The divinization of democracy.

  He who has not lived before 1789 does not know the sweetness of
  living.
  --TALLEYRAND (1754-1838)

CALL IT ONE MAN'S OPINION; but Talleyrand happens to have been one of the most perspicacious and all-savoring of men. He had his faults but he was open to experience, well traveled and well read, eclectic, not at all doctrinate.

His remark has the ring of authority. It seems to articulate a general experience: life in the old regimes offered many satisfactions--of a healthy kind ("sweetness"). Life after the undoing of tradition is missing something important, at least to intelligent men of sensibility and good will.

"Before 1789" means before the loss of everyday experience in a society in which aristocratic, not mass-democratic, values and modes constituted the social paradigm; before the experience of State aristicide and before the divinization of democracy. It would be charitable to grant that Talleyrand had some idea of what he was talking about. He lived thirty five years before the Revolution and about fifty beyond it; long enough to recognize the steady drift (not only in France) toward democracy, that is, toward societies increasingly abandoning the traditional ideal of excellence and handing governance over to the Numbers, the mass who live, as John Buchan puts it, "for the day and their bellies."

Talleyrand knew what life was like when the excellence advocated and symbolized by Christian aristocracy was an orienting ideal, the nucleus of acculturation. We know rather less, and the savants of democracy want to keep it that way: They know that the attainment of excellence and the clear recognition of superiority are "elitism," an evil horrible to contemplate. Champions of Liberty and the open mind, they hide what they can and censor what they can not. Under their hand, things thin out, disappear. Pre-democratic European history; the achievement of the West in the fine arts, theology, and philosophy; even the history of the United States when it was still known (and loved) as a somewhat aristocratic republic: this has become forbidden knowledge; little of it remains on the bookshelves or in the school curricula. Print and film go more and more to things demotic and culturally exotic. Schools, libraries, government agencies, legislators, networks, and the press initiate or support generally covert attacks on intellect, factuality, particularity, and acquaintance with the Western heritage.

When one has lost something the heart if not the head knows to be immensely valuable, one may not want to be reminded of it. Hide, censor, discourage notice. One may even try to cheer up by telling oneself--and of course others--that what has been lost was not really valuable but, the more one thinks about it, actually evil--elitist, aristocratic.

Talleyrand suggests that, whatever its shortcomings, the aristocratic past was inspiriting--in everyday streets, not just in the polished halls of the Chateau d'Azay or Versailles. The pre-democratic past had the vigor, warmth, and "character" (the individual genuineness) of the personal life--which is also the poetic life and the only place where inwardness can grow. Aristocratic aegis favored and fostered that life which preceded the prefabricated and packaged life of machinisme. Aristocracy, particularly on the Continent, was agrarian, and the personal, the authentic life gives its best yields far from the madding crowd. Even in England, long inclined toward a more citified economy, aristocracy and gentry constituted a bloc generally dubious about and opposed to the encroachments of machine living. It was a plebeian conglomerate--the tinkers, traders, merchants, hawkers, build-scapers--that financed and in general peopled the early modern republics that edged toward democracy. These enterprising plebs, an ever-expanding segment of "the people," wanted, and got, a milieu where "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers," a world busier, faster, shriller, grimier, more demotic, and more impersonal than the old one. Talleyrand's douceur owed much to aristocracy's backwardness. Backwardness meant not only the countryside quietness sprinkled with villages and sleek and fleecy animals; it meant continuity as well, an easy thing to love, a supplier of love! In 1860 Marian Evans (George Eliot), that warm-souled genius, was still speaking for millions, not just for the noblesse: "I desire no change that will break the ties of the past."

