While having a discussion regarding freedom my flatmates friend replied to my praise of freedom and critique of democracy with a question of whether democracy isn't the flip site of the coin of freedom. Now lets do not forget that democracy is just a voting system, it implies nothing about the views of the elected government, neither about the governmental structures... a voting system that got Hitler into power. Even commies had quasi-democratic elections! More interestingly democracy does not predict who will win the elections. What do I mean by that? Well, dependently on the exact voting system and division of constituencies, it does not have to be the majority of the population who ‘wins’. If we take into the account that not everybody is voting, the results of the votes show a even more skewed vision of the nations will, and it is the individuals who will bear the biggest benefits or losses that have the most motivation to go and vote. This rises a point that policies that are massively discriminatory against minorities e.g. extremely rich people have a high chance of being passed. At least for the moment we will put aside the issue of who and why should be voting, if at all anyone should. Democracy has the ability of subduing people in a legitimate way to the the wills of the government. To justify this I will have to at some point write on the relation between freedom, social policy and other abstract ideas like the common good. And one more point: the government elected may not be one that supports freedom, whether economic or social. I hope that I presented a general notion of why democracy does not necessarily imply freedom.
I think it is a long-accepted fact that the more democracy we have, the less free we are. Everyone always knew this. In this regard I always follow Lord Acton because his prose was particularly powerful. He wrote that: "The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections." True lovers of freedom were never democrats. Democracy is actually the political version of what communism is in the physical property realm. I guess I run one of the most anti-democratic blogs ever, and I am glad to have another ally!
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