When Is Democracy Undemocratic? (with Emily B. Finley)

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0:00:08.0 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus. Joining me today is Emily B Finley, author of The Ideology of Democratism. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Emily.

0:00:16.8 Emily Finley: Thanks for having me.

0:00:19.6 Trevor Burrus: Well, at the end of your book, you bring up an interesting… Well, you bring it up throughout the book, but I think before we get the conversation going about this term you coined called democratism, the book itself tries to pin down what this could mean, but one of your observations, which is something that has struck me over the years, especially in 2016, is criticisms of populism as being anti-​democratic. So you’d hear people say, we had the populist elections, whether it was Brexit, Donald Trump, other people throughout Western Europe and the western world saying they’re against democratic norms. This is not democracy. And on some basic level, that seems incoherent, because if the most people vote for you and you appeal to the most people popularly, then that is democracy. So what does that say about the general idea that you come up with in the book and talk about democratism?

0:01:13.0 Emily Finley: Yeah, it’s such an interesting paradox that we can be told repeatedly that the will of, not even necessarily a majority, but even just a plurality of people that are operating from within the democratic process, that that could somehow be anti-​democratic or a threat to democracy. We hear it so often now that it’s a phrase that’s kind of lost its meaning, but in a sense, it really is a window into this ideology, and so it can be said by somebody like Biden in his recent speech that the MAGA wing of the Republican party is a threat to our republic, and that these people are threatening our democracy, he can say something like that without apparent contradiction, because he subscribes to this very widespread and pervasive notion of democracy that has very little to do with actual popular rule.

0:02:10.9 Emily Finley: And so we’ve been under the influence of a Rousseauian understanding of democracy for the last couple of centuries. Rousseau really lays the blueprint for this understanding in the social contract, in which he comes up with this idea of the general will, and the general will is what the people’s will ought to be. And so it’s this ahistorical ideal of the popular will, that Rousseau says does not necessarily need to reflect what the people actually desire, and very often it doesn’t, the particular wills of individual people very often go against this hypothetical and ideal general will. And so, that sounds maybe very philosophical, but at its core, this basic idea of a…

0:02:56.0 Trevor Burrus: That’s okay, we do philosophy on this show, don’t worry about it.

0:03:00.4 Emily Finley: [chuckle] Yeah, good.

0:03:00.5 Trevor Burrus: I’ll jump in and make sure you’re clarifying, but we do economics, philosophy, everything, so, go for it.

0:03:03.2 Emily Finley: Great, so at its very core, this idea of a hypothetical and ideal popular will that is over and above the actual historical will of the people was informing Biden’s speech, and he probably has not even read Rousseau, and so many people who subscribe to this idea might not even be familiar with Rousseau’s ideas, but Rousseau’s understanding of democracy is now, I argue, the formative and prevailing understanding of democracy for so many in the west. I give many examples of people who understand democracy in the sense… From Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson to the American neo-​conservatives. It informed the Bush Doctrine, it has informed US foreign policy since at least the time of Wilson, arguably back to McKinley, but it’s a new notion of democracy that is at its core pretty anti-​democratic.

0:04:05.9 Trevor Burrus: The question I think my listeners are thinking are, one, is this a pro-​populism book, which it’s not, depending how we define it, part of it is defining what it would mean to be populism, and then the second one is, is your foil for this concept of democracy, just pure majoritarianism mob rule is what democracy really is, and these other people have a perverted sense of democracy?

0:04:30.2 Emily Finley: No, for both questions. The first, is this pro-​populism? I actually started writing this book as my dissertation in 2015 before the rise of Donald Trump and the populist movement in America, and so it was actually really interesting to watch that unfold and to see how it related to these ideas that I had been talking about, and so when in 2016 everyone in at least the corporate media started to accuse the populists of being anti-​democratic, I said, “Aha, I’ve seen that before. [laughter] I have a whole bunch of chapters on that,” and so I guess it certainly isn’t a pro-​populist book, but maybe it’s an apology in the classical sense of the term for populism in a certain sense, it’s at least trying to expose how populism can’t really be anti-​democratic, except for in this very particular sense, if we understand democracy to be an ideal and a hypothetical rather than the actual practice of popular rule, and then as far as the second question…

0:05:47.0 Trevor Burrus: Direct democracy, mob rule, is that the ideal then?

