Student activists have been out in force this year to protest at American universities. They are called activists because they are dissatisfied with the normal activity of our country’s intellectual centers of research and education. Just as judicial activism means going beyond normal judging, so student activism means greater than normal interest in politics.

“Normal” in our country is exercising one’s individual rights within the law. It includes those few students who ready their talents for politics as well as the many who will be, we hope, informed voters. Activists want your attention and are sometimes willing to coerce, even perhaps violently, to get it. They break rules, norms and laws. Though they claim the right to speak freely, activists rarely argue; they make demands. Not for them, the normal ways democracy affords to persuade others.

Setting aside indignation for the means activists employ, or the unworthy causes they at times espouse, there may be something to be learned from activism about the nature of modern democracy. We voters may not be entirely different, in the end, though it may not seem obvious quite why. Activists oppose established elites and the elitism they stand for, but as students, they are also prepping themselves for the effort of becoming a new elite replacing the old one. Having learned how to get attention, the new elite will want to rule.

But modern democracy is hostile to rule and depends on consent. We know from the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and endowed with rights; to secure these rights, they consent to government. Government, in this view, comes from a contract; it is not imposed by a ruler. Government is said to represent us, meaning that it acts for us and does not impose on us like a ruler. This contractual view of government was discovered in the 17th century by philosophers who wished to replace the old notion of rule, dating from Aristotle, with a new idea that government should protect rights rather than establish the rule of a certain principle.

Aristotle had said that human beings are political by nature and use their reason to claim to rule according to the principles they think best. Democracy is the rule of the people for the sake of a democratic way of life. The modern thinkers, led by John Locke, held that individuals have rights before they have government, so that government is necessarily limited. In order to represent the people, it must secure or protect rights, but not demand, as a ruler would, that they be exercised in a certain way. The exercise of rights is up to the individuals who hold those rights.

This distinction between representation and ruling is fundamental to our democracy and to liberal democracies around the world. Coming back to the activists, representation creates what we regard as normal and denies their desire to boss others around. But what about the elites that the activists complain of and oppose? Don’t they rule, even in a modern democracy? Is there not such a thing as meritocracy that endangers democracy?

The answer is yes. If government is necessary and all persons are equal, the most truly democratic way to select it is by lottery. Lottery makes the inequality of governing into a mere chance and does not imply that success is deserved. If success comes from an election, however, it is deserved. The winner won for reasons that in some way made him better than the loser. Nowadays, elections are considered to be democratic, even the essence of democracy, but Aristotle was correct to say that they are aristocratic. They imply that some persons are superior to others, even if they are elected by everyone, and if the reasons for their success are feeble and biased.

So we democrats need to admit that perfect equality is impossible. Some jobs are necessary and will require capable people to do them. We need plumbers, for example. All of us breathe a sigh of relief when the plumber arrives. The plumber, however necessary, needs to be paid but doesn’t boss us around. This kind of meritocracy doesn’t disturb democracy very much. Merit, and reward for merit, are justifiable in democracy if they serve the needs of democracy and do not openly challenge its principle of equality. But suppose the inequality is not so modest or little threatening as the plumber. People who want to get ahead, ambitious types, have something of a ruler in their minds. They want you to make way for them, which means get out of their way. Ambitious people like to compete, to come in ahead of others and to show their success rather than be quiet about it. The rest of us may distrust such folk, but we depend on them to seek promotion in a company, to start a new enterprise, and, in politics, to run for office. In our private lives, we value those who accept responsibility for dealing with difficult or messy situations. There are people, generally, whom we look up to; their merit is useful and acceptable. They are not equal themselves but, while violating equality, they make it work.

Merit remains a challenge to democracy precisely because it is necessary. Those living in a democracy will often be tempted to denounce its elites and their showy, arrogant elitism.

Between these two types of merit, the latter does threaten equality because it contains a measure of ruling. It is made less threatening, however, under a constitution like ours in America with provision for federalism and separation of powers, two very important principles that force individuals with the merit to win elections to compete with one another. They are what James Madison called “auxiliary precautions” besides elections that keep unequal merit in check. Together with the public constitution, the private sphere in America keeps competition alive where powerful individuals with monopolies might otherwise tell others how to live.

Still, merit remains a challenge to democracy precisely because it is necessary. Those living in a democracy will often be tempted to denounce its elites and their showy, arrogant elitism. That accusation comes from the left and the right and the center, and it comes from one elite to another, as well as from ordinary people against the elite. Professors like to accuse the moneyed elite for being rich while forgetting that they themselves with their big mouths and fluent pens also have unequal advantage. But ordinary citizens, too, entertain suspicions that occasionally break out as angry denunciation against those who seem or want to be better than ordinary. At the same time, there are celebrities who enjoy popular favor as long as they behave well by thanking their fans and do not appear condescending. Actors, musicians and athletes excel in ways all can appreciate, and they do it without claiming to rule because of their celebrity. Sometimes actors take a political stand, but usually without much effect. One of them, Ronald Reagan, became president, yet did it through partisan political channels using his talents for attracting votes rather than his, admittedly, somewhat mediocre fame as an actor.

Democracies democratize whatever inequalities in society are obvious or implicit. The authority of parents over children might seem to be a natural necessity, though hard to justify democratically. Everyone knows that children are “dependents” on adults. Yet the tenor of American education from start to finish is anti-authoritarian, to put it mildly. It is very hard for us to admit to ourselves and to others that anyone must be ruled often against their inclinations. Teachers are an elite but understand themselves rather as professionals serving democracy rather than diminishing it. Professional elites are to be found everywhere in modern democracy but elitism is always deplored. Except for the Marines — “the Few, the Proud, the Marines.” But they come from all ranks of society and they defend a democracy.

