Johann von Leers: The Tragedy of Democracy [Der Weg 1951-04]
An original translation of "Die Tragödie der Demokratie"
Title: The Tragedy of Democracy [de: Die Tragödie der Demokratie]
Author(s): Johann Jakob von Leers
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 5, Issue 04 (April 1951)
Page(s): 295-299
Dan Rouse’s Note(s):
Der Weg - El Sendero is a German and Spanish language magazine published by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos-Aires, Argentina by Germans with connections to the defeated Third Reich.
Der Weg ran monthly issues from 1947 to 1957, with official sanction from Juan Perón’s Government until his overthrow in September 1955.
Selectively quoting Wikipedia:
Johann Jakob von Leers was an Alter Kämpfer and an honorary Sturmbannführer in the Waffen-SS in Nazi Germany, where he was also a professor known for his anti-Jewish polemics. He was one of the most important ideologues of the Third Reich, serving as a high-ranking propaganda ministry official. He published for Goebbels, in Peron's Argentina, and for Nasser's Egypt.
The work is proceeded by a paragraph by the Editorial Staff, likely either Eberhard Fritsch or Reinhard Kops.
Source Document(s):
[LINK] Scans of 1951 Der Weg Issues (archive.org)
[LINK] Aristophanes’ The Knights, Greek
[LINK] Aristophanes’ The Knights, George Murray’s Translation
Editor’s Note: Democracies have, from time immemorial, depended entirely on the magnanimity, self-sacrifice, and eager sense of duty borne by a select few individuals of genuinely aristocratic character—those who offer themselves to the cause and outwardly conform to the democratic playbook, all the while fully aware that the "gratitude of the fatherland" will one day strike them down in the guise of a frenzied mob. Should such selfless, aristocratic leaders no longer stand ready to serve a so-called democracy, it swiftly plunges into the mire of corruption and the tumult of unbridled caprice and utter lawlessness. Though one might protest that aristocratic systems of governance all too readily slide into tyranny, it must be conceded that democracies, bereft of the deliberate self-offering of the aristocrats who linger within them or following their total eradication, display an even more pronounced drift toward tyranny—specifically, the tyranny of the most ruthless and ferocious. How could it be otherwise? The moment the state ceases to be upheld by the inborn bearing of those destined to guide humanity, it must either crumble into dissolution or fall prey to men of brute force. So it transpired in Greece, in Rome, in Iceland, in France, and, naturally, in the United States as well—not to speak of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." The very notion of democracy is, at its core, a chimera, a self-contradiction, for the people themselves can never truly govern; at best, they may, through sporadic assertions of will—sometimes steeped in violence—determine whether they shall be ruled by the noblest or the basest. Yet in this act, the representatives chosen by the "majority" are, by their very nature, neither the finest nor the truest leaders. Thus, the word "democracy" harbors from its inception an intrinsic deceit, and it is this deep-seated deceit that forms the tragic essence of democracies.
The Tragedy of Democracy
Johann Jakob von Leers
Aristophanes’ The Knights, Lines 1121–1130
Δῆμος νοῦς οὐκ ἔνι ταῖς κόμαις ὑμῶν, ὅτε μ᾽ οὐ φρονεῖν νομίζετ᾽: ἐγὼ δ᾽ ἑκὼν ταῦτ᾽ ἠλιθιάζω. αὐτός τε γὰρ ἥδομαι 1125 βρύλλων τὸ καθ᾽ ἡμέραν, κλέπτοντά τε βούλομαι τρέφειν ἕνα προστάτην: τοῦτον δ᾽, ὅταν ᾖ πλέως, ἄρας ἐπάταξα. 1130
„Geschmeichelt so täglich sein, 1125 Das geht mir behäglich ein, Auch wähl ich mir einen gern, Der stiehlt, zu meinem Herrn, Hat er sich dann vollgestopft, Leer wird er geklopft!“ 1130
"There is no very plenteous share Of brains under your long hair, If you think I am not aware How I founder and flop; I like to doze in the blare 1125 Of talk, but am quite all there; I keep one rogue, to care For me and my daily fare, I puff him full up with air; And then make him go pop!" 1130
In this fateful hour, as the great, unified ideological, political, and military communist offensive looms, the statesmen of the United States and the Atlantic Pact nations strive to rally the peoples of Europe under the banner of "democracy" against "totalitarianism." This effort follows the destruction of the National Socialist German Reich, Fascist Italy, and their allies, and the willing surrender of all Eastern European states and many in Central Europe, as a final defensive front is raised. Yet they—above all, the North Americans—marvel that the cry "Protect democracy!" meets with tepid reception among nearly all European peoples, stirring few hearts and finding little echo. Indeed, they must see that they themselves have tarnished this word in many lands—a word that in Europe has stripped millions of families of home, livelihood, and joy, and through purges and denazification has cast them into a bitter, outcast class on the world’s stage. Their relentless daily propaganda, paired with the deeply unsatisfying fruits of restored democracy in many nations, has so fouled this word among wide swathes of the populace that "scarcely a dog would take a crust of bread from it." And all the while, everyone knows that in hardly any country are the finest spirits—and in some, nearly the basest—those who have appointed themselves democracy’s guardians; the people inwardly reject the "democrats" even more than "democracy" itself.
