Steven Bilakovics is a Lecturer in Political Science at University of California, Irvine. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.
When reason loses authority, violence fills the vacuum.
James Baldwin
For many years, I’ve opened my course on democracy with a singularly critical question: What, currently, is the dumbest show on television? Without much dissent, each class bestows the title upon the leading reality-TV show of the day: Jersey Shore; Here Comes Honey Boo Boo; The Bachelor; Keeping Up with the Kardashians. From this settled ground I venture an obvious follow-up: What ought we consider among the finest works in human history? The room always goes silent as students await one another. Soon enough, though, and again without much dissent, they put together a shortlist of candidates for election: Hamlet and Anna Karenina; the Mona Lisa and David; something by Mozart or Beethoven. Of course once enough of these dusty relics have been name-dropped, some provocateur can be counted on to interject with the irreverence of a Beastie Boys album or Breaking Bad.
Thus far students are amused, if a bit bemused: What could this possibly have to do with freedom, equality, and the socio-politics of liberal democracy?
Then I ask them to discriminate: Which is better, Hamlet or Honey Boo Boo? Immediately, a few faces turn knowing. I refine my wording: Which ranks as the superior work of art? If Hamlet is really good and Honey Boo Boo really bad, the truth would seem self-evident. Yet all present hesitate. Amid discontented murmurs, I double-down: Judged solely as artists, is the creator of the Mona Lisa superior to the creator of The Kardashians? Further, and again judged solely along a single axis, is the high-culture connoisseur superior to the guilty-pleasure glutton? If David is high and The Bachelor low, is the lifelong “consumption” of one elevating and the other degrading, at least in some small measure?
Poised for months of struggle with demanding texts and unanswerable questions, students respond with a resounding “no!” Outraged, they go on the offensive: The highbrow snob is worse since he’s likely condescending and judgmental. I should ask if they’ve just established an alternative rank order wherein they look down on the snob and judge the judgmental inferior. But I never think that fast.
Instead, I plead confusion: Wait, isn’t the hierarchy of The Republic over The Apprentice warranted by the original verdicts? Untroubled, they backtrack toward equality, the antithesis of hierarchy, and summon equality’s bouncer, subjectivity: Who’s to say which is better? It’s all in the eye of the consumer.
As I ponder who is to say, the class pushes its advantage: Love Island is fun and Dante’s Inferno is not, and so what if we feel like indulging ourselves after a hard day? Besides, The Kardashians is way more popular than any pretentious old poem or play, so maybe it, in fact, is better. Numbers aren’t up for debate – ratings over rankings.
Finally, detecting the specter of paternalism, hierarchy’s headmaster, the class united lands the knockout blow: Who are you to tell us what to think and what to choose and what’s good for us? I liberally concede that I don’t have the authority to tell anyone much of anything (especially being a closet Bachelor fan), but ask whether they hadn’t arrived at their own resolutions.
They veto my question and close the conversation by calling in equality’s leg-breaker, cynicism: Granting “superior” status to the so-called Great Works is just a cultural conspiracy to perpetuate the inegalitarian (and so, it goes without saying, unjust) status-quo. It’s discrimination in service to monopolized power and normalized privilege. Knowing a little of history, I can’t disagree. So, outvoted and a touch ashamed, I retreat into silence.
Democracy or Self-Government?
Despite such chastening experiences, I want to take up the case for hierarchy. I do so, perhaps heretically, in the name of democracy. More precisely, I write to renew faith in a particularly aristocratic expression of democracy, that of self-government.
Even as voting rates rise (the 2020 presidential election had the highest turnout in at least three decades), we hear that democracy in America is collapsing. The usual suspects are many: polarization; inequality; institutional dysfunction; systemic injustice; the decline of liberal norms; oppressive intolerances issuing from left and right; populist reactions to the power-elite establishment; the tribal appeal of authoritarianism; disregard for common-ground truth and fact; the lethally unserious hysterics of our social-media “communication environment.”
These threats are typically represented as external to democracy – an infection afflicting the body politic. But our anti-democratic pathologies are more cancerous than viral, traceable back to democracy itself. This is not to victim shame. Rather, it is to recognize that democracy is profoundly, paradoxically complex. Certain elements of the democratic way of life may subvert others. The spirit of what I’ll call democratic aristoiphobia may undermine the practice of self-government.
