Fernando Teson — The Uneasy Marriage of Liberty and Democracy

We speak of liberal democracies, meaning roughly those societies that prize liberty and allow laws and rulers to be selected by popular vote. Tyrants, in contrast, suppress liberty and elections. So democracy and liberty seem to go hand in hand, both through history and in common parlance. This union is reinforced by the obvious fact that the democratic state, deficient as it may be, is better than the undemocratic state. 

Here I’d like to raise a narrower question: what is the proper place of democracy in a classical-liberal or libertarian (libertarian, for short) view of politics? By democracy I simply mean a political system where many binding decisions are adopted by majority rule.…

This is an interesting post in that it lays out the dilemma of individual liberty and majority rule, as well as the principle proposals for dealing with this from a Libertarian vantage.

As a libertarian of the left, I would say that the fundamental issue is harmonizing the fundamental principles of Enlightenment liberalism — Liberté, Égalité, et Fraternité.

Liberty is about freedom of individual choice, on one hand, and protections of human rights and civil liberties on the other. Egality is about justice under the rule of law based on the consent of those under the law, as well as equality before the law, that is, absence of privilege. Fraternity is about community based on recognition of the universality of human nature, as well as the interconnectedness interdependence of all beings that is the basis of rights.

The basic issues involve reconciling independence with interdependence. Because societal organizaiton has deemphasized the the individual historically, at least after the dawn of surplus societies introduced class structure and asymmetrical power, libertarians of both left and right put emphasis on liberty. However, overemphasis on liberty may disrupt the delicate balance between independence and interdependence.

Constitutional democracy is the best way yet devised for dealing with these issues in that the interdependence of all is recognized and independence of individuals is protected by enumerated rights and liberties. Where the principle issues arise today is due to representative democracy being the norm instead of popular participatory democracy. A recent study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page suggests that the US is not even a democracy operating in terms of the wishes of the majority of voters but by an oligarchy of those capable of influencing the political process.

Bleeding Heart Libertarians
The Uneasy Marriage of Liberty and Democracy
Fernando Tesón | Tobias Simon Eminent Scholar at Florida State University College of Law