Martin Elson
Who Watches the Night Watchman? ended on the minarchist’s best reply. Grant that a monopoly on force is dangerous. What if the monopoly answers to the people it rules? Let them choose who holds it, throw the holders out at the next election, and make the law by majority. Then the state is a servant, not a master: government of the people, by the people, for the people, as Lincoln put it at Gettysburg. Most people who distrust the state still trust that sentence.
The word does the double work that “government” did in the last chapter. “Democracy” can mean an ideal, that people should govern their own affairs, or a procedure, that the larger number decides. Anarchists have quarreled over which one they are hearing. Edward Abbey called anarchism democracy taken seriously. George Woodcock answered that anarchists don’t want political freedom at all, but freedom from politics. When the Center for a Stateless Society gathered ten anarchist writers on the question in 2017, they split the same way.
This chapter argues that democracy is the best answer any state has given to one of the three questions from Consent of the Governed, and no answer to the other two. Elections let people call their rulers back, and that is worth a great deal. They don’t ask whether the people being counted agreed to be counted, and they don’t open a door for those who lose. Keep democracy’s tools, the vote, the mandate and the recall, inside associations people join and can leave, and they work. Lay them over a territory, and a majority becomes one more master.
The case for democracy
Karl Popper gave the case its sharpest form. Political philosophy, he argued, had asked the wrong question since Plato: who should rule? Every answer, whether the wisest, the best born or the workers, invites tyranny once that ruler is in place. The better question is how to get rid of bad rulers without bloodshed, and democracy is the one answer we have. On this view an election is not a way to find the will of the people. It is a way to fire the government. In this site’s terms, it is the state’s best answer to the second test, recall.
The evidence is on Popper’s side. Amartya Sen found that no major famine has ever struck a working democracy with a free press; rulers who must face voters and newspapers can’t let people starve unseen. R. J. Rummel, whose count of the dead the last chapter used against the state, found that democracies killed far fewer of their own people than any other kind of government, and he summed it up in a line: power kills, absolute power kills absolutely. And established democracies have almost never gone to war with each other, the finding students of international relations call the democratic peace.
There is also a case from knowledge. The Marquis de Condorcet proved in 1785 that if each voter is a little more likely to be right than wrong, and voters judge independently, a large majority is almost certain to be right. Hélène Landemore and others have built on him: many minds with different views can outperform a few experts, because their errors cancel and their knowledge adds up. And Kenneth May proved in 1952 that when equals choose between two options, majority rule is the only rule that treats every voter alike, treats both options alike and responds when votes change. If everyone counts the same, majority rule seems to follow.
Behind all of this sits a fair worry. People affected by a decision should have a say in it. Albert Hirschman called this voice and set it beside exit: a member who can’t speak can only leave, and one who can’t leave has only voice. The democrat wants voice for everyone. The aim is right. The question is whether counting heads across a territory is the way to give it.
Where it goes wrong
Fifty-one percent of what? Consent of the Governed showed that a ballot is not a signature. The majority raises a further question: why should fifty-one people bind forty-nine? Among members of a club who agreed to decide that way, the answer is that they agreed. Among the people who happen to live inside a border, no one agreed to anything. The vote settles who will hold the monopoly. It doesn’t ask the losers whether they accepted the contest. Henry David Thoreau saw the gap in 1849: “Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it.” Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill named the danger, the tyranny of the majority, but both looked for limits inside the state, in courts and customs, and those limits are only as strong as the next majority allows. Thomas Jefferson saw one more gap. The earth, he wrote to Madison in 1789, belongs always to the living generation, and no society can make a perpetual constitution or even a perpetual law; he proposed that every constitution lapse after nineteen years. Most people living under a constitution were never asked, and the majority that ratified it is dead. Lysander Spooner pressed the same point in 1870: whatever contract the Constitution once was, it could bind only the people who made it, and they were all dead. Counting heads instead of breaking them is real progress, and Popper was right to prize it. But it answers the recall question only. Did the minority agree? No. Can it leave? No more than before.