***
Democracy is premised on the axiom of equality. If not in power than in authority, we are equals. Though you are stronger, smarter, wealthier, more beautiful, and have more Instagram followers, you have no authority over me. In other words, who are you to tell me fill-in-the-blank? Who the fill-in-the-blank do you think you are?
Freedom, of a sort, necessarily follows from equality. You have no authority over me, therefore I am free from you. You may not command me, therefore I am, by right, free to choose – to pursue my own good in my own way. I am my own private property; no trespassing.
We often conflate democracy and self-government, but for all of their Venn-diagram overlap they are not simply synonymous. Self-government too presumes equality; the self is not subject to the governing authority of some superior other. But it also presumes hierarchy. It is premised on the axiom that there is a self that ought to govern, and a self that ought to be governed. There is a self that speaks for some sort of authority and so should make the rules, and a self that, however powerful, should submit to those rules. Self-government coheres in this constitutional tension, between the poles of equality and hierarchy.
The collective self of democracy – “the people” – manages this tension by ranking quantity over quality. Equality dictates one person, one vote; add up votes and the majority makes the rules. Unlike the aristocratic rule of the best, democracy amounts to the rule of the most. Popular sovereignty is, literally, government by authority of popularity. Should superiority and popularity align, we can have our cake and eat it too. Should popularity trump superiority, we end up with a democracy the quality of reality TV.
What, though, of the individual self? How am I to govern myself when there is but one of me? You have no authority over me, but what rules, if any, should I impose upon myself? I feel the motivating power of my desires, but do I recognize some ordering purpose? I exercise will, but do I abide by reason? I am free to choose, but am I able to judge? On what higher ground does my governing self stand?
One reaction to these questions is cynicism. Authority over power; judgment over choice; purpose over desire; reason over will: Get real! Right over wrong; true over false; superior over inferior: Grow up! The emperor has no clothes. Claims to authority – political, moral, scientific – are just conspiratorial cover-ups masking rigged systems, hidden agendas, and written-by-victors histories. Follow the money. Whatever our public posturing, we all know we’re all just self-interest incarnate. We use whatever we have to get whatever we want, and the more, the better. Our only purpose is to win. Our only standard of judgment is success. This is the only truth, the basic fact of base reality. The only virtue is the manliness to handle and wield this brutal truth. The only rule is there are no rules. Submitting to governance, even self-governance, is thus for suckers.
Or as one of our greatest aphorists put it: “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.”
Salvaging self-government from the cynics’ reflexive contempt requires a leap of faith. We’d have to overcome our egalitarian aversion to hierarchy and honor the properly governing elements of the self. We’d have to bend the knee to the self that deserves respect. We’d have to judge ourselves.
In Defense of Hierarchy
Hierarchy has gotten a bad rap, and for good reason. “The rule of the high,” hierarchy is simply the order wherein superiority ranks over inferiority. The Stradivarius violin is a superior type of the form; Hilary Hahn’s is a superior expression of the instrument. Knowing nothing of violin, I am inferior. The music they make is excellent, masterful, beautiful, even if I’m unable to appreciate it; the noise I’d make is not, even if I’m partial to it.
Through perversions like patriarchy, oligarchy, and white supremacy, though, hierarchy has become associated with the disorder wherein those of no particular excellence place themselves above others by virtue of their greater power. In the most imbecilic of generalizations, some demographic category ranks itself as the superior expression of humanity and claims the categorical right to rule inferior expressions. That some historically dominant clique assumes its embodiment of reason and respectability, and asserts its paternal governance over a properly subordinate caste, is no more than nonsense. Male over female; rich over poor; white over black: This is hierarchy for idiots.
A tautology, “legitimate hierarchy” now sounds oxymoronic. Perhaps the currency of hierarchy has been so defaced by its counterfeiters as to be rendered worthless. Perhaps we have so disgraced ourselves as to justify the cynics.
Try as we might, though, we cannot do without hierarchy. We can hardly think – much less reason, evaluate, decide – without it. To judge (and risk being looked down on as judgmental) is to recognize some vertical architecture of authority wherein x rightfully stands above y – true over false, virtue over vice, equality over inequality, tolerant over intolerant, antiracist over racist, Hamlet over Celebrity Apprentice. We may make choices randomly, or based on personal tastes, preferences, and feelings. But judgment involves the impersonal “should” of things: Should I tell the truth? Should I practice antiracism? Should I read Hamlet?
