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T rump supporters stand on a U.S. Capitol Police armored vehicle as others take over the steps of the Capitol. (with acknowledgements to Kent Nishimura/LATimes) |
Jeffersonian Democracy versus Trumpian Tyranny
By David Comfort
A‘Flawed Democracy’. That is how the Economist Democracy Index now classifies the United States, taking into account, broadly, such things as the Electoral College distortion of the popular vote; the influence of dark money in elections; gerrymandering of electoral districts; the ascendency of the executive branch at the expense of congressional and legislative power and the blurring of lines between of Church and State.
All of which makes it a good time to step back and consider how, historically and philosophically speaking, did America, for so long so proud to see itself as the world’s ‘greatest democracy’ and a beacon to other nations, get here?
Democracy is a rarity in human affairs. Ancient nations were ruled by god-kings; the sole exceptions were Democratic Athens and Republican Rome. After the fall of Rome in the fifth century, divine-right European monarchs and the Church enjoyed absolute power for more than a millennium. Theocrats argued that since God’s will is absolute, the only choice people could make was to either bow to their religiously sanctioned leaders and be saved, or oppose them and be damned.
Amongst the philosophers daring to oppose such theocratic autocracy was Jeremy Bentham. The father of the moral system known as utilitarianism, was an English atheist who argued that morality should not be dictated by an imagined divine will, but actions instead carefully weighed up – calculated – in order to achieve to ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people’. At the time, for many, the humanist philosophy seemed to be a revival of pagan Epicureanism. Indeed, to some evangelists, the idea of worldly happiness was subversive, if not plain ungodly.
Nonetheless, over in America, the American founding fathers embraced the new ethics. Before the Revolution, Patrick Henry famously declared, ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’ while, in the Declaration of Independence, his young colleague, Thomas Jefferson, wrote that liberty and the pursuit of happiness were ‘inalienable’ human rights. To protect them, Jefferson called for a separation of Church and State, an idea first proposed by the ‘father of liberalism’, the British philosopher, John Locke, a steadfast champion of freedom of religion.
As for Benjamin Franklin, the patriot who, besides George Washington, perhaps deserves the most credit for American independence, was in his own words, ‘a thorough deist’. He was also the Ambassador to France and thus in good position to enlist its invaluable support for shaking off the English shackles. The brightest of the founding fathers, the honorary doctor was a polymath, the founder of the American Philosophical Society (founded in 1743 in Philadelphia), and a friend of Voltaire and David Hume. After the Revolution, the wife of the first mayor of Philadelphia, the Cradle of Freedom, asked him: ‘Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?’ Recalling the short-lived Athenian democracy and Roman republic, he famously replied: ‘A republic – if you can keep it’.
Recalling Demosthenes, Cicero, and other historic martyrs of freedom too, Franklin warned Jefferson shortly after signing the Declaration of Independence, ‘We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately’. Fittingly too, the American motto chosen then became E Pluribus Unum or in English, Out of Many – One.
The authority of Judeo–Christianity was based on the idea that the Bible was the unimpeachable word of God: Jefferson and his compatriots challenged this idea. Jefferson, the third president, a deist suspected of being a closet atheist, redacted the entire Old Testament – with its divinely mandated commandments, genocides, plagues, and enslavements – from his new Jefferson Bible, calling it and the Gospels too ‘defective and doubtful’. Rejecting the medieval dogma of Biblical Infallibility, he and other Enlightenment thinkers took the good book, especially the Pentateuch, for myth, not as the literal word of the Lord to Moses. Moreover, as a Unitarian like many of his colleagues, Jefferson, an optimist about human nature, rejected the notion of original sin and man’s alleged corrupt nature. After leaving the White House, the classical scholar wrote to his predecessor, John Adams, a fellow Unitarian, of his hope that ‘the human mind will someday get back to the freedom it enjoyed two thousand years ago’. Athenian democracy, the first in history, was a great inspiration to him and his colleagues (though, with women and slaves disenfranchised, only twenty percent of the populace could participate).
