Democracy, Good and Bad

My wise and learned friend Professor Gerhart Niemeyer has written an eloquent tract on the misguided notions of “freedom” that animate the soul of present-day “democracy.” “If the people ceases to be composed of ‘ruling beings,’ who are kings over themselves,” he writes [NR, Feb. 4], “the heart of democracy stops beating.” To this, every lover of Plato, and of political freedom, must say Amen.

Yet Professor Niemeyer perpetuates a certain misunderstanding of the intention of the Founding Fathers when he says that they “looked on ‘popular government’ as anything but the best of all political forms,” and when he adds that for James Madison the “main question . . . was how to counteract the manifest shortcomings of democracy.”

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Harry V. Jaffa

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My wise and learned friend Professor Gerhart Niemeyer has written an eloquent tract on the misguided notions of “freedom” that animate the soul of present-day “democracy.” “If the people ceases to be composed of ‘ruling beings,’ who are kings over themselves,” he writes [NR, Feb. 4], “the heart of democracy stops beating.” To this, every lover of Plato, and of political freedom, must say Amen.

Yet Professor Niemeyer perpetuates a certain misunderstanding of the intention of the Founding Fathers when he says that they “looked on ‘popular government’ as anything but the best of all political forms,” and when he adds that for James Madison the “main question . . . was how to counteract the manifest shortcomings of democracy.”