediation, the result will be less democracy. To the extent that we insist on democracy, the result will be a heightened risk of disaster. Political power may be a God-given right, but political wisdom is not a God-given power.