One must first strive to shed these emotional currents to behold the phenomenon of democracy with calm and some measure of objectivity. Some exalt it as an idol every soul must worship, the sole permissible form of political life, beyond which no other may exist. Others—not the communists, who doubly cloak themselves as "people’s democratic"—so despise the word that among themselves they speak of "democracy" only with terms of revulsion. Yet democracy is neither the only, nor the best, nor the sole "progressive" form of state. Nor is there but one democracy; there are many, and often peoples bind to it notions not truly its own. For instance, those who speak of democracy’s "freedoms" truly mean the liberal freedoms. The unchecked rule of the numerical majority—democracy’s starting point—does not inherently embrace the far-reaching personal liberties that liberalism champions against the state, even the democratic majority state. Other peoples, meanwhile, tie to "democracy" values they alone perceive, born of historical chance where these aligned with democracy’s rise—like those whose national independence or statehood, newly forged or restored, entwined with democracy’s triumph, casting the glow of patriotic fervor over its era: Switzerland, modern Turkey, most American nations. They cannot grasp that for others, the word "democracy" smacks of a forcibly imposed, alien, unwanted order linked to the reign of the unworthy, where the people feel not as rulers but as sufferers—as with the Germans.
In historical terms, there exists the free-peasant phase of small regional and tribal states. Caesar and Tacitus attest that, alongside monarchy, this way of life prevailed among many Germanic tribes; its vestiges endure today in four Swiss cantons. There, several times a year beneath the open sky, the canton’s armed men assemble, elect their officials, and settle the few laws needed. Such a gathering carries a venerable, primal air—something that stirs heart and mind, truly granting each man a sense of deep involvement in his small commonwealth. This ancient, direct, and fundamentally communal self-governance also took root in numerous farming communities across the United States. Unwittingly, when the North American speaks of "democracy," he still recalls this self-rule of equal, free, responsible men who, at their core, feel aristocratic. All the persuasive power of democracy’s ideal springs from this memory of primal days, often fused with recollections of medieval free-peasant struggles against feudal bonds.
Yet it is telling that this "direct democracy" never exists in pure form and likely never has. Tacitus notes that in such Germanic republics, weighty matters were first debated by tribal chiefs. Between Caesar and Tacitus, this form seems already decisively eclipsed; by the Migration Period, duchies or kingdoms—save for a few tribes—reigned supreme. This is no mystery: in war, it was unthinkable to leave all decisions to an army assembly; in peace, uniting several great tribes made it impossible to gather all free men periodically in one place. Political affairs grew too intricate for the mass of toiling folk, even then, to fully grasp. Thus, families distinguished in war, law, and governance rose above, birthing an aristocratic leadership seen at the fore throughout the Migration Period.
The Hellenic world, advancing in waves of conquest and migration from the north into what became Greece, emerges at once under kings and "aristoi," as Homer’s verses vividly portray. Memory of any once-customary "direct" role for all free men faintly lingers in Hesiod. That form, utterly impractical for a roving, conquering people, had long sunk away. The aristocracy forged the Greek states—settled, keen on noble lineage, bearers of ancestral law and refined statecraft. Whatever statecraft the Hellenic world possessed seems lodged in this class. For when the likely more mixed-blood urban masses push back this landed nobility—from Solon’s laws to the tanner Cleon’s final ousting—still the aristocrat Pericles guides Athens to its civic and artistic zenith. The brilliant, rootless aristocrat Alcibiades, a late bloom, secures Athens’ political triumphs—yet when the "little people" prevail at last, decline swiftly follows. Shifting all decisions to Athens’ marketplace, the "Agora," excludes peasants from influence in deed if not in law, stripping away ancestral caution, peasant gravity, and sobriety. The city’s former craftsman, now a petty industrialist with a slave economy, thinks in coin, commodifies the state, seeks only profit from it—paid for assembly attendance, jury service, even theater visits. Savage envy of the able, sycophantic mischief, venomous party strife take hold. "From party struggles, every vice erupted among the Greeks; piety faded, simple manners were mocked," Thucydides bears witness. These civic feuds spill into war. It is no accident that the Peloponnesian War opens with flagrant breaches of international law by the "democratic" Athenian side—massacres of prisoners after sham trials, violations of temple asylum—descending into a ghastly pan-Hellenic civil war. "Athens sank into political impotence through democracy’s victory," notes the sage Jacob Burckhardt, no "fascist" by any measure.
