The speech Joe Biden gave at Pointe du Hoc (Normandie, France) in celebration of D-Day echoed the idea of widespread neglect of democracy. The general theory goes like this: Democracy is a system where the voter is in charge. He is very knowledgeable and votes to express his interest in the public goods that the government proposes to produce. Politicians and public officials are selfless public servants who faithfully respond to the demands of the electorate. If I could put a summary in Biden’s mouth: the result is freedom, law, and government that works for “the people”; democracy is good; we come together and do great things with great sacrifices.
In fact, to summarize public choice theory, most citizens vote blindly because each vote has no electoral or referendum effect. Many remain indifferent. Politicians and administrators are ordinary self-interested people who live in the public sector to further their interests. If necessary, they will surrender to special interest groups. Liberalism (classical) believes that democracy is a means to individual freedom, not an end, and that the scope and power of government should be limited to certain important functions in order to limit its power to exploit a portion of the population.
The naïve view confuses freedom with democracy and views collective choice as superior to individual decisions. The collective is greater than the individual, and the latter must contribute to the former. Democracy is a combination of people’s faces. Biden announced (see “Against D-Day Backdrop, Biden Puts Democracy at Center of Anti-Trump Pitch,” The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2024; and C-SPAN video of the speech):
American democracy asks the most difficult things: believing that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. So democracy starts with each of us … when one person decides that something is more important than himself … when he decides that his country is more important than himself.
Be careful in transferring the propaganda from “one person” to the political “they”—presumably to avoid “he.” Interestingly, Biden later congratulates “the brave men who climbed these cliffs.” The real function of changing the singular pronoun to plural, I believe, is to erase the individual.
Biden confirms that the US military is taking Omaha Beach
they 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 protect democracy … to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
At least, there is talk of freedom, but it seems to be a synonym for democracy, which is the main idea.
Free society is very different. Its government leaves everyone free to make the sacrifices they want without imposing sacrifices on others such as conscripts in times of war. Milton Friedman’s incipit Capitalism and Freedom (1962) states:
In the most quoted part of his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” …. No part of the statement expresses the relationship between the citizen and his government that is suitable for the purposes of free men in a free society. My father’s expression “what is your country doing for you” means that the government is the protector, the citizen in the ward. … Nature, [sic] “what you can do for your country” means whether the government is king or god, citizen, worker or voter. For a liberal, the world is a collection of people who create it, not something beyond them.
James Buchanan saw a strong relationship between citizen and government created and limited by a unanimous social contract. But he emphasized (along with his collaborators Gordon Tullock or Geoffrey Brennan, to mention only those) how the whole system was based on the absolute choice of the individual. The citizen is not considered a sacrificial lamb. No public or collective purposes, only private purposes. This freedom is definitely worth protecting.
The idea of Mr. Democratic Biden is closer to Spartan democracy, which was all about the power of citizens as a collective, not about individual freedom. At Pointe du Hoc, he preached against the instinct “to be selfish, to impose our world on others, to hold power and never lose power.” But does forcing the world of some upon others mean any kind of gathering? I suggest that there is another way Mr. Biden failed his test. It is clear that, in the Democratic Party, many candidates for the presidency without the 81-year-old apparatchik would have more chances to save the Republic from Donald Trump. But Biden is selfish and won’t give up power.
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The democracy of organists and the old king, DALL-E’s thanks to Thomas Hobbes and your humble blogger
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