0:05:51.0 Emily Finley: No, not at all. And I try to differentiate in this book between democratism and republicanism in the classical sense. Republicanism as something that founding fathers such as John Adams or Hamilton, those were two exponents of a view point that opposed Jeffersonian democracy, which I categorize as a democratist view of democracy. And so I’m trying to juxtapose… I mean, we don’t have a democratic… We’re not an American democracy, we’re a Constitutional republic. And so I’m trying to differentiate between that idea of representative democracy and then this idea of democratism, which is ideological in the sense that its exponents are not really being forthright, they are the loudest champions of democracy, but then you look at their policies and what they’re actually asking for… And they have a disdain for ordinary people, and they’re actually not interested in the will of the majority or in taking to account even a plurality of voices, they have a very specific understanding of what they want society to look like, and so they call that democracy and they say that anything that threatens their ideal is anti-​democratic, but it doesn’t actually necessarily need to take into account the popular will at all.

0:07:26.5 Trevor Burrus: On one level, it’s important if you’re gonna support democracy, and of course, depending on how you define it, is a fairly… Is post-​enlightenment democracy is new, we have Athenian democracy, which is a little different, but it does require some belief about the nature of human beings and what kind of choices they are… They can make and they can make in a valid way with education, with knowledge of different competing viewpoints, with knowledge of the nature of government, that if the people are completely benighted… Let’s just say North Koreans, that if they let them vote but not let them hear any viewpoints, not educate them, would it be valid to say that whatever the North Koreans came up within the system of not hearing opposing viewpoints, not being educated is an example of democracy, as opposed to something that we need a richer conception of to figure out what the will the people actually might mean.

0:08:24.7 Emily Finley: Yeah, I think there needs to be some meaningful input from the people, and like you say, if there was some sort of “democratic election” in North Korea, I think we would all look at that and say that that doesn’t actually incorporate any meaningful input from the people, and so a chapter in my book that I… I address this phenomenon in not such an extreme way, but I tackled deliberative democracy, which is a school of thought that is arguably dominant within… Certainly within democratic theory, or at least it was when I was writing this book a couple of years ago, and it’s been enormously influential in political finance…

0:09:09.4 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, no, it still is. [chuckle]

0:09:13.6 Emily Finley: Yeah.

0:09:13.7 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, it still is.

0:09:13.6 Emily Finley: It’s enormously influential. And so from all the research I was conducting on deliberative democracy, there would be some quibbles within deliberative democracy about how to change the rules of the game a little bit, or how to tweak things so we can incorporate different voices, but it was rare that I could find anybody who was really going at the foundation of deliberative democracy as highly problematic, which is what I was arguing, which is that the very paradigm of deliberative democracy is a much more watered down version of what you’re talking about, what happened in North Korea. [chuckle]

0:09:52.3 Emily Finley: So I hesitate to even make that comparison, but it’s the same concept, deliberative democracy, it has this pretense to be highly democratic, it’s about trying to incorporate the will of the people, the voice of the people through dialogue, dialoguing in order to get true democracy. But when you really read the works of these deliberative democratic theorists, you see that there are all kinds of different rules and parameters for appropriate discussion and who can and can’t say what, and you see that actually they have a normative outcome that they’re aiming for, and so all of these different parameters for what’s appropriate discussion, it’s already set up to lead to their sort of pre-​ordained conclusion about what democracy ought to look like, and so if at the outset, the rules are set up that you can’t actually discuss certain topics or the system is set up a certain way, then how democratic is that really?

0:11:05.6 Trevor Burrus: Well, the normative point is something that has occurred to me, that there’s a normative underlying claim to what seems to be a process claim, that… I’ve had this come up in my career at Cato many times, especially in the campaign finance world, where that the idea of different voices allowed to speak and to influence the people is not democratic, if it’s certain voices who are telling them, maybe we shouldn’t have labor unions or single-​payer healthcare, and that the single-​payer healthcare as a normative outcome would be the output of a truly deliberative process or something from the right, like foreign policy excursions, as you write about in the book, that if it was all fair in some sense of the word, then the output of this democratic process would produce the normative political conclusions that I personally want as the theorist, which seems to underlie a bunch of this, and as you pointed, especially the deliberative democracy theorists who don’t tend to be libertarians or conservatives to say the least, in terms of their substantive policy proposals.

0:12:18.0 Emily Finley: Yeah, they claim that they’re just setting up this procedural politics, and so the procedure itself is empty of normative claims and it’s empty of values, but if you really look at it, the procedures themselves are substantive and there are certain commitments that are being made in those very procedures, and so I argue that the way that these procedures are all set up, if it’s right in line with the ideology of democratism.