In Rome, from the clash of plebeians and patricians, Marians and Sullans, there rises at last in Caesar’s towering form the order-bringing ruler. The democratic strain aids Rome’s state-building, yet it is never decisive. The imperial vision granting Rome political eternity is Caesarian, not democratic—resting on the army, not the assembly. Nothing marks this clearer than Caesar’s words to a restless legion: "You are discharged, Quirites"—in English, "Go home, civilians!" The army crowns the imperator; democratic stirrings, breeding more civil strife than structure, play no part in shaping the world empire that gifted centuries of peace to ancient cultured humanity.
In sum, it grows plain that in Europe’s early historical sphere, the so-called "free-peasant, direct democracy" was ever guided by leading clans and faded early. The Encyclopedia Americana (1948, p. 639) states broadly of primitive society what holds here: "Thus it must be acknowledged that these brushes with democracy in primitive society signal an undeveloped, unpolitical state far more than a deliberate design of social order rooted in political liberalism." Moreover, in those times, man appears not as an atomized individual but as a clan member, politically potent and counted only within that bond. Take the Dithmarschen peasant state into the early sixteenth century: individuals acted politically only within their "kluften" framework—a late yet striking case. The tribal assembly, too, is typically "a mere formal gathering to secure prior consent to the leading groups’ plans." Rejection by the assembly was rare; clans simply endorsed what clan heads had settled. As tribes swelled, a "highly autocratic, hierarchical caste" swiftly arose (Encyclopedia Americana, loc. cit.). Thus, "neither Athens nor Rome was ever a democracy" (ibid.)—leaving aside the voiceless masses of slaves and metics in Athens, or foreigners and clients in Rome. Antiquity hardly favored democracy: Plato warns that rule by the many soon breeds anarchy; Aristotle views Athenian citizen democracy as a minority regime serving its own ends.
Antiquity’s grand cultural feats—the pyramids of Egypt, the great eastern states like the splendid Persian Empire, Alexander’s realm, and the Roman Imperium—are monarchic creations. Athens owes its bloom more to the aristocrat Pericles than to its democracy.
The Middle Ages knew democracies, but only at the humblest level, always steeped in aristocratic hue. Friesland’s few peasant republics were steered by chieftain clans; craft guilds held only the elite of masters and journeymen; merchant guilds shut out the lower ranks. The era’s great works—the Catholic Church and the Empire—were hierarchical and aristocratic. True, the able could ascend: a poor monk might become pope, a page knighted, but only through merit. This tenet is not "democratic" but "aristocratic": the best should rule, typically born to families long marked by exceptional deeds, yet open to talent and achievement beyond them. Deny this, and a sealed, rigid aristocracy decays without fresh blood; overstretch it, as Poland’s King John Sobieski did, ennobling whole cavalry units after victories—and yet, as a principle, it thrives. The Middle Ages never entertained the mad notion of equal state shares for all, merely for having "a nose and two buttocks." For us Germans, this time—until the Hohenstaufen’s end—was the Empire’s peak of might and glory.
Modern democracy claims forebears that are not its own. The Encyclopedia Americana rightly notes that the Magna Carta of 1215, wrested from King John Lackland by English lords, bore no tie to democracy. That charter, granted on Runnymede’s meadow, was no democratic path but "a reactionary manifesto of feudal lords, incensed by royal power’s new reach, seeking in 1215 to plunge England back into the decentralized lawlessness and local tyranny of feudal rule" (Charles E. Ellwood).
Gradually, with the seventeenth-century commercial revolution, the spread of Christian "brotherhood," and above all Calvinism’s western triumph, early forms of today’s democracy emerged. "Popular sovereignty," foreshadowed by Manegold of Lautenbach and Marsilius of Padua, gained sway in Rousseau’s framework. Yet even the United States arose not as a democracy but an aristocratic republic.
Democracy—the rule of parliament’s chance majority—did not prevail by its own might. Peoples would have been fools to trade a monarch’s known, accountable absolutism for that of anonymous parliamentary cliques, untouchable until the next vote. Only allied with liberalism—its just call for free speech, opinion, mail, conviction, and press—could democracy ascend. Once victorious, it often first savages that very freedom of conscience (denazification, purges), flouts law with special courts worse than the Stuarts’ Star Chamber or the Church’s Inquisition, crushes press liberty, and tramples free speech. "Freedom" becomes "democratic freedom"—the clique’s right to rule and exploit unchecked, as once Athens’ tanner Cleon did.
