Democratic Leadership
All organisation requires
leadership, including democracy, a circumstance which
complicates the relation between leadership and the people.
Jefferson developed the concept of a 'natural aristocracy
of virtue and talent' as opposed to hereditary aristocracy
in this context. Whereas right wing American leaders wanted
to replace the British monarchy by an American monarchy,
radical leaders such as Jefferson and Thomas Paine sought
to establish democracy. Jefferson considered these
differences fundamental to politics in general: 'Men by
their constitutions are naturally divided into two classes
1) those who fear and distrust the people and wish to draw
all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes
2) those who identify with the people, have confidence in
them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and
safe, although not the most wise depository of the public
interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in
every one where they are free to think, speak, and write,
they will declare themselves. Call them therefore liberals
and serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, Whigs and Tories,
republicans and federalists, aristocrats and democrats, or
by whatever name you please, they are the same parties
still, and pursue the same object. The last appellation of
aristocrats and democrats is the true one, expressing the
essence of all.'
In America these differences more or less coincided with
the distinctions between radicalism and conservatism.
Jefferson sought to empower the ordinary people;
conservatives led by Alexander Hamilton sought to restrict
power to the higher classes. The unity of the American
revolutionary aristocracy was strained to breaking point by
these differences. Freemasonry is at the heart of these
difficulties: although it played a leading role in the
revolution the narrowly aristocratic, self selecting
tendency of this conspiratorial fraternity exerted a
restricting influence on democratic progress, and on the
American constitution. Slavery was one focus of these
differences, but it also affected other, fundamental
questions. Jefferson, effectively excluded from the
constitutional convention, endorsed its findings only after
the Bill of Rights was accepted as amendments. These
differences found continued expression in the opposition
between radicalism and conservatism that has characterised
all subsequent political systems based on the American
model, termed 'representative democracy.' With various
exceptions, its relatively narrow parameters have given
rise to two party political systems. European conservatism
at first considered such systems to be prone to hidden
forms of monopolistic control and a vehicle for factional,
and in particular, Jewish intrigue. These suspicions later
found extreme expression in the ideology of fascism, which
denounced democracy as being in itself intrinsically
fraudulent. American radicalism however was the original
opponent of secret factionalism. The American Antimasonic
Party claimed with some justification to be the true heir
to Jefferson's legacy.
The American revolution did not fulfil all the aspirations
of its radical supporters. Jefferson and Paine looked to
Athenian democracy as the example towards which political
reform should develop, in which the chief form of election,
as in most republican constitutions that had existed until
1776, was sortition - election by random selection, as with
juries. Sortition however was all but eliminated from the
US constitution by conservative forces. Madison, who played
a centrist role between Jefferson and Hamilton,
misrepresented Athenian democracy in the constitutional
convention proceedings in regard to its merits in
containing factional influences. As S.E. Finer notes,
Madison's claims that Greek 'pure' democracy can offer 'no
cure for the mischiefs of faction' are not only '...
demonstrably false. Not merely false: they are
contre-verities' (History of Government, 1998, Vol 1,
p362). What Madison's (possibly Masonic) motives were in
this deception is not clear but its result was to exclude
sortition from the constitution in all areas save for the
right to trial by jury later insisted upon by Jefferson,
despite the fact that the Articles of Confederation - the
first US constitution - had incorporated sortition at the
highest levels of interstate authority. The self evident
truth that sortition can prevent secret factionalism was in
this way restricted in application, as were also the basic
truths of common sense in regard to hereditary wealth.
Jefferson and Paine had agreed on a further 'self evident
truth' in this regard: that 'the earth belongs to the
living.' If it is plain to common sense that the dead
should not have dominion over the living, as Paine
maintained, then it follows inherited wealth and the
constitution should be subject to redistribution and review
by each succeeding generation. Jefferson actually suggested
a nineteen-year cycle of review to this purpose. These
proposals were not acceptable to the Right and so were
shelved - indefinitely, as it turned out.
A further limitation in the early development of American
democracy concerns payment for citizen participation. In
Athenian democracy the ordinary citizen could earn half a
day's wage for taking part in city assembly meetings. In
the American republic this practice was ignored in favour
of the idea that political participation is best left to
the leisured aristocracy, who did not require payment. The
Masonic grandmaster Andrew Jackson later supplanted this
distorted, aristocratic conception of political
impartiality by the unabashed pursuit of votes by factions
for financial gain: those factions which win elections are
able to staff lucrative government posts with their own
supporters. At best intrinsically partisan, at worst
plainly corrupt, this system has been adopted in all
representative democracies. Although, therefore, slavery
has been abolished, the role of sortition, payment for
citizen participation and hereditary wealth in American
society have still not been addressed in ways consistent
with the aspirations of the founding fathers. Integral to
these limitations has been the evolving struggle between
aristocratic and democratic tendencies. In America these
differences more or less coincided with the distinctions
between radicalism and conservatism within the
revolutionary movement. In France, however, these
distinctions were more problematic, and underlay both
defeat of the French revolution and the emergence of
totalitarianism.