Democracy Is Not Liberty

If you disagree with this assertion, you need to understand that democracy is a political system, as in a form of government, whereas liberty is a state of human existence. Unfortunately any form of government, democratic or otherwise, can impose oppressive restrictions on liberty.

This is an important concept of political and sociological science; in the context of current American politics and society it’s an existential issue. No government actually gives you liberty as it’s something you are born with, and therefore no government, no matter its political system, has the right to take it away. Actually governments have no rights, only the powers its people give it, and therein lays the existential issue.

So apparently the political solution would be to protect against a government oppressing liberty, right?  Better yet, define why government is even necessary to begin with; after all, if government is the main threat to liberty, the obvious solution is not to have one, right? Well anarchists have used that argument for millennia, but I believe that would also raise an existential issue, specifically how do you protect against coercive threats, external or internal, to liberty? 

So to distill the many arguments for and against government we come down to the issue of coercion, which is inherently evil because by its very nature it seeks to reduce the individual to nothing more than a means to achieve the goals of someone else, like a thief or a group such as a political party.

Now take the last example since we are talking about politics and liberty. What difference does it make if the coercion is a product of a dictatorship or a democratic mandate? This is not an argument against government; it’s an argument against coercion.  The true and only justification then for government is to protect all its citizens against coercion, both foreign and domestic. Using force against invasion of your country or invasion of your home is self-defense.  A government that Initiates force against another country or its own citizens is therefore by definition oppressive.

In the democratic process it is assumed that the rule of the majority is necessarily a good thing, as it is and expression of freedom; that is a false positive in defense of liberty. If something is wrong, it does not become good because the majority say so. If the majority votes to entitle them to something they have not earned, then it is of necessity at the expense of someone else who has consequently lost that measure of liberty.

In a truly free society, the concept of what is a greater good is not a justification for the use of coercion, whether by dictate or mandate. Currently we are bombarded with the nonsensical proposition of social justice, an excuse for the use of coercion to create equality in all things; it is the most corrosive phenomenon against liberty, yet it is the sacred cow of those that consider themselves “Progressive”, an oxymoronic label considering it is actually regressive. Do Progressives realize that their proposition destroys liberty, the very essence of what it means to be human and an individual?

What does equality in the context of social justice even mean? If it means that we are all equal before the law, great; apparently that is not the case as it proposes that all humans are equal in all things. Such a concept is contrary to humanism; we are all individuals and not some homogenous entity. To reduce humanity to such sameness creates a dystopia antithetical to liberty. 

Politically such a phenomenon, if enacted by mandate, proves Floyd Arthur Harper’s warning that “The citizens of a democracy have in their hands the tools by which to enslave themselves.”