The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large

“The genuine Whig was a conservative, for he rested his claims on the ancient Constitution of the Kingdom.” — A. Carthill, The Legacy of Liberalism.

POLITICAL concepts do often have paradoxical elements in them. In the realm of pure logic two contradictory statements have no place side by side if they claim both to conform to the truth. Yet nations have paradoxical characters and survive; constitutions have paradoxical and contradictory provisions and harmonize if not in theory yet in practice. The rigidity of a powerful officialdom and liberty (relative liberty, of course) are not incompatible. Neither is it true that a power unchecked has a “natural” tendency to ask for more and more prerogatives until it develops into absolute tyranny. Fathers, for instance, do not increase (or try to increase) their hold upon their children from year to year, neither do teachers or professors become more tyrannical with advancing age. The automatic desire for more power is only apparent in children, primitives, people of low character or intellect; for the superior man, power is like a cross, duty a burden, responsibility an obligation. And it is usually the uncertainty of power which creates in the people wielding it, the desire to increase it. The man who has his powers guaranteed will more rarely abuse them than the man to whom prerogatives are given only for a short while. The psychological reasons for such an attitude are obvious. We need not discuss them.

It is then natural that the nation should look up to their legislators and administrators who are part of the nation yet should have risen to their positions, thanks to their intelligence, industry, and achievements, and not due to their popularity.3 There should be a certain pietas (respectful love, in the Latin sense) which should exist between those in power and office and those profiting from his efforts. This feeling must be mutual. It is more easily developed in monarchies where one and the same family rules a country for centuries and traditions are added to a personal sentiment. There is something slightly shocking and undignified in seeing the people in the cinema booing their President; one feels there must be something wrong with the popular concept of the office. It is odd that every servant who had served well and faithfully can hope to be retained, and every employee would be outraged if on principle one would “give him the sack” after a couple of years. Not so the President. He is suspected eo ipso of becoming, after a couple of years, a potential tyrant and the absolute belief in the absolute corrupting effect of power or of the public office is apparent. But as only the inferior man is corrupted by power (the Church elects for life the Supreme Vicar of Christ), the suspicion is implicitly expressed that the President is a man of minor character. One of the main reasons for the lowering of the general respect for the office of the President may lie in the fact that the modus of his election has been considerably “democratized.” We have still the fiction of electors and it is still possible that a minority of votes determines who is going to be President; but since the days of Andrew Jackson the electors have ceased to function like an independent conclave and today they feel themselves bound to vote for the candidate.4 A monarch on the other hand is not chosen or created; he is born into his office. He is a king, begotten so by his parents (cum auxilio Dei), and thus a “fatality” and nobody’s free choice. He may be popular or unpopular; nobody is responsible for him.

It is humanly often more agreeable to be under a completely unpopular king than under a man who is the neighbor’s choice and the representative of a hostile political philosophy. Thus a President represents legally the nation, i.e., the citizens. A traditional king represented a country and not a nation. The king of France was “France” and the king of Denmark just “Denmark.” Only at a later historical period do we get such plebiscitarian dynasties as the “kings of the Belgians” or the “czars of the Bulgars.” Hitler is similarly the “leader of the German people” and that makes it worse. Paradoxically as it sounds, liberties are always more threatened by “leaders” than by “rulers.”

The man who can sway the masses is ordinarily their embodiment. The enthusiasm of the masses for him is then in most cases only a love of themselves. In the framework of a megalopolitan civilization such a man ought to belong to the middle classes. He should be a symbol of averageness, joviality, strength, and success. If America would have been really as ochlocratic as some people maintain, President Roosevelt would not have had a chance to defeat Mr. Willkie in the last elections. But the romantic sentiment as well as the craving for security of the helpless urban masses worked the miracle; the Hudson Valley Squire triumphed over the “local boy who made good.” (And it may be that the southern votes for Mr. Roosevelt had a deeper symbolic value than just the age-old protest against northern Republicanism.)

Yet the case of Hitler is more complicated than all that. He is not only an “embodiment” or a “personification,” but he has also a demoniacal quality which is lacking either in Mussolini or Stalin.6

Goethe in his Dichtung und Wahrheit (Book XX) described with various exaggerations a man of his type when he wrote:

The demoniacal element has the most terrifying aspects if it is strongly represented in a human being. I had during my lifetime the occasion to observe such men partly from a distance partly from an immediate nearness. These men are not always brilliant persons and they distinguish themselves neither by their intellectual capacities, nor by their talents and least by their kindness, yet they emanate a terrific magnetic force and they exert an incredible power over all creatures and even over the elements [!]. Who can tell how far their influence goes? All the united moral forces are powerless against them and the more intelligent part of humanity tries in vain to unmask them as simpletons or as frauds; the masses will always be attracted by them. Seldom or never one finds several men of that type as contemporaries and nothing is able to overpower them except the Universe itself [!] against which they have picked their fight; and from such observations and remarks the terrible sentence might well-nigh had found its origin: Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse.