Love it or leave it. The democrat has a ready reply to the forty-nine: you had your say, and if you don’t like the result, you are free to go. brainpolice took this apart in a short essay. It reverses the burden of proof. The dissenter isn’t asking to be let out of something she agreed to. She is asking the state to leave her alone, and the state’s right to stay has yet to be shown. He then noticed the same reply at work and at home. You can always quit your job, and you can always leave the house. But being able to quit doesn’t make whatever a boss does acceptable, and a beaten wife doesn’t consent to her husband’s violence by staying under his roof. An owner who may do anything to the people on his land, so long as they could have left, has only “privatized authoritarianism.” The lesson for this site is that the three tests are three. Exit is necessary, and The Door That Stays Open argues for it, but an open door doesn’t license what is done to those who stay. And Hume’s ship, from Consent of the Governed, still has no real door.
Rooting for your team. Voting is rooting for your team, but it doesn’t put you in the game. Anthony Downs explained why in 1957. In a large electorate one vote almost never decides anything, so learning enough to vote well costs more than it can return, and most voters rationally stay uninformed. Bryan Caplan went further in The Myth of the Rational Voter (2007). At the ballot box a false belief costs the believer nothing, so people keep the beliefs that feel good, and Caplan found the errors are systematic, not random: voters lean the same wrong way on trade, markets and jobs. Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky called this expressive voting. The vote is a cheer, not a choice. Condorcet’s theorem needs voters who are more often right than wrong and who judge independently. Shared bias and groupthink break both conditions, and then the theorem runs in reverse: a large majority becomes almost certain to be wrong. Compare a purchase or a job offer, where the person who chooses badly pays for it. That is not an argument for experts. It is an argument for decisions made by the people who bear their costs.
No will to find. Condorcet found the other problem too. With three or more options, majorities can run in a circle: most prefer A to B, most prefer B to C, and most prefer C to A. Kenneth Arrow proved in 1951 that no way of combining rankings escapes such trouble while meeting a few plain conditions of fairness. William Riker drew the lesson in Liberalism Against Populism (1982). Whoever sets the agenda, the order of votes or the options on the ballot, can often pick the winner, so there is no will of the people waiting to be found, only results that depend on the procedure. The everyday form of it is familiar: choices framed as two, a captive market of two parties, and answers that come out yes or no, all or nothing. Reforms such as ranked or approval ballots can soften this. They can’t remove it. Riker’s own conclusion was Popper’s. What survives is the power to throw rulers out, and that is worth keeping. It just isn’t self-government.
Concentrated interests. Mancur Olson explained in 1965 who gets heard. A small group with much at stake, a few firms seeking a tariff, can organize, while millions who each lose a little can’t be bothered. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock built public choice on the same point: officials and voters are self-interested people, not servants of the public good. Tullock and Anne Krueger called the result rent-seeking, money spent to win privileges from the state instead of making anything. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page tested it in 2014 against 1,779 policy questions in the United States. Economic elites and business groups had substantial independent influence on what passed; once those were counted, average citizens had close to none. Critics such as Omar Bashir answered that the average and the affluent want the same thing most of the time, and that when they disagree average citizens win about as often, which softens the finding. It doesn’t remove the mechanism. A monopoly that can grant subsidies, licenses and tariffs is a prize, and prizes get bought. Greg Palast’s The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (2002) reported both halves of the trade: the money that buys access, and the machinery that decides who gets to vote at all, such as Florida’s 2000 purge list of supposed felons, which struck eligible voters from the rolls, disproportionately Black ones, in an election decided by 537 votes. George Carlin was blunter: the politicians are there to give you the idea you have a choice, and “you have owners.” The owners, he added, belong to a club: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” This is the site’s unifying thread at work. The state’s power and the private privilege it props up are one problem, and a vote every few years doesn’t pull them apart.
The vote stops at the border. A democracy answers to its own voters and to no one else. Established democracies seldom fight each other, but they have reached into other countries freely. Dov Levin counted 81 attempts by the United States to sway foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, against 36 by the Soviet Union and Russia, about two thirds of them covert. His count leaves out coups. Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow traces those: Iran in 1953, where the CIA and British intelligence helped remove Mohammad Mosaddegh, prime minister of a parliamentary government; Guatemala in 1954, where the CIA removed the elected Jacobo Árbenz; Chile, where Washington worked against the elected Salvador Allende from 1970 until the coup of 1973. John Perkins describes the quieter version, done with debt and contracts. The people these acts fell on had no vote in the country that did them, couldn’t recall anyone who ordered them and couldn’t get out of their reach. Most voters at home never knew. A vote can call back only what it can see, and only for the people allowed to cast it.
The strongest case against
The strongest case against this chapter is Popper’s and Sen’s, and it is empirical. Among the states we have, democracies starve, kill and make war on their own people least. That record is real, and anyone who has lived under a dictatorship knows what it is worth. Note the qualifier, though: their own people. The last section showed what a democracy can do to people who have no vote in it, and at home the harm takes quieter forms aimed at those with the least say: the internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans in 1942, the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign against civil rights and antiwar groups, one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. Nothing on this site should be read as indifference between a democracy and a tyranny.
But look at what the record measures. Sen credits elections and a free press: rulers who can be removed and acts that can be seen. And a free press is not a fixture of democracy; it can be squeezed from both sides. In 2026 Reporters Without Borders dropped the United States seven places, to 64th of 180, saying the administration had turned its hostility toward the press into systematic policy. At the same time a few companies, several of them seeking the government’s approval for mergers, came to own most of what Americans watch. Paramount’s merger with Skydance was approved in 2025 after CBS’s parent settled a $16 million lawsuit brought by the president, and the FCC approved Nexstar’s purchase of Tegna, which would reach some 80 percent of TV households, before a federal court halted it. A press the state can lean on and a few owners can buy fails the visibility test either way, and it is the site’s unifying thread again: public power and private privilege working the same lever. Rummel credits the spreading out of power: the less concentrated it is, the fewer it kills. Both findings support the tests this site uses, recall and visibility, against concentration. Neither tests the monopoly itself, because the comparison is between states. As with Pinker in the last chapter, law without a sovereign isn’t in the sample. Sen and Rummel were democrats, not anarchists, and their evidence doesn’t make them anarchists. It points in a direction, away from concentrated power, and the humanist rule from the Introduction says to follow it by steps that can be checked and reversed, not by leaps.
The second objection comes from the left, and it is the closest to home. Murray Bookchin spent his last decades arguing that anarchists who reject democracy have nothing to offer but private protest. His alternative, libertarian municipalism, put power in face-to-face town assemblies deciding by majority, joined in a confederation of delegates with binding mandates who could be recalled at once. Consensus, he argued, lets a single holdout rule everyone, and May’s theorem is on his side: among equals, majority rule is the fair rule. In the 2017 symposium Kevin Carson made a gentler case, that democracy in the sense of having a say over what affects you is a value anarchists can’t do without. William Gillis and Shawn Wilbur answered that anarchy means the abolition of rulership, including the rule of all over all. The Black Panthers’ slogan makes the same point from the other side: all power to all people is no power over anyone, because power spread to everyone equally leaves no one to command and no one to obey.
This site agrees with Carson on the practice and with Gillis on the principle. Inside an association people chose and can leave, majority voting, mandates and recall are good tools, often the best, and a cooperative that votes is not a state. Phones and networks make those tools cheaper than ever. Anyone with one could vote on every question, hand a vote to a delegate and take it back at any moment, the idea behind liquid democracy, and Taiwan has used online platforms to find consensus on contested rules. But cheap voting doesn’t change who is bound. An app that lets a majority decide for people who never joined is a faster town meeting, not a freer one, and the blockchain experiments so far, where votes are usually weighted by tokens held, show Olson’s few with much at stake winning again. Bookchin’s assembly is different when it takes in everyone who lives in the town, members or not. A town meeting over people who never joined and can’t leave is a small state, as Consent of the Governed said of Rousseau’s. Bookchin came to see the tension himself, and in 1999 he stopped calling himself an anarchist. He called his politics communalism instead, and blamed what he saw as anarchism’s drift into individualist “lifestyle” protest.
The third objection comes from the other side. If voters are ignorant, Jason Brennan argued in Against Democracy(2016), give more weight to those who know more: an epistocracy. It takes Caplan’s diagnosis seriously and draws the wrong conclusion. The knowers are a class with interests of their own, and Olson’s logic applies to them first. Brennan’s knowers would answer to fewer people than elected rulers do, and a monopoly run by experts fails the three tests just as the other kind does. Caplan’s own conclusion was better: where voting goes wrong, move decisions to places where people bear the cost of their own choices.
