Is America Democratic or Bureaucratic?

I recently put the wraps on a year of teaching American history and am beginning my preparations for teaching Ancient history. To that end I am reading Anthony Esolen's Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization. We stand to learn much from the history of Greece and Rome since we took our democratic cues from their civilizations. Esolen writes:

Note what such a State cannot be. It canot be an empire, because empires steal from men the opportunity to govern themselves. It cannot be anarchy because lawlessness makes one's life too uncertain for the leisure to pursue the good of the intellect. It must somehow take into account human nature as we find it.... The State cannot be so vast that we fall into anonymity, and government is imposed upon us rather than created by us and for our purposes. Thus the modern "democracy," neither republican nor democratic but bureaucratic, distant, imperial in its all-encompassing demands ... is poor soil too for man's thriving.

What then? "Man is political animal," says Aristotle. He thrives in a community of families and clans who govern themselves freely and well, providing for more than a basic subsistence. What they mainly provide is freedom: free time, leisure for conversation, an arena for debate, for struggles that have consequences, for reading and arguing, for sport, for contemplation, for honing all the practical and intellectual virtues. True civility has more to do with a well-ordered fight than with the bonds of niceness (36).

By taking responsibility for its citizens the State takes responsibility away from its citizens. Consider the what Alexis De Tocqueville said about the despotism of too much government:

I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.

Over these is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle. It would resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood … it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs…

The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Government needs to be strong enough to provide for human flourishing and weak enough not to get in the way of its citizens' flourishing. Government needs transcendent morality that can only be provided by the church and its God and it must enforce it. The government also needs to respect the image of God in man and trust it to take care of itself.

Man needs freedom but freedom without morality is not true freedom. Luther spoke of "royal freedom" as the ability to do what is right. Today in America we have reduced freedom to choice. Esolen points out that both Plato and his student Aristotle "saw that if freedom means 'being free to take what you like, within the law," then no nobler faculty of the soul beyond the appetite will be developed." We want De Tocqueville's "small and vulgar pleasures." This makes us weak and malleable for the state to form us to its liking. We lose ourselves.

Plato wrote in his Republic: "The father habitually tries to resemble the child and is afraid of his sons, and the son likens himself to the father and feels no awe or fear of his parents" (8.562e). Esolen comments:

Teachers fawn upon their students; students ignore their teachers. A lawless egalitarianism descends upon all, along with a great touchiness, an inability to bear any restraint, until finally, slaves to their appetites and plunged in chaos, the people choose to be slaves to a 'protector' who can rein them in. Hence tyranny--welcomed!

We need the civility of a well ordered fight! We need a contentious democracy and citizens who imbibe from the wells of revelation!