Key ideas: In Liberty or Equality, published in 1952, Kuehnelt-Leddihn examines democracy and liberalism and shows that democracy does not mean liberty. He also analyses the term equality that became popular in the 18th century and argues that majority rule in democracy is a threat to individual liberty and that democracy inevitably leads to dictatorship.
The former is concerned with the question of who should be vested with ruling authority, while the latter deals with the freedom of the individual, regardless of who carries on the government.
A democracy can be highly illiberal: the Volstead Act, quite democratically voted for, interfered with the dinner menus of millions of citizens. Fascism, National and international Socialism repeatedly insisted that they were in essence democratic.
Dostoyevski [...] with his interest turned toward the future rather than the past, saw in the egalitarian madness the cause rather than the result of tyranny. Thus he speaks of Shigalyov, the leftist ideologist in The Possessed:
Shigalyov is a man of genius. He has discovered “equality.” He has it all so beautifully written down in his copy-book. He believes in espionage. He wants the members of society to control each other and be in duty bound to denounce their neighbours. Everybody belongs to all and all belong to each single one. All are slaves and equals in slavery. As a final resort there will be calumny and murder; but the most important thing remains equality.
Dostoyevski [...] saw a fateful germination of the seed of destructive ideas; he distinguished between the old-fashioned liberal—the representative of the late Russian Enlightenment—and the following far more radical, if not nihilistic, generation. The drift the great Russian novelist sensed was revolutionary. This is evident when we read of the reactions of Stepan Trophimovich, the old liberal, to a recently published book:
I agree that the author’s fundamental idea is a true one,” he said to me feverishly, “but that makes it only more awful. It’s just our idea, exactly ours; we first sowed the seed, nurtured it, prepared the way, and indeed, what could they say new, after us? But, heavens! How it’s all expressed, distorted, mutilated!” he exclaimed, tapping the book with his fingers. “Were these the conclusions we were striving for? Who can understand the original idea in this?“
Alexis de Tocqueville [...] clearly recognized the psychological roots of the levelling mania:
'Equality is a slogan based on envy. It signifies in the heart of every republican: “Nobody is going to occupy a place higher than I.”
No wonder that the modern dictatorships with their “equality in slavery” are so strongly based on the egalitarian system and on mass support, not on élites or existing aristocracies (save those coming into existence through the new bureaucracies). National Socialism of the German pattern has been no exception to the rule.'...
It was also De Tocqueville who foresaw, in a more precise and concrete way than all his contemporaries, the danger of an evolution from democracy—and especially from democratic republicanism—to tyranny. He envisaged this evolution not as a process of dialectics, but in a direct and logical sequence...
We find it in the second volume of his Democracy in America, contained in two chapters entitled “What sort of despotism have democratic nations to fear?”
This is an accurate picture of the totalitarian state, only seemingly marred by the author’s emphasis on the element of mildness. Here we have to bear in mind that brutality and cruelty in the totalitarian state are merely means to achieve specific ends. The vistas of De Tocqueville relate to a peaceful evolution (or, if we prefer, degeneration)—a slow process of interaction and decline, with men becoming gradually more like mice, and states more like Leviathans...
"Despotism . . . appears to me peculiarly to be dreaded in democratic ages. I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it"
It is in the second volume of Democracy in America that De Tocqueville arrives at this pessimism. Our author confesses that the primary interest in his research and analysis was not the United States as a country, but democracy as such: “America was only my frame, democracy the subject.” (Letter to J. S. Mill, dated November 10, 1836)
Speech delivered February 5, 1852:
"Not being able to read in the book of history, which shows that democracy degenerates everywhere into despotism, it undertook to establish democracy in France . . . thus it dared to fight in every way the two foundations of all societies, authority and inequality; inequality which is the obvious basis of all activity and fecundity in social life; which is at the same time the mother and the daughter of liberty, since equality cannot be imagined outside of tyranny.
To be sure, I am not speaking about Christian equality, whose real name is equity; but about this democratic and social equality, which is nothing but the canonization of envy and the chimera of jealous ineptitude. This equality was never anything but a mask which could not become reality without the abolition of all merit and virtue ...
. . . No, property, the last religion of bastard societies, cannot resist alone the onslaught of the levellers. Have we not seen in our days that the privileges even of intellect have been challenged, and that appeals have been made to ignorance* in order to save the revolution? It cannot be doubted that the dogma of equality, quite logically, should not respect merit or wealth more than birth."
Burke:
"Of this I am certain, that in a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority, whenever strong divisions prevail in that kind of polity, as they often must; and that oppression of the minority will extend to far greater numbers, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single sceptre.
"In such a popular persecution, individual sufferers are in a much more deplorable condition than in any other. Under a cruel prince they have the balmy compassion of mankind to assuage the smart of their wounds; they have the plaudits of the people to animate their generous constancy under their sufferings: but those who are subjected to wrong under multitudes, are deprived of all external consolation. They seem deserted by mankind; overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species."
Not only from a variety of political processes, but from the ever-growing state itself, did many nineteenth-century thinkers fear a distinctive menace to person and personality. The lie of the identification of “state” and “people,” of “state” and “nation” moved Nietzsche to write these famous lines:
Thus spake Zarathustra:
State, what is that? Well then, now open your ears; now I will tell you my tale about the death of nations. State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. It lies coldly and this lie crawls out from its mouth: “I, the State, I am the People!”
Where there is still a real people it does not understand the State and hates it as the evil eye, as sin against morals and rights... (Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra)
Democracy, let us repeat, is concerned with the question of who should be vested with ruling power; while liberalism deals with the freedom of the individual, regardless of who carries on the government.
A democracy can be highly illiberal, while on the other hand an absolute ruler could be a thorough liberal—without being for this reason the least bit democratic...
It should be self-evident that the principle of majority rule is a decisive step in the direction of totalitarianism. By the sheer weight of numbers and by its ubiquity the rule of 99 per cent is more “hermetic” and more oppressive than the rule of 1 per cent... Even 51 per cent of a nation can establish a totalitarian and dictatorial régime...
If we investigate the propensities of the masses we find that they frequently sacrifice freedom [...] in order to enjoy material or psychological advantages.
The concrete political situation of the present moment is not the subject of our analysis; it is nevertheless fairly obvious that “democracy,” in spite of the ubiquity of this term, has failed the expectations of mankind.
Democracy, no less than its bitter fruit—the tyranny of the one-party state—has foundered as a guarantor of freedom, the role in which it has posed for so long.
Democracy, moreover, has betrayed its own idealism (which found such pregnant expression in the “Atlantic Charter”) with greater levity than any modern despotism.
Democracy, no less than modern tyranny, is morally dead, a living corpse, a whitened sepulchre; yet tyranny with its monarchical externals is at least a sinister concentration of material forces and drives.