The Incompatibility of Democracy and Equal Freedom

Abstract

It is commonly believed that democracies are freedom preserving. In a limited, consequentialist sense, this presumption may be correct. However, if someone were to look critically at an application of liberal democracy, she would discover that democracy is not as consistent with freedom as it appears to be. This paper argues that democracy is incompatible with equal freedom as realistic applications of democracy undermine liberty on both a practical and structural level. To accomplish this task, this paper discusses the role of group agents in a democratic political system. While voting allows citizens to express their opinions, voting cannot—in practical or theoretical terms—preserve equal freedom as a result of an individual vote’s lack of efficacy. By forcing individuals to act as groups, democracy undermines equal freedom. Volume 10, Issue 1 Res Cogitans 2 | eP1188 Res Cogitans People frequently assume that the most popular opinion must be the one they ought to hold. It is often said that democratic governments best protect the interest and freedom of their people. The question of whether idealized democracy— defined as theoretical form of government that requires the unanimous consent of each constituent to create and legitimate the rule of law—is compatible with liberty is almost vacuous. In its ideal form, there is no concept of democratic coercion as every citizen consents to every law that is created. But the purpose of any government structure is not to be an ivory tower ideal. Instead, political theories must be applied and tested. In the case that a single citizen did not consent to either democratic rule or a specific policy option determined via a democratic procedure and was forced to obey the law, it seems as though the law would undermine liberty. While theoretically democracy could be compatible with liberty, modern governments that embody democratic structures are incompatible with both political and personal liberty. At best, realistic applications of democracy do not provide as much liberty as its proponents believe it does— democracies provide an illusion of free choice to individual citizens and afford limited liberty to group agents. Although democracy seems simple to define, in reality it is quite difficult to define it comprehensively. In the context of this paper, a proponent of democracy could argue that because a democracy is defined by a government’s adherence to democratic ideals—fairness, equality, free speech, or free expression—democracy most obviously prioritizes freedom. Procedural or structural accounts of democracy (i.e. the methods of electing individuals to govern a constituency) are more useful to discuss in the context of freedom because any type of government could, hypothetically, embody most democratic ideals— a dictatorship could allow for each citizen to be equal to every other citizen, provide for a fair criminal justice system, and ingrain freedoms of speech and expression into its legal code. The question of the relationship between democracy and freedom is one of whether the structure of electing representatives via an organized system is compatible with freedom. Freedom cannot be defined by “a list of circumstances in which we would describe situations as ‘free’ or ‘unfree’” and our background contexts of human behaviors associated with freedom (Hyland 1995, 39–40). Liberty can best be understood as a specific form of freedom, where freedom is defined as “independence from being constrained by another’s choice” (Ripstein 2009, 240). The behaviors associated with a use of liberty are mainly unseen— a person with a positive right to liberty will have the ability to choose between all possible options, with no options taken away from her by anything other than her own choice. The question of Koreman | The Incompatibility of Democracy commons.pacificu.edu/rescogitans eP1188 | 3 compatibility is not one of comparison. It asks whether, conceptually and in terms of application, independence of choice is consistent with democracy. Constitutively, any government with normatively justified political authority will infringe on absolute liberty via rightful coercion. Even in the most mundane, wellintentioned, and minimal exercises of coercion, the government makes a citizen’s choice to perform certain sets of actions dependent on state laws. By creating a law—and placing penalties on citizens for breaking the law—the government puts a constraint on a potential action that a citizen would make. The question at hand is whether a democratic government will infringe on liberty in ways that violate equal freedom, defined as freedom that balances the freedom of all individuals and never uses one person’s freedom as a means to the freedom of another (Ripstein 2009, 6). Institutional decisions cannot choose to ignore or preference the liberty of certain constituents over others and still qualify as ensuring equal freedom as it would undermine the notion that everyone’s access to liberty is valued to the same extent. This poses a fundamental problem for democracy— modern democracies do not require unanimous voting to pass a policy. If a democracy enacts a law—perhaps about mandatory vaccinations in the name of public health— and it passes through a democratic process even though certain citizens did not vote for it, then the democracy undermines liberty. Even if a citizen chooses to shirk the rule of law, she would then place herself in a situation where an entity may enact punishment on her. The fear of punishment alters the would-be-free choice of a citizen. Liberty is not an intrinsic part of a democratic process. Part of the draw of democracy is that the exercises of authority by the democratic state are said to be done by the people that it governs. Because modern democracy functions via a majority rules system where the most number of votes wins, applications of democracy deny the freedom of the minority in favor of enacting the wishes of the majority. If liberty has this relationship with choice where “an agent has autonomous control over some... state of affairs only to the degree that their actions can change, affect, or make a difference regarding that object or state of affairs,” then exercises of liberty under democracy are limited to individual acts of deliberation like voting (Brennan 2016, 88). While a citizen could exercise autonomous control over her individual vote, she exerts no control over the law once it is created. There is also a stronger dilemma. Because democracy requires coalitions, groups dominate the decision-making process. Furthermore, the larger the population, the less likely individual votes are to affect outcomes. Just because an individual is free to join a coalition or cast a vote, it does not mean that she can independently influence politics. Volume 10, Issue 1 Res Cogitans 4 | eP1188 Res Cogitans This is a point of tension. If a tenet of democracy is that there is equal participation, and—under a cynical view— the only autonomous individual is the one that casts the deciding vote, then there is some degree of inequality in regard to political participation. Some people act as sub-groups, others act as individuals. And the decisive power of either the sub-group or the individual is unequal, depending on the numbers of a particular vote. The proponent of democracy may rightfully and easily answer this specific objection back by emphasizing democracy’s care for equality of political participation, rather than equality of ends. However, this response misses the more upsetting component of democracy’s care towards groups. Democracy breeds a façade of choice. Structurally, political equality prioritizes a rational creation of coalition building and the establishment of groups. Individuals have a myriad of opinions regarding policy. Even well-informed, well-educated individuals disagree about the best possible policies to implement. Democracy recognizes this and, hypothetically, allows for individuals to disagree and debate. In encouraging this, democracy contradicts exercises of liberty in two main ways. First, because of structural concerns in modern democratic states, certain votes have more power than others. To maximize votes, candidates cater towards groups that will win them the most votes. A single example would be areas of great populations like metropolitan areas (Warf 2009). For certain issues, individuals in metropolitan areas may have different opinions than individuals in rural areas based on the geographic differences between large cities and small towns— for example, preferences about agriculture policy or allocations towards public transportation. Direct democracy incentivizes policymakers to pander to the largest number of voting blocks and ignore the opinions of the minority— undermining notions of equal freedom. Second, the idea that individual votes are meaningful in a democracy is a farce. Even if a democracy were to allow for absolute freedom of expression and open discourse, certain ideas will naturally gain more popularity than other ideas. This is not by itself a problem— people ought to be free to believe in whatever warranted belief they possess regardless of that belief’s popularity. But the idea that certain beliefs are more popular poses a special problem for democracy. Because democracy determines policies—or, elected officials—via a vote, the most popular belief will ultimately win out. This is what democracy wants. But the idea that individual votes are meaningful fails because “individual votes in fact have almost no instrumental value” (Brennan 2016, 86). Instead, because the majority does in fact rule in a democracy, coalitions gain power. Parties and groups have real autonomy in a democracy to drive decisions; individuals do not. When democratic assemblies make decisions, an individual Koreman | The Incompatibility of Democracy commons.pacificu.edu/rescogitans eP1188 | 5 does not always on her own have the ab