Every Election Day, politicians, intellectuals, and activists propagate a
seemingly patriotic but utterly un-American idea: the notion that our most
important right--and the source of America’s greatness--is the right to vote.
According to former President Bill Clinton, the right to vote is “the most
fundamental right of citizenship”; it is “the heart and soul of our democracy,”
says Senator John McCain.
Such statements are regarded as uncontroversial--but consider their
implications. If voting is truly our most fundamental right, then all other
rights--including free speech, property, even life--are contingent on and
revocable by the whims of the voting public (or their elected officials).
America, on this view, is a society based not on individual rights, but on
unlimited majority rule--like ancient Athens, where the populace, exercising
“the most fundamental right of citizenship,” elected to kill Socrates for
voicing unpopular ideas--or modern-day Zimbabwe, where the democratically
elected Robert Mugabe has seized the property of the nation’s white farmers and
brought the nation to the verge of starvation--or Germany in 1932, when the
people democratically elected the Nazi Party, including future Chancellor
Adolph Hitler. Would anyone dare claim that America is thus fundamentally
similar to these regimes, and that it is perfectly acceptable to kill
controversial philosophers or to exterminate six million Jews, so long as it is
done by popular vote?
Contrary to popular rhetoric, America was founded, not as a “democracy,” but
as a constitutional republic--a political structure under which the government
is bound by a written constitution to the task of protecting individual rights.
“Democracy” does not mean a system that holds public elections for government
officials; it means a system in which a majority vote rules everything and
everyone, and in which the individual thus has no rights. In a democracy,
observed James Madison in The Federalist Papers, “there is nothing to
check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.
Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and
contention [and] have ever been found incompatible with personal security or
the rights of property.”
The right to vote derives from the recognition of man as an autonomous, rational
being, who is responsible for his own life and who should therefore freely
choose the people he authorizes to represent him in the government of his
country. That autonomy is contradicted if a majority of voters is allowed to do
whatever it wishes to the individual citizen. The right to vote is not a
sanction for a gang to deprive other individuals of their freedom. Rather,
because a free society requires a certain type of government, it is a means of
installing the officials who will safeguard the individual rights of each
citizen.
What makes America unique is not that it has elections--even dictatorships
hold elections--but that its elections take place in a country limited by the
absolute principle of individual freedom. From our Declaration of Independence,
which upholds the “unalienable rights” of every individual, among which are
“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” to our Constitution, whose Bill
of Rights protects freedom of speech and the freedom of private property,
respect for individual liberty is the essence of America--and the root of her
greatness.
Unfortunately, with each passing Election Day, too many Americans view
elections less as a means to protect freedom, and more as a means to win some
government favor or handout at the expense of the liberty and property of other
Americans. Our politicians promise, not to protect the basic rights spelled out
in the Declaration and the Constitution, but to violate the rights of some
people in order to benefit others. Today’s politicians want capital for failing
banks--by forcing non-failing Americans to pay for them; subsidies for
farmers--by forcing non-farmers to pay for them; prescription drugs for the
elderly--by forcing the non-elderly to pay for them; housing for the
homeless--by forcing the non-homeless to pay for it. The more “democratic” our
government becomes, the more we cannibalize our liberty, ultimately to the
detriment of all.
This Election Day, therefore, we should reject those who wish to reduce our
republic to mob rule. Instead, we should vote for those, to whatever extent
they can be found, who are defenders of the essence of America: individual
freedom.