The Bill of Rights is the Antidote to Soft Despotism
The American regime of today is a far cry from the one envisioned by our founders. As the nation approaches what looks like a weak and divided
commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,
another milestone has arrived with little acclaim. Today marks the 239th
anniversary of the introduction of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. House of
Representatives.
It should be a day of celebration every year. The Bill of
Rights is one of the most important documents in human history. James Madison,
one of the nation’s central founders and a future two-term president, introduced it
in Congress on June 8, 1787.
The central lesson of the Bill of Rights lies in Madison’s purpose: to bind every level of government to one
overriding mission — protecting individual rights against majority tyranny.
The Bill of Rights Institute summarizes Madison’s concern
well. Before the Constitutional Convention, Madison wrote “Vices of the Political System,” an essay detailing the
flaws of the Articles of Confederation. One of the chief defects, in his view,
was that tyrannical majorities in the states passed unjust laws violating the
rights of minorities. He had seen the oppression of religious dissenters in
Virginia and became the leading advocate for the Virginia Statute for Religious
Freedom.
At the Constitutional Convention, Madison argued for
separation of powers, checks and balances, bicameralism, and federalism as
safeguards for liberty. But he lost one key feature of his plan: a national
veto over state laws meant to prevent majority tyranny in the states.
Today, we are light-years away from Madison’s vision and
from the founders’ plan to protect it. Neither Madison nor anyone else could
force the American people and their governments to live within the letter and
spirit of the Constitution and the common law. The founders could only encode
their vision into the Constitution, laws, and judicial precedents, then hope
later generations would preserve it.
They often have not.
In 1840, only a half-century into the American
experiment, Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated the rise of “soft
despotism” in the United States. He saw that the passion for equality could
erode devotion to natural law, natural rights, and self-government.
Tocqueville warned of a sovereign power that takes each
individual “into its powerful hands” and covers society with “a network of
small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules.” Such power, he wrote, “does not
tyrannize” but “hinders, represses, enervates, extinguishes,” and finally
reduces the nation to “a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the
government is the shepherd.”
He also warned that this mild, regulated servitude could
exist “in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.”
That is the danger America now faces.
Restoring respect for the Bill of Rights and the founders’
vision is essential if we hope to rescue the United States from the soft
despotism into which the American experiment has devolved — and from the harder
totalitarianism toward which it now hurtles.
Documents and laws alone will not achieve that. In our
present decline, the only way to reverse the slide is to remove the temptation
that feeds it: the ability of majorities at all levels of government to vote
themselves ownership over other people’s property, liberties, and lives.
In an ironic turn, the United States may now be approaching
a resolution of sorts: the collapse of the national government’s ability to pay
for everything Congress, presidents, and courts have promised Americans over
the past century and a half.
Entitlements such as Social Security, food stamps, Medicaid,
Medicare, federal housing subsidies, and other national bribes have become
insupportable. They now threaten a debt spiral as high interest rates and
inflation weaken the economy and erode the government’s tax base.
The federal debt has already risen above
100% of gross domestic product — the nation’s entire annual economic
output. More ominously, the debt is accelerating. The total now sits just short of
$40 trillion. It is projected to rise to $55 trillion
by 2031, an increase of more than one-third in five years. By 2036, it is
projected to reach $77 trillion, nearly doubling in a decade.
Meanwhile, federal and state governments have steadily eroded individual rights, freedom of association, free enterprise, election integrity, and countless other safeguards of
liberty.
This is the outcome of majority tyranny. We have less than
half a decade to avert a fiscal collapse of the federal government and the
social and economic destruction that would follow. What would arise from such a
catastrophe is impossible to know.
History offers little comfort. The chances are strong that
whatever replaced our flawed yet hardy constitutional system would not resemble
the order our forefathers established in the 1700s. A nation founded on
individual rights and self-government could vanish from the earth.
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