All animals are equal.
Some are more equal than others
— and pigs are most equal of all.
— from ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell, 1945
Let us speak of pigs — and democracy.
In 2024, they combined to deprive Floridians of recreational marijuana, and protection for some abortion rights — which serves as a morality tale for those who proclaim Donald Trump is “an existential threat to democracy”. Here is the tale.
Article X, Section 21 of the Florida Constitution protects the welfare of pregnant hogs. That’s right, in Florida pregnant sows have constitutional rights! You can read that section here.
Why does the Florida Constitution include that provision, passed by the voters in 2002? Well, here is the best explanation I’ve found, “The only thing it does is give the animal-rights movement something to brag about”
As that article accurately points out, the ‘pig amendment’ accomplished little else its proponents intended. However, as eventually turned out, putting protection of pregnant sows in the state constitution had both an immediate effect – which the animal rights supporters apparently never contemplated – and a long-term effect many who voted for it doubtfully could have imagined.
The immediate effect was that the only two Florida hog farmers the amendment applied too promptly butchered their hogs (and sold the meat) to avoid the cost of compliance with the amendment.
The long-term effect was that in 2024, proposed amendments to the Florida constitution to protect abortion rights, and legalize recreational marijuana, failed to receive the necessary votes to pass.
The law of unintended consequences is immutable.
That’s how “direct citizen democracy” works, as I am reminded of every time a politician, or media talking-head, anxiously decries threats to our democracy.
To understand why those making that claim show their ignorance — and of how giving the animal-rights movement an opportunity to brag about having protected the rights of pregnant sows resulted in limitations on the rights of pregnant humans — requires a journey down through history.
After adjournment of the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787, that produced the Constitution of the of the United States, Benjamin Franklin, a delegate to that convention, was asked what sort of government had been created.
Franklin’s response, “A republic, if you can keep it”, has become iconic. From the History News Network:
Franklin’s ‘a republic, if you can keep it’ line is as memorable as it is catchy. It is a story that appeals across partisan lines…
But it’s what Franklin did not say that is as relevant to this tale. He did not say “a democracy”. The difference is not merely semantic.
Franklin, and the other delegates, were the educated elite in an era when few went beyond basic schooling. They knew what history taught about the inherent dangers of democracy. The 2002 ‘pig amendment’ to the Florida Constitution, subsequently restricting the rights of pregnant humans, is an ironic example.
So how did that irony come to pass? It began in ancient Athens, Greece, the ‘birthplace of democracy’.
First, let’s define ‘democracy’.
According to Stanford University Hoover Institute professor Victor Davis Hansen, an expert on ancient Greece, in their language of the time “democracy” meant “people power”. In ancient Athens, it referred to government that incorporated the landless poor into the voting citizenry. It emerged as a populist reaction to monarchy, and oligarchy, that had previously concentrated power in one individual or a few wealthy landholders.
The Athenian assembly was the governing body. It was comprised of the citizens who gathered in the public square to decide what the government should do by simple majority vote.
The epitome of direct citizen democracy.
The so-called “Golden Age” of Athens was a roughly hundred year span of the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. That era produced some of the greatest minds of antiquity, among them Socrates and Plato, as well as the two historians, Thucydides and Xenophon, who chronicled the major upheaval of that Age: the Peloponnesian War. They all criticized Athenian democracy, and how it contributed to Athens losing that war.
Born 20 years after the war, Aristotle (considered by many to be the ‘father of political philosophy’) was not Athenian by birth, but was educated there. His treatises Politics, and Nichomachean Ethics are among the foundations of our politics and morality. He discusses democracy at length.
Aristotle explains the different forms of democracy one of which, direct democracy, (such as in Athens), is “to other democracies what tyranny is to other monarchies.” He considered it the worst form of democracy.
In 1790, Edmund Burke — a political philosopher and member of the English parliament — wrote about the political murders occurring during the “reign of terror” in the aftermath of the French revolution.
“Of this I am certain, that in a democracy, the majority of its citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority, whenever strong divisions prevail in that kind of policy, as they often must.”
Sixty years after Burke, another English political philosopher, John Stuart Mill, expressed the same concerns about radical democracy. “Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities.”