A warning
Every argument in this chapter can be borrowed by people who want something far worse than democracy, and some of them already have. Curtis Yarvin, who wrote for years as Mencius Moldbug, reads the same failures and concludes that the cure is a king. In “Patchwork” (2008) he pictured the world divided into sovereign corporations, each owned by shareholders and run by a chief executive, whose residents have no vote at all, only the right to leave. Nick Land named the movement the Dark Enlightenment in 2012 and borrowed Hirschman’s terms for its slogan: exit, not voice. Peter Thiel wrote in 2009 that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible. In “The Butterfly Revolution” (2022) Yarvin turned the theory into a plan. A returning president would sit as chairman of the board and appoint a chief executive to run the government without interference from Congress or the courts, shutting down most existing institutions and replacing them with new ones. JD Vance cited him by name when he proposed firing the civil service and ignoring the courts if they objected. Yarvin calls himself a monarchist; his critics call the tendency techno-fascism.
The warning belongs here because they speak this site’s language. They criticize democracy, they praise exit, and they describe the state as a corporation. Read their plan against the three tests instead. A sovereign corporation owned by shareholders is Hoppe’s covenant community with a stock ticker. The residents never agreed to it, can’t recall the chief executive, and can leave only on the owner’s terms, into another owner’s territory. Exit with no voice and no consent is the employment contract at the scale of a country, the bargain Consent of the Governed rejected. Yarvin’s answer to democracy’s failures removes the one test democracy passes, recall, and keeps the monopoly. That is not less state. It is the state with its last check taken off, and an alliance of tech fortunes with state power is the oldest pattern this site opposes: private privilege riding on public force. Public choice applies to a chief executive as surely as to voters, and Rummel’s line applies with full force: power concentrated is power that kills. So any critique of democracy, this site’s included, should be judged by which way it moves power. Anarchism faults democracy for not going far enough, for leaving a monopoly in place over people who never joined. Reaction faults it for going too far, for letting the ruled call their rulers back. A chief executive is a master, and the slogan was no gods, no masters.
Where this lands
Abbey and Woodcock were each half right. Take democracy’s ideal seriously, that people govern their own affairs, and it ends in anarchism, as Abbey said. Abbey didn’t follow his own line far. The same writer wanted the southern border closed to immigrants, which takes the majority seriously and the people outside it not at all. His model was Switzerland, and two Swiss cantons, Glarus and Appenzell Innerrhoden, still make their laws in the open air at a Landsgemeinde, the citizens voting by show of hands. It is majority rule at its purest, and it shows the limit: Appenzell Innerrhoden’s assembly of men kept women from voting until 1990, when the federal court ordered it. Take its procedure as the goal, majority rule over everyone in a territory, and anarchists want to be free of it, as Woodcock said. The choices come down to four: submit to others, subject others, associate, or mix the three by vote. Representative democracy is mostly the first two, with a ballot every few years. Direct democracy has more association in it. Consensus and contract are association, though neither is immune to the other two. That makes democracy the third-best means, after consensus and contract, and a dangerous one. Its tools still work without the monopoly. People form associations at work and where they live. Each sends a delegate, elected or chosen by lot, with binding instructions, who can be recalled at once and goes back to ordinary life when the job is done. No association has to submit to a decision it rejects, and the federation exists only while it is needed. That keeps voice and recall from democracy and adds the consent and exit democracy never had. Proudhon’s motto, which Benjamin Tucker printed on the masthead of Liberty, says where the order comes from: liberty, not the daughter but the mother of order.
Here is how the arrangements in this chapter sort against the three tests.
| Arrangement | Did the people it acts on agree? | Can they call it back? | Can they leave? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monarchy or dictatorship | No | Not short of revolt | Only if the ruler lets them |
| Yarvin’s sovereign corporation | No | No; shareholders can remove the chief executive, residents can’t | On the owner’s terms, into another owner’s territory |
| Epistocracy (Brennan) | No | Fewer people can than now | No more than now |
| Representative democracy | No; a ballot is not a signature | Yes, at elections, for what voters can see | Only by emigrating |
| Bookchin’s communalism (direct democracy over a town) | Not those who never joined | Yes; delegates can be recalled at once | A person can move; a community only with the confederation’s approval |
| An association that votes (a cooperative, a union, a club) | Yes, by joining | Yes | Yes |
| A federation of mandated, recallable delegates | Yes, association by association | Yes, at once | Yes; any association can withdraw |
| Consensus or contract | Yes | By withdrawing or renegotiating | Yes, on the terms agreed |
Democracy wins a state the middle column, and only partly. Only association fills all three.