The patrician past was profoundly inegalitarian everywhere; in council, in the courts, in the guilds, at the livestock sale, at the well, at the butter churn. The past was norms, selective and exclusionist by definition. Hourly and year-round, hayseeds (some were Adam Bedes!), shopkeepers, and London economists were making distinctions and judgments of every conceivable type, perceiving and judging the qualities of materials and individuals, noting the differences among horses, squires, M.P.s, lawyers, and schoolteachers. Discovered equalities were adventious, and fairly rare. No two pieces of human or other cloth were alike. Setting the standards, influencing the evaluations at every moment, was the heritage, tradition, the aristocratic paradigm. From on high, princes of church and state gave this creative and preservative counsel: Love excellence in all things. Quality freshens the heart and saves the horse.

Ties with local custom and the wider Tradition were strongest on the land. They brought opposition to the two ideas--more sentiments than actual concepts--most important to the emergence of democracy: the goodness of equality and the innate goodness of man.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, romantic stylist, wrote so well that by 1780 he had made large parts of Europe receptive to the democratic sentiment-idea. Man is innately good but has been considerably corrupted by the corrupt institutions of tradition. Free us from those chains and our natural goodness will flower into unprecedented creativity and benevolence. Tradition is aristocratic. The riposte to it therefore is egalitarianism, obeisance to the General Will (Rousseau's high-flown euphemism for the persuaded, or bought, vote of the masses).

Natural Goodness, Natural Equality: very appealing to sentiment; immensely attractive to all have-nots who can not keep. One further thing might clinch the deal: the blessing of religion. What resistance to the new gospel could remain if we were to discover that God not only judges us on equal footing there but that He counsels--even commands--us to believe that we are all equal in endowments and inclinations here, and to act accordingly. Had God not, after all, come down from heaven expressly to deliver the noblest and most profound of all messages?--One Man/One Vote.

For mediocre humanity--"the people"--and its flatterers--the sentimentalists, sycophants, demagogues, and aristophobes--the discovery of God's politics was the best news of all time. It made one fellow's incapacity just as good as another's ability. It lightened the hard work of thought, an activity never popular with the people: unexamined and uninformed "opinion" became as valid, as acceptable, as intellectual cogency. To be "just as good as" anyone else, one needed only to be born (we are born good)--and of course to avoid corruptive influences such as the system of law and order, the Virgin Mary, Louis IX, Elizabeth of Hungary, Thomas Aquinas, and the Franciscans. The pressure to be responsible for one's thinking and behavior was off! What a boon for sloth, ego, and criminality! God's mandation of Equality even helped make the supreme dream of the born envious come true: it legitimized the hatred of excellence, which, wherever it is recognized, automatically becomes a sin against equality-in-mediocrity. Aristicide itself becomes virtuous: if God is a democrat, then princes and their supporters are living in sin; to do them in is piety.

An eschatalogical concept held as an article of faith for 1,800 years (and still held in traditional quarters) becomes politicized by the simple process of intellectually irresponsible extension, by sheer assertion unsupported by any evidence whatever and well-streaked with mundane political purpose.

Love itself--vital to any society that can know "the sweetness of living"--becomes a victim of egalitarian politicization. Democracy, in all its variant forms, means that politics, not love, conquers all. The kinds of love found essential or poetic in the Western tradition--devotional love, romantic love, love of friends and family--are suspect in the egalitarian outlook. The quintessential democrat sees them as self-indulgent, asocial, unimportant compared with love of "humanity," of "the people"--a love demonstrated in the social activism that flatters and champions the great crowd. Against this outlook, common sense and penetration to the heart of the issue are of no avail. The egalitarian sensibility, the democratic syndrome, is inherently emotional and incorrigibly partisan, unsusceptible to facts and logic, to those of George Santayana, for example: "Mankind at large is ... to some minds, an object of piety ... this religion of humanity is rather a desideratum than a fact: humanity does not actually appear to anybody in a religious light ... the collective influence of men and their average nature are far too mixed and ambiguous to fill the soul with veneration." Love happens only between persons anyway, never abstractly or generically. People who "love humanity" and on that basis march for democracy, are pitifully--but also dangerously--lacking in self-knowledge. The democratic politicization of love means the progressive sterilization of the human being in his personhood and therefore of society as a whole. Half a century ago Rollo May, no hasty observer, already saw the love leaking out of our mass democracies at an alarming rate: the general condition of our culture is "schizoid ... out of touch; avoiding close relationships" and suffering from "the inability to feel."

