The speech given by President Biden at Pointe du Hoc (Normandy, France) to celebrate D-Day echoed a naive and widespread conception of democracy. The general theory is this: democracy is a system in which the voter is in power. He is well informed and votes to express his interest in the public goods that the government proposes to produce. Politicians and government bureaucrats are selfless public servants who faithfully respond to the demands of the electorate. If I can put a summary in Biden’s mouth: the result is freedom, the rule of law, and a government that serves “the people”; democracy is good; we come together and do great things at great sacrifice.
In reality, to roughly summarize public choice theory, most citizens vote blind because each person’s vote has no impact on the outcome of the election or referendum. Many remain apathetic. Politicians and bureaucrats are ordinary self-interested individuals who occupy the public sector to promote their own interests. If necessary, they will give way to special interest groups. The liberal (classical) believes that democracy is a means to individual freedom, not an end, and that the scope and power of government must be strictly limited to certain essential functions in order to restrict its ability to exploit part of the population .
The naive conception confuses freedom and democracy and considers collective choices to be superior to individual choices. The collective is greater than the individual, and the latter must sacrifice himself for the former. Democracy is collectivism with a human face. Biden said (see “In the context of D-Day, Biden places democracy at the center of the anti-Trump discourse“, Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2024; and C-SPAN video of the speech):
American democracy requires the hardest thing: believing that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. So democracy begins with each of us… when a person decides that there is something more important than themselves… when they decide that their country matters more than them.
Note in passing how the rhetoric shifts from “a person” to the politically correct “they” – ostentatiously to avoid saying “him”. Oddly, Biden later praises the “brave men who scaled those cliffs.” The real function of replacing singular pronouns with their plural is, I believe, to erase the individual.
Biden claims that American soldiers who took Omaha Beach,
ask us to care for others in our country more than ourselves… to be part of something bigger than ourselves… to protect freedom in our time, to defend democracy… to be part of something greater bigger than ourselves.
Freedom is at least mentioned, but it appears as a simple synonym for democracy, which is its central concept.
A free society is very different. His government leaves everyone free to make the sacrifices they wish without imposing sacrifices on others, like conscripts in times of war. The incipit of Milton Friedman Capitalism and freedom (1962) stated:
In an oft-quoted passage from his inaugural address, President Kennedy said: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” »…. Neither half of the declaration expresses a relationship between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. Paternalism “what your country can do for you” implies that the government is the boss, the citizen the ward. …The organic, (sic) “what you can do for your country” implies that the government is the master or deity, the citizen, the servant or the devotee. For the free man, the country is the set of individuals who compose it, and not something added to them.
James Buchanan saw stronger relationships between the citizen and a government created and limited by a conceptually unanimous social contract. But he underlined (with his collaborators Gordon Tullock and Geoffrey Brennan, to name but a few) how the entire system was based on the absolute primacy of individual choices. The citizen is not considered a sacrificial lamb. There is no social or collective purposefor private purposes only. This freedom is of course worth defending.
Mr. Biden’s concept of democracy is closer to Spartan democracy, which relied solely on the power of citizens as a collective, not individual freedom. In Pointe du Hoc, he preached against the natural instinct “to be selfish, to impose our world on others, to take power and never give up.” But isn’t imposing the world on one another exactly what any kind of collectivism means?
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Organicist Democracy and the Old King, by DALL-E with gratitude to Thomas Hobbes and your humble blogger