If you judge Abraham Lincoln the superior president (and person) to Donald Trump, you too may be a hierarchist.
Affirming hierarchy is, of course, dangerous. To concede authority is to invite its abuse by some artificial aristocracy. It opens the door to absolutism, the rule of those who claim to own truth or right, to represent naturalness or normalcy, to speak for divinity or tradition or progress.
Yet denying hierarchy is not without its own dangers. To bar authority is to invite the strong man, the autocrat who taps the people’s cynicism to level most every standard by which he (and they) might be judged. He’ll be held to account only in terms winning, along with his genius for emancipating the base from those paternalistic elites who claim governing authority. He’ll command respect not through respectability but by show of force, whether deployed to break rules or impose order, benefit friends or brutalize enemies. He’ll claim superiority by virtue of virility, and qualification to rule by the logic of biggest-as-best. The result will be a democracy the quality of demagogy.
Plato’s Wager
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Once upon a time, there was a great nation governed by great leaders. These statesmen displayed the moral and intellectual virtues to rule well and wisely. They did what was right, insofar as they were given to see the right. They were selfless, governing for the sake of the governed. They could be trusted with power because they did not desire the power that was thrust upon them.
Then corruption set in. Some change occurred (nobody really knew what, though everyone had their pet theory), and the great nation lost its way. Its golden age gave way to a generational lessening. People became consumed with money and power, and the acquisitive rich, in their abundant power, came to rule. They were petty, and their view of happiness was low. Yet they strove to appear at least as if virtuous to signal that they were indeed deserving (and because it was advantageous to seem trustworthy). So they closeted their greed behind a façade of well-dressed, well-spoken, well-mannered refinement.
Eventually, though, this performance was exposed for the hypocrisy it was. Everyone knew the rich were no better (and probably worse) than the rest. Even those supposedly noble few of the golden age were no better (and probably worse) than the rest. In fact, anyone who pretended to be better was actually worse. The only evidence this egalitarian faith required was any sign of self-interest.
Amid such enlightened disillusionment, the people settled into a semblance of anything goes. Things seemed pretty sweet as, liberated from the old strictures of shame and civility, all felt free at last to express/expose themselves. Even in the public square, suit-and-tie formality and the artifice of etiquette folded before the alluring openness and intimacy of private life. Uprightness was read as uptightness. Integrity came to mean authenticity – not conducting oneself with strict fidelity to truth but being unapologetically true to oneself. Character came to mean personality – the self-promoting performance of unrepressed authenticity. Immoderation became proof of conviction. Proudly immodest, people pressed to show their enthusiastic love of one another, and their enthusiastic hate. Empathy and outrage became de rigueur.
In this emancipation drama all granted themselves the right to live however they pleased. The “I” stood as its own authority, a judge in its own case – as self-righteous as it was self-expressive and self-interested. Though admittedly venal, it was to “think for itself,” to be the author of its own story. It was free to choose, even its own privatized truths. And to justify its choices it needn’t offer reasons, but only appeal to the intensity of its personal beliefs and feelings. Who was to say otherwise?
***
Yet even absent rulers there were rules. Having leveled hierarchy, the sovereign “I” found it could move in but one dimension. The new world of equality was open but flat. In time, a new order arose amid this sprawl – a way of life characterized by a host of defining norms, orthodoxies, and prejudices.
Since pursuers of happiness couldn’t conceive of service to an elevating purpose, they fixed on the feverish, competitive accumulation of whatever they happened to desire. Understood as “drives” – the felt imperative of heart, gut, and groin – desires weren’t subject to qualifying reason and judgment. Their sole decree was plain common sense – the more, the better. Normalized as natural, the “self” and its “interests,” which could have been imagined as most anything, flattened to the creature that slavishly pursues power after power to feed its overpowering desires unto death. The sovereign “I” revealed itself to be, at bottom, a petty tyrant, consuming what it desired and consumed by desire.
And so, though liberated, the people were moved, as if by some great invisible hand, in the same direction. They were like travelers in a forest where all roads led to the same point. All were free to choose, and all chose more of more or less the same thing. Discrimination lost standing and diversity leveled to variety, stylistic variations on the same basic uniform. The sovereign individual happily took its place in the ascendent mass, under the sovereignty of popularity.