In his young days, Victor Hugo, then a royalist, offered the following definition: Egalite: traduction politique du mot envie [Equality: political translation of the word "envy."] The word, seldom uttered in Franklin's Philadelphia or at Concord or Valley Forge, became electrifying at the time of the French Revolution and has retained its powerful charge ever since.

Equality is the word, leveling is the deed. Whatever may have been the proportion of rancorous envy to good will and idealism in the historical development of modern democracy, demotic leveling was one of its constant features. It was a demand of plebeian England in the 1670s and culminated in the victory of the commerce-oriented and proto-republican parliamentary party over the more feudal-minded court loyalists. Slapping kings and hard-riding country Tories in the face was an emotional and symbolic prelude to a more practical form of leveling: extensions, in stages, of the franchise, ending in One Person/One Vote. Charles Lindbergh, one vote, Charles Manson one vote. Franchise equality supplies a precedent for yet deeper and broader equality. Through "rights" and "equal rights" legislation, political propaganda, mass education, and blessings from pulpits, the People's tribunes put massive pressure on society to accept the idea that "people are equal" means equal in virtues and talents, and that everyone should be equally praised, rewarded, and blessed, no matter the performance. As this acceptance gains ground, we enter into the next phase of development (likely a longish one), mass democracy, democratism, as some have called it. This radicalization of the democratic faith produces a curious result not at all appreciated in conservative quarters: Equality, originally conceived as a means toward legitimate ends, becomes an end in itself, and ends, traditionally defined in terms of values, drop out of sight. If it turns out that Democracy as thoroughgoing equality fosters an increase in crime and moral indifference, and a decrease in the quality of intellectual and artistic achievement, it hardly matters: equality, having become the supreme end, has to be kept going.

In this phase, the self-divinization of The People in their new-fashioned democracy, a mere majority vote on any issue whatever--the moral law as well as the tax rate or bond issue--is seen as a perfectly valid procedure. The voice of The People--an essentially raw and otherwise plebeian voice--becomes a voice difficult to question.

In fact, within the democratic principle itself--egalitarianism--there is nothing to prevent the radicalization into democratism and the extension of the principle to every aspect of our lives. Egalitarianism is an abstraction like other abstractions: applicable wherever someone or some group with power decides to apply it. Any check whatever to its demands and momentum is necessarily adventitious. The more conservative and patrician elements that survive in a mass democracy have to live with their fingers crossed--from day to day, not just in early Novembers.

Pursuing and extending its goal--equality--democracy "advances" by shaking off more and more of the inegalitarian, quality-loving matrix from which it separated. Attainment of "full democracy"--still the goal of enthusiastic democrats--means plenary repudiation of the Western tradition. Even one's own national heritage must be gradually downgraded: the early republics become tabu because they were still strongly influenced by the aristocratic paradigm. In 2007 no happy democrat goes out of his way to put in a good word for Alexander Hamilton or Gouverneur Morris.

Bemused by high-sounding abstractions, democracy brings and legitimizes enfeeblement of the personal life. Politicization implies movement away from particulars and embracing vague abstractions. The masses are highly susceptible to mesmerization by galvanically phrased abstractions. Under Soviet rule, the people of Romania, once notably tradition-loving, became so strongly conditioned to the empty but glittering Communist phrases constantly put before them, that they paid little attention to facts like the emptiness of the food markets and the increasing unavailability of ordinary amenities.

In mass democracy, politics--life as abstraction, rhetoric, and overriding partisanship--becomes omnivorous, devours the inner, soul-knowing life out of which individuals are born; and individuals are the generators of sane and benevolent creativity. Politicization destroys the quietness and the freedom necessary to them. The freedom to be sincere and candid, to think, feel, imagine, and speak without fear or the need of secrecy; the freedom to inherit the best of what one's ancestors have bequeathed; to build a house without having to bow low to bureaucrats; to take up a trade early instead of wasting years in Liberty's compulsory classrooms: such freedoms as these have long since disappeared. Demos repeats and repeats the ploy word Love. But in attenuating the personal life, he diminishes the love that makes the world go round.