0:12:51.0 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, one of the things is having fair and balanced information within the procedure, but who gets to supply that information, for example, what is fair and balanced? If you’re talking about… Like say, gun policy, does the NRA get to contribute a fair and balanced report to that, or if you’re talking about certain science policy do people who believe that the earth is flat get to be involved in the policy discussion and how do you determine that at the outset. But I wanna go back to the beginning, as you said, this starts in your thesis with Rousseau and the general will, and whether or not he’s been labeled as a proto-​fascist, as a pro-​totalitarian by many people, as sort of the progenitor of those who wanna dominate society in the claim that this is what the people really want, what is the general will to Rousseau, and how does that percolate down the wick? We can get to the other theories, but how does it become the kind of basis for democratism?

0:13:54.4 Emily Finley: Yeah, the general will, it’s hard to pin down because Rousseau himself isn’t exactly clear about the general will, but in essence, it is the ideal of the popular will, and so he says that there is the general will, and then there is the will of all, and the general will can never err, it can never be in the wrong, it is what all of the people would desire if they were thinking rationally and if they were at their best. The will of all on the other hand is just simply majority rule, and so that can be wrong, and it often is wrong, that’s just the historical aggregate of all of the people’s individual wills, and there’s nothing special about that, and so politics ought to be guided by this ideal general will, because it can never be wrong.

0:14:44.2 Emily Finley: And so then the question obviously arises, which is, how do we instantiate this perfect will, since it is the elevation of this collective will of the people in the sort of mystical sense, and Rousseau’s answer to that question is through a legislator figure, and this legislator as Rousseau describes him is almost like a god, he’s some kind of deity who brings into existence the people, and he is able to elevate the people into a corporate body that had not existed before, and so that is how the ideal general will is brought into being and then in a particularly chilling passage, Rousseau says that because this general will is all that it should be and ever will be, any individual will that goes against it is wrong, and these people who are…

0:15:47.2 Emily Finley: We can think of the phrase voting against their best interest, we’ve heard that so many times, especially in 2016, those people who are going against what is actually in their best interest, they’ll need to be forced to be free. And so Rousseau goes so far as to say that the man who is a threat to the social fabric by opposing the general will, he can even be killed, and he would not be killed as a citizen, so Rousseau is already finding a way to segregate the people who are outside of the democratic process. So he’s not even considered a citizen anymore because he’s going against the general will, and so to eliminate him, to kill him would not be wrong, and it wouldn’t be immoral, he’s not even killed as a moral person, Rousseau says, he’s just simply killed as an enemy, and we can see how that translates into what we witness today with the overreach of the state and with these democratists who are claiming to be acting in the name of democracy and who try to cordon off part of the population as extremists and as anti-​democratic, and so we can safely exclude those people from the democratic process because they’re not acting democratically anyways.

0:17:07.6 Trevor Burrus: One of the metaphysics of the human in Rousseau’s mind, and this will come up of course with other theorists, especially Jefferson, in line with this, but what is his view of the human animal as such that you can do something to find the true nature of the human, the romantic element of Rousseau and diverting from that via, you know, say academia, which is different people of high station who would teach people are actually perverting people away from like a noble savage, of course, the term associated with Rousseau so much, but perverting them, and that that’s why we can stop, we can stop people from perverting the general will, and we try to establish a general will by creating a unified core metaphysical reality of the way human beings are in a way.

0:18:00.4 Emily Finley: So if I’m understanding correctly, Rousseau, he makes certain assumptions about human nature and about the way that people interact. Rousseau, I think, what is crucial to his politics is his view of human nature, which is that human beings are essentially good, and so if human beings are essentially good then how to explain the evils that we see, especially what Rousseau identifies as one of the prime evils, which is inequality, how to explain that if we’re all actually at our core good. Rousseau says that it’s perverted social institutions, institutions like the church, the arts and sciences, even custom, culture, all of our history, this is just accidental and perverse, and these institutions just benefit the few who use them to oppress the many.