This new regime stood firm upon a perfect circle of prejudice. The brutal truth of cynicism warranted the base good of licentiousness, which certified cynicism as realism. The “grown-up” worldview justified a childish liberty, and vice versa. And the two tag-teamed dissent into submission. All were known to be little conspiracies of self-interest, all hungered to indulge their desires, so anything better became both unbelievable and intolerable. An affront to fact and value, any invocation of nobility became both ridiculous and insufferable. Any expression of superiority aroused a puritanical zeal to unmask and expose, uncover and confess, strip naked and dig down to the ugly underneath. To secure equality’s freedom, to safeguard their status in the new order, the people flocked to vandalize any vestige of aristocracy.
Thus, in the great cycle of things, the Golden Age gave way to the Gilded Age, which gave way to the Age of Ignobility.
To conserve the new regime, a strict etiquette of ignobility was enforced. People were free to express themselves, and vulgarity became the lingua franca of the nation. Profanity became obligatory, and a point of pride. It was honored as “f-bomb” power and insubordinate freedom, brutal honesty and shameless self-expression, the defiance of paternalistic prohibitions and inhibitions alike. To be obscene was to keep it real. To be offensive was to be oneself. To be obnoxious was to be down to earth. To be outraged was to speak one’s truth and tell it like it is – and the louder, the better. And any voice that dared trespass on the sacrosanct self was dismissed by means of the middle finger.
In the end, having censored the paternal, the sovereign “I” found no reason to ask permission even of itself. Liberated from respect for that which is higher, it finally overthrew the strictures of self-respect. Adulthood was emancipated from maturity.
***
For leaders, the juvenile many chose those who promised to deliver what they desired. What else was there? This amounted to security and prosperity, of course, but also to the symbolic validation of prevailing orthodoxies and prejudices. The people wanted affirmation of their cynicism and licentiousness, which required brutalizing proof that none stood above, or even upright. They wanted someone to level intellectual and moral complexity into us/them zero-sum math, thereby ousting judgment. They wanted someone to mud-wrestle the hypocrite elite and humiliate the faux aristocracy – and the more entertaining, the better. So they chose the disobedient boy-king who incarnated their aristoiphobia.
Spurning paternalism, the people ended up under a demagogue. He didn’t govern for the sake of the governed, but pandered to the governed for the sake of himself. He was the most petty tyrant of all, and so was fluent in the people’s vulgar language. He was ostentatiously obscene, but that signified power and authenticity. He was the biggest slave to desire, but that played as manliness. He was a flagrant degenerate, thus the perfect bad-boy antihero to sack the citadels of the haughty establishment. He was a creature of flattery, which he mastered to fan the vanities of the narcissistic mass. He personified raging ignobility, which honored the base. His words were ugly and brutal, and so though a liar he testified to the cynic’s truth and was heard to tell it like it is. As there were no standards of high and low, only of more winning and less losing, he spoke seductively as the biggest winner of all. And the whole pornographic spectacle was just so entertaining.
Our story ends with the people governed not by great statesmen, nor by themselves, but by an autocratic clown who, while far from for the people, was very much of the people.
***
This is not the story of America. Rather, it’s the story (with some elaboration) of regime decline told 2,500 years ago by Plato in his Republic. The narrative arc is straightforward, from aristocracy, through oligarchy, to democracy, into tyranny. Take power from the hands of virtue and where can it end up but in the hands of vice? Cynically dismiss the possibility of virtue and what but vice remains? The options are clear: the rule of the noble or of the base; the just order of aristocracy or the order without justice of tyranny.
To our surprise, Plato located democracy a short, slippery slope away from tyranny. The democratic rule of equality debases hierarchies of judgment and virtue. The authority of reason is dethroned and the usurpatious power of desire rushes to fill the void. To rise within democracy, the tyrant need only satisfy the people’s appetites and aversions, above all their contempt of aristocracy.
We moderns see a nobler potential in democracy, a superior prospect in equality. We’ve wagered that the rule of popularity may make peace with the rule of superiority, and that democracy need not culminate in populist demagoguery. We’ve wagered that we can do ourselves the honor of governing ourselves.
So how have we fared?
