The Preservation of Democracy

According to the popular idea, [democracy] is a form of government where the government does what the people want; and the people secure a government which acts according to their interests by participating in governmental procedure through the election of legislative representatives and executive and judicial officers who depend for their reelection on the conduct of affairs while they hold office. This is a fairly correct description of the structural side of democracy, and the only trouble with it is that the structural side does not mean very much.

We know–through the efforts of the leading scholars who have analyzed the problems of parliamentarism and popular representation in the last hundred years, through Hegel and Bagehot, through Grey and Renan, through Mosca, Pareto, LeBon, and Max Weber–that the essential problem of a working democracy is not the vote of the people but the type of the governing elite and its relation to the mass of the people. The election of men and the voting on issues is the last and relatively least important phase of the democratic process. The decisive question is, Who shapes the issues and who presents the men?

[The plebiscite–a national vote to approve actions already taken by political leaders–was used by the Nazis] because it is a procedure accepted as legitimate in the world of Western political ideas; and it was used effectively insofar as, at least for a while and by certain segments of Western public opinion, the view was taken that after all it was up to the Germans if they liked the Nationalist Socialist regime to the extent that election and plebiscite figures seemed to prove. The effectiveness of the plebiscite screen on Western minds is conditioned by the fact that in the prevailing public opinion the idea of democracy has become formalized.

For the purpose of this study we may say roughly that the democratic quality of a government hinges on three points: (1) the type of the elite who shapes the issues, (2) the issues themselves, and (3) the state of mind in which a voter goes to the polls. The three problems are closely interwoven.

The first condition of democracy is that the governing elite permit only issues to be shaped that do not stir up emotions too deeply and are not apt to produce an irreconcilable cleavage in the people. This requires, of course, an express or tacit gentlemen’s agreement between the party leaders to refrain from vote-getting by stirring up emotions beyond a definite limit. It requires a relation of mutual confidence between the leaders that none of them will take undue advantage of the others by using unfair means of rabble-rousing in his favor.

When a situation exists like that in Germany, where the National Socialist party, even during the days of the Weimar Republic, persistently arrogated to itself the monopoly of fighting for national honor and resurrection and branded everybody else as a traitor to his country and a subhuman beast fit to be wiped out, democracy is gone, even though its forms are preserved and are used to gain power in a legal way.

This brings us to the third point, the voter’s state of mind. When the voter is worked up to a state of hysterical frenzy by permanent unmeasured calumniation of the opponent, by constant appeal to and glorification of aggressiveness, by Jew baiting, etc., he is not a democratic voter even if he casts his vote as a secret, free vote.

At least the classic democratic thinkers of the eighteenth century and the fathers of the constitution of this country would not have acknowledged him as such. And he is even less a democratic voter when he casts the vote against his will because he knows what will happen to him if he does not.

To summarize: The plebiscite is an effective screen pattern because the idea of democracy has become formalized, and because the opinion-shaping agencies such as newspapers, intellectual magazines, texts used in the educational organization, etc., seem not to be even aware that there is the problem of substantial, as distinguished from formal, democracy. The knowledge of the problem is reserved to types of men and literature who have no possibility of influencing opinion to a politically relevant degree.

One of the leit-motifs of Hitler’s speeches explaining his expansion is always the wrong done to the German people by the Treaty of Versailles, a wrong that can be righted only by the successive steps he takes. The motif is clad recurrently in the promise that he will settle down peacefully if only just this last of his burning desires is quieted. This screen has proved successful again and again. The reason for the success, as far as it can be gathered from British speeches and editorials, letters to the editor of The Times, etc., seems to be a curious belief, current in the Anglo-Saxon world, in the psychology of frustration.

The argument runs like this: The German people have been frustrated; they have become angry and aggressive as a consequence of frustration; if their frustrated wishes are satisfied they will settle down and become peaceful and pleasant neighbors again.

There are several flaws in this argument. First of all, frustration is a concept of individual psychology; for methodological reasons it cannot be transferred to collective behavior. The argument could be dismissed on this ground, but let us assume its validity for the moment in order to analyze its further qualities. From an experience of frustration anger and aggressiveness do not necessarily follow as a consequence: the reaction may as well be resignation. Whether the one or the other is the outcome depends on further qualities of character.

