Another election season has come and gone. We were bombarded with messages for and against various candidates and messages merely imploring us to vote. Some Americans relish what they think they will get from the outcome; others dread its results. In any case, we accept that, for all its flaws, democracy is the way the United States is supposed to work.

In his book Liberty in Peril, Florida State University economist Randall Holcombe argues that democracy was not the way the country is supposed to work. Our founding philosophy was that liberty should prevail, not democracy — that the reason for government was to protect the individual’s freedom, not to subject him to the will of the majority. Over time, the philosophy of liberty has been shoved aside and today democracy rules to the point where, as the author puts it, liberty has an almost quaint air about it.

As Holcombe’s subtitle suggests, this is a work of history, explaining the nation’s shift from the ideology of liberty to the ideology of democracy. He observes that there is a tension between the two. Under the ideology of liberty, the important question is how to put limits on government so that it can protect individual rights. Under the ideology of democracy, the question is who will hold power to do what the public wants. Where the former prevails, the people tend to have a healthy wariness of government and desire to keep it in check. Where the latter prevails, the people eagerly listen to politicians who promise them benefits from the government.

Consensus: Holcombe begins his history not with the Constitution or even the colonists, but with the Iroquois, the largest confederation of Indians that European settlers encountered. The Iroquois had an unwritten constitution and its key principle was unanimity. Colonists who became familiar with the Iroquois system commented on its “absolute notion of liberty.” The Iroquois had a Great Council composed of tribal chiefs, but it did not act like we expect legislatures to act: imposing decisions on the people. Instead, the Great Council facilitated the building of consensus among the tribes. Questions were debated and then the chiefs would return to their tribes to assess the sense of their members. Not until a proposal (and I wish Holcombe had said what kinds of issues the Iroquois dealt with) was acceptable to all the tribes was it adopted. That “debate it until we have consensus” mode meant that little was done, but to the Iroquois that was preferable to forcing people to abide by rules they did not agree to.

The British colonists found it frustrating to deal with the Iroquois because their representatives always said, “We must take this proposal back to our Great Council for consideration.” Yet, some colonists incorporated the unanimity principle into the Albany Plan of Union, drafted in 1754. That plan was never put into effect, but it called for unanimous consent among the colonies for any action to be taken. Consensus was required, not majority rule.

The first central government formed in the United States was under the Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1781. Most historians brush aside the Articles, but Holcombe thinks them worth analysis. Under them, the United States had a unicameral legislature without any federal executive or judiciary. Proposed amendments required unanimous consent. The central government had little power, as would be expected from a people who had just waged a long war to get rid of a government that, most thought, had too much power to violate individual liberties. The central government could not levy taxes directly, but instead had to request funds from the states. Holcombe finds virtue in that arrangement because each state could decide whether the expected benefit of turning funds over to the central government was worth giving up the best use of those funds within its own borders.

Life under the Articles was less than ideal, particularly the way some states interfered with interstate commerce, but such problems might have been dealt with by amending the Articles. Indeed, that was the original purpose of the 1787 convention that we now call “the Constitutional Convention.” More than a few of the delegates objected to the way certain leaders decided to instead draft an entirely new plan of government.

For all the Constitution’s restrictions on federal authority and its famous “checks and balances,” Holcombe finds that liberty was much more secure under the Articles. That was especially so because the federal government was no longer accountable to the states but was a power center unto itself. Furthermore, consensus was diluted because the Constitution could be amended with only two-thirds of the states agreeing, rather than all. And most troubling of all, the powers given to the federal government were vaguely worded, such as to “regulate commerce” and “promote the general welfare.” While the drafters of the Constitution were fearful of democracy, they opened the door to its growth.

Democracy and special interests: In the decades prior to the Civil War, democracy slowly gained ground against liberty. An intriguing instance was the “reform” of the Post Office in 1851. Until then, it had operated as a profitable public entity, charging differential rates. Under the new law, rates were made uniform, thus subsidizing postal customers in remote, western areas at the expense of those in the heavily populated east. The upshot was that the government was beginning to pick winners and losers through policy.

The Civil War (or the War Between the States, as Holcombe argues it is more accurately called) vastly expanded the power of the federal government and put the states in a subservient position. The promotion of the economic interests of some Americans at the expense of others became widespread and blatant. An egregious example was the way the lobbying group for Union veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic, managed to expand benefits dramatically, covering more and more soldiers and their families with increasingly large payments. Holcombe notes that President Grover Cleveland, who had been popular with the group until 1887, lost its favor when he vetoed a bill that he thought went too far. A large reason for Cleveland’s reelection loss the following year to reliably pro-veteran Benjamin Harrison was that bit of fiscal responsibility.

Also, in the decades after the Civil War, economic regulation intended to benefit some groups at the expense of others was common. The distinct but related Populist and Progressive movements drove the country further into democracy and away from individual liberty. For example, states were given the green light by the Supreme Court to interfere in private contracts by dictating the prices that grain elevator owners could charge farmers. Government had turned from protecting liberty to promoting the economic interests of politically influential groups. The same was true for regulation of railroad rates by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

World War I led to a burst of government activity that undercut liberty, including freedom of speech. After the war there was a “return to normalcy” under presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, but liberty did not regain much of the ground it had lost. The War Finance Corporation, begun during the war, remained alive throughout the 1920s to make business and agricultural loans, the Inland Waterways Corporation was created to operate barges on the Mississippi River and the Agricultural Credits Act lent money to farmers. Immigration Acts were passed in 1917 and 1924, among other federal interventions having nothing to do with the protection of liberty. (See “The ‘War’ on Chinese Restaurants,” Summer 2017.) The bad habit of extending the government’s scope was not at all cured during the Roaring ’20s.

Things got much worse under Coolidge’s successor, Herbert Hoover. Hoover, notes Holcombe, was a progressive who thought that government authority should be exerted to improve the country and then, once the Depression began, to bring the country out of it. When Franklin D. Roosevelt took over in 1933, his whirlwind of federal activism dramatically transformed the nation. Numerous boards, commissions, and agencies issued mandates and prohibitions. Liberties that Americans had always assumed were theirs, such as the freedom to set their own prices or grow what they choose on their land, were abrogated.

For a while, the Supreme Court blocked some, although not all, of the New Deal programs on constitutional grounds. But after Roosevelt’s court-packing proposal in 1937, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes came around to the new “progressive” understanding of government’s role. Social Security is a good example. Nowhere in the Constitution is the government authorized to run a retirement program, but as Holcombe writes, “If the Constitution, thus interpreted, gives the federal government the power to run a compulsory retirement program, it is difficult to see any constitutional limits on the programs that the federal government is permitted to undertake.”

After World War II, governmental power kept ratcheting up — more slowly under Republican presidents, and more rapidly under Democratic ones, especially Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama.

In the end, Holcombe is deeply pessimistic. Liberty is certainly in peril — what is left of it, anyway. “A utilitarian undercurrent,” he writes, “has arisen in the nation that is willing to weigh the costs of sacrificing a little more liberty in exchange for other goals. Liberty is not taken for granted; it is willingly sacrificed.”

Can anything rekindle the love that Americans once had for liberty and reverse the ratchet of government control? That is the question this excellent book leaves readers wondering.