Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is an Austrian Liberal Conservative nobleman. Born in 1909, passionate about social sciences, speaking eight languages, and able to read 20, he shares his ideological opposition to totalitarian systems, from the first: Jacobinism, to more recent Bolshevism and Nazism.
In 1943, during his exile in the United States, he published "The Menace of the Herd or Procustes at Large". In this book, he explains to Americans that democracy is a form of government inferior to monarchy because demagogues always end up stroking the egalitarian instincts of the masses, forever looking to rally a mob and spark a witch-hunt against any form of freedom and excellence.
Remarkably, the United States allows this level of political discussion during a war where ideological propaganda has a major role.
Nationalist and complex conservatism of Austrian superiority
Generalities that one can write about one's relation sometimes tell more about the author than his religion.
Thus, the German protestant Max Weber explained in his work Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism that protestants are richer because they work more, and that catholic nations were doomed to poverty because Catholics cease to work as soon as they have sufficient means.
For our catholic Austrian RKL, Catholic morality was much better suited to Austro-Hungarian society. Charity and tolerance were more developed there than among the Germans, English, and other Americans. President Wilson's interference after the 1st World War that imported democracy into Central Europe is one of the sources of Nazism.
Political cynicism: monarchy as a balance of powers
The author explains that the traditional monarchy was characterized by a balance of powers between the people, the nobility, and the monarch. This balance, when preserved, gave greater freedom to the individual and the possibility of greater diversity.
Cultural life in Austria at the time of the Vienna Circle had nothing to envy to the Nazis and show according to him that education under a monarchical regime had nothing to envy to that of democracy which led to Nazism. With Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Tsarist Russia also had nothing to envy in cultural or educational matters to the Bolsheviks.
He then explains that the Americans and President Wilson in particular replaced monarchical governments well integrated into their socio-cultural contexts with democracies where the masses make myopic decisions and eventually turn to communism or fascism as a result of the inept and misguided policies that were enacted.
Progressivism and equality destroys freedom
The author feels confident about his conservatism: the monarchy is not based on a partisan policy, but is better integrated into the family and religious framework of a Christian society. According to him, a monarchy would have more potential to preserve the freedom and diversity of individuals and their opinions than a democracy.
In addition, the question is not so much who should govern as how to govern. The knowledge required to administer the democracy of the American farmers of 1800 has nothing to do with the administration of a federal state unified by railways and telegraphs sixty years later. Political, economic, technological, scientific, military, and psychological knowledge of the masses and their representatives are always further from the knowledge required to make logical, rational, and moral decisions in these fields.
Finally, democracy pushes to impose equality by coercive means or coercion based on identity reasons and has a standardizing and anti-liberal tendency.
From 1943 to 1967, from 1973 to 2020
Ritter's monarchical sentimentalism may seem as obsolete as that of the Chouans, but his vision in 1943 concerning the European monarchies and the regimes that followed them was more articulate and better informed than that of President Wilson in 1918.
The word democracy is imbued with different positive meanings: it would be a competent government, respecting political and economic freedoms in a society with high social capital (trust, civility). The author reminds us that correlation does not imply causation.
In 1943, whether for RKL in "The Threat of the Herd", Friedrich Hayek in "The Road to Serfdom", Karl Popper in "Open Society and its Enemies", or Schumpeter in "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy", democracy and socialism could appear the last stop before fascism and communism. The argument of all these authors did not relate to the economic efficiency of liberalism but to the progressive erosion of freedoms to satisfy the redistributive and egalitarian preferences of the majority.
For a reader in 1967 in a free progressive society, these works had lost the relevance they had in 1943. The experience of the thirty years after 1945 seemed to demonstrate the economic efficiency of social democracy (which maintains and develops consumerism by redistribution) and neo-liberalism (with the opening of borders to trade and immigration) in comparison with communism. A considerable increase in the weight of the state was made without bringing a reduction in freedoms.
The situation changed with a clear economic slowdown between 1967 and 1973. Fifty years later, are we seeing a drift to coercive policies and a comeback of the Malthusian views of society which seemed manifest in 1943?