0:19:03.4 Emily Finley: And so in order to liberate people, Rousseau believes that these institutions need to be torn down, and so that’s why he has this revolutionary new politics that levels, there’s no role for leadership in the social contract, there is just this great legislator figure, who I argue, actually, this has a lot in common with Hobbes’ Leviathan. They would seem to be opposite arguments. Hobbes argues that the state of nature is such a chaotic place and that human beings are naturally enemies of one another, and so there needs to be a strong Leviathan to create order. And this would seem to be the opposite of Rousseau’s theory, which is that human beings need to be liberated, but if you look at the social contract and you really read about the legislator and the role that the legislator is to play, it actually parallels the Leviathan in a few ways. And so for Rousseau, the naturally good human beings, we can be liberated and we can be restored in a certain sense to the pre-​Civil state of freedom, not completely, Rousseau says, but we can regain a part of that by releasing ourselves from these perverted social institutions that act as so many chains upon our spontaneous wills.

0:20:35.4 Trevor Burrus: Our real… If I’m putting that in scare quotes, “Our real spontaneous wills,” which conglomerate apparently, are the general will, which is another aspect of this that I enjoyed immensely in the book that… Something I’ve worked on in the policy realm, that one thing comes up with a lot of democratists, as you would expect it would, because if you’re trying to figure out… You don’t like the will of the people as it’s manifested just through sheer voting, but you believe that there’s a more real… Again, however you define, will of the people, that should be actualized, and one of the things you might pursue therefore is education policy from the state to try and make sure that the people are actually having real wills and real opinions versus having fake ones in some sense, and so you have Rousseau with a very interesting, very specific view on education, you mentioned that he talks about the bath water temperature that young children should be raised in to, I don’t know, keep their humors balanced or something, but another one who… My favorite chapter of the book is the Jefferson chapter because he needs to be thrown under the bus way more than he is, and not just ’cause of the slavery thing, but definitely because of that too, and the raping of Sally Hemings, but Jefferson was more Rousseauian in this sense too, and how he viewed human, the authentic human will and where that would come from, and also the role that education would play in that.

0:22:05.9 Emily Finley: Yeah, Jefferson was a thorough going Rousseauian. There are so many parallels between the two of them. Their views on human nature are very similar, that human beings are essentially good, and yet the two of them land on a politics that really tries to circumvent people as they actually are. Jefferson is remembered as a champion of democracy, as a lover of just ordinary people, but when you read his writings, he really believes that his countrymen ought to change in some fundamental ways. He is known for having this sort of dual commitment to agrarianism and the pastoral life. He was a gentleman farmer, but at the same time, he was this tinker enlightenment figure who believed that the sciences ought to be pushed, he advocated for the government sponsorship, the national government sponsorship of the sciences, and he believed that farming practices ought to be updated and that ultimately, the views and the religious views of his countrymen ought to be modernized, and he railed against superstitious beliefs and priest craft as he called it, and he just… He had the Jefferson Bible, which was his “Historical” interpretation of the Bible, where he scrubbed it of anything that he believed was a superstition or miracles that couldn’t be substantiated empirically, and then this went against the views of many of his countrymen who he claimed to celebrate and who he, in many instances, was applauding.

0:24:00.4 Emily Finley: And so there’s that twin side to democratists where they celebrate the people and they seem to be the people’s champions, they are most vocally for democracy, and democracy that’s not even necessarily mediated through representatives. They want pure democracy, but at the same time, these are the people who believe that they want pure democracy from people expressing their viewpoints, and so while they are calling for pure democracy, at the same time, they’re calling for these rigorous educational measures that will ensure that the people’s viewpoints are what they ought to be, according to the democratists, so that is why you get these treatises on education from people like Jefferson and Rousseau because we can’t just leave something as important as our elections up to an irresponsible and unreliable electorate. We need to make sure that they vote the right way.

0:25:01.1 Emily Finley: And so, yeah, Rousseau’s Emile, his treatise on education, he called that his most important work, and you can see why because this is his chance to play the role of an architect of the human soul. It’s kind of perverse in a certain way, he’s really indulging in absolute control over the child, and everything down to the temperature of the bath water is supposed to control how this child is going to emerge, and it’s all very ironic or paradoxical because he assumes the child to be just a spontaneous creature of nature, and yet Rousseau is clear that the tutor is guiding this child toward a certain outcome.

