Democracy and Tyranny Go Hand in Hand

I had every intention of seeing “V is for Vendetta” this weekend. Instead, I installed two chandeliers in our vaulted ceiling, and the death defying feat of climbing a ladder and doing the work took everything I had. The first chandelier took almost an hour because I kept screwing up and having to take everything apart. The second took five minutes. I can learn, it seems, even under the stress of a phobic reaction to being 8 feet up on a ladder working on a ceiling 14 feet off the floor.

I am overjoyed that the film did so well at the box office. In your face, Michael Medved! If the film helps create a legion of revolutionaries or even troublemakers, I will be even more grateful. The film was panned by a reviewer in the New Yorker. The main complaint of the reviewer seemed to me to be a quibble with V’s methods. Why, asked the reviewer, would V blow up Parliament, a symbol of liberal democracy instead of the dictator’s headquarters? The reviewer could not conceive of democracy as a fount of tyranny.

In this country, Congress is a serious threat to liberty, and the House of Representatives, the more democratic of the two chambers, is by far worse than the Senate at chipping away at freedom. Democracy, without a mechanism for limiting the scope of government, is no guarantee of freedom. Quite the contrary, the majoritarian tendency is to totalitarianism, and a democratically chosen totalitarian state is bolstered by the legitimizing myth that it reflects the will of the people. An elected dictator arguably embodies that will, and it is harder to demystify his rule than if he had seized power through some other means.