This is the same human-inhuman type which Jean Paul had in mind when he wrote in his Quintus Fixlein: “The Almighty provides each century with an evil genius who is its greatest temptation.” But why blame “the Almighty” where man is responsible?

It is curious how often one encounters people who are genuinely afraid of a strong government, fearing for their liberties. But a strong government will always be generous, a weak government will either commit atrocities to bolster its tottering powers or surrender to small, brutal groups. The exterior effort is not a sign of strength; an inner, voluntary acceptance of the nation is strength. The plebiscitarian autocracies of Europe are not really strong, because they possess bitter, and utterly hostile minorities that are diametrically opposed to everything emanating from these governments. As long as such minorities exist no generosity can be expected from the totalitarian “leaders,” who need the protection of a well-organized police force to keep them in power, to keep them alive. It is the nemesis of the superorganized, supercentralized, super-technicized modern state that one pistol shot, one explosion, one betrayal can bring it to the brink of an abyss.

The structure of old-fashioned popular representation on the other hand was such that it worked under the supposition that “No man is indispensable.” This is a practicable attitude in a primitive world when the average man understands the problems which do not yet surpass his comprehension. All that changed during the past 150 years. It is the tragedy of representative government, as an idea, that it came into fashion when its practicality and feasibility were rapidly vanishing. “Democracy” rose contemporaneously with the industrial development which made lay opinion so obsolete. European “democracy” has probably no inner reason for its sudden revitalization. It was not a movement bound by an inner necessity to burst into blossom; it was primarily a smoke screen for the Third and later on the Fourth Estate in their fight against a depatriarchalized, and therefore rotten, caste system, a temporary egalitarian weapon which served its purpose in their struggle against an aristocracy or a monarchical ruler forgetful of their duties. Accepted and embraced as an ad hoc measure and institution this egalitarian smoke screen7 became a res per se, a fatality which had to run its course, forming the spirit of the time and formed by the Zeitgeist, until it assumed in its reductio ad absurdum the forms of communism and National Socialism.

Such a conception — the idea of a historical development at the “wrong time” — may sound strange, but one should not forget that there are novels published at the wrong time, men dying at the wrong moment, people born in a “wrong age.” There is no reason why a political philosophy should not become popular under conditions which make it an increasingly unworkable proposition.

This is, of course, only a pious hope because the suicidal, self-liquidating aspects of modern civilization are not manifest to the masses, and it is significant of our times that the leaders follow the masses and not vice versa. The masses see only the “bigger and better” and never the reverse side of the medallion. We can observe in the political development of the past 150 years an almost deterministic and coercive sequence of phenomena, leading us with an ever increasing speed to the downfall of western civilization. We witness a seemingly unavoidable doom expressed in the terms of enslavement, coldness, ossification — a return not only to the animal world, but to the helpless, motionless, deaf, dumb, and insensitive realm of minerals.

Abyssus abyssum vocat. Yet the abysses get wider every time. We saw since the sixteenth century not only the spectacle of heresies provoking counterheresies but also such political forms as compelled directly or indirectly geographical neighbors to copy and imitate these forms, often very much against their own will and desire. One country using party regimentation, totalitarian forms of government, compulsory military service, poison gas, military planes or tanks coerces all the rest of the world to adopt similar means of warfare — or to surrender.

Even the great victories of the “democracies” over the semifeudal, semibureaucratic, semiparliamentarian monarchies were largely due to the fact that the “democracies” (still mitigated by their strange, liberal tradition) could rally a mass enthusiasm which could not possibly be “organized” by the states with a predominantly hierarchic tradition. Quantity defeated quality. The Prussian State in particular, and the different Fascisms (and socialisms) in general, worked toward a synthesis of mass enthusiasm and efficient, cold-blooded (nonpatriarchal) bureaucracy, an arousing of the hatred of the mob and the mechanical planning of a state machinery working on precision. This lies at the bottom of Nazi, and even of Fascist, efficiency. There is, after all, nothing deadlier than the combination of the spirit of Chicago and Pots-dam, or a mixture of Bentham, Frederick of Prussia,8 and Henry Ford.