0:25:50.5 Emily Finley: And Jefferson, his ward system, as he called it, which was going to… It was going to decentralize government and it was gonna provide for this form of direct democracy, so on its face, it looked very democratic and incorporated an element of education and how the school system was going to be created, it looks very democratic on its face, but then you see that Jefferson also is indulging in this hypothetical where he gets to be in control of everything. He’s redrawing districts, he’s coming up with this rational plan for democracy, so there’s something very paradoxical about that, because at bottom, these people, these democratists need to get rid of existing norms and existing ways, which is actually supremely democratic because these are the actual practices of the people, and so when that needs to be scrapped for this rational plan of the philosopher, you end up with something that’s very undemocratic.

0:26:53.1 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, a question I’ve asked in different areas that I work in, which I think this… Your thesis of your book touches on some areas. I mentioned campaign finance and other… How we’re gonna control the political conversation and who’s gonna control it, I also think that the drug prohibition has elements of this where we’re trying to prevent the people from indulging or becoming people we don’t want them to be, and it has this question that hangs is, are the people supposed to craft the state or is the state supposed to craft the people? And since the state comes after individuals, it’s going to have to require some sort of control if it’s going to take over the job of crafting the people in the name of democracy, which again is ironic to say the least. Your next… What are the next… But the other chapter, which I also liked a lot because he’s not, to say the least, my favorite person, and you can tell there’s a lot of vitriol in the word of your Woodrow Wilson chapter, entirely deserving, but he is also a democratist who didn’t really either like the will of the people or care about it and thought it should be in a specific way oriented to his ideology.

0:28:04.7 Emily Finley: Yeah, Woodrow Wilson, there was one author who I quote in that chapter who describes Wilson in a way that is so reminiscent of Rousseau. He says that he is this idealist, he’s a poet, that Wilson was most at home when he was just in his own imagination, and crafting essentially the world as it ought to be in his mind. And you think of Rousseau, this romantic idealist who the two of them come up with this vision of the world as it could be, and so what happens is this romantic bi-​polarity when you begin with a vision of reality that… Or when you begin with a vision of the world that defies reality and it defies what has been possible historically, then you end up with… You end up with this depressed conclusion where I guess when the reality comes crashing home that that is not a possibility, that that idyllic vision is not actually possible, then the vision swings in the opposite direction, and so there’s so many passages throughout Rousseau where he just, he comes across as like a middle school girl, as he’s just lamenting that the world isn’t as it should be, and all of humanity is his enemy.

0:29:43.7 Emily Finley: He never blames himself. At one point, he says, “At least I am not to blame. I know that.” And the same for Wilson, these people who are untethered from reality, they end up with a very dark side to them that can manifest through violence, through a rebellion against reality, we see that in Wilson’s foreign policy, he begins with his 14 points in this very optimistic view of what’s possible after the war, he believes. He wanted to make the world safe for democracy. And then what did we get… We got the Second World War, and that was in large part due to the idealism of Wilson and believing that you could liberate humanity at the stroke of a pen, at a peace conference that was attended by the very orchestrators of the carnage in the first place. It’s preposterous.

0:30:43.7 Trevor Burrus: And of course Wilson is, in his writings, is a Princeton, constructional government, congressional government, starts creating the first seeds of the administrative state, which is explicitly and intentionally anti-​democratic, it’s a way of making sure that people don’t necessarily get what they want because of experts and of course, if he was really for democracy in this sense of let the will of the people be expressed, heard and actualized in some sense, then he probably wouldn’t have spent so much time crushing anti-​war opinion during Word War I and before in a way that hadn’t been seen since the Alien and Sedition Acts, that’s a perfect example of how a democratist, someone who’s supposedly pro-​democracy comes in and says, “Well, yeah, what we really need to do is this war, and that’s in the best interest. And if you knew better, you would understand this. In order to make that happen, I’m going to make sure that people can’t criticize me and my government and the war that we’re fighting in Europe.”

0:31:43.1 Emily Finley: Yeah, exactly, you see that he’s crushing democracy at home in the name of democracy abroad, and so this is so fundamental to the democratist mindset, which is that the American system is inefficient, and we saw this with Obama needing to get around the inefficiency of the separation of powers, of Congress, actually the founders, they designed the separation…

0:32:09.5 Trevor Burrus: Well, to be fair, we’ve seen that with pretty much every president, and more and more bipartisan Trump. Trump wanted to build a wall. Biden is doing this. Yeah.

