Power v Rights
“Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.”
Power, in the political sense of the word, has but only aim: to impose your will on others. It is the dominant feature of a dictatorship; but it is also characteristic of a pure democracy, where the majority can ride roughshod over the minority. The nation’s founders were very much aware of both these threats; and while their disdain of mob rule has often been ascribed to their contempt for common people, I think what they feared far more were the events that unfolded on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021.
Early America’s most famous observer put the matter succinctly:
“Now, if you admit that an individual vested with omnipotence can abuse it against his adversaries,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, “why would you not admit the same thing for the majority? Have men, by gathering together, changed character? . . . So when I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to whatever power, whether called people or king, democracy or aristocracy, whether exercised in a monarchy or a republic, I say: the seed of tyranny is there and I try to go and live under other laws.”
To guard against each of these seemingly contradictory threats, the founders tried to design institutions to protect the nation from both of them. To that end they established a republic in which checks and balances sought to place limits on power, whatever its source, and to rein in the appetites of tyrants in whatever form they emerge. For the founders believed that the fundamental purpose of government is not to amass power; it is to protect rights – a concept they embedded in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
The Declaration could hardly be clearer:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Individual rights are not granted by government; they are inherent in the people themselves, who then form a government to protect them. In 1789 the Constitution set forth a road map for how to do that, one that included keeping in check the power of the government itself. For many, even that wasn’t enough, and two years later the first 10 amendments were added to the Constitution. Known collectively as the “Bill of Rights,” their objective was to safeguard the rights of the people from the power of their own government.
As we gear up to celebrate our 250th anniversary, such a notion seems a bit quaint. All the talk these days is about power, and its military stepson, “lethality” (which rhymes so inharmoniously with “legality”). There is very little talk of rights. While we may be the most powerful nation in the world, we are far from the happiest.
It has long been an axiom of history that a government that prioritizes projecting its own power cares little for the rights of its people, whereas a government that prioritizes protecting its citizens’ rights sets limits on its own power. If America continues on its current path of political gerrymandering, suppressing dissidents, enriching insiders, and sowing fear, we will soon have both a real dictatorship and a fake democracy – as Germany did in the 1930s, and have so many other countries – from the Soviet Union to Venezuela – whose elections regularly return landslides for the ruling party. “Authority that does not exist for Liberty,” wrote Lord Acton, “is not authority but force.”