SPEECHES

"People" versus "The People"
(or "What is, and what is not, Democracy.")

A speech written and delivered by Freedom Party of Ontario Leader Paul McKeever to the attendees of the April 12, 2003
Ontario Provincial Election Dinner in London, Ontario.

Ladies and gentlemen,

In recent days a socialist dictator has been removed from power. Some have actually struggled to see the justification. Ontario’s premier has purported to deliver a budget in an auto parts factory, rather than in the midst of parliament. The premier himself struggles to see what is wrong with doing so, and can conclude only that it was not a very popular thing to do.

Accordingly, it is incumbent upon us to revisit the definition of a word both overused and poorly defined. A word that, by virtue of its reputation as a reference to all that is good in society, enshrouds even the most immoral forms of government with a veil of respectability. A word that, in so many societies, arouses such warm and passionate emotions that virtually any government action done in its name need rarely fear scrutiny. A word that has become so well-respected that an explicit understanding of its meaning seems unimportant to most, and that a wide-spread understanding of its meaning is undesirable to a scheming few. I am speaking of the word "democracy".

The word is Greek in origin, but translated literally means "people power" or "rule by people". Since the word was first used, but perhaps most frequently in the past century or two, the natural question asked by those who study government and society is: How do people rule in a democracy? How.

There have been many answers. Marxists, holding the decisions of the collective to be more important that the desires of the individual, have argued that, in a true democracy, the machinery of production - capital - should be owned by people collectively. According to the Marxists, the majority of people then decide how to use the capital for the benefit of the collective. This model of government, they call "social democracy".

Some Individualists, holding the peaceful decisions of the individual to be more important than the desires of the collective, have rejected democracy outright, on the ground that majority rule is logically inconsistent with individual freedom. Other individualists have nonetheless embraced democracy, but have instead argued that, in a real democracy, there are limits on the power of the majority. Those limits are typically cited to be individual rights or freedoms. In some cases, the limits are said to relate to an individual's rights of life, liberty and property. We typically find these advocates of democracy championing court-enforced bills of rights as limits on the law-making powers of legislatures. Such people sometimes call this understanding of democracy "liberal democracy".

Yet other people have argued for "direct democracy". Here, we see a different sort of pro-democrat: the advocate of a system in which the will of the majority should not be and is not stymied by individual freedoms or rights, and in which the power of the legislature is held to be supreme to that of a bill of rights enforced by an unelected judiciary. The advocates of direct democracy are philosophically attached neither to the supremacy of the collective will, nor to the supremacy of individual freedom. Whether because they believe in the inherent goodness of mankind, or whether they see majority rule as the only means to override the constitutional protections of individual freedom, matters not. The simple fact is that, whatever values such people may claim to hold - whether an attachment to freedom of speech, property rights, racial or religious tolerance et cetera - all such values are secondary to their commitment to unmitigated majority rule.

Social democracy. Liberal democracy. Direct democracy. It has been my observation that few meaningful words depend for their understanding upon an adjective. Yet that is precisely the situation with the definitions commonly given the word democracy. In the minds of the Marxists, the Populists, and even some Individualists, the word "democracy" ceases to confer any meaning at all except perhaps that, in one way or another, the majority of "people" - "the people" - should rule.

But even that meagre definition cannot survive careful scrutiny. In Canada, for example, but also in the numerous democracies of ancient Greece, not all of the governed voted. In virtually all democracies, only a small subset of people - chosen by lot or by election - has voted on laws. The majority of people cannot be said to rule in that sense.

Enter another adjective in a desperate attempt to save the notion that democracy means majority rule: representative democracy. As it turns out, that adjective fails miserably to solve the problem: in many countries, even the selection of representatives is not dependant upon majority opinion. In Canada, for example, one need only have the support of the largest minority of voters in order to win a seat in the legislature, yet Canada and other multi-party jurisdictions with the first-past-the-post electoral system consider themselves democracies.

I submit to you that - by oversight or by design - those who bother to think about or discuss democracy have jumped the gun. By assuming that democracy is a society that makes its rules in a certain way - by assuming that democracy is a law-making process - the semantic guardians of democracy have ensured that virtually any society in which political opinion is voiced or a representative chosen by at least some of the governed can claim to be a democracy.

I submit to you that, if democracy is to have value beyond its usefulness to corrupt government sloganeers bent on justifying the unjustifiable, we must ask the primary and more basic question. Before we ask how people rule in a democracy, we must ask what is meant by the word "demo": "people".

When we turn our mind to this question, and to its answers, a multitude of implications appear. Specifically, if from the word "people" we infer "the collective", we are led mindlessly and quickly to the question that all - Marxists, Individualists, and Populists - are so eager to answer in their own wildly differing ways: how does a collective express its will or, "how do people govern?".

