PROTECT AND PRESERVE:

Old Europe’s New Despotism (Samuel Gregg, D.Phil. (Oxon.), 5/11/05, Acton Commentary)

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville suggested that democracy was capable of breeding its own form of despotism, albeit one without the edges of Jacobin or Bonapartist dictatorship with which Europeans were all too familiar. The book spoke of “an immense protective power” which took all responsibility for everyone’s happiness-just so long as this power remained “sole agent and judge of it.” This power, Tocqueville wrote, would “resemble parental authority” but would try to keep people “in perpetual childhood” by relieving people “from all the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living.”

Such circumstances might arise, Tocqueville noted, if democracy’s progress was accompanied by demands for a leveling of social conditions. The danger was that an obsession with equality was very compatible with increasingly centralized state-power. Leveling social conditions, Tocqueville observed, usually involved using the state to subvert those intermediate associations that reflected social differences, but also limited government-power.

Tocqueville’s vision of “soft-despotism” is thus one of arrangements that mutually corrupt citizens and the democratic state. Citizens vote for those politicians who promise to use the state to give them whatever they want. The political-class delivers, so long as citizens do whatever it says is necessary to provide for everyone’s desires. The “softness” of this despotism consists of people’s voluntary surrender of their liberty and their tendency to look habitually to the state for their needs.

Reflecting upon “old Europe” today, it seems to exhibit basic symptoms of soft-despotism. In Germany, Chancellor’s Schroeder’s relatively-modest reforms of an unsustainable welfare-system have encountered mass-resistance. Similar protests have occurred in Italy and Austria. In France, the political left now refers to the 35-hour week as an “inalienable right.” Tampering with the 35-hour week thus seems to loom in their minds as a potential human-rights violation. More recently, Jacques Chirac’s government caved into demands for public-sector pay-rises after just 3 days of marches by a million protestors.

The European Constitution also shows signs of a soft-despotism mentality. It does not limit itself-as any sound constitution should-to outlining the origins, divisions, and limitations of state-power. Instead, its 511 pages embrace a plethora of subjects ranging from fishing, humanitarian-aid, space policy, sport, tourism, to financial assistance to the former East Germany. In other words, the European Constitution provides the backing of fundamental law to EU officials wishing to meddle in almost anything.

By encouraging such tendencies, Europe’s constitution is unlikely to facilitate the growth of those intermediate associations that, in Tocqueville’s view, assist in preventing democracy from slipping into soft-despotism. These associations, Tocqueville believed, helped the young American republic to limit government precisely because of their unique ability to inculcate the virtues required by free people.

It is the peculiar genius of Third Way solutions like the Ownership Society that they use the mechanisms of government authority to make individuals independent of the State. The Right will squawk about your being ordered to save for retirement by the government but the Left is absolutely frantic over the prospect of everyone owning a stake of their own in society.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 11, 2005 11:49 PM