0:32:17.6 Emily Finley: Absolutely. And so that idea of needing to get around the efficiency of the American system in the name of democracy is very democratist at its heart. And for Wilson, I think philosophically, what this comes down to is a mistaken notion that the ends are separate from the means, and so the idea that we can use whatever means we need to, if it’s in the name of the ideal, if it’s in the name of Democracy with a capital D, that is a flawed way of thinking because the means are the end. And so if you are using undemocratic means, you are never going to end up with a Democratic end, you are going to end up with exactly what the means that went into it are. And so in the chapter on the hard Wilsonians, the neo-​conservatives in the Bush administration, and that foreign policy, the means are the ends, and we now get to witness that sadly in Iraq and Afghanistan, which was that trying to liberate these nations by force and creating… The eruption of civil wars, the proliferation of new terror groups, it’s not magically, down the road, gonna result in western style democracy.

0:33:44.6 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, the chapter on the neo-​con is very interesting. But there’s even more that animates that… It’s the American messianic mission, which is maybe the fullest expression of democratism that we’re out there spreading democracy, sort of like Lincoln’s, like the theory that the people know what they want and they deserve to get it good and hard, and that actually what the Iraqis, inside, I can’t remember who you quote, inside every Iraqi is a… It’s a fictitious quote, is just an American wanting to get out with so much of the background claims essentially before the Iraq war, more so than the Afghanistan War, and that this is actually just the fate of humanity as ordained by God or whatever… Whatever reason, it is the fate of humanity, and therefore it is fully okay for America to do horrific things in the name of spreading democracy in the most non-​democratic way you could possibly imagine. I mean sure we set up puppet elections and puppet people to be elected so we can pretend we’re doing it, but ultimately that really wasn’t the goal, the goal was also the idea that this was just what the people wanted, and they didn’t know it yet.

0:34:56.3 Emily Finley: Yeah, exactly. It comes back to the Rousseauian idea of the general will. We imagined that there was this general will for democracy in the Middle East, and that the good people of Iraq deep down desired American style democracy. And so we were gonna go over there and give it to them one way or another, by force at gunpoint as Max Boot was so eager to say. And so it does, it still comes back to Rousseau’s idea of the general will, and that is the general will put into foreign policy practice, and there’s also this element of a historical determinism to it, to that, ahistorical ideal of democracy, which is that the world is trending toward democracy, history, the locomotive of history is moving toward Democracy with a capital D, it’s really not so different from communism from what the Soviets believed, that the Globe was trending toward communism, and the communist revolutions were simply meant to accelerate the historical process. Well, the same… We have the same mentality with Iraq and Afghanistan, and with democratism, more generally, there is this underlying assumption of the deliberative democratists. It was there in Jefferson, it was there in Wilson, that domestically and across the globe, we are moving toward this ideal of democracy, and so through revolution, through force, we’re gonna get there, we’re gonna help to accelerate the historical process.

0:36:33.9 Trevor Burrus: And Rawls, which we’ve talked about Rawls a lot on the show over the years, and I studied him a lot in college, but he’s in the deliberative democracy element that “if you created a system wherein people could fairly choose what they really want,” again, I’m putting those in scare quotes, for those who can’t see us, which is everyone. Then we would produce… I mean essentially a social democracy of Western European style, which is baked into the system in a strange way, it’s like the arch of the universe is long it bends towards single-​payer health care seems to be the underlying assumption, and we get there by crafting a system where we make sure that people can’t use their own values and beliefs to choose and then they choose what we want.

0:37:24.3 Emily Finley: Yeah, exactly, those are beliefs and viewpoints that would tend away from what Rawls believes is true democracy, those are excluded at the outset, which is all traditional religious beliefs. It’s all traditional beliefs, period, anything that differs from… Rawls even admits that essentially the only outcome is liberalism, but he qualifies, there’s some variation of liberalisms that are possible.

0:37:57.0 Trevor Burrus: Now, on the normative side, your book is mostly positive, but there’s so many good lines in it, it’s not hard to see what your opinions are on what democracy should be, ’cause our listeners might be like, okay, does she think it should just be… If the people want communism and oppression, what is the point of the system if it’s not to produce a more just world in some sense, especially compared to the options that we had before the people had any voice in government. So how should we conceive of democracy more correctly than having this sort of idea of democratism that it’s the enacting of the will of the people, if they know what they really wanted. Which is a very shortened form of what democratism is in your definition, but what’s a better version of democracy then?

