Parliamentarism is the worst form of government except for all the others. But it may degrade into tyranny of the majority as the Tai Ji Men case shows all too well.
by Marco Respinti*
*A paper presented at the webinar “How an Effective Democracy Can Protect Religious Liberty and Tai Ji Men,” co-organized by CESNUR and Human Rights Without Frontiers on June 30, 2023, International Day of Parliamentarianism.
Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965) has been an intriguing historian, an able journalist, and a smart chameleon in politics, who went from one party to its opposite, reached the apex of power in Great Britain, maintained it, and regained it once he had lost it. This—and the bizarre concept of human rights that he held, strongly supportive of eugenics as he was—gained Churchill the credentials to become a paradoxical authority on democracy.
One of his most famous, but probably less understood, maxims, uttered at the House of Commons, on November 11, 1947, goes like this: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” (Richard M. Langworth, ed., “Churchill by Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations,” foreword by Lady Soames, introduction by Sir Martin Gilbert, New York: PublicAffairs 2008, p. 573).
We don’t know whether the words “it has been said,” that Churchill used in that passage, are accurate, and thus the concept expressed is an echo of some other unidentified and uncredited author. Perhaps this is just a rhetorical pose, intended to emphasize the sardonic skepticism they convey to communicate a piece of truth.
It is in fact true that “democracy is the worst form of Government.” It can be very feeble, in comparison to other forms of government; it is subject to different winds, not all of them positive; it is often unstable; it is slow; and above all, it can even commit a crime: “la tyrannie de la majorité,” to use the French language of the author who first wittily denounced it, Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville (1805–1859), in Part II, Chapters 7 and 8, of his famous “Democracy in America” (1835–1840).
The tyranny of the majority, also known as the tyranny of the masses, is the oppression that those who are legitimated in power by the mechanisms of democracy may exert on those who, for different reasons, are not part of the majority. While in a democratic system the political opposition, which is not part of the ruling majority, finds its guarantees in the parliamentarian system, this system in a democratic regime can in fact easily overlook and even tread upon the rights of non-parliamentary minorities, for example when it comes to the fundamental right of religious liberty.
In this case democracy, which should be the “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) said in his “Gettysburg Address” of November, 19 1863, becomes a tool for neglecting the rights of some individuals and groups, often without formally breaking the law, but transforming democracy itself into its opposite and resulting in an abuse of power.
The case of Tai Ji Men in Taiwan, which has been going on since December 1996, is one of the best examples of all this. One can fantasticate that, had they had knowledge of it, Churchill would have used the Tai Ji Men case to spectacularly illustrate his famous maxim, as well as Tocqueville would have finely dedicated to it a section of his “Democracy in America,” Part II, Ch. 8. Tai Ji Men is in fact an astounding case of the limits of democracy and the tyranny of the majority, denounced by Churchill and Tocqueville respectively.
The government of Taiwan, which is freely elected by free citizens, became in fact hostage of some rogue and corrupted bureaucrats, who, acting for personal interests while claiming to represent the people of the former Formosa Island, managed to persecute some pacific Taiwanese citizens who happen to be a minority in comparison to the whole of the Island’s population.
These bureaucrats, as the Tai Ji Men case openly shows it, betrayed their mandate, hiding behind the ideological manipulation of that very same mandate, and confirming Tocqueville’s and Churchill’s suspicion on democracy. This is why the Tai Ji Men case is and should be of interest not only for the Taiwanese people, but for all friends of freedom all over the world. It happened there, so it can happen everywhere, to paraphrase a famous saying by Auschwitz survivor Italian author Primo Levi (1919–1987) on the Holocaust in his 1986 collection of essays “The Drowned and the Saved.”
Now, democracy deserves this criticism, but not at the expense of the second part of Churchill’s quote I used so far. He in fact adds that, despite its fallacies, democracy remains the best form of government. This is profoundly true for one simple and often overlooked reason. Churchill didn’t craft that concept in order to excuse the inexcusable, but because it contains a wise advice worth of Ancient Greece’s phronesis, φρόνησις, or practical wisdom.
The rationale for this lies in another often-ignored distinction. Many tend to identify democracy with a regime. Instead, it is a condition of the exercise of power by those who hold it in relation to the participation to political life by all. Thus, democracy is compatible with different forms of good government, its contrary being the despotic abuse of power, which is in turn compatible with many different forms of bad government. One of these is of course the parliamentarian system, once it is transformed in the tyranny of the majority, which Tocqueville called “ochlocracy.” This term is frequently translated with “mob rule.” However, we all know that mob rule is in fact an unattested reality. Mobs do not have a life of their own: their agitations and unrests are always the fruit of the manipulation by some ideologue. In the case of Tai Ji Men, if people and media believe that Tai Ji Men is a “cult,” raises goblins, and evades taxes, it is only the effect of a manipulation: a mob was trapped by an ideologue.
In his 1851, posthumous “A Disquisition on Government,” American political theorist John C. Calhoun (1782–1850), at one time Vice President, proposed a remedy to the flaws of democracy and the tyranny of the masses. His theory passed into history under the name of “concurrent majority.” Each of the conflicting interests in a democratic society, Calhoun suggested, should be granted veto power against each other, and all of them should bring into the political discussion and evaluation not only their numbers but the added value they incarnate. Calhoun was critical of the dogma of modern democracy, that is the absolute principle “one man, one vote,” which he saw as the root cause of the possible degradation of democracy into the tyranny of the majority. He in fact tried to envision a system where the number of the citizens is balanced by what deeply shapes communities that live side by side and constitute a nation—a community united by birth and destiny. As we all know, in the United States the President is not elected through a mechanical application of the “one man, one vote” principle. A candidate may have less votes than the opponent in the nation as a whole and still become President, as the system is based on a balanced representation of the states in the decision on who will win the presidential elections.
Probably, Calhoun discovered the holy grail of modern political science, but his was no utopia. He tried to address the topic of parliamentarism and political representation in a way that may reduce the risks of derailments. In fact, the words by Churchill from which I started should be always handled with care, the care being another deep concept uttered by Churchill himself: “If I had to sum up the immediate future of democratic politics in a single word,” he said on May 23, 1909, speaking in Manchester, England’s Free Trade Hall (Langworth, p. 384), “I should say ‘insurance.’ That is the future—insurance against dangers from abroad, insurance against dangers scarcely less grave and much more near and constant which threaten us here at home in our own island.”
Churchill’s Island was of course Great Britan, but today is Taiwan, and the words by the British statesman are the best appendix to the title of todays’ webinar, “How an Effective Democracy Can Protect Religious Liberty and Tai Ji Men.” Democracy is security for a nation’s people. If it falls short of this, democracy is yet another form of despotism.
Until Taiwan doesn’t make all its citizens secure, considering not only how small their number may be but chiefly the added value that they can offer to all, as Calhoun suggested, Taiwan would represent a Churchillian bad form of government. If instead Taiwan is able to finally find a political solution to an ideological problem caused by some of its corrupt bureaucrats, Taiwan may aspire to truly become a government of the people, by the people, for the people that leaves no one behind, beginning with Tai Ji Men.
Start loving human beings, not only counting them. Perhaps the holy grail of parliamentarism is not that far away.
Source: Bitter Winter