I call this kind of question “meteorological”: it is like asking, “Do you think that it is going to rain today? Had I better take my umbrella?”
You will permit me also to state that, among the insults today offered to liberty, none seems to me more gross than that implied in the question whether the liberal system is to be preferred to the authoritarian system.
The choice between liberty and suppression of liberty is not on the same plane as a choice between things of different values, one of which may reasonably be preferred to the other—the first means human dignity and civilization, the second the debasing of men until they are either a flock to be led to pasture, or captured, trained animals in a cage.
But authoritarianism in our times, in those we see looming ahead, is irreligious and materialistic, despite its pretenses and rhetoric, and comes down to a brutal rule of violence over people who are prevented from seeing and knowing what is going on, and who are forced to submit to leadership and give unquestioning obedience to it.
We see it also as a phase of mental decadence that the political problem is now usually presented in terms of “the masses,” and what is suitable “for the masses.” “Masses” are not, as people seem to believe, something new in history; they have always existed, smaller than today, to be sure, since the proportions of society as a whole were smaller, but of the same nature and with the same spirit, the same threat, the same peril.
Liberalism should be at one and the same time the friend and the foe of democracy. It should be its friend, because the governing class is fluid, and its efforts are applied to increasing its membership and its following and to choosing them more carefully, and thus democracy implies an administration that provides at the same time an education of the governed for governing. But liberalism must be the foe of democracy when the latter tends to substitute mere numbers or quantity for quality, because by so doing democracy is preparing the way for demagoguery, and, quite unintentionally, for dictatorship and tyranny and its own destruction.
A man who works for an ideal finds in that ideal his hope and his joy. And yet his human flesh may perhaps look for comfort in some more specific aspiration. And this too he can have, if he considers that, under the present conditions of the world, the reserve of intellectual and moral force is still enormous, and that civil liberties have been preserved in great and powerful nations. These will withstand the perils to which they are exposed and will serve as signal flares for general recovery and resumption of progress. Even under authoritarian governments the achievements won by a liberty formerly enjoyed still endure in many persistent attitudes of mind, and such governments make use of these attitudes, even while they seek to change them and to blight their seeds of future growth, destroying or compromising for the future the very productive forces which the governments need for their maintenance.
Well, then, freedom will succumb, to be sure, but with the certainty that the processes of acquiring it will have to begin all over again, and that, in order to begin again, people will resume the efforts which for the time being have failed to win victory but which will win it in days to come.
To the last of your questions (which falls outside the political or moral problem) “whether authoritarian systems provide better than liberal systems for the ‘safety of the individual,’ that is, for his material and economic interests,” I can reply only with another query, “Can we suppose that our affairs will be in safer hands if we give carte blanche to others to manage them as they see fit, without the interested persons being able to intervene, to object, or even to ask questions?”
Here, too, an anecdote comes to mind, that of the king of Illyria in Daudet’s “Les Rois en Exil” who renounces his throne to live blissfully as a private individual with a woman. When he triumphantly announces to her that he has done so, she laughs in his face, “Jobard, va!” (you poor simpleton) and walks out.
Hence then, the article about the future of democracy was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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