From Cicero to Ron Paul, classical liberals, republicans, and other associated political ideologues have tried to give themselves plausible deniability. As their preferred form of government inexorably leads to totalitarianism/democracy, they “warn” us that “liberty is fragile,” that we have to “maintain it through vigilance.”
Republics were famous for not lasting very long in the ancient world, which is why America was so closely scrutinized by men like Alexis de Tocqueville. Sooner or later the oligarchs were ousted by mob violence, a dictator, or both. The economy went sour, the elites became decadent, the army went to pot and enemies poured across the frontier. The American Revolution, thanks to the giant ocean separating it from any serious European power, was able to cobble together enough compromises to last about eighty years. In 1861, the forces of democracy, progress, finance, and industrialization finally began a war to crush the agrarian, “backwards,” and still somewhat traditional South, which had tried in vain to maintain its disproportionate power in the rapidly democratizing republican political structure. We all know how that went.
The French Revolutionaries had no such buffer, and so their revolution deteriorated from constitutional monarchy to the Terror in a space of roughly four years. Kerensky’s constitutional government tricked the Tsar into abdicating and lasted roughly a year before the Bolshevik Revolution began the war that would topple it.
In all these cases, the revolutionaries refused to take any blame for what happened. Instead they placed the responsibility on the people, who didn’t appreciate what they had been given, were too stupid to maintain it, hadn’t outgrown their servile habits, etc. “You ingrates, we gave you a perfect system. It’s your fault it fell apart so quickly.”
Hence the endless exhortations by republicans et al. to create virtuous citizens, to inculcate virtues in children, to expand education, etc. What they openly admitted (and still admit, unthinkingly) is that a republic/constitutional state/democracy needs virtuous people in order to make it work. In other words, the system they create is reliant upon outside institutions in order to survive, most often some form of religion.
It is here that the rub comes in. A Cicero or Robespierre is willing to allow religious groups to operate within what is otherwise an amoral, areligious system, for the sake of making good people who will infuse their conscientiousness into that system. Perhaps, like Jefferson or Paine or Washington, they are even willing to pay lip service to “God” or “the Creator” in order to assuage the doubts of religious people. The classical liberal is fueling the trajectory of his political train with borrowed virtue.
“Liberty” is fragile, because “liberty” does not create virtue. It’s only a matter of time before the accumulated capital of culture, virtue, respect, tradition and custom built up in monarchist rule is used up. Once people realize that the game has changed, that their obedience is arbitrary, they will start acting just like their politicians at the top. They need us to be good little boys and girls who follow the rules and stay out of trouble, so that they can mortgage our future and expand their power. A monarch needs people to “behave” just as much, if not more (his hold on power was generally much more decentralized and underfunded than any modern government would be willing to accept), but monarchs were smart enough to realize that in order to do this, they needed to not just give the Church a minimal set of rights to play nicely in the corner, but rather work closely with the Church and share authority and power with it. That means (GASP!) that there is no such thing as “separation of Church and State.”
The liberal state knows that in order for the oligarchy to really seize power, all organic institutions (monarch, Church, minority groups, guilds) that could check the power of the legislature must be rendered irrelevant or destroyed. The exact method doesn’t matter. Only the State must survive the power struggle, so that it can become ever more centralized, indebted, and “efficient.” Classical liberalism means the end of Society (which includes the State, the Church, the monarch, the family, etc.) and the supremacy of one part of that former Society, the State. The path to totalitarian rule is wide open. After all, the bishops, warlords, chieftains, and various other thought leaders are not “elected” and therefore are not as legitimate as the “elected” legislature.
Exceptions are made for the unelected press, though truly only for those media outlets that are within the State’s mandated Overton window. Revolutionaries were always quick to demand free speech for themselves yet ban royalist newspapers once they got their way. John Milton was perhaps the biggest hypocrite in history in that department.
Parliaments and Congresses scream about mismanaged public finances, and then borrow their way into inconceivable amounts of debt. They are no different when it comes to virtue – they borrow and borrow and never put anything back in the piggy bank. It’s only a matter of time before they fall.