America at Risk: Threats to Liberal Self-Government in an Age of Uncertainty

Defending Liberty: Liberal Democracy and the Limits of Public Power

Defending Liberty: Liberal Democracy and the Limits of Public Power William A. Galston The defense of liberty is the distinctive aim of liberal democracy. By monopolizing force and respecting the rule of law, even autocracies can protect individuals’ lives and security. In modern circumstances, however, only liberal democracies have given sustained and effective attention to the preservation of liberty. They do so in two different ways, re›ecting the distinction between liberty’s public and private dimensions. From the liberal democratic perspective, public liberty is collective selfgovernment , the antithesis of which is tyranny. Given the less admirable side of human nature, tyranny is the near-certain result of concentrating political power in a single individual or institution. To minimize the possibility of tyranny, liberal democracy disperses power among a variety of entities , de‹ned functionally or geographically. Often but not always, written constitutions formalize the dispersion of power. This strategy gives rise to a number of familiar topics and challenges, among them the separation of powers, the relation among legislative, executive, and judicial functions, and federalism. Private liberty consists in the ability of individuals to act in ways that are not determined by collective decisions. This is not to say that the public sphere is irrelevant to private liberty. On the contrary; without appropriately designed public institutions and suitably motivated public of‹cials, individuals cannot be secure in the exercise of private liberty. Even though liberal democracy stands or falls with the distinction between the public and private spheres, students of liberal democracy tend not to consider deeply enough how the distinction between public and private is to be understood . This oddly neglected question is the subject of my essay. / 57 Liberal Democracy and the Public/Private Distinction There are three key dimensions of decisions that claim to be authoritative —structure, substance, and scope. Structure denotes the institutional and procedural arrangements through which decisions are made—by the one, the few, or the many, with equal or unequal participation, directly or through representatives, and so forth. It is, in my judgment, an open question whether decision-making structures must fall within a certain range for their decisions to be deemed acceptable, as many democratic theorists insist. Substance encompasses the outcomes of decision-making processes, assessed in a host of familiar terms—just or unjust, promoting the common good or special interests, consistent with the rule of law or constituting the arbitrary use of power, among others. Scope (the principal focus of this essay) points to the range within which the authority-bearer is entitled to decide. At the heart of liberalism is the idea that political authority cannot rightly dominate the full range of human life. All rightful government is limited government. No matter how much we prize a particular structure of political decision-making, such as democracy, its exercise becomes illegitimate when it breaches this limit. As Leo Strauss puts it, “Liberalism stands and falls by the distinction between state and society or by the recognition of a private sphere, protected by the law but impervious to the law.”1 Liberal democracy, then, is limited democracy . Its antonym is not conservative democracy (whatever that might be), but rather plenary or total democracy. Practical Challenges to Limited Democracy In a volume devoted to dangers facing the United States, it may seem odd to identify liberal democracy itself as threatened. At ‹rst glance, the basic institutions and practices of liberal democracy would appear to be virtually unchallenged. But appearances are deceptive, or so I shall argue. Today, practical challenges to liberal democracy have emerged on four different fronts. None of these is novel; each has roots, and analogues, through American history. The ‹rst challenge arises from the desire for security; more precisely, from the sense that security is threatened. In the wake of September 11, 2001, many Americans have become more willing to compromise liberties and invade privacies they would have defended in other circumstances. As 58 / america at risk Alexander Hamilton, no foe of energetic government, remarked in Federalist 8,“Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates . The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe...