Part I

The Cycle of Regimes

Revolutions in democracies are generally caused by the intemperance of demagogues.

—Aristotle, The Politics

* * *

THE FOUNDING FATHERS' NIGHTMARE

The Federalist Papers literally opened and closed with demagogues. In the first article of this series of eighteenth-century op-eds, written to urge the voters of New York to ratify Congress's recently passed Constitution, Alexander Hamilton wrote that "of those men who have overturned the liberty of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants." In Number 86, Hamilton concluded the Papers by warning against the "military despotism of a victorious demagogue."

These words might just as well have been written in Greek or Latin—which is not to say they were complex but that they literally drew from Athens and Rome. The Framers of the Constitution were all classically educated and literate, if not fluent, in the classical languages. In 1785, two years before the Constitutional Convention, for instance, James Madison wrote his friend Thomas Jefferson, who, as Minister to France, had access to the world's greatest bookstores, to send back "Treatises on the ancient or modern Federal Republics, on the law of nations, and the History, natural and political, of the new world." He specifically requested works "such of the Greek and Roman authors ... where they will be got very cheap, as are worth having, and are not on the common list of school classics." His budget issues aside, Madison received and read hundreds of books that Jefferson sent over the next five years.

Madison and the other Framers read Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, and Cicero, among others. These were dark books with sordid plots andominous endings. Ancient stories of democracy's self-destruction at the hand of demagogues shaped the Founding Fathers' own thoughts. They wanted raw democracy about as much as they wanted another revolution. Elbridge Gerry, for instance, a fiery representative from Massachusetts (and later vice president under President James Madison), thought that allowing ordinary Americans to vote for the president was madness. "A popular election in this case is radically vicious," Gerry lectured his fellow Founding Fathers during the Constitutional Convention. "The ignorance of the people would put it in the power of some one set of men dispersed through the Union & acting in Concert to delude them into any appointment." Two months later, he declared that democracy was simply "the worst ... of all political evils."

What was Gerry so worried about? The demagogue. At the time, the nation was still recovering from a revolt of debtor-farmers in western Massachusetts led by a man named Daniel Shays. While Shays' Rebellion in 1786 cost only a handful of lives, it struck terror deep into the hearts of the Founders about whether the ancient cycle of regimes would replay in the modern new nation. Rather than placing trust with the people, Founders like Gerry abandoned hope instead. As the delegates sweltered indoors in the Philadelphia heat, Gerry proclaimed, "The people are uninformed, and would be misled by a few designing men."

To understand the concerns that drove the formulation of the American Constitution and that linger in our thoughts even today (though we might not realize it), we need to understand the intimate connection between the most hopeful of political ideas and the most dreaded political villain.

* * *

DEFINING THE DEMAGOGUE

A few definitions will first be helpful. Let's begin with democracy. At its simplest level, democracy is a political system that grants power based on what large groups of people want. Democracy is unlike an oligarchy, which makes decisions based on what a small group of rich people wants to do, or a monarchy, where only a single person matters. Democracy instead lets the people make decisions. So in a democracy, whoever controls the people, or the authorized representative of the people, has great power. That power can lead to a wide range of actions, from justice to massacres.

There is spirited discussion among experts about how to define democracy, which has only become more complicated over the centuries since its invention. Today we see electoral democracies, liberal democracies, illiberal democracies, quasi-democracies, and incomplete democracies, among others. Electoral democracies are defined simply by the fact that they have elections. However, the basic existence of elections does not tell you much about a country's overall politics, just as a judicial system does not mean a country actually has justice if all it can assemble are sham trials. Saddam Hussein, for instance, was routinely "elected" with more than 90 percent of the vote in Iraq. Liberal democracy is what we familiarly think of in America as "democracy"—its elements include political accountability for everyone with power (meaning the military or royalty do not have a monopoly or some reserved jurisdiction beyond the control of the people), checks among the various branches and institutions of government, freedom of speech, a free flow of information, and judicial review. "Illiberal democracy" is a term made famous by the political scientist and journalist Fareed Zakaria. It describes the backsliding that can occur in formal democracies that substantively are governed by autocracy and, in many cases, demagogues.

The debate about defining democracy is important both to understand how to improve freedom and to dissect the various causes of failed democracies. This book focuses not on democratic institutions or systems, per se, but rather on the relationship of people to individual mass leaders. This connection can channel tremendous power to a demagogue; it's also a means by which the people can recover control of their country. Most fundamentally, however, the connection between leader and people can create tremendous volatility. Democracy suffers from an intrinsic...