The early figures who preached the demotic sermons were fantasists and abstractionizers, not thinkers. Turgot, Price, Priestley, Paine, La Mettrie, Condorcet had the talent of publicists, not of philosophers who looked closely at the human condition and at historical experience. Their limitations were recognized by their conservative contemporaries. Bonald and Chateaubriand warned that the popular government advocated by these philosophes soi-disant was bound to result in pollutive and spoliative industrial development, in overpopulation, deculturation, intellectual and artistic decline, and a tempo of life too fast for anyone's good. Even Guizot, a dry Protestant, wrote a brilliant diagnosis of the "philosophers"' diseased condition--narcissistic abstractionism. Mme. de Genlis, an incarnation of normality, was bored to tears in their palavering soirees. America never wanted to get to know these critics of political insanity, and succeeded only too well in that know-nothing.

Upon abstraction and fantasy the stubborn particulars of reality will eventually obtrude. The dewy-fresh Democracy of egalitarian dreams appeared as a prince and turned into a frog. Out of the Enlightenment's novel and heterodox assertions about the goodness of man, the necessity of equality, and the sunniness of The Future came the corresponding political instaurations: republics, democracies, socialist and communist regimes; and the particularities of these were perennially unstable government and general divisiveness, totalitarianism, civil and world wars of unprecedented destructiveness.

These anti-climactic developments appeared rather quickly. Later, in the United States, England, and elsewhere came high-tech-facilitated global terrorism, invasions, wars, nuclear threats, and contaminations; the marginalizing of the family; massive cynical assault on innocence; acculturation by slick, package-thinking, cliche-imprisoned media people; the population, vehicle, roadway, entertainment, drug, and pornography explosions; credit-carded and computerized acquisitiveness and throw-away consumption; and suffocating, depersonalizing home and workplace technology. The latchkey generation appeared. The streets became unsafe. Downtowns died. Sexuality became politics. Romance, a holdover from the aristocratic tradition of sexual polarity, headed toward extinction. Fast became the national food of choice. Schools taught the children to love only Narcissus. Serial and walk-in killing became routine. These and related developments are ubiquitous and everyday but are seldom drawn upon as evidence in support of the Goodness of Man idea.

However, as fantasy begins to fail, evasion comes to the rescue. The bigger or more numerous the miscalculations, the more important it becomes to keep up the rhetoric and keep quiet about the reality. Scientists say that about 90 percent of all experiments toward discovery or innovation fail. In our "experiment in democracy" today no public figure ever speaks of "our wonderful mass society" or of "our great heritage, mass democracy." The People's many tribunes continue to speak, always in tones of solemn secular religiosity or mindless self-congratulation, of "the liberal democracies," "our great democracy," "our democratic heritage." If you could stay awake to listen, you would think we were somehow still living in the quaint days of Betsy Ross sewing the flag, and Young Ben Franklin carrying his loaves of bread through the quiet streets of Philadelphia.

The incorrigible anachronism of democratic rhetoric will not likely ever be cited as a clear example of intellectual honesty. One recalls that in the formative years of modern popular government the reformers and revolutionists were constantly bringing the charge of "corruption," e.g., of dishonesty, against monarchic government. Purer-than-thou, the devotees of Demos have been known to wield the allegation of "corrupt noblesse" as a means of inciting "the people" to democratic pillage, arson, rape, and murder.

Democratic dishonesty runs deep and wide. Might it be congenital to the plebeian sensibility? If not, then why does one find, in the democracies themselves, so much evasion of crucial issues, so little deep-probing critique? Are there "problems of democracy," as some commentators are willing to admit, or are there so many ever-growing problems that the truth is, simply, democracy itself is the problem? But no one seems to have the courage to haul democracy itself into court. No one wants to become the pariah that he may well become if he maintains that democracy, like so many other things, easily, naturally generates the seeds of its own destruction--seeds that have now, both in Europe and in the New World, grown into the mass society.

Evasion is dishonest, eschewal of self-critique is dishonest, tacit censorship is dishonest when it exists as a hidden agenda behind unreal, unactualizable guarantees of "freedom of speech." Preaching "openness" and "dialogue," the democratic cult is really a closed system like many other systems. Critics of Demos the god are cowed into silence or frustrating half-truths. It becomes difficult for the unbeliever to crystallize a whole truth publicly. Almost any statement outside math and physics may be relied upon to anger some retaliation-minded group, sect, lobby, or witch-hunting litigious Friend of Man. Discussion of the "problems of democracy" has to be kept on a quite superficial level.

Glorifying the Vote, sacred ritual of secular democracy, is another instance of the dishonesty popular in popular government. In their hearts, in their quieter moments, everyone knows that the vote is a circumscribed power productive of circumscribed results. In and of itself the franchise protects nothing whatever, not the nation, not even itself. In 1933 the Weimar government, ultra-democratic (and, not surprisingly, ultra-inchoate), voted--freely, in the Reichstag--to abolish its political parties (and therefore the meaningful--the unintimidated--vote) and allow Adolf of The People to dictate destiny.

Voting does mean party, and party is another aspect of the egalitarian departure from tradition, another gamble on the beneficence of mass action. The modern democratic world: political parties of mammoth size and power: whole populations divided into contesting blocs, not united in the dreamers' Brotherhood. The characteristic mode "before 1789" of relatively localized squabbles settled by seasonal skirmishes, tributes, small cessions, and marriages is replaced by universal politicization with its potential for global war and its enormous tax base to support armies and weaponry on a scale unimaginable in the old regimes. Even in its transient times of peace the new world of mass election means government by the party in power at the moment. Written constitutions themselves, being subject to interpretation and amendment, are at the mercy of party. The supposed "checks and balances" features of liberal democracy are checked and balanced by the fact that even the courts, including the Supreme one, consist not of angels but of party appointees free, once ensconced, to do their own thing, and with impunity.

Apologists for the system occasionally admit its fallibility, its malfeasances: the hidden agendas behind supposedly reasonable legislation or court decision; the lapses into lies, evasions, half-truths, coverups, withholdings, and other entertainment. But the servants keep the faith, solemnly reminding us that to err is human--unless those who err happen to be princes or other supporters of tradition.

The primal objection to all solicitude for popular government is twofold. First, mass-elected government is bound to be essentially plebeian. The system boasts of providing "free choice." But it automatically precludes the choice of the patrician. Barons and viscounts are not on the ticket. One does not have the choice of voting outside the demotic framework. Patrician values, or some of them, may be dear to a few candidates here and there, but these few are more likely than not to be unknown to the voter, and in any event, even if elected, they remain obliged to make obeisance to Demos and espouse the system. In democracies everyone votes freely for Politics, and Party Spirit always gets elected.

Party Spirit and Party Substance constitute the second great objection. Party is integral with the democratic performance, and it represents the institutionalization of a massive and continuous corruption of human nature already sufficiently susceptible to corruption without the addition of mass politics. The party system, democracy's modus operandi, is no lovely thing to behold. It means not only diurnal and perennial dishonesty but discontinuity, confusion, ephemerality, and worst of all the legitimation of an ongoing heyday for anger and hatred.

"Democracy in action" and "the democratic process" are high-sounding euphemisms for the national cultivation of factionism that means constantly shifting programs, laws regarded as heaven-written one year and repealed the next, never-settled truculent quarrels over the interpretation of the many and ever-proliferating laws on the books and even over the meaning of "representative" governance itself. Everyone knows the spectacle: fickle enthusiasm; bitter partisanship; fanaticism; accusation, attack, retaliation; caricature and half-truth proffered as reality; demagoguery; denial and distortion of facts; conniving silence; evasion on sensitive issues; faked shock and dismay; faked regard and concern.

No penchant for Excellence here. The aristocratic state, imperfect, human, all-too-human, nevertheless offered a different sort of display. Does the democratic electorate take the party performance as a model for values and behavior? If so, we can expect nothing better than what we have already become accustomed to: progressive social hardening, deepening and contagious cynical disregard for others and for principles and values. The extinction of good will, truthfulness, honor, dignity: no small matter. The great Balzac, profound and royalist, saw it coming long ago: "all that envious hatred which wells up in the bosom of the democrat."

From Talleyrand's youth backward as far as one cares to go, the societies usually regarded as high civilizations were created, developed, and defended by aristocratic secular and religious leaders. Culture was the handiwork of kings, oligarchs, landgraves, archons, praetors, nobles, privileged senates, councils, and judiciaries. It was not "the people" who drew up laws, searched for painters and sculptors, and beautified the polis. Solon, Lycurgus, and the Bourbons did that, and not by vote and not by listening to bureaucrats who told them to hire the incompetent and the irresponsible. No one claimed that individual aristocrats were perfect or that aristocratic rule was just or benevolent in every conceivable way. But the impressive civilizational construction was there for all to see. Elitist creativity with its prescription of excellence was supported not only by the high-born few but by perceptive, judicious, truth-seeking people born as commoners: Socrates, Confucius, Mahomet, the Talmudists, Shakespeare, Burke, Racine, Disraeli, Goethe, Balzac, Talleyrand, justice-loving Theognis, jovial Dickens, humane Marian Evans, generous Karen Blixen; elitists all.

The past associated democracies with the lower, not the higher. It was common knowledge that they were almost always established by slaughterous revolt and thoroughgoing aristicide. In Greece and elsewhere, patrician males (including children) were mass-murdered. Patrician women, after being raped, were sold into slavery or taken as personal possessions. Temples, palaces, the best-built homes were looted and vandalized. Libraries and works of art were hammered and burned. The goon mobs of Demos at Megara and Argos in the sixth century B.C. prefigured those of 1793-94.

But eighteen centuries of general refusal to sing paeans to Demos was not to be a featured theme of Modern Education. And it is rare to find a commentator nowadays who acknowledges the corollary of that rejection of the god. The sequitur is perfectly obvious: all serious critique of "the people" (the generality, the Numbers) implies a rejection of governance by them.

From the Bronze Age to the Plastic, a vast literature of animadversion on the mass has been accumulating, much of it by men and women generally thought of as the most deeply searching and insightful thinkers and artists ever known. By contrast, the literature that extols and at the same time realistically specifies the virtues indigenous to the crowd is submicroscopic. The literature of Demos is almost exclusively a corpus of distortion, evasion, superficiality, sophistry, hype, and wishful thinking. It glorifies "the people" by avoiding the known particulars. The best of it--the best of Whitman, Dreiser, Hugo, Michelet--is marred by what common sense and observation recognize as sentimentality and demotic propaganda. The people's tribunes give us rhetoric and abstraction in lieu of convincing image: Gorki's envisionments of the future, or those of Granville Hicks or Edward Bellamy. "The literature of democracy" sounds grand, but it turns out to be the democrats-for-war hoopla of Philip Freneau or J.G. Whittier (Whittier's flag-waving drivel "Barbara Frietchie" was inflicted upon three generations of unsuspecting American schoolchildren). In its socialist and communist variants, democracy brings us William Morris's soporific socialist workers' marching songs; Demian Bedny's Soviet kitsch; 100,000,000 tons of trees wasted on pulp for fiction glorifying factory managers who meet Stalin's production quotas.