Yet modern anthropocentrism in spite of its dynamic appearances, its constant flux, and its seemingly manifold forms of expression, is extremely poor in alternatives. There is usually only the choice between the chronologically different forms and stages of one and the same thing.

The choice of the anthropocentrist, rejecting all “political” forms congenial to medieval theocentrism, is therefore an extremely limited and unhappy one; he either chooses to be “modern” and to be a slave of a Leviathan state and society under a totalitarian plebiscitarian “leader” or he prefers to cling to a more old-fashioned ochlocracy with a limited liberal tradition. Life in this form of “democracy” is infinitely more human, agreeable, and desirable; but the sword of Damocles under which he lives is prospective military defeat on account of amateurish incompetence and this means a life under an alien tyrant in an alien setup. For him there exists no other choice.

There is something apocalyptic in this ever increasing speed of development which even optimists have ceased to call “progress.” Whoever has observed a big stream approaching a fall will be impressed by the constantly increasing rapidity of the waters as they come nearer and nearer to the brim of the cascade. Here is a point at which a boat would seem to have no chance to reach the security of the shore. A mile further up a landing might still have been feasible, but not fifty yards before the threatened cataclysm occurs. The Occident has now fairly well reached the dangerous point. A “return” to the medieval values has its sworn enemies everywhere and the final catastrophe is a menacing possibility. There is still a faint possibility of salvation but without action, without a fundamental change of direction, the boat loaded with the thoughts and inventions of the past 150 years will continue its suicidal course and speed to its doom.

Looking back it seems paradoxical at first thought that the anthropocentric trend was initiated by men who denied the greatest dignity of man — free will. This denial of the greatest of all our qualities is the common stigma of all heresies from Calvin to Marx, Rosenberg, and Freud. This denial created generations of “drifters” as well as irresponsible fanatical activists. And neither of them is now able to act freely any more. They are subject to history.

Liberal democracy in Europe had still the advantage that it offered a freedom (to those who believed in it) and permitted also the dissemination of theocentrical, cultural values. Totalitarian ochlocracy on the other hand is watertight. It kills where its predecessor only sneered. When Walt Whitman exclaimed:

One’s self I sing — a simple, separate Person;
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word en masse,

he had also extolled totalitarianism without knowing it. Yet now when the great hour for America has struck it is not the formless mass, the phantasmagoria of artificially leveled equality, the illusion of progress which stirs her to action but the eternal ideal of the dignity of the person and his liberty. She knows that sacrifices await her, sacrifices without material reward, without recompensation. She is ready to take the other way, not the easy and dark one of the unhappy East, but the steep and glorious one of the West. She knows and senses with Milton, whose work belongs not less to America than to England, the old truth of his immortal lines:

But what more oft, in nations grown corrupt
And by their vices brought to servitude,
Than to love bondage more than liberty —
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty.

________________

9 In the next volume we will discuss the functions and limitations of such a “bureaucracy.” There is a constant danger that control and co-ordinated planning degenerates into a form closely resembling State socialism. The final result is totalitarianism, State omnipotency and the total loss of individual liberty and independence. This trend finds curiously enough many supporters among the professional anti-Fascists who see in Fascism and Nazism not an enemy but heretical competitors. It would be pathetic if the United Nations would defeat German national socialism and become victims of various homemade forms of the same malady. This danger is greater in Britain than here. (Cf. P. F. Drucker, The Future of Industrial Man (New York, 1942.)

10 See James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (New York, 1941).

11 “Party and reason are incompatible,” says Geoffrey Bourne courageously in his small book War, Politics and Emotion (New York, 1941). The same work contains a perspicacious analysis of expert knowledge and the democratic process, but it suffers from the usual misconceptions about Germany which impair its value.

12 Here is in many other respects it would be wise to consider the intentions of the Founding Fathers.

13 Germany was the only country in Europe after 1919 where the President was elected by the whole people. There is little doubt that Hindenburg would not have been elected if the question would have been put before the Reichstag instead of before the masses.

14 The very best representation of his evil strength can be found in one of the most demoniacal books of our time — in Ernst Jünger’s Auf den Marmorklippen (Hamburg, 1939), the most incredible and daring symbolic novel ever published in Nazi Germany by an army officer.

15 The Bourgeoisie actually wanted domination, not equality. Yet the clamor for equality was morally more justifiable. Marx dropped the mask when he spoke about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even Ernest Renan, by no means an admirer of conservative values and an outspoken enemy of the Church, warned against the confusion of American and European “democracy.” From a European democracy he expected nothing but a series of disasters. (Cf. his La Réforme Intellectuelle et Morale, Paris, 1884, pp. 66-67, 79, 103–104, 114.)

16 Yet he was at least a statesman and not a politician like those ignorants who dug the graves of their own countries in 1919 at the Peace Conference or that sublime myopic idiot Ludendorff (by no means a Junker) who for immediate “gains” organized bolshevism in Russia. A statesman makes history, a politician “politics.”

• 3* About its confusion with liberty see the text concerning liberalism.
• 4* Charles A. and Mary R. Beard wrote: “As was said afterwards, the founders of the Republic in general, whether Federalist or Republican, feared democracy more than they feared original sin.” (America in Midpassage, New York, 1939, Vol. III, p. 922.) About the use of the word democratic between 1865 and the close of the century, see p. 923 of the same book.
• 6* The expression democracy in the notes, Appendix I, as used by American and foreign authorities, has its classical, standard meaning and is equivalent to the term ochlocracy in the text.
• 7* Military Manual published in 1928 and in use for the succeeding four years. (TM 2000–25)
• 8* Cf. Stringfellow Barr’s article “Ourselves Again” in Tomorrow, Oct., 1942. Condensed reprint in the Catholic Digest, Nov., 1942. This essay of the president of St. John’s, Annapolis, not only evaluates democracy correctly, but also gives an outline of Hitler’s democratic background.
• 9TO PUT in its right light and scientific context the technical word democracy is naturally our first task. Representative government as established in the United States is not synonymous with democracy. The Founding Fathers established a republic (res publica, politéia), not a democracy. And many of the Founders of the Constitution of this country have repeatedly emphasized this fact in so many words. Some of the best American minds have again and again called attention to this important fact and have protested loudly against the use of the term democracy for the fundamental laws of their country, which they respect and by which they abide.*
• 10We see, then, from the plurality of present-day connotations of democracy that it would be thoroughly unjustified to use the term “democracy” in any other sense than in the classical and universal one.* We may well agree that the mischief started by uneducated popularizers has already reached such proportions that a Hercules is needed to clean this Augian stable of popular misconceptions, false labels, and mispresented ideologies. Even some of the more intelligent writers have become a prey to popular pressure, and as modern intellectuals do not lead the masses any more, but follow them and subordinate their ideas and language to the demands of the market, the confusion has now reached its climax.
• 11Today democracy is confused with liberalism,* freedom, and prosperity alike.
• 12“Democracy” as an ideal of the Founding Fathers is equally denied by W. H. Hamilton and D. Adair in The Power to Govern (New York, 1937, p. 158). It must also be borne in mind that the protest against calling the Constitution democratic comes from historians of all groups, yet while Rightists praise lack of “democracy” in the Constitution, “Leftists” like Charles Beard* and H. Rugg are prone to condemn it outright.
• 13We have said before that it is difficult to find the exact reasons for the growing popularity of the word democracy and democratic taken from a dead language which is thoroughly nonunderstandable to 999 out of 1000 Americans. The decline of classical education in favor of progressive “self-realization” has favored the increased use of wrong labels. It is deplorable that even Catholics have become victims of this chaos in verbiage. They have naturally “their” democracy, the Leftists have “another one,”* and even Conservatives indulge in the worship of a thing called “democracy” with a thoroughly different content. The only way out would be to discard the label completely, restore it brutally to its pristine meaning, and to call the things hitherto covered by the label with their proper names.
• 14In order to denote the classical interpretation of democracy as well as its cultural concomitant we have chosen to use the word ochlocracy and — as its adjective — ochlocratic.* The Greeks used this expression strictly in the sense of mob rule, regardless whether these mobs created majorities or minorities. The selection is not a very happy one, and the reader is reminded that we understand under “mob” not the “lower classes,” but just the vast masses of inferior people which can be found everywhere; these products of a soulless culture and civilization who in their terrifying mediocrity are neither fish nor flesh, have neither face nor expression, neither wisdom nor knowledge, piety nor enthusiasm, faith nor charity, hatred nor love, those who go neither with the angels nor the devils and because of their lukewarmness will be spat out by our Lord on the day of reckoning.
• 15It is almost in the strictly classical sense of the Greek word ochlocracy, to which reference has just been made, that the United States Army Military Manual* defines democracy in Section IX, Lesson 9, on “Representative Government.” Having first described autocracy as resulting in “arbitrariness, tyranny, and oppression,” it goes on to what it considers the opposite extreme:
• 16While many may consider the government established by the Founding Fathers as a constitutional democracy, it is clear that no such idea entered into the mind of those from whom Americans derive their form of government, nor did these men give coloring to such an interpretation by their own actions.*