Burke and Mill were referring to what can happen to a minority in a democracy when the government apparatus becomes the handmaiden of a partisan majority. Similarly Ben Franklin, in another quote attributed to him, described democracy as “Two wolves, and a lamb, voting on what to have for lunch!”
So whenever anyone talks about “an existential threat to democracy”, we might ask, “What do you mean by that?” Whenever I ask such questions, the fears of Aristotle, Burke and Mill come to mind — as does the ‘weaponization’ of the federal government under the previous administration.
The first red flag I detect is if the person so concerned with threats to democracy is okay with laws restricting so-called “misinformation”. Infringement of the right of free speech, by using the power of government… tyrannical democracy in practice.
Stanford’s Victor Davis Hansen describes how the Athenian democratic assembly crafted “a number of institutions, from forced liturgies to ostracism, to engineer an equality of result rather than of mere opportunity.” DEI in ancient Athens. Think of efforts by some in our government to enforce the use of certain pronouns (forced liturgies). Or mandating hiring based on gender identity regardless of merit (equality of result rather than mere opportunity).
So, again, what form of democracy is a person talking about, when claiming ours is under threat?
If they mean the Athenian form of direct citizen democracy, are they aware of not only the forced liturgies but also the brutality that democracy engaged in during the Peloponnesian War? In Athens, conduct of that war was ultimately in the hands of the assembly by majority vote. Among those decisions was what to do with prisoners taken when the Athenian army captured cities allied with Sparta.
Those decisions seemed to depend on the mood of the majority of citizen’s voting in the Assembly, influenced by the loudest voices on any given day. The result, Hansen writes was, “once these Athenians got into their collective minds to butcher… butcher they did, with impunity.”
Athenian commanders in the Peloponnesian War were elected by the assembly, regardless (as was ultimately proven) of military skill. Strategic decisions were micro-managed by the assembly. The worst decision of that war, which ultimately lead to a Spartan victory, was the Athenian attack on the Sicilian city of Syracuse. It seemed like a good idea to a majority of the assembly.
That war lasted 27 years, during the course of which several Athenian generals — even victorious ones — were indicted by the assembly at the insistence of vociferous instigators for partisan reasons. They were condemned to either exile or death by majority vote.
As a result, “…Almost every savage measure taken by generals in the field was either pre-approved by the sovereign Athenian assembly or understood by fearful commanders to be in line with the harsh dictates of an unforgiving voting citizenry back home.”
Athenian generals were not the only ones who died at the hands of Athenian democracy. Socrates, a veteran of the Peloponnesian War, was condemned by a majority vote of the assembly. The principle ‘crime’ for which Socrates was condemned to death by the assembly, was “corruption of the youth”. He had publicly challenged, among other things, the “forced liturgies” of Athenian democracy.
Socrates may well have been the most famous victim of political correctness and the ultimate form of cancel culture. An inevitable example of ‘tyranny of the majority’… a concept that will be expanded on, in Part Two.
As I mentioned in a previous column about Europeans seeming to enjoy war, Athenian “radical democracy” was one of the principle causes of the Peloponnesian War. Athens and Sparta had been allies for the previous 50 years, before the outbreak of that war.
Their alliance produced the epic last stand of the “300 Spartans” at Thermopylae — which bought enough time for the other Greek city-states (led by Athens) to assemble the force that ultimately defeated the Persians at Salamis and Marathon. But over the half century since those victories the alliance had decayed to a point where the two had become armed rivals.
That rivalry had reached a “live and let live” accommodation as the Spartans warily watched Athens became an empire — with colonies around the Aegean, and other Greek city state tributaries. Like all empires throughout history, the Athenians enjoyed the riches and power that comes with imperial rule.
The Spartans could live with Athenian imperial expansion — so long as Athens didn’t infringe on the region of Greece controlled by Sparta (the Peloponnese Peninsula). But Athens got greedy, in part for ideological reasons.
Hansen writes, “… once Athens began to combine its lust for power with a radical ideology of support for democracy abroad, Sparta rightly concluded that the threat transcended mere armed rivalry …”
The ‘radicals’ within the Athenian assembly were the most vocal, and sought to expand their radical ideology into Spartan territory, ultimately with similar results as the United States “nation-building” efforts in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
So… again… the question for those most vocal about threats to democracy is, what form of democracy are they fearful of losing?
The kind that gets into ill-conceived wars?
Read Part Two, tomorrow…