The United States Declaration of Independence opens with Jefferson’s ringing phrase that ‘all men are created equal’. And yet, like six other of the twelve founding fathers, he owned slaves. In his case no less than six hundred over his lifetime, an amount considered to be typical at the time, and, at death, he freed five (including his two surviving children by Sally Hemmings, his domestic servant and maid) while selling off the remainder to pay off the Monticello plantation’s debts. Even so, he called the oldest global practice ‘abominable’ and during his presidency moved swiftly to outlaw the international slave trade. On the other hand, groups of American Indians who resisted his assimilating ‘civilisation program’ were forced into indentured labor without pay (while the 13th Amendment of 1865 emancipating Blacks did not apply to them for another fifty years.) Nevertheless, Jefferson, the plantation owner, expressed sympathy for indigenous peoples. In this, he was, likely, further influenced by freethinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau who in their writings had celebrated the ‘noble savage’ as innately good and uncorrupted.
The ringing proclamation in the Declaration of Independence of rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, although penned by Jefferson, likely followed George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights (adopted June 12, 1776), which referred to ‘the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety’, but beyond that were the phrases of the English philosophers, notably Jeremy Bentham, who was in turn echoing Thomas Hobbes.
The authority of Judeo–Christianity was based on the idea that the Bible was the unimpeachable word of God: Jefferson and his compatriots challenged this idea. Jefferson, the third president, a deist suspected of being a closet atheist, redacted the entire Old Testament – with its divinely mandated commandments, genocides, plagues, and enslavements – from his new Jefferson Bible, calling it and the Gospels too ‘defective and doubtful’. Rejecting the medieval dogma of Biblical Infallibility, he and other Enlightenment thinkers took the good book, especially the Pentateuch, for myth, not as the literal word of the Lord to Moses. Moreover, as a Unitarian like many of his colleagues, Jefferson, an optimist about human nature, rejected the notion of original sin and man’s alleged corrupt nature. After leaving the White House, the classical scholar wrote to his predecessor, John Adams, a fellow Unitarian, of his hope that ‘the human mind will someday get back to the freedom it enjoyed two thousand years ago’. Athenian democracy, the first in history, was a great inspiration to him and his colleagues (though, with women and slaves disenfranchised, only twenty percent of the populace could participate).
The United States Declaration of Independence opens with Jefferson’s ringing phrase that ‘all men are created equal’. And yet, like six other of the twelve founding fathers, he owned slaves. In his case no less than six hundred over his lifetime, an amount considered to be typical at the time, and, at death, he freed five (including his two surviving children by Sally Hemmings, his domestic servant and maid) while selling off the remainder to pay off the Monticello plantation’s debts. Even so, he called the oldest global practice ‘abominable’ and during his presidency moved swiftly to outlaw the international slave trade. On the other hand, groups of American Indians who resisted his assimilating ‘civilisation program’ were forced into indentured labor without pay (while the 13th Amendment of 1865 emancipating Blacks did not apply to them for another fifty years.) Nevertheless, Jefferson, the plantation owner, expressed sympathy for indigenous peoples. In this, he was, likely, further influenced by freethinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau who in their writings had celebrated the ‘noble savage’ as innately good and uncorrupted.
The ringing proclamation in the Declaration of Independence of rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, although penned by Jefferson, likely followed George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights (adopted June 12, 1776), which referred to ‘the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety’, but beyond that were the phrases of the English philosophers, notably Jeremy Bentham, who was in turn echoing Thomas Hobbes.
Ironically, although in his writings Hobbes affirmed a slave’s right to rebel, he supported the monarchy, arguing that without its constraints human life would revert to the natural state of being ‘nasty, brutish and short’. In France, around the same time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they’. And as the legendary German philosopher–poet, Goethe, had put it: ‘None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free’. Here was a revolutionary idea, shifting focus from national freedom to personal. While the aristocrats may have considered themselves free in their power and privilege, many were yoked to their own insatiable and consumptive wants.
The Founding Fathers – for the large part schooled in Greek, Latin and classical thought -- believed that citizens must be well informed to participate in a true democracy. So, naturally, they stressed the importance of education. Toward this end, Jefferson and Franklin were among the first to open free libraries with their own books. (The word ‘library’, incidentally, derives from the Latin liber, meaning both ‘book’ and ‘free’.) The signatories to the Declaration of Independence feared that a nation lacking books and education would degenerate into a ‘mobocracy’ motivated by, in the words of the Federalist, Alexander Hamilton, the ‘grossest errors of misinformation and passion’.
This was the same fear expressed long before by Plato. For this reason, in his utopian Republic, he replaces democracy with a sophocracy (meaning a state ruled by ‘the wise’) led by a dispassionate Philosopher–King. Less pessimistic than Plato about the character and intelligence of the common man, though, the Founding Fathers declined such a coronation and instead gave power to the people. And yet, two hundred and fifty years later, in 2021, American democracy barely survived a mob insurrection triggered by an unscrupulous populist who, after his election, declared, ‘I love the uneducated!’
It is perhaps more significant than is generally realised that, in his bid for re-election at a recent rally, Donald Trump, real estate developer and TV reality star turned Commander in Chief, threatened to shutter the Department of Education. At the same time, Trump pledged to expand funding for religious schools, some of which advocated for teaching such things as Creationism and banning books such as 1984, Brave New World, and The Handmaid’s Tale. It is also revealing to find that one of the books most targeted by these schools is Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. Another is the Analects, by Confucius. Here, to be sure, Trump taps into a deeper vein of American anti-intellectualism with pre-revolutionary roots in religion, as well as into the antipathy aroused by Martin Luther when he called reason the enemy of faith and ‘the devil’s whore’. Or, as the Massachusetts fire-and-brimstone Puritan, John Cotton, thundered: ‘The more learned and witty you be, the more fit to act for Satan will you be!‘
It was despite such reservations about an unschooled citizenry that James Madison composed the American Bill of Rights. Again, it is slightly ironic that the American version followed an English precursor, in this case being inspired by the thirteenth century English Magna Carta that had made all free men equal while preventing royal tyranny. (At least in theory.) Madison’s first two amendments were the most consequential: those for freedom of speech and a right to bear arms. The combination is significant as although Shakespeare wrote that ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’, for millennia writers’ hands had been chopped off or their tongues cut out in accordance with Babylonian, Biblical, and Inquisition law. The Age of Reason was all about free expression and thought, even if the grim historic fact remained: as Otto von Bismarck put it, that world affairs are never decided by ‘speeches’ but by ‘blood and iron’.
Granted, words may trigger wars, but swords and bullets finish them. Orator Patrick Henry’s battle cry in a speech made to the Second Virginia Convention on March 23, 1775, at Saint John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia: ‘Give me liberty or give me death’ was stirring, but it was the blood of British soldiers that birthed American freedom. Similarly, Inquisitionists’ sermons about the wrath of God may have been disturbing, but it was the rack, the stake, and the chopping block that brought the message home to anyone tempted to think, much less express themselves, independently.
Yet, today, the first two amendments to the US Constitution are fundamentally at odds: freedom of speech rests on reason and persuasion; freedom to bear arms summons a violence, often deadly, that silences speech. Originally, in the wake of the Revolution, the second freedom was defensive and collective, approving a well-regulated militia for national security; under might-makes-right aggressors and intimidators, it has become offensive, giving individual vigilantism and terrorism free rein. Meanwhile, even as AR-15s, not muskets, have become the leading cause of death for American children, that champion of deregulated gun rights, the National Rifle Association, has for decades enjoyed a tax-free status otherwise reserved for religious, and charitable causes, for organisations opposed to cruelty to children and animals.
