The Open Society and Its New Enemies: What Karl Popper’s classic can teach us about the threats facing democracies today. (Matt Johnson, 29 Jan 2025, Quillette)
“In his criticism of democracy, and in his story of the rise of the tyrant,” Popper wrote, “Plato raises implicitly the following question: What if it is the will of the people that they should not rule, but a tyrant instead?” Popper took this “paradox of freedom” seriously, and he didn’t have any illusions about democracy. He recognised that some democratically elected rulers will be demagogic, incompetent, and even authoritarian. In fact, he believed that this outcome ought to be expected in a democracy. This is why he presented a “theory of democratic control” to address this concern: “The theory I have in mind is one which does not proceed, as it were, from a doctrine of the intrinsic goodness or righteousness of a majority rule, but rather from the baseness of tyranny; or more precisely, it rests upon the decision, or upon the adoption of the proposal, to avoid and to resist tyranny.” He continued:
This principle does not imply that we can ever develop institutions of this kind which are faultless or foolproof, or which ensure that the policies adopted by a democratic government will be right or good or wise—or even necessarily better or wiser than the policies adopted by a benevolent tyrant. … What may be said, however, to be implied in the adoption of the democratic principle is the conviction that the acceptance of even a bad policy in a democracy (as long as we can work for a peaceful change) is preferable to the submission to a tyranny, however wise or benevolent.
Popper argued that the first responsibility of a democratic system is avoiding bad outcomes—not engineering some prefabricated utopian future. Responsible leaders must confront the “greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.” According to Popper, the primary goal of democratic governments should be to “create, develop, and protect political institutions for the avoidance of tyranny.”Popper argued that the “one really important thing about democracy” is the “restriction and balance of power.” He observed that democracy “provides an invaluable battleground for any reasonable reform, since it permits reform without violence.” Liberal democracy is a political “battleground” because it is explicitly unconcerned with ultimate ends—it doesn’t exist to lay the foundation for a utopian workers’ state, a racially pure nationalist ethnostate, or any other teleological fantasy. Nor does it exist to save citizens’ souls and shepherd them into some otherworldly utopia in the afterlife. Liberal democracy isn’t meant to give people’s lives meaning—it’s meant to create the conditions that allow diverse citizens to pursue lives of meaning as they see fit, as long as they don’t prevent others from doing so.
“Institutions are like fortresses,” Popper wrote. “They must be well designed and manned.” Democracy is always vulnerable because institutions are only as strong as the people who maintain them. And this maintenance doesn’t always come naturally, as leaders and citizens must set aside their tribal loyalties to respect impersonal rules and norms that privilege the health of democracy over their narrow parochial interests.
The objection of the ethnonationalists–like Donald, Bibi, Orban, Putin, Xi, etc.–is to republican liberty: the idea that every citizen should participate in governance and that every lawadopted should apply to all univeresally, which is the entirety of liberalism. Conservatism seeks to conserve liberalism.