The aristocratic regimes were always a little rough and ready. They seldom made claims of purer than thou, more objective than thou, more honest than thou. Modern democracy is the opposite: a pretentious type of government imbued with the Protestant hankering after public purity. But pretension is the father of self-delusion, hypocrisy, and plain old fallacy. The pretentious code of secular holiness under which democratic politics operates and which produces mice, not stallions, also governs democratic intellectual life, and with the same results. The New Jerusalem syndrome--the goodness of man and of equality syndrome--encourages fear, ego, and partisanship to set up roadblocks all along the route toward truth. This demotic remissness shows up most glaringly exactly where one would expect to find it: close to the nerve--in political, social, historical, and cultural studies.

Increasingly, over the past half century, American (and other) scholars and analysts have gone out of their way to make things look good for democratic theory and practice. Things have to be made to come out right: the savants follow the demotic party line. They probably see this as patriotism; Truth sees it as treason. No doubt some of this democratic slanting is unwitting. But it remains reprovable. In fact, blatant propaganda is more intellectually respectable than concealed bias. To provide an encompassing and reasonably just assessment of the historical experience of democracy, the studies-makers would have to admit and make allowances for their own rationalist, egalitarian, and plebeian prejudices; and having done that, to demonstrate an adequate understanding of aristocratic values and their role in helping to create and preserve the West. A novelty of this sort would also have to work up a plenary and specifics-laden analysis of earlier cultures'--Eastern as well as Western--massive and persistent aversion to Demos.

Burckhardt, Spengler, Sorokin, Toynbee and others long ago made it clear that cultures in decline have been unable to achieve a general or lasting reinvigoration. But any degree or briefest period of renascence is better than nothing. The partial and temporary restorations brought about by the Maccabees in the second century before Christ, and by the land-loving, backward-looking Ultra-royalists in early nineteenth-century France, were glories of this world, inspiring--and rescuing!--the high-natured men and women of their times.

Today even the smallest suggestion about reconstruction brings down the Furies. Political figures, analysts, institutions themselves insist that the "problems of democracy" are merely adventitious and are corrigible right within the system.

These political time-servers must be rebutted, vigorously. Democracy is devolutionary, the more so as it becomes fruitful and multiplies. This is the blasphemous fact, the treasonous truth that has to be faced if there is to be even the slightest movement away from what Stanley Rosen calls "the base nihilism that disguises itself as egalitarianism." Government "of, by, and for the people," far from being the guarantor of civilization and meaningful freedom, is and always has been a menace to it. Democracies everywhere and at all times have ultimately empowered the masses, human beings too irresponsible, unstable, and imperceptive to govern themselves, let alone society. The modern age is partly the history of the constantly increasing pressure they have exerted upon institutions and individuals to subscribe to the fantasy of innate Goodness and Equality, and to alter values, laws, age-old understandings and inclinations, religious doctrine and symbolization, manners, deportment, art forms, language, and even styles of dress.

In mass democracy's obscurantist milieu it seems impossible to get much of a hearing for John Adams: "the people have waged everlasting war against the rights of men.... The numbers of men in all ages have preferred ease, slumber, and good cheer to liberty.... The multitude must have a check." Thomas Jefferson, too, goes unheard: "there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.... The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society ... that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government."

Our continuing loss of meaningful--of actually exercisable--freedoms and our continual dumbing-down, are the result of a diminished aristocratic residue: the virtues, ideals, outlooks, habits of mind, prejudices, institutions, and unconscious inclinations inherited from European tradition and by no means attacked in the American Revolution. If there is any hope for the effective survival of any values and modes except plebeian ones, of a personally and socially leavening innocence, of moral consensus and its free public symbolization, of the recognition and rewarding of intellectual acumen and of personal and aesthetic quality, of the personal and poetic life itself, of the effective spiritualization of the individual, that hope lies in discovering and implementing some way to slow down the further evaporation of that residue.

The dissolution of Western tradition--aristocratic through and through--means the needless, pointless suffering of those who least deserve the fatality of their civilization: not only Jefferson's perceptive, thoughtful, high-minded, generous aristoi, but quite ordinary people, including children, who live lives of good will and who, innately loyal to innocence and high standards, still seek what sweetness of living remains in their day.

ROBERT BEUM is the editor of the anthology of American poetry To the Clear Fountains (2002).