So democracy is the state’s best answer to one question out of three. Ask of any majority what this site asks of any enforcer: did the people it acts on agree, can they call it back, can they leave? Elections can win the second, and only for what voters can see. Sen’s famines were prevented by a free press as much as by the vote, and the coups Levin left out of his count were never on any ballot. Recall needs sight. That is the question of Power Has to Be Watchable.
Sources
- Democratic Failure (libertarianous.com, 2012). The list of democratic failures; the four options; the delegate model. This chapter’s own working notes.
- brainpolice, “The ‘Love It Or Leave It’ Argument” (Polycentric Order blog, 2008). The burden of proof reversed; the same argument at work and at home. original (archived) · copy here
- Center for a Stateless Society, Anarchy and Democracy (Mutual Exchange Symposium, June 2017; in print 2020). Including William Gillis, “The Abolition of Rulership or the Rule of All Over All”; Kevin Carson, “On Democracy as a Necessary Anarchist Value”; Shawn P. Wilbur, “Anarchy and Democracy: Examining the Divide.” original
- Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge, 1945), vol. 1, ch. 7, and “The Open Society and Its Enemies Revisited” (The Economist, 23 April 1988). Who should rule versus how to remove rulers.
- Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Knopf, 1999), ch. 7. Famine and democracy.
- R. J. Rummel, Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence (Transaction, 1997). Democide and the democratic peace.
- Marquis de Condorcet, Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions (1785). The jury theorem and the voting paradox. Public domain.
- Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press, 2013). The epistemic case.
- Kenneth O. May, “A Set of Independent Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Simple Majority Decision” (Econometrica 20, 1952). May’s theorem.
- Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Harvard University Press, 1970).
- Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849). Public domain.
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (1835), part 2, ch. 7, and John Stuart Mill, On Liberty(1859), ch. 1. The tyranny of the majority. Public domain.
- Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 6 September 1789. The earth belongs to the living; nineteen years. Public domain.
- Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (Harper, 1957). Rational ignorance.
- Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton University Press, 2007). Rational irrationality; systematic bias.
- Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference(Cambridge University Press, 1993). Expressive voting.
- Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (Wiley, 1951), and William H. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism (W. H. Freeman, 1982). No will to find.
- Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Harvard University Press, 1965); James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (University of Michigan Press, 1962); Anne O. Krueger, “The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society” (American Economic Review 64, 1974). Concentrated interests and rent-seeking.
- Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” (Perspectives on Politics 12, 2014); Omar S. Bashir, “Testing Inferences about American Politics: A Review of the ‘Oligarchy’ Result” (Research & Politics 2, 2015). The finding and a critique.
- Dov H. Levin, “When the Great Power Gets a Vote: The Effects of Great Power Electoral Interventions on Election Results” (International Studies Quarterly 60, 2016), and Meddling in the Ballot Box (Oxford University Press, 2020).
- Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (Times Books, 2006).
- John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Berrett-Koehler, 2004).
- Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso, 2015). Libertarian municipalism; against consensus.
- Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2016). Epistocracy.
- George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (World, 1962). Freedom from politics.
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Solution of the Social Problem (1848). Positive anarchy; liberty the mother of order. Public domain.
- Curtis Yarvin (as Mencius Moldbug), “Patchwork: A Positive Vision” (Unqualified Reservations, November 2008), and “The Butterfly Revolution” (Gray Mirror, 7 April 2022). Sovereign corporations; the CEO plan.
- Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (2012). Exit, not voice.
- Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian” (Cato Unbound, 13 April 2009). Freedom and democracy as incompatible.
- Swiss Federal Supreme Court, Rohner and others v. Canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden, 27 November 1990 (BGE 116 Ia 359). The all-male Landsgemeinde’s refusal of women’s suffrage overruled. background (swissinfo)
- Reporters Without Borders, 2026 World Press Freedom Index (30 April 2026). The United States at 64th. original
- Committee to Protect Journalists, “How US media consolidation endangers press freedom” (April 2026). Paramount/Skydance, Nexstar/Tegna. original
- Edward Abbey, “Theory of Anarchy” and “Immigration and Liberal Taboos,” in One Life at a Time, Please(Henry Holt, 1988). Anarchy as democracy taken seriously; closing the border.
- Lysander Spooner, No Treason no. 6, “The Constitution of No Authority” (1870). A contract binds only its makers, and they are dead. Public domain.
- Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Pluto Press, 2002). Money and access; the Florida 2000 felon purge.