Proponents of the Red Caesar Plan (such as Curtis Yarvin and Michael Anton) has said that their ultimate goal is to move America away from John Locke's classical liberalism and towards Robert Filmer's reactionary authoritarianism. They will achieve that goal when Trump rules America as the Red Caesar with the arbitrary power of an absolute monarch like that defended by Filmer: this Caesaristic Trump cannot be limited by the rule of law because he is the absolute sovereign, and whatever the sovereign wills is the law, and only what the sovereign wills is law. Trump will rule as a tyrant, and, as Filmer argued, the people will be obligated not to resist his rule but to show passive obedience to him.
Locke challenged Filmer's teaching by arguing in his Two Treatises of Government for what today we would call classical liberalism. In seventeenth-century England, Filmer was on the side of the Tories, while Locke was on the side of the Whigs.
Locke's position can be summarized in five principles. First, every person possesses the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness--rights that first arose in the state of nature where human nature was formed. Second, these natural rights are rooted in each person's self-ownership--his right over himself and his labor. Third, the only just function of government is to protect those natural rights. Fourth, government derives its limited authority from the consent of the governed. Fifth, political rulers who become tyrants who infringe upon or fail to protect those natural rights may rightly be resisted and replaced.
If we agree with Filmer, then our proper response to Trump as the Red Caesar will be passive obedience. If we agree with Locke, then our proper response will be active resistance. Or is there perhaps some moderate middle ground between these two extremes?
One way of thinking through this debate is to consider one of the best critiques of Locke's teaching--by David Hume in his Essays (Liberty Fund, 1985).
Hume saw the conflict between the Tories as the party of authority and obedience to rulers and the
Whigs as the party of liberty and resistance to tyranny as a political battle in which the partisans of each faction refused to see the partial truth in each side: good government requires a tense balance between authority and liberty, so that each side moderates the other. Extreme authoritarianism creates tyranny. Extreme libertarianism creates anarchy. The task of a philosopher is not to become a partisan but to mediate between the two extremes and promote compromise and accommodation. Hume saw himself as a true philosopher, while identifying Locke as a partisan rather than a true philosopher (27-31, 40-41, 69-72, 465-66, 469-70, 486-87).
But if one reads Locke carefully in the light of Hume's critique, one can see that Locke is indeed a philosopher rather than a narrow partisan, and he agrees with Hume that good government requires a balance between authority and liberty. And while Hume attacks Locke's doctrine of consent, Hume ends up closer to Locke's position that he realizes.
Remarkably, Hume accepts Locke's claim that in the original state of nature among hunter-gatherers, every adult was equally free from being ruled by anyone else; and therefore