But if, when we attempt to define the word "people", we do not carelessly forget that every individual has the same inalienable natural rights and that all individuals are equal in that sense, democracy takes on a whole new, logical, and grander meaning. To those who recognize in every individual the same inalienable rights of life, liberty in property, "people" means: individuals, all of whom have the same natural rights. Thus, to logical advocates of individual freedom, democracy means "rule by individuals having the same natural rights as everyone else".

We commonly hear that equality is a value treasured in a democracy. I submit that it is not merely a value in a democracy, but that equality - the sameness of every person's rights - is the defining feature of democracy. In any society that recognizes all individuals to have only certain rights, "rule by people" necessarily implies "rule by equals".

The significance of this is, of course, tremendous. When the rights of our governors are the same as the rights of the governed, governors - even when they act in concert and call themselves "the government" - can take no action that cannot morally be taken by one of the governed. The governed, lacking the right to violate another person's liberty, cannot have their liberty violated even by individuals in government. The governed, lacking the right to take another's property against their will, cannot have their property taken from them against their will even by individuals in government. Whereas governed individuals may not morally initiate the coercive use of physical force against others, they have the moral authority to use force in defence of their life, their liberty and their property. Thus, in a society that recognizes individual rights, "democracy" can mean only: a society in which the government lacks the authority to violate any individual's rights of life, liberty or property, but is charged with the responsibility of protecting those rights for every individual.

Now, of course, the advocate of Marxism would say: "Aye McKeever, but individuals don't have rights". But that defence only points to the logical flaw underlying the Marxist’s claim to democracy. It could hardly be denied that a government is a thing with the right to use force. However, in a Marxist society, the individual has no rights. It follows that, in a Marxist society, the term "democracy" would refer to a society ruled by people having no rights. At this point, you must yourself: how can people lacking rights logically have the right to rule? The answer, of course is: they cannot. Denying that individuals have rights, a truly Marxist society can have a government only if the government is comprised of individuals having rights the governed lack. In other words, Marxism, though completely compatible with voting, and though completely capable of having a ruler, is logically and utterly opposed to a government comprised of the people: it is an enemy of democracy (and, I might add, of equality).

The advocate of so-called "direct democracy" might also chime in: "Some advocates of direct democracy," he might say, "agree that individuals have rights. Whether or not we agree that those rights exist, advances in technology now make it possible to determine the will of the majority of all voters. Therefore, democracy does mean majority rule!". But the argument of the direct democrat is no more impressive than that of the Marxist. If a direct democrat eschews the notion that individuals have inalienable rights, he shares the aforementioned logical flaw of the Marxists: he cannot advocate democracy because individuals who lack rights outside of government also lack rights when they get together with others to govern. And, if the direct democrat embraces the existence of inalienable rights, he renders "majority rule" inoperable, because for the majority’s will to prevail, logic dictates that no individual can have a right that would limit or negate the will of the majority. Seemingly ignorant of hard-earned rewards of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 - part of the history of North American government - the direct democrat, in reality, is an absolutist whose Sun King is not an individual but a dynamically constituted sub-group of the governed. The direct democrat, like the social democrat, in fact detests democracy. He wants to overcome the rights of individuals with the crushing force of the will of a majority. An enemy of democracy, he actually favours a fluid sort of oligarchy or aristocracy.

How, in a nutshell, should we comprehend democracy? I submit that to know what democracy is, we must first remember what it is not. Remember that democracy is neither the process by which a society’s laws are made, nor a society whose laws are made in a certain way. Remember that only a society with a government whose authority to use force is the same as that held by the individuals it governs, may rightly be called a democracy.

Who, then, is in favour of democracy? Perhaps it is easier for most to tell who is not. Look for the politician who is willing to do virtually anything that is popular, without regard to every individual’s rights of life, liberty and property. Look for the politician whose opinion changes with, and is governed almost entirely by, opinion polls. Look for the politician who implicitly declares that he is the state by shielding his decisions from the scrutiny and opposition of parliament: though he will praise democracy, he is - in his heart - an absolutist Sun King who holds democracy in contempt.

Who defends democracy? Those who recognize that the actions of individuals acting in concert as a government are subject to the same moral judgements as the actions of those individuals acting alone. Those who believe that "every individual, in the peaceful pursuit of personal fulfilment, has an absolute right to his or her own life, liberty and property." And, among them, those who, I am proud to say, support Freedom Party.

And what of elections? They are an indispensable safeguard for freedom. But elections do not a democracy make. So, in the upcoming election, vote for freedom, and democracy will necessarily be the result.

Thank-you.