Badnarik on Exporting Democracy
Michael Badnarik – Libertiarian candidate for president
(at the 2004 Libertarian presidential debate aired on C-Span)
“First of all, the founding fathers loathed a democracy calling it a ‘tyranny of the majority’. The United States is not a democracy. The United States is a constitutional republic based on private property and individual rights. In the 1860s we passed the 13th amendment which presumably eliminated slavery and it took well over a 100 years to erase the racial hatred between the whites and the blacks. How do the American government think that they can go into another country and overide thousands of years of culture? It is not our job to export anything but products and services.”We must assume that Badnarik is ascribing merely the sentiment of the phrase ‘tyranny of the majority’ to the ‘founding fathers’ as it was made famous by Alexis de Tocqueville’s in 1831 in his political and cultural analysis ‘American Democracy’ (and later recapitulated in spirit and phrase by John Stuart Mill in ‘On Liberty’, 1859). The idea being that democracy naturally lends itself to abuse by the majority, and that he felt the then new American nation was susceptible to it.
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“I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny.”
de Tocqueville was not alone, certainly. James Madison (in Federalist papers no.51) and Thomas Jefferson were both quite concerned with the dangers of ‘factions’ (political parties) and the lack of any real provision for the protection of the minority.
de Tocqueville quotes Jefferson in this eerie passage in a letter from Jefferson to Madison in 1789:
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“…The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period.”
Comment posted on 7-27-2004
So, the argument presented is this….if it takes a long time to accomplish…we should not do it…mmmmmmmmm.
Comment posted on 7-27-2004
My take was this: The argument about whether the war was right and
justified aside, it may not be possible to impose our ideology on these
people. And even if it IS somehow possible to "liberate" the Iraqis (from
themselves?), doing so is not in our constitutional mandate. The implication
is that we should lead by example, and not try to "export" something
(democracy) which we so not ourselves really adhere to – the US is a
constitutional repulic, not a democracy. I went on to explore the phrase
"tyranny of the majority" which I found to be an interesting study. Thanks
for stopping by, you always manage to get me thinking about stuff.