Who Should Defend Democracy?

Matt Zwolinski responds to my critique of his earlier article on libertarianism and democracy.

On October 4, I published a post on "Libertarianism and Democracy," critiquing political philosopher Matt Zwolinski's earlier Liberalism.Org article on the same topic. Matt has written a response to me, which I have agreed to post at this site. The remaining paragraphs of this post were written by Matt Zwolinski, not me (Ilya Somin). I have posted a rejoinder to Matt's thoughtful response here.

Who Should Defend Democracy?

A reply to Ilya Somin

My recent Liberalism.org essay, "Democracy Belongs on the List," made the case that classical liberals should count democracy among their core commitments, alongside private property, free markets, and the rule of law. And it belongs there for the same reason. Like property rights and markets, democracy is a crucial way of keeping power in check.

Ilya Somin has written a generous and thoughtful reply to that piece. And I think he actually agrees with me more than the framing of his post might suggest. Ilya grants that democracies are generally freer and more prosperous than the alternatives, that democracy is "a valuable check on power," that libertarians should arguably stress these points "more often," and that "in much of the world today, right-wing nationalists pose a greater threat to libertarian values and priorities than the political left does." What's left mainly comes down to two questions: what counts as a libertarian critique of democracy, and whose job it is to defend democracy.

Before turning to those substantive issues, though, there's one terminological matter that's worth clearing up. Ilya says that nothing of significance hinges on whether we call our view "libertarian" or "classical liberal." And on most questions I'd agree. On this one, though, I think the difference matters. In The Individualists, John Tomasi and I draw a distinction between strict libertarians and classical liberals. The former group tends to treat liberty as a moral absolute and to derive their politics from a single overarching principle like the non-aggression axiom. Think Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand. The latter treat liberty as a strong but defeasible presumption and are more empiricist and pluralistic in their approach to politics. Think Friedrich Hayek or Richard Epstein.

My sense is that these two camps within the broader "liberty movement" have taken pretty different stances toward democracy, with strict libertarians being much more critical than their classical liberal brethren. Even back in the 19th century, you could find Benjamin Tucker insisting that voting is always a form of aggression, and Lysander Spooner arguing that women "have just as good a right to make laws as men have, and no better: AND THAT IS JUST NO RIGHT AT ALL." Herbert Spencer was even willing to walk back his support of women's suffrage once he decided that women would probably use their vote to support bigger government. That's a pretty different take than anything you're likely to find in Ludwig von Mises or Friedrich Hayek (more on whom later), let alone in John Stuart Mill.

That brings us to the first of the two substantive issues under dispute. Ilya argues that recent events have made libertarian critiques of democracy more important than ever, and that the libertarian solutions to democracy's flaws are "primarily to limit and decentralize government power." I'm with him on that, but I don't think this settles, or even really addresses, the debate about democracy. Limiting and decentralizing government power is a claim about the scope of the state, about how much government should do. It's a principle that would apply to any government, whether democratic or not. And, crucially, it isn't an argument against democratic control of whatever the state does do.

That distinction was at the heart of my essay. Following Jacob Levy, I argued that classical liberals have let a perfectly sound critique of too much government slide into a skepticism about democracy itself, treating democracy, in Levy's words, "as if the contrast to 'democratic' were 'economic' rather than 'autocratic.'" One can be a radical about reducing the scope of the state and still insist that its agents must be answerable to the people they govern. Most of what Ilya calls the libertarian critique of democracy is really a critique of big government. That's an argument I largely agree with, as far as it goes. The trouble comes when we file it under the wrong heading. When we ourselves blur the line between critiques of state power and critiques of democracy, we shouldn't be surprised when people come away thinking libertarians are against democracy.

That brings me to comparative advantage, which is where I think Ilya's argument is most interesting but also most mistaken. Libertarians are a small minority, he says, and "we have no comparative advantage when it comes to extolling the virtues of democracy relative to authoritarianism. Other types of liberals can do this work just as well as we can, perhaps better." So we should stick to what we do best, which is analyzing democracy's flaws.

This argument might make sense in some contexts. But as a general principle, I think it misfires, and it misfires most badly when the audience is classical liberals and libertarians themselves. That, after all, is where the turn against democracy has actually happened. Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed argued that monarchy was preferable to democracy, and complained that "habitual democrats" had been tolerated rather than "isolated, excluded and expelled from civilization." Curtis Yarvin, who came to neoreaction by way of libertarianism, credits Hoppe with opening "a kind of door to the pre-revolutionary world" for him. And in 2009, Peter Thiel wrote in a Cato Institute publication that "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." None of this follows from the libertarian critique of voter ignorance, and nothing Ilya has written points in this direction. But it grew in a movement where, as Janet Bufton recently put it in Liberal Currents, "even liberal libertarians were taught arguments about why democracy fails," and hardly anyone was making the case for democracy on libertarian terms. Any old liberal can explain to the public why democracy beats dictatorship. But a libertarian drifting toward Hoppe or Yarvin isn't going to listen to them. Only libertarians can tell libertarians that democracy is theirs.

So if democracy is a libertarian value, what kind of libertarian value is it? Ilya argues that democracy shouldn't be "a first-order libertarian priority, on par with liberty, constraining coercion, property rights, and increasing human happiness," because its value is instrumental rather than intrinsic. I agree that the value of democracy is instrumental. In that way, it's in precisely the same position as a number of items on the classical liberal list. Free trade, federalism, judicial review, and the rule of law are instrumental too. What I want to resist is the claim that because democracy is only instrumentally valuable it's therefore dispensable – something that can be traded away whenever we can imagine something better. What we can imagine, though, is a poor guide to what works. The better question, as David Schmidtz argues, is what has "an observable history of leading self-interested agents to act in ways that are useful and agreeable to the people around them," and by that test democracy has very few rivals.

Which leaves us with Hayek. Ilya defends Hayek's preference for "a liberal dictator to a democratic government lacking liberalism" as a claim about rare hypothetical cases, and suggests that transitional non-democratic rule "may be necessary" in places like Russia and China, citing the Allied occupations of Germany and Japan. But those occupations were run by democracies answerable to their own voters, and they ended. Russia and China, in contrast, have no outside power that could impose a transition and then hand power back. The only realistic candidate for transitional power in those countries is a domestic strongman, which is exactly the case Hayek had in front of him. Hayek wasn't musing about hypotheticals; he was talking about Chile.

Ultimately, Ilya and I want the same thing. We both advocate a form of libertarianism that resists concentrated power wherever it appears, including when it arrives through the ballot box. Where we differ is on the need to say out loud that democracy is one of the ways we resist it. I think we should, and I think libertarians are better placed to say it than anyone, since the people who most need to hear it are our own.