The Drift Toward ‘Democratic Despotism’, by Frances P. Sempa
“Popular tyrannies” seek to outlaw or delegitimize oppositional political parties.
2:54 pm on October 12, 2022he Biden administration’s excessive use of executive orders, regulatory rulemaking power, and lawfare against state governments and other “intermediary institutions”; its dictatorial pandemic decrees; and its ongoing efforts to delegitimize the Republican Party as an organization of dangerous neo-fascists, lawless election deniers, and insurrectionists are all manifestations of this country’s continuing drift toward “democratic despotism,” which didn’t start with President Joe Biden and will not end with him. The roots of this political phenomenon can be traced to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, but, as the political philosopher James Burnham pointed out, democratic despotism fundamentally springs from the “myth” of democracy.
Seventy years ago, in a little-remembered lecture at the Aspen Institute in Colorado, titled “Democracy, Oligarchy and Freedom,” Burnham warned that the United States was drifting toward “democratic despotism,” the key symptoms of which were the centralization of power both in the presidency and in the bureaucracies of the executive branch and the weakening of “intermediary institutions” that stand between the people and the executive. Burnham argued that if we continued down this path, the end result would be Caesarism, where the executive in the name of the “popular will” suffocates liberty.
In 1952, when Burnham delivered the lecture, he was far along on his political/philosophical odyssey from 1930s Marxism (the Trotskyite version) to National Review conservatism. He had written two sociopolitical books — The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World (1941) and The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943) — and had completed a Cold War trilogy that set forth a geopolitical strategy for winning the Cold War. He was also in the midst of breaking with his former liberal, anti-communist colleagues at Partisan Review over the issue of domestic communism — Burnham took the threat of internal communist subversion far more seriously than the liberal intelligentsia. He refused to unambiguously condemn Sen. Joseph McCarthy, warning that the Left was using “McCarthyism” to discredit anti-communism.
Burnham’s 1952 lecture focused on the internal threat to liberty posed by the rising “managerial class,” who increasingly controlled the economic and political direction of the United States, regardless of which political party was in power. In hindsight, Burnham’s lecture contained the seeds of his much neglected but brilliant 1959 book Congress and the American Tradition. And the philosophical foundations for Burnham’s lecture and book reach back to his arguments and analyses in The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians.
Burnham began his lecture by asserting that democracy was a “myth” and that “all governments are oligarchies” where a small governing or ruling class holds political power. Oligarchical rule, however, was sustained in part by force but also by political “myths” or formulas that provided “legitimacy” for the ruling class. In the United States, the prevailing “myth” has been that “rule by the people” and the “popular will” are manifestations of “democracy.” Burnham noted that “the people cannot in fact rule” and that government “by the people” was a practical impossibility.