Aggressiveness on the other hand need not be caused by frustration: it may develop when a weak, persistently peaceful object offers itself to aggression. Nonresistance or defenselessness of the object provokes aggression in a man who inclines to it.

Appearances like those of Ramsay Macdonald or Neville Chamberlain might induce even a moderately aggressive man to try some threatening and bluffing on them. Further, if aggression is caused by frustration, it does not follow that it will subside when the suppressed desires are satisfied; on the contrary, it is highly probable that with satisfaction the desires will grow.

And ultimately and most important, there are quite a number of desires that should be frustrated when the individual is not capable of sublimating them in such a way as is compatible with the value system of the community in which he lives.

Our whole civilization is built on the frustration of desires that would destroy it if satisfied. If a man cannot stand the frustration of desires that our civilization imposes, we do not grant him satisfaction, but we call him a criminal and put him in jail.

In spite of its obvious flimsiness, the frustration-aggression pattern has worked excellently and has certainly contributed considerably to the success of National Socialism. The promises of Hitler that he would be finally satisfied when just this last demand should be granted are highly interesting in another aspect. After the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, British statesmen realized that something might be wrong with Hitler’s promises. They did not know exactly what, and they do not seem to know yet, but at least they found a pattern to cover it: Hitler lies, he lies habitually, pathologically.

The case is not as simple as that. A lie, we may say for the purpose of this paper, is a statement known to be untrue by the man who utters it, who nevertheless makes it with the intention to have it appear true. Now, first, it is not quite certain that the statements and promises made by Hitler and broken later were always lies subjectively when made. He may have been at the time of making them in a state of auto-suggestion which made him sincere.

However, this is a minor point for our present problem. The more interesting one is that the National Socialist movement has developed a theory of truth, most amply elaborated by Alfred Rosenberg, to the effect that truth is what is useful to the German people.

This principle is applied in millions and millions of cases in everyday life by all German governmental agencies in the sense that promises, agreements, understandings, contracts, etc., are liable to be broken at any time when a superior political interest seems to require it. It is even incorrect to say that they are broken, for in any given promise is implied the understanding that it is not supposed to be a stabilizing factor of the social order but a passing point in a revolutionary process.

The same principle, of course, applies to statements made by Hitler himself, or by any German official, in international relations. If spoken or written language of a National Socialist in official capacity is understood by the partner to the discussion as a promise or statement in the sense of Western stabilized, nonrevolutionary society, this certainly is not the fault of National Socialism; for the National Socialist point of view is elaborately expressed and accessible to everybody who can read and cares to know it.

The unrealistic, nonobligatory use of language is, furthermore, not altogether an invention of National Socialists. Even before the war, German lawyers advanced theories that came rather close to the National Socialist idea, such as the theory of the clausula rebus sic stantibus in Erich Kaufmann’s famous book bearing this title. And even more, the general trend of the German mind and language in the direction of unrealism and nonobligation, of which the nonobligation of promises is a specialized outgrowth, has been the great problem of German culture for more than half a century.

It has given rise to counter-movements that tried to reestablish the realistic character and obligatory force of the German language, and to analytical efforts describing it in all detail. I am talking of the movement initiated by Stefan George in the Nineties, and of the more than thirty fat volumes, beginning in 1900, of the periodical [Die Fackel (The Torch)] issued and for the greater part written by Karl Kraus, which contain practically nothing but a thousandfold-instanced analysis of this problem.

Hitler as a writer is an outstanding representative of precisely this style of unrealistic, nonobligatory language. These style characteristics, being peculiarly German and determined by the German revolutionary process for at least sixty or seventy years, are untranslatable into any other language.

A translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf is equivalent to a destruction of its most essential characteristics. If Western statesmen know about these facts and problems of German cultural history, and nevertheless insist on treating National Socialist use of language according to the Western pattern, this certainly is their own fault.

 

This excerpt is from Published Essays, 1940-1952 (Collected Works Volume 10) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004)