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By democracy we usually mean a government comprising popular rule, individual human rights and freedom, and a free-market economy. Yet the flaws in traditional Athenian democracy can instruct us on the weaknesses of that first element of modern democracies shared with Athens: rule by all citizens equally. In Democracy’s Dangers & Discontents, Bruce Thornton discusses those criticisms first aired by ancient critics of Athenian democracy, then traces the historical process by which the Republic of the founders has evolved into something similar to ancient democracy, and finally argues for the relevance of those critiques to contemporary U.S. policy. He asserts that many of the problems we face today are the consequences of the increasing democratization of our government and that the flaws of democracy are unlikely to be corrected. He argues that these dangers and discontents do not have to end in soft despotism—that American democracy’s aptitude and strength can be recovered by restoring the limited government of the founders.
- Sales Rank: #1519237 in Books
- Published on: 2014-07-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.40" h x .90" w x 6.40" l, 1.07 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 205 pages
About the Author
Bruce S. Thornton is a professor of classics and humanities at California State University–Fresno and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of nine books and numerous essays on Greek culture and civilization and their influence on Western civilization. He lives in Fresno, California.
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
he presents a convincing foundation for his predictions about the future of this widely praised and rather easily corrupted form
By Searcher
Dr. Thornton offers a precise and perceptive analysis of the inherent problems of the systems and styles of democracy. Reviewing the warnings about and defenses of this form of government, from those of the ancient Greeks through those of the Founding Fathers and later American political activists and thinkers, he presents a convincing foundation for his predictions about the future of this widely praised and rather easily corrupted form of government as it exists in today's world. He is particularly insightful in his analysis of the threat to stable democracy posed by the progressive movement and its presidential adherents from the early twentieth century on. Ultimately he presents not the political jeremiad some readers might expect but a review of Americans' peculiar qualities and values that still might prove successful in preventing the complete loss of their hard-won freedoms. It couldn't be more relevant for today's citizens.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent book! Anyone interested in the historical roots and ...
By Jacalyn Thornton
Excellent book! Anyone interested in the historical roots and concerns about democracy, why our founders created a democratic REPUBLIC, and how our government evolved far from its founders' intent should read this book. Tyranny of the mob and government control over individual lives and freedoms were concerns in Athens, in young America, and are coming to fruition today. This book makes that case while still defending the system of government our founders developed based on the Constitution and the rule of law.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
The Tyranny of the Majority from the Ancient Greeks to Barack Obama
By Terry Jennrich
He does a good job of tracing the evolution of representative government ,i.e. "democracy" from its roots in Ancient Greece to modern times.
He makes a good case for a return to the framer's limited constitutional government which the Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century eroded and the populists of the late nineteenth century propelled, and the Jacksonian Democrats of the 1820's began evolving from the milder version of the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans of the election of 1800. The administration of Lincoln transformed the American government in a fashion that would have satisfied Hamilton. To win the Civil War, the Republicans: re established a national bank, issued federal paper currency, expanded the national debt, created new federal taxes including a progressive income tax, and imposed a tariff to encourage industrialization, and instituted internal improvements and other programs designed to promote the long-term interest of the American people. pg 103-104. In time the stresses of industrialization, urbanization, and a complex economy would begin to stretch the constitutional limits of the federal government that would be broken by new political theories which the ancient political theorists posited as the inevitable culmination of extreme democracy. pg 104.
The antidemocratic political philosophy stated the flaws of democracy inevitably lead to tyranny. Radical egalitarianism and excessive freedom--what the founding generation called a "leveling spirit" and "license"--corrupt the masses, leaving them vulnerable to ambitious men or elites who in exchange for their political support promise the masses gratification of their wants and desires. Forgiveness of debts and redistribution of property are the mechanisms by which despotic regimes finance the hedonism of the people. It is the feedback loop between the tyrant's lust for power and the people's desire for wealth transfers that eventually destroys political freedom. pg 106.
Alexis de Tocqueville described a federal government grown tyrannical in its intrusive powers that were exercised through legal and regulatory coercion rather than by naked force, and financed by taxes and entitlements rather than by violent redistribution of property. But the end result was the same--the diminution of personal autonomy by American citizens, the transformation of political freedom into hedonistic license, and the growth of the encroachment and the overbearing power of the Leviathan State into every corner of the citizen's lief including his school, work place, church, and store. pg 108.
The Progressive movement rejected the philosophical foundations of the U.S. Constitution. The framers distrusted human nature driven by "passions and interests," as James Madison said, whether these are found in the masses, in competing factional interests, or in an elite vulnerable to the corruption of power. The Progressives, believed human nature could be improved using technological, scientific, and economic changes happening in society. The new "sciences" were discovering the material causes of human behavior affected by social and economic disruptions which arose from industrialization. People "experts" with this new knowledge could now apply this new knowledge with new techniques to government polices and agencies to solve the new problems in society and life which arose from the industrialization and technological change. The founder's Constitution had to be replaced by the "living Constitution" that codified and empowered this new knowledge and the government based upon it. pg 108.
