This article was originally publisehd by Finn Andreen at The Mises Institute.
As has often been noted, “majority rule” in the political sense does not exist in the way it is presented by the dominant institutions of Western so-called “democracies.” The Western public’s resistance to criticism of “democracy” is, therefore, remarkable.
The staying power of representative democracy in the West can be explained as follows: Firstly, democracy is widely but uncritically seen as a progressive and enlightened political system that replaced monarchies, typically portrayed as retrograde and repressive. Secondly, despite the difficulty of “majority rule,” democracy can play a role of channeling public opinion in a politicized society. These two points are explained below.
Democracy as a Questionable Improvement to Monarchy
The dominant storyline is one that sees democracy as a moral improvement over monarchy. Governments today receive their legitimacy from the “will of the people” and no longer from the divine right of kings. However, this is a largely caricatural and counterfactual view, not least since elections and voting practices are not specific to “liberal democracies”; some were in use long before political representation was introduced.
The often-touted “will of the people” is the latest “political formula,” to use the phrase of Italian historian Gaetano Mosca, allowing the “organized minority” to justify its rule over a “disorganized and uninterested majority” in the secular era of individual rights. From this standpoint, there is no fundamental difference between democracy and monarchy.
As James Burnham summarized in The Machiavellians (1943):
The existence of a minority ruling class is, it must be stressed, a universal feature of all organized societies of which we have any record. It holds no matter what the social and political forms—whether the society is feudal or capitalist or slave or collectivist, monarchical or oligarchical or democratic, no matter what the constitutions and laws, no matter
The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at SHTF Plan