Ordinary people vote, which as seen above, is an aristocratic action of choosing the best. It is also an action of rule. One often hears a deprecating remark intended to sound modest that goes: “It’s my view, I’m not imposing it on you.” But when voting, imposing on others is what you are doing. Whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, you want a society that agrees with you, and when you vote on that issue, or any other, you are doing what you can to impose your view on the whole. This is partisanship, a problem for representative government if it wants to avoid ruling. The government resulting from an election that represents voters is supposed to secure their rights, not exercise them; this is the limitation that characterizes modern democracy. Limited government has to be nonpartisan, impartial among the opinions that divide society. But democratic citizens won’t feel that their rights are safe if governments impose partisan opinions on the exercise of rights. They are likely to become activists to defend themselves against the opinions they reject.

It seems, then, that protest activism for the sake of ruling others is hard to distinguish from normal, partisan activism. They seem to set forth the same desire to rule, and the “normal” is merely less ruling than the transgressive, protest activism of students and professional agitators. Our parties seem to cross from representation into ruling. In fact, modern democracy began with an attitude hostile to parties, as it was the terrible wars of religious parties in the 17th century that induced the political elite in Britain to adopt the representative government set forth in the writings of John Locke. Yes, it was the elite that made modern democracy and did so to prevent civil war by parties desiring to impose their will on society. Only in time did parties become respectable as limited in their ambition and willing to tolerate alternation with their opponents. In the United States, the founder of the Democratic-Republican party, Thomas Jefferson, declared his triumphant election in 1800 showed that his party was the true party. It was not until Martin Van Buren’s presidency (1837-1841) that a president began to speak of the opposition party as if it deserved to exist.

Do parties rule or do they represent? It seems that they do some of both, representing in a way that falls short of tyrannical domination but still contains something of rule. To the extent that partisans are activists, they want to rule. But the normal parties argue strenuously with each other and neither want or expect the other to disappear or be annihilated. Aristotle is right that man is by nature a political, meaning partisan, animal. But modern democracy has found a way to tamp down partisanship by emphasizing the rights of individuals rather than parties. Insofar as we emphasize individuals, we hold to a nonpartisan standard. But then it turns out that we argue about the allegedly nonpartisan standard, as for example on abortion. Who is the individual with rights, the woman or the unborn? Parties are needed to define the individual and espouse its rights. In sum, modern democracy seems to be the creation of Locke with more than a dash of Aristotle, Locke’s opponent.


It is the main feature of modern democracy, part of its fundamental constitution, to be dissatisfied with itself

A difficulty arises in the fundamentals of Locke’s thinking about individual rights. In order to put individual rights first, one must find a situation beyond societies in which individuals are given their place and their rights by society rather than by individual choice. In these normal societies, individuals appear to be ruled. Locke found a way to get beyond this domination of society by conceiving a “state of nature,” where there is no common judge, no government, to decide disputes. In this state of nature, individuals are supreme and yet equal in their inalienable rights to life, liberty and property. An inalienable right is one that cannot be taken away from you. But if everyone has such rights, how can government bring peace to the inevitable conflict that will arise? The answer is government by consent of the governed, the self-government in which modern democracy takes pride. This government is made by contract among individuals, who trade their absolute right that is insecure in the state of nature for limited rights that are secured by government limited to that purpose. This is Locke’s reasoning, and more or less consciously, it is ours too.

The trouble is that when you trade your inalienable right, you will want to keep track of what the government does with it. Will it actually do the limited job it has been given? So our regime answers this need for accountability with a constitution and with elections. But suppose the constitution is interpreted against you or your party loses the election? You will be tempted, and with some reason, to withdraw your consent and look for some other constitution or society you might prefer. The difficulty with an inalienable right is that it does you no good to keep it and you cannot give it away. You can’t keep it because it’s insecure, and you can’t give it away because it’s inalienable. A fundamental inalienable right of the individual is, if you look hard at it, nothing but Aristotle’s desire to rule concealed by Locke’s invention of a state of nature one never sees.

There is a human desire to rule others that occasionally rears up when it is riled. With a good constitution and a minimum of virtue in society, it can be controlled most of the time, but not easily and not always. It takes a statesman, or perhaps in a democracy an elite of statesmen, to keep society whole and guide it to an end it can regard with pride.

All this has been to argue that the student activism we have been seeing is, in its way, normal. It is the main feature of modern democracy, part of its fundamental constitution, to be dissatisfied with itself. It wants to represent the people but often succeeds only in ruling them. This means that student protest should not be a surprise, but it does not mean it should be welcomed or excused as youthful exuberance. Student protest makes its points by breaking rules rather than by making arguments. But breaking rules has the same desire to rule. The protesters would say that they are more honest and straightforward than the elite they confront because they are not afraid of rules that are rigged to keep them silent.

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Yet what do the protesters have to say but to issue demands? The First Amendment contains rights to free speech and free assembly. Free speech, unfortunately, has been transformed into “free expression.” Protests against government gained respectability as expression, and nowadays are held to be the best form of speech, for it is more emphatic and passionate than mere words. But words are required for argument, and argument puts reason to work. Speech at its best is giving reasons that persuade people freely. That was the original purpose of the First Amendment: to support free government with free speech. Free speech includes the right to assemble to “petition” the government.

The student protests want the contrary — to intimidate an audience. They seek to rule, and to rule like bullies, using bullhorns and shouting juvenile chants and slogans. They threaten violence they may not plan to use. In doing so, they spread their own discontent and abuse the democratic right to be dissatisfied. They also waste their precious time at universities, where they should be cultivating their minds in order to be worthy of helping rule in our constitutional democracy.

Harvey C. Mansfield is an American political philosopher. He was the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he began teaching in 1962.

This story appears in the July/August 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.

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