Of course, totalitarians have always relied most heavily on weaponry while exploiting words for propaganda (in other words, ‘alternative facts’ and hence alternative reality). Just as Stalin killed millions in the Great Purge, Mao famously promised ‘Justice will come from the barrel of a gun’. Later, Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ claimed the lives of millions.
Against this, Mahatma Gandhi, India’s apostle of nonviolence, once said: ‘No one can hurt me without me giving them permission’. Forty years later, Martin Luther King, who called the Indian freedom fighter his ‘guiding light’, broadened the context by saying: ‘No man is free unless every man is free’. However, as with Lincoln, Sadat, and the Kennedys, bullets can put an end to the lofty First Amendment words with Second Amendment bullets. And it seems that today many citizens who feel their country and traditional liberties endangered by secularists, immigrants and/or an imagined New World Order find themselves in a militant might-is-right frame of mind. They call themselves pro-life even as they remain staunchly pro-gun, pro-war, and pro-capital punishment. In 2024, polls show that a third of the population of Jefferson’s land of the free now want Trump, their defeated commander in chief, to return not only as their ‘justice’ but also as their ‘revenge’. Some even call him a messiah who will cast their elitist enemies into Eternal Fire.
As for Trump himself, it is alarming to read in a 1990 Vanity Fair feature that Ivana Trump once revealed that her former husband kept at his bedside a collection of Hitler’s speeches, entitled My New Order. Ever since then, Trump has been at pains to deny reading the book, although his speeches certainly echo Hitler’s toxic nationalism, even talking of migrants ‘destroying the blood of our country!’
Hitler himself is known to have read and studied Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (as did Stalin and, indeed, the Founding Fathers). Claiming that ‘it is safer to be feared than loved’, the medieval diplomat and historian, considering people ‘fickle, hypocritical and greedy’, advised leaders to ‘caress’ the submissive and ‘crush’ the troublesome, all the while ‘appearing to be religious’. Cynically adopting this policy, Hitler demanded, ‘Who says I am not under the special protection of God?’
Today, Trump claims to be the voice for the voiceless. Saying he has ‘the best words’ and boasting of his ‘high IQ’, he calls outsiders and critics animals, vermin and scum before urging his followers to ‘get wild’ and ‘knock the crap out of them’. Infuriated with ‘fake news’, the professional prevaricator launched Truth Social, a website which soon became a forum for death threats against his enemies – congressmen, critics, prosecutors, judges, and even his own former Vice-President! During the January 2021 insurrection, the Chosen One’s Christian soldiers wore ‘GOD, GUNS, TRUMP’ hats, AR-15 pins – and concealed weapons in black, leather Bible holsters. (Months earlier, Trump the firebrand had energised his followers by holding a Bible (upside-down) at Saint John’s church, as police used tear gas and violent riot control techniques to disperse peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in what was was widely condemned as the sue of excessive forcend an affront to First Amendment rights to freedom of assembly.
Ironically, even as enflaming the MAGA mob with his rhetoric and shaking fists, Trump himself nearly shared the fate of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King when a lone gunman attempted to shoot him. But, saved by a sudden turn of the head during his speech, and now sporting an ear patch, he managed to turn the sniper’s wound into a stigmatic red badge of courage. Like his devout predecessor (and another champion of gun rights) Ronald Reagan, Trump claimed God himself stepped in to protect him from the assassin’s bullet.
All of which goes to say that today, America is more fractured and endangered than at any other time in American history, save the Civil War. As in that fraught time, the post-Independence fellowship among citizens has given way to a fear – and even hatred. The world will soon discover if enlightened Jeffersonian democracy will prevail and strengthen under the very different leadership of Kamala Harris – who would be America’s first woman President – or if the work of the Founding Fathers will be undone by a cult leader who exploits the most irrational and tribal instincts of its people.