Thus it follows that since the First World War, peoples unleashed an anti-democratic tide that in many lands ended or paused democracy.
Bolshevism proves most resolute: if the majority must rule and its will prevail, that majority is the working class, its will alone supreme. Lest the bourgeoisie mislead or buy it, even turn it against itself, the Communist Party assumes its helm—and rules it utterly.
Fascism and National Socialism, by contrast, stressed the state’s continuity, spanning not just the living majority but the dead and unborn. They deny the fleeting, random majority sole sway over the state, instead binding all to its service—yet granting them a share. Herein lies their compelling strength. In democracy, a citizen picks a party every few years, with no say in its makeup or course; it claims to represent him but denies him a stake in the state. His vote may theoretically shape grand policy, but in practice, he’s shut out. In fascist or National Socialist states, all but the utterly unworthy could join the state’s life through its bodies—leadership corps, SA, SS, trade groups, Fascist Militia. Though directives flowed from above, each person truly partook as a collaborator; it was "his" state. Democracy’s state was the "party bosses’ state," barring him outright. If Germany now whispers of "neo-Nazism" or Italy of "nostalgia for the happy time," it rests not just on memories of material ease and social joy but on a time when people shared in the state—unlike democracy, where parties leave them sidelined and unclaimed.
Where it existed, primal free-peasant democracy worked because each person was firmly rooted in his clan, in Roman terms, "gens." These ties, like those of birth or trade estates, have faded or fallen for modern man. He stands isolated, atomized, alone—a mere grain of sand in the social frame, and many such grains make a mass.
Fascism and National Socialism sought to "organize" this atomized mass-man, to "bind" him anew. Some ties stayed hollow and lifeless; others forged a true esprit de corps, an inner, unshakable might, as with the SS. Twentieth-century democracy is mass democracy, shunning estates, camaraderie, living bonds for lone voters, unshaped masses, "voting cattle."
Yet man cannot live without ties to an ideal and a community. Herein lies the deepest root of democracy’s malaise today—a malaise easily proved. Democracy loathes monarchy: a king who might shield the people from parliamentary corruption and shortsighted greed, who embodies tradition, honor, and duty to past and future, is its foe. Tellingly, no surviving European monarchy—Sweden, Norway, Denmark, England, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece—sees democracy spark an anti-royal surge (though communism might). Were North Americans and Soviets not clutching Europe so tight, more peoples would turn to monarchy—surely Hungarians and Serbs, likely Portuguese and Spaniards. Europe’s democratic wave ebbs; its peoples, scarred by bitter trials, yearn for a bulwark against its caprice and abuses. Where monarchy stands intact, they cling to it.
That democracy dies in Europe of age and sins shows in its scramble to shield itself from the people, or great swathes of them, with protective laws and harsh constitutional decrees.
Where monarchy cannot return or bears ill repute, "neo-fascist" undercurrents swell, craving a new elite to lead, for elected, unaccountable parliamentarians have failed.
Democracy neither guarantees peace—often more warlike and persecution-mad than most states—nor is it uniquely "progressive" (a foolish term, for progress depends on its aim), nor the finest order all peoples must embrace. Rather, it suits shadowy political forces bent on misguiding and mastering nations, who thus propel it. It is no "people-friendly" rule—under its banner, folk may be worse tyrannized than by any tyrant. Often it paves communism’s way: where the leftmost democracy is sown, communism’s poison wheat thrives richest. Nor is it culture’s bedrock; humanity’s greatest cultural heights were not democratic. For all its beneficiaries’ near-dogmatic clamor, enforced by pressure and terror—denazification courts, crafted public opinion—it is an impossibility, a self-contradiction, a deliberate misguiding of peoples who, believing they shape their fate, are only more surely enslaved.
Democracy, in its inwardly false concept and its full history of practice, is one cruel tragedy.
Note: The especially tragic course of democracy in the United States of North America, and its telling backdrop, will be explored in a later essay.
A. Schwarzenberg Th.
Umgrenze mit strengem Gebote Dein bleibendes Bild. Du bist für den Würger der drohte Schon weidwundes Wild. Erhalte im Herde das Feuer Im Herzen das Recht. Verlierst du was Ahnen einst teuer Erlischt dein Geschlecht.
Define your enduring self with unwavering resolve. You stand vulnerable, like wounded prey, before the strangler who looms. Keep the flame alive in your hearth and the sense of justice burning in your heart. Should you forsake what your ancestors held dear, your lineage will fade into oblivion.