Probably the most famous product of the Enlightenment
was the American Declaration of Independence
and Constitution, a blueprint for a form of
governance that tried to get the benefits
of government—seeing as how anarchy is worse
because you get spirals of vendetta and feuding
and violence—You don’t get the coordination
of large scale economies without some kind
of governance; Trying to get the benefits
of governance without the perennial hazard
that anyone given a bit of power will aggrandize
their power and become despotic.
So the checks and balances of American democracy
were a way of – I think of it as negotiating
a middle route between the violence of anarchy
(and anarchy does lead to violence—We were
never noble savages that lived in harmony.
Regions of the world without government are
almost invariably violent) but also avoiding
the violence of tyranny.
Mainly you give someone power, they’re going
to use it to maximize their benefits, their
power, their longevity of their reign at the
expense of people.
Democracy is a way of steering between these
extremes, of having a government that exerts
just enough violence to prevent people from
preying on each other without preying on the
people itself.
Now in practice no one has ever developed
a democracy that works particularly well if
judged in absolute terms.
Democracies are always messy, they’re always
unequal.
They always involve lobbying and power grabs.
But all the alternatives so far have been
worse.
Democracies seldom go to war with each other.
They have higher standards of living.
They have higher levels of happiness.
They have higher levels of health.
And they’re the obvious preferred destinations
for people who vote with their feet.
The whole world wants to live in a democracy.
It’s an ongoing project.
It’s currently under threat from a number
of directions, but there’s never been a
time in which we’ve had a well-functioning
democracy in terms of meeting all the criteria
in a high school civics class.
