This is both the right question, and a sign of how bad things are that the question even needs to be asked. https://t.co/nM6bJanDQL
— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) January 6, 2022
I beseech you, sir, to recollect the time when my three volumes of Defense were written and printed, in 1786, 1787, and 1788. The history of the universe had not then furnished me with a document I have since seen—an Alphabetical Dictionary of the Names and Qualities of Persons, “Mangled and Bleeding Victims of Democratic Rage and Popular Fury” in France During the Despotism of Democracy in That Country, which Napoleon ought to be immortalized for calling “ideology.” This work is in two printed volumes, in octavo, as large as Johnson’s Dictionary, and is in the library of our late virtuous and excellent vice president Elbridge Gerry, where I hope it will be preserved with anxious care. An edition of it ought to be printed in America; otherwise it will be forever supressed. France will never dare to look at it. The democrats themselves could not bear the sight of it; they prohibited it and suppressed it as far as they could. It contains an immense number of as great and good men as France every produced. We curse the Inquisition and the Jesuits, and yet the Inquisition and the Jesuits are restored. We curse religiously the memory of Mary for burning good men in Smithfield, when if England had then been democratical, she would have burned many more, and we murder many more by the guillotine in the latter years of the eighteenth century. We curse Guy Fawkes for thinking of blowing up Westminster Hall; yet Ross blows up the Capitol, the palace, and the library at Washington, and would have done it with the same sangfroid had Congress and the president’s family been within the walls. O! my soul! I am weary of these dismal contemplations! When will mankind listen to reason, to nature, or to revelation?
--John Adams, 1814
Former president John Adams was not amused when fellow politician (and fellow John) John Taylor criticized Adams’ political theory for calling “our attention to hundreds of wise and virtuous patricians, mangled and bleeding victims of popular fury, and gravely counts up several victims of democratic rage as proofs that democracy is more pernicious than monarchy or aristocracy.” In a letter to Taylor, he responded: “Is this fair, sir? Do you deny any one of my facts? I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy. But while it lasts, it is more bloody than either.”
--Lapham's Quarterly, a note to the above entry in the volume "Democracy"
I especially like Adams' reference to "revelation." Not all the "Founding Fathers" were Deists or Jeffersonian agnostics.
I wouldn't call it the despotism of democracy, I'd say it was the insanity of the idolatry of reason. Though it certainly works into my theory that democracy without equality, morality and good-will is bound to produce an evil that democracy with equality, morality and good will are less likely to decay into.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with America's democracy are all three of those conditions not being met nearly often enough, without that in the People the mechanisms of government set up in the Constitution can easily be turned against equality, morality and good will. They can accelerate the speed with which a democracy will turn into something like Adams described. Attaching the instrumental reasoning of "reason" and scientism to that makes the catastrophe worse for whatever efficiency those bring to it. The belief of the French revolutionaries that they were reasonable is matched by the Soviets and Nazis believing they were scientific. You were a lot more likely to escape the Inquisition alive and with all your limbs intact than you were the rack of reason.
I can't recall reading much of anything Jefferson wrote about it that was as good but I doubt anyone's fully read Jefferson, he wrote so much.
You don't know how disappointed I am that I can't find that dictionary Adams alludes to in Archive.org.
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