0:38:46.4 Emily Finley: Yeah, the bulk of the book is really exposing this democratist ideology, but here and there, I suggest that there is an alternative that is more democratic, and the alternative is what paradoxically has been called elitist by these democratists, which is the vision of some of the founders of the US Constitution, for example, John Adams, I think is one, or you could go back to… Not a US founder, but to Edmund Burke, his understanding. I talk about Orestes Brownson, the American convert to Catholicism, who was a great admirer of the American system.

0:39:28.8 Emily Finley: So these figures, they all put forth an idea of… You could call it democratic republicanism or something, where you’ve got the meaningful input of the people, it’s not pure majoritarianism, it’s not the un-​mediated will of the majority, it’s something where there’s a role for democratic leadership, you can have a genuine aristocracy that’s not an oligarchy, but you can have these democratic leaders who are able to inspire the best in the people. And so I think if we look at the American founding, that was a good example of a system that’s not pure democracy, but it incorporates the meaningful will of the people and it also takes account of minority interests.

0:40:27.3 Trevor Burrus: There’s a subtext… I’m surprised you didn’t reference it in the book, but many people have talked about it, but in Thomas Sowell’s Conflict of Visions, he talks about the constrained, the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision or the tragic vision, that there are certain things about humanity that you have to accept as just how things are, if you’re going to a democratic system that is not oppressive or based on the supposed will of whoever is leading it, is that part of what we should be doing when we’re promoting democracy is saying, “Look, this system is not gonna give you everything you want.” If you want you to rebuild Iraq, if you want to create the general will, if you wanna have an agrarian amazing society, like Jefferson did, they will not… People will not do that if you let them choose, so we just have to accept that part of what we do with government is let interest compete, let people talk and see what happens in the end.

0:41:26.2 Emily Finley: Yeah, and you have to begin with what is given, what are the actual historical practices, and so Edmund Burke is someone who says that, “A Constitution without the means of change is a Constitution without the means of its own preservation.” And so there has to be some way of allowing for change and allowing for organic development, but you can’t just expect a wholesale change in the people toward a pre-​ordained and that’s where you end up with violent revolution that destroys the existing civil society, and you end up with something much, much worse. So I think if we’re aiming for some positive change in society, we have to start small because you don’t know the law of unintended consequences is powerful and we don’t know exactly what our actions are going to do, especially with something like social policies, those have far reaching consequences and the federal system in the US is so beautiful because we can actually see state to state what the outcome of certain policies are, so when you have a mass exodus from a place like California to a place like Florida, for example, we can see that, “Oh, it looks like people prefer some policies over here and they’re not thriving too well under the policies over there.”

0:42:49.7 Trevor Burrus: Do we see this getting worse in this sense. Because reading your book, I see democratism as you call it, coming from the left and the right, in equal measures, maybe at different times, it’s bigger on some things, but one thing is that both parties tend to claim in different ways is that due to various forces that exist in society, the people are not… They don’t really know what they want because they haven’t been educated properly, both conservatives and the left says this about the public school system, or conservatives rail against the universities, saying the universities are corrupting the will of the people, or social media is corrupting the will of the people, but the left things, the corporate media is corrupting the will of people or other sorts of nefarious conservative forces like Fox News.

0:43:37.5 Trevor Burrus: And so at the end of the day, there’s a lot of people in this country who believe, as you pointed out earlier, that people are voting not in their best interest. And if they just knew better and were better informed via some sort of policy, they would all more agree with me, which is something I always find that most people think that if the debate were fair, whatever that means, they would win it, they would win that debate. Right, but because the debate is not fair, their side is losing the debate, and therefore we have to do something to fix democracy if it’s not producing the outcomes we want, whether that’s coming from the left or the right.

0:44:15.7 Emily Finley: Yeah, I think that there’s this assumption on the left and the right, as you say that there’s a problem with information and with education, and the assumption there being that the problem is intellectual rather than moral. And so in my book, I don’t know if the subtext is there, but I think I certainly hint at it, that the problem is a moral spiritual problem, it’s not an intellectual problem, it’s not a problem of rationality, you can make a rational argument for or against any given policy, what it comes down to is the moral issue. And so I think that we’re only going to see a revival in our country and in the last [0:45:01.8] ____ more generally, when we have a moral spiritual revival, it’s not about better education or more rigorous rational thinking, it’s not gonna be a revival that’s brought about by logic courses, it’s a revival that’s gonna have to start in the home with the family, with the moral upbringing of children, I believe. I don’t go that far in the book, but that’s certainly what I believe.

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0:45:38.1 Trevor Burrus: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.