Aristoiphobic America
Were you Team Smails or Team Czervik? For the unfortunately young among us, allow me to explain. In the 1980 epic Caddyshack, a war for the hearts and minds of the Bushwood Country Club raged between Ted Knight’s Judge Smails and Rodney Dangerfield’s real estate developer Al Czervik. The businessman was far wealthier – swamping the judge’s humble dinghy with his immense yacht. He was incivility personified – insulting all within earshot and venting his libidinal excesses on friend and foe alike. He was all garish narcissism and petty underhandedness – lying, cheating, and manipulating to win a golf-game bet. And for all these reasons, this reprobate bully life-of-the-party one-percenter was the people’s champ. We were all Team Czervik.
To venture back even a bit before 1980, Alexis de Tocqueville concluded in Democracy in America that democratic peoples “will suffer poverty, servitude, and barbarity, but they will not suffer aristocracy.” We often conflate inequality and hierarchy, but for all of their Venn-diagram overlap they are not simply synonymous. Inequality involves power; hierarchy invokes authority. Hierarchy rises along the qualitative axis of high over low; inequality spreads across the quantitative of more and less. Democratic peoples may affirm inequality; votes, wealth, popularity and more may be more or less amassed, generating different degrees of power. But they will not suffer hierarchy, the rule of the high, and its aristocratic embodiments. If it defaces aristocracy, they may even serve barbarous power.
Democracy’s protagonists thus can be educated but not intellectual, rich but not upper-crust, famous but not aloof, egotistical but not condescending, alpha but not smug, well-trained experts but not privileged elites, obnoxious blowhards but not pompous windbags. Their greed is good, so long as it’s vulgar. As in our esteemed line of American antiheroes, they can do violence – in word and deed – so long as their sights are set on those who sit in the commanding heights.
Al Czervik was a paragon of vice. But precisely in his vicious desecration of country-club norms – his uncensored, slouching, gleefully irreverent giving of offence – he exposed the Big Lie of aristocratic elitism.
Democracy’s antagonist is, in sum, Judge Smails. He was an aristocratic out of central casting – the nose-in-the-air, colorless, asexual anti-democrat in the morality play of slobs-versus-snobs (or better, thugs-versus-smugs). He was wholly intolerable, playing at WASP noblesse oblige and a paternalistic superintendence of the rabble caddies of Bushwood. And he was utterly fake, holier-than-thou rectitude and a powdered complexion plastered over petty tyranny. Though concealing himself behind an artifice of refinement – from his starched posture and pretentious gentility to his pompous enunciation and senatorial pronouncements – he was just as much a bully as Czervik. Whatever his air of authority, Smails was no better (and in truth worse) than Czervik.
This becomes the standard of discrimination in democratic times: Czervik over Smails. This is how one may rise in times of equality: Mock those you oppose as Smalsian aristocrats and let popularity render its judgment.
***
Unsurprisingly, those of aristocratic airs fare poorly in the democratic vote. Take, for example, most every recent American presidential election. Obama over Romney; Bush over Kerry; Bush over Gore; Clinton over Dole; Clinton over Bush; Reagan over Mondale; Reagan over Carter: the least Smailsian shall prevail. The folksy fast-food-scarfing sax-riffing basketballer cowboy common man defeated the effete Europeanish Volvo-driving latte-sipping wind-surfing dressage-aficionado gentleman. Bush and Dukakis was an exception where the dissatisfied electorate was stuck with two uptight, out-of-touch stuffed suits. Obama and McCain was an exception where neither could be tarred as aristocratic, despite Obama’s eloquence and education and McCain’s dignity and service (though McCain covered his bases with über anti-aristocrat Palin while Obama teamed-up with Amtrack Joe).
The 2016 war for the hearts and minds of the American electorate exemplified Caddyshack democracy to a degree that strained credulity. If you hadn’t heard, a vulgarian rich man ran against the distilled essence of an elite establishment figure. The rich man had never so much as run for student body president; the elite woman had amassed several lifetimes of experience at every level of government (and was happy to tell you all about it). The rich man turned his gaudy wealth into gaudier celebrity, and made no apologies for abusing all the power these brought; the elite woman assumed all the authority of her ample expertise. The rich man was infantile, immoral, and incompetent; the elite woman lectured in the scolding tone of a stern parent from behind a plastered smile. The rich man was obscene and shameless, and so apparently strong; the elite woman engaged in deplorable shaming, until she was made to back down. The rich man was a slobbish monument to inequality; the elite woman was a snobbish advocate of equality.