Progressives wanted to vastly expand the scope and reach of the federal government to address the economic and social challenges affecting average citizens in 1900-1940. They preferred the federal government rather than state or local governments, civil society, or the free market. Pg 109. Progressives said human nature was not fixed like the founders thought, but plastic, malleable and correctable by those possessed with "scientific" knowledge of human behavior. Remove the corrupt influences of corporations and politicians and everything would be fine. pg 110-111.
Progressive democracy was very different from the democracy of Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln. The former wanted to ensue the freedom of individual citizens to rise as far as their talents and abilities could take them under equal laws and without hindrance from elites defined by caste, birth, or wealth. Freedom for Progressives did not apply to individual citizens or even local communities in all their variety of clashing interests and beliefs. Rather freedom for Progressives was limited to a collectivist "people," one that ignored the great variety of regional, sectional, and religious indentities and folways comprising American's of all walks of life. Instead, the multitude of interests, values, beliefs, and goals of individual citizens would be homogenized and unified according to the interests, values, and aims as defined and chosen by the all knowing techno-political elites who comprised the Progressive party members. pg 112.
Man under modern conditions is a "member of society." Only as he recognizes his duties as a member of society can he enjoy opportunities as an individual. The doctrine that an individual has fundamental personal and property rights which are beyond the reach, not only of the majority, but of the state itself, will no longer be permitted. It is an obsolete notion like the doctrine of natural rights. pg 116.
We need a powerful executive and many bureaucracies and agencies to implement the new policies and regulations necessary to achieve social justice, social duties, and social efficiency in the twentieth century that presumably comprise the true interests of the people, whether they know it or not. Progressives sought to get rid of the nongovernmental mediating organizations and associations that helped ordinary citizens--families, churches, mutual-aid societies, fraternal societies, voluntary associations--that attempted to address many of the social problems the Progressives decried. pg 118.
Progressives believed their administrative elites could deduce what the people wanted and needed and then give it to them. Progressives believed that the advances in sociology or psychology had created knowledge and techniques that insulated technocrats and their political masters from the temptation to abuse power assumed to be a permanent feature of human nature by political philosophers from Ancient Greece to the framers. pg 119. Progressives abandoned Lincoln, Jefferson , and Hamilton and their concern for individual natural rights, a belief in local self government and a limited federal government to maintain individual liberty. The Progressives became a modern version of the ancient tyrant who championed the people in order to obtain power for their own wrongheaded conception of truth, right, and justice. The pressure and crises produced by two world wars and the great depression led to the expansion of the federal Leviathan through a proliferation of agencies and regulations and a multiplication of social welfare programs, that for all their initial good intentions, would evolve into the modern equivalent of the redistribution of property with which the ancient tyrant bought the support of the masses. The price paid by american citizens is the erosion of personal freedom and self-government by coercive federal regulatory power over more and more of each of our private lives and state and local businesses. pg 124-125.
In subsequent presidential administrations, more programs are created to recognize more rights and since taxes are not raised to pay for the programs , they function as a mechanism to redistribute income. pg 132. What used to be called "charity," or "handouts," is now termed "rights." pg 133. All classes of U.S. citizens, not just the poor, receive government benefits and transfer funds through either tax deductions ,credits, or grants, benefits, or money. Many citizens do not consider these programs redistributive transfers like welfare or food stamps. The federal government employed 2.3 million civil servants, not counting military members in 2012, at a cost of 200 billion dollars per year. Total federal spending in 2013 was 3.5 trillion dollars, a 40% increase over the last decade. In 2012 , the Federal Register comprised 78,961 pages. The Code of Federal Regulations contained 174,545 pages, with over a million individual regulatory restrictions. pg 134.
In 2012, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and other health spending made up 45% of the $ 3.6 trillion budget, with another 19% going to federal employee retirement and benefits, veteran's benefits, and antiproverty programs such as food stamps and welfare. As a result of reforms in 1984, the number of workers receiving Social Security Disability Insurance increased from 2.9 million in 1980 to 10.9 million in 2012, at a cost of $ 137 billion dollars. Over the past decade the number of people receiving food stamps has more than doubled to 47.6 million, but the cost of benefits has quadrupled to $ 80.4 billion dollars in 2012. As a result of this expansive network of government transfer benefits, today about half of all households in the United States receive some sort of federal benefit. pg 136. The total amount of unfunded liabilities for Social Security and health care entitlements is estimated at $ 123 trillion dollars!!!
Despite Bernie Sanders and the progressive democrates cry of unequal income distribution, we have the most progressive tax system in the world. In 2008, the top 10 % in the U.S. paid 45.1 % of the taxes, but earned 33.5 % of the income, a ratio of taxes to income that is higher than European states with more generous social welfare transfers. In 2010, the top 40% here paid 106.2 % of income taxes, while the bottom 40% paid a negative 9.1 percent, due to programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the child tax credit. pg 137.
