Mob Rule or Rule By Law? A Distinction Without a Difference

The banality of this oft-repeated distinction, between democracy and a republic, never seems to persuade people to stop making it. Conservatives often and very proudly make this distinction when talking to liberals who advocate strengthening democracy. Yes, it’s boring, but is it also true?

It has been repeated so often as a matter of fact that nobody bothers to think about it anymore. What we are told is that the founders understood that we cannot have a democracy because it’s ultimately a form of mob rule where the majority could simply vote to take away the rights of the minority (“Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for dinner”). So the founders instead set up a Constitutional Republic which is a system based on the rule of law, where individual rights and principles are held to be sacrosanct and are enshrined into law via the Constitution. This is basically a secular version of the Ten Commandments. The theory is that with the rule of law, society wouldn’t regress into mob rule. This is where the lesson usually ends.

This theory is totally false and it’s very easy to disprove logically. In reality, we have always had mob rule. It doesn’t matter what you call it. This is because, in a supposed Republic, the mob is given the privilege of electing representatives who in turn will either uphold the constitution or not. It’s not that we live by the rule of law, it’s that sometimes the mob cares about the rules and sometimes they don’t. Increasingly they don’t care about the rules. The minority is still, and always will be, at the mercy of whether or not the mob cares about the rules that are meant to protect the rights of minorities, of individuals.

Whether you call it a Republic or not, your life is ruled by the mob. Limited government proponents ignore this fact of life. They keep talking about getting back to the Constitution, but if the mob isn’t listening they’re wasting their time. Who is the Constitution written for anyway? It’s not for those of us who already care about liberty. We don’t need a piece of paper to tell us how not to treat other people. If it’s not written for us, is it written for those who don’t care about liberty? If somebody doesn’t care about liberty then they don’t give a shit about your piece of paper either. They just see it as antiquated and getting in the way of “progress”. So who or what is the Constitution for? Why do we need to write down any laws at all? Good people don’t need laws and bad people will only follow a law if the consequences of not following the law outweigh the benefits. The Constitution is written to prevent bad people from doing bad things to good people, but what are the consequences of breaking the greatest law of the land? What if bad people who don’t care about this law become our leaders?

This is all to say that these distinctions are meaningless. We are ruled by a mob and always have been. We have a system of incentives, economic and political, that pushes more and more bad people from the mob, who don’t care about the law anyway, into positions of power. Please spare me your lesson on our supposed Constitutional Republic.