And the rich man won (or at least parlayed his impropriety into an exceedingly improbable second-place finish in the popular vote, along with an enduring hold over the American psyche). He cashed in on his gilded ignobility while she wore her superiority like a scarlet letter. Better 31-flavors of corruption than one whiff of condescension. He may have been rich and famous but he wasn’t aristocratic, and that made all the difference. In his brutal bid for power he promised to violate the aristocracy, and that was qualification enough. He embodied a cynicism we could believe in.
If you want to lose an election in aristoiphobic America, let it be known that you read Hamlet and look down on Celebrity Apprentice.
The Aristocratic Self
Have you ever made a New Year’s resolution? Perhaps you’ve resolved to eat well and exercise, to volunteer more and spend less time in the company of screens, to read War and Peace and be more noble. In making such resolutions, you are self-legislating. There’s something you find reason to believe good (health, for instance). You identify means to that end (eat well and exercise). You pass laws that align action with aim (thou shalt eat broccoli and walk to work). Then you attempt to govern your self. You come up with all sorts of executive policies (don’t shop when hungry) and incentive programs (carrot: get donut hole after walking to work; stick: friend shames you after yoga no-show). And, if you are like the rest of us, your resolve prevails until the first siren note of maple walnut ice cream and binge-worthy TV.
It’s as if there are two selves, the self that ought to rule and the self that ought to be ruled. There is the authoritative self that speaks for your purpose (health), and the powerful self that speaks for your desires (you have an aversion to broccoli and an appetite for donut after donut that ceaseth only in death). If you’re lucky, appetite is at peace with aspiration. Otherwise, civil war ensues. In such a contest we all know that the strong does what it wills while the weak suffers what it must. And you break your vows.
When are you free? When you serve your purpose or submit to your desires? When you govern yourself or permit yourself? When you act as law-maker or rule-breaker?
Obviously, freedom lies with the latter. Think about it. Why should you eat well and exercise? That’s just something some smug doctor told you to do. We all know they’re just out to make a buck (probably in the pocket of Big Broccoli) before heading out for eighteen holes at Bushwood. And the ugly truth is your goal isn’t really health. The fact is you just want to look good – to possess the power of desirability, of popularity. Denying yourself donuts is actually just caving to cultural norms of beauty. And the rules are rigged in favor of the genetically privileged one-percenters. So you’re really free when you rebel against these discriminatory standards – it’s empowering, and you can post about it. You may not be able to take pride in sticking to your resolutions, but you can be proud of your insubordination. So @#$%! all those @#$%ing shoulds that shame you! You shouldn’t should yourself so much. Besides, you’ve had a hard day and deserve a treat. So what if you can’t help yourself? You’re only human! Maybe you just need a drink to drown those nagging inhibitions.
This is cynicism in service of licentiousness, against self-governance. One by one, your legislative, executive, and judicial capacities are brought low by leveling rationalizations and resentments. You’re free to do what you want, but can’t order yourself to honor your resolutions.
***
Now just a few hundred years old, liberal democracy was conceived in a sort of symbolic patricide (made fully overt in the French Revolution). Self-evident equality banished the father’s authority from politics, and perhaps society generally. Those who held power were recast as servants of the people, subordinate to the popular sovereign. The right of command was supplanted by the right to choose, expressed by way of contract and consent. Paternalism became, as Immanuel Kant put it, “the worst despotism we can think of” – oppression justified as to the benefit of the oppressed.
Opponents of this new order argued that exiling the father figure abandoned citizens to the liberty of children. We would, when our parents left for the weekend, promptly commence trashing the house, the house we ourselves live in, necessitating a tyrannical reaction to the anarchy we unleashed.
The early champions of popular rule believed that we might do better than paternalism and libidinal irresponsibility alike. We may not be philosopher-kings, but we’re reasonable enough to govern ourselves. Though perhaps less than noble, we’re mature enough to make democracy work.