We redistribute income from the wealthy citizens to the lower-income citizens. Obamacare will force the young to buy more-expensive health care in order to subsidize the older and sicker among us. But worse yet, our $ 17 trillion dollar national debt, destined to grow higher in order to fund the aforementioned entitlement programs, is a redistribution of income from generations yet unborn to those living today. pg 138. Sanders and Obama decry "income inequality" as a great injustice, but the truth is that when you count government transfer's as part of income, income inequality actually declined by 1.8% between 1993 and 2009. However, the Progressive liberal Democrats or the socialists like Bernie Sanders prefer to use the class-warfare rhetoric of "income inequality" to justify the redistributionist and entitlement polices than in turn prop up the Leviathan federal government and its intrusive regulatory powers over citizens lives. pg 147.
The Progressives have than their political policy to its final stage by beginning to advocate a right to a more equitable income and now includes the satisfaction of subjective "needs." Today almost any kind of inequality now counts as oppression. Now we have to be concerned with subjective perceptions of esteem people feel they deserve. The Progressives want to discard the old world view of a tragic flawed human nature limited by a world filled with want, scarcity, and risk, a world in which the only equality is that of everyone's vulnerability to all these contingencies. pg 148. Progressives believe that knowledge and techniques can create an equality of psychic well-being , if only the unjust economic, political, and social structures that presumably create this unhappiness and disrespect can be corrected. And just as inequality of property is a problem for a powerful federal government to correct by redistributing property , so too coercive laws and regulations are created to eliminate or improve whatever unjust social and economic structures damage the self-esteem and happiness of citizens, and to punish those complicit in perpetuating inequality, particularly for those deemed victims of previous social or political oppression. pg 148-149. We will begin to have "servile minds." THe masses to turn to an all powerful federal government to protect themselves from being harrassed, offended, or damaged in self esteem or made to suffer something oppressive as the Progressive government elites mandate by some government rule, will have produced radical egalitarianism that reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. pg 149.
Ancient critics of democracy agreed that political freedom was not the ability to live as one likes--indulging every transient desire or gratifying every appetite--but to live subject to the limits of law both written and unwritten, the only life suitable for a rational and virtuous human being. The state should be designed to turn out good moral citizens who use reason to govern their lives and follow the mind not their hearts and passions. pg 149.
Ordered liberty in the U.S. has been reduced to mere license. Modernity has produced secularization--the driving of religion from the public square and the reduction of it to a private lifestyle choice no more significant than any other. The founders thought that religion was needed to restrain the excesses and destructive appetites of the masses. The sexual revolution also transformed ordered liberty into license. It weakened the family as the intermediary authority between the individual and the state. Sexual freedom has replaced political freedom and individual independence as the highest expression of liberty. pg 150-151. Drunk on the wine of freedom, citizens will sacrifice ordered liberty and personal responsibility as long as the state subsidizes their licentious self-indulgence with wealth transfers through entitlement programs. pg 151.
The fickle and uninformed public citizens of a democratic republic engage in diplomacy and deliberation in Congress as an excuse to avoid military action when citizens and politicians do not want to pay the cost in lives and money required for timely action to eliminate a foreign threat to the Republic. pg 152. As in ancient Athens, these shortsighted decisions reflect the desire to spend money on social welfare entitlements rather on defense. pg 153. Many citizens today seem concerned less with preparing for the future threats to the U.S. security and interests, than with ensuring that entitlement spending continues unabated. pg 154. Today democracy promotion reflects an idealistic internationalism based not on a balance of power codified in treaties that mutually serve the interests of sovereign nations, but on an ideal of progress beyond war to a world unified in its pacific beliefs and aims. Progressives like Obama, assume that all peoples everywhere desire the same things as Westerners-- economic development, political freedom, human rights, and peace--this ideal relies upon transnational organizations and international treaties to adjudicate conflict through verbal processes and negotiations, and to promote the creation of liberal democracy and free-market economies in order to bestow freedom and prosperity on those lacking them. pg 154.
The bottom line is that not all people prefer to live under a liberal democratic government that gives them freedom and economic opportunity, rules by law rather than arbitrary force, and respects human rights. pg 159.
In short, Bruce Thornton correctly sounds the warning bell for the destruction of the American Republic, but does not provide much of a remedy to prevent it's impending collapse from citizen license, government bankruptcy, or the incompetence of the Progressive elite office holders and bureaucrats currently running the federal government and some state governments. Hopefully other authors will suggest a plan before its too late. The specter of the fall of the Western Republic in 476 A.D. looms ever larger in my mind as time grows short to fix the nations problems. Congress does little to sovle problems preferring instead to argue , collect it's huge salary, and run for re election in uncompeteative districts.
Terry Jennrich
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