Immediately after he rejected the conventional view that political authority replicates that of a father over his children, John Locke introduced an alternative hierarchy – that of reason over will. And ingeniously, he derived this hierarchy from a state of perfect equality. We are by nature equal, meaning no one has “jurisdiction” over the property (the mind, body, soul, voice, or estate) of another. Reason, in turn, dictates that we have rights – the birthright, as equals, not to be subject to another. Those who submit to this simple rule of reason are superior. Those who respect rights are deserving of respect, and of self-respect.
Obedience to impartial reason’s law was, for Locke, the paradoxical essence of liberty – liberty as self-governance, the rule of the reasonable self. If I mistake liberty for the right to do whatever I want, I make the category error of associating “right” with permission rather than prohibition and obligation. This is liberty as license, the abdication of self-governance. It amounts to the emancipation of the unruly tyrant who proceeds arbitrarily, by force, in violation of reason and right. Grasping for power, I shun the authority of my higher self and end up selling myself into, if not slavery, then base servility. This is liberty degraded, and as degrading.
The American constitutional project was, in James Madison’s view, an attempt to institutionalize the rule of reason over passion, as he put it frequently in the Federalist Papers. This didn’t reduce to the rule of some well-born or wealthy aristocracy, as many Anti-Federalist critics charged. Nor was it “counter-majoritarian.” Rather, the plan of government organized political time and space – diffusing decision-making through stages of procedural complexity and strata of national diversity – to stymie the intemperance of power. The majority would rule, but more often than otherwise with the moderating distance from itself required of judgment. The tradeoff would be a politics of immediacy for one of impartiality. With its frustratingly slow connectivity, its unresponsiveness, the new system might enable we the people to refrain from trashing our own house. The end was neither more nor less democracy, but a better form of democracy.
Thomas Jefferson placed his faith in education more so than institutional design, but to similar ends. His model of education aimed to cultivate a “natural aristocracy” of “virtue and talent,” which would supplant the “artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth” that had for so long plagued humanity. The few would be drawn from “every condition of life” and taught to serve the public as statesmen. The many would be taught to serve the public as citizens, the electoral “guardians of their own liberty.” Unlike the purely democratic method of appointing representatives by lot, by unselective selection, elections would be occasions for the citizenry to discriminate between “the real good and wise” and the “pseudo-aristoi” (and, presumably, the overtly base). This vertical architecture would, Jefferson hoped, secure the standing of judgment in democracy.
Diagnosing democracy’s inner conflict between the aspiration to self-government and the aristoiphobic unwillingness to suffer the self that ought to govern, Tocqueville warned of a tragic resolution wherein democratic peoples “raise themselves to sovereign power only to gratify trivial and coarse appetites more easily.” In an adolescent mix of unruliness and puerility, the same individual who “cannot tolerate subordination” ends up with “such contempt for himself that he thinks the only pleasures he is made to savor are vulgar ones.” The sovereign individual becomes the author of its own story, and cynically casts itself as a reality-TV star.
Tocqueville envisioned a counter-culture of self-respect, the foundation of self-government. What we need most is pride, a disposition cultivated less in swearing that none may look down on us that in finding cause to look up to ourselves. We do ourselves honor not by declaring that none may order us – with all the siege-mentality resentment and self-righteous outrage this breeds – but by demonstrating that we may order ourselves.
Participating in local political and civic associations; assenting to jury service and a free press; respecting religious mores and human rights; submitting to legal forms, political procedures, and civil manners; for Tocqueville, these are how we daily practice the art of self-government by learning to exercise power and judgment simultaneously. They make democracy the best version of itself.
Our Two Dignities
Liberal democracy is an alloy of opposites, and so always a balancing act. Its ethical axiom is equality, but it cannot do without hierarchy. Equality puts the “self” in self-government, and even liberal government involves hierarchy – of judgment over choice and interest, reason over violence and desire, impartiality over illiberality and factionalism. Reject equality and you authorize oppression; reject hierarchy and you’re left with power freed of inhibition.
For equality, it’s both the best and worst of times. Inequality runs amok while hierarchy has become a dirty word. Concentrations of power go unchecked while claims to authority are all but impermissible. Advantages both subtle and overt order society while “privileged” and “elite” stand as accusations.
This simultaneous waxing of inequality and waning of hierarchy may not be coincidental.
Those who’ve taken political center stage amass power after power not by being morally and intellectually qualified for office but by performing anti-paternalism. They win elections by promising disobedience – a seductive mix of unseriousness and riotousness – which they declare independence. They accrue charismatic authority by staging confrontation with the rule-making elite – whether mocking it as soft and effeminate or raging against it as insidious and controlling. And so they don’t so much “get away with” violating norms of civility, slandering the rank of virtue over vulgarity, and refusing the impartial authority of truth as they make these their brand.
Though often advancing the cause of caste, they campaign as the anti-heroes of equality against the Smalsian forces of the establishment. They are the rebel movement, the underdog uprising of a colonized people. Their flame-throwing nostalgia for a bygone (dis-)order plays as a stand-your-ground defense of the working-class folk against the censorious soft-power aggressions of the flaccid but moralistic palace aristocracy. Sure, they may occasionally go too far into indecency in their full-frontal assault on the ivory tower’s henpecking and finger-wagging, but, hey, better misogynistic than patrician. To amass popularity, they need only pledge to dethrone the high-and-mighty who would “force fill-in-the-blank down your throat.” The egalitarian principle of anti-paternalism can always be turned against the liberal reformer.
Those who monopolize the nation’s wealth have similarly learned to consolidate power upon egalitarian premises. These gilded titans of industry occupy a world apart from we Morlocks, with their panoptic dominance over matters both public and private. Yet they claim no special right to rule. Indeed, they’re satisfied with the right not to be ruled. They cannot assume any special honors or titles of nobility, but nor need they justify the world-order they own (beyond that of a vaguely Darwinian metaphysics). They may choose to use their wealth benevolently, but need not bear the obligations of noblesse-oblige governance, even of themselves. Their great “influence” comes with no responsibility, only the liberty to do whatever they please (and let’s be real, we all know we’d do the same were we similarly flush).
Intuiting a key to democratic culture, they know that even grotesque inequality can be democratized by a symbolic contempt of aristocracy. Shunning the paternalistic forms, fashions, and functions of aristocracy, our slob robber barons can be just the kids with the most toys – Chevy Chase’s Ty Webb in our Caddyshack social imaginary. From deep within their zip-code enclaves, they work and play in their ostentatiously unpretentious t-shirts and tennis shoes. Like ill-mannered children, they revel in moving fast and breaking things. They may, for all I know, even binge The Kardashians and Celebrity Apprentice, those homages to vulgar excess. They’re just like us!, only more so. In their abundance they happily play by our rules, the democratic rule of the most.
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We liberal democrats have long served as our own grave diggers. We’ve turned hierarchy into something self-serving and simple-minded – a matter of undiscriminating, ascriptive categorization. Reason is turned against itself when made male; respectability becomes disreputable when colored white; virtue is subverted when classified as belonging to the monied. This is just violence gentrified.
Like the lie that degrades the institution of language, these corruptions of hierarchy debase the very concepts of authority and judgment. Claims to authority become no more than the sheep’s clothing of power, and the architecture of judgment the scaffolding of prejudice. The terms by which we grope our way toward legitimacy in a liberal democracy are weaponized, consigning us to a spiraling, dispiriting crisis of legitimacy. All that’s left standing is a know-nothing, know-it-all cynicism, with its conspiracy theories, brutal truths, and power plays. Having raised ourselves to sovereign power, we lose faith in that we may govern ourselves.
Can we do better? Can we turn the terms and conditions of hierarchy against inequality? Can we reframe freedom as self-government, thereby sapping the demagogue’s appeal? Can we argue together, out from between the rock of cynicism’s “we all know!” and the soft place of subjectivity’s “who’s to say?”
We might begin to repair the house we’ve trashed by recognizing that there are two aspects of human dignity. The first is democratic, a testament to our essential equality and inestimable worth. Honoring it demands our emancipation from all those faux-aristocracies that would exploit authority for their own odious pretensions. It mandates the unqualified grant of respect that is our birthright due.
The second aspect of dignity is aristocratic, the culmination of our capacity to discriminate between that which is beneath us and that which is worthy of us. Honoring it demands we sit in judgment of ourselves, submitting to those hierarchies by which we order – and elevate – ourselves. It mandates all due self-respect. Conducting ourselves accordingly reveals the beautiful truth that there is more to the “self” and its “interests” than the indignities typically assumed.
Together, these two dignities fortify us against both the paternal rule of imperious others and the puerile rule of our juvenile selves. In their union hinges the grandeur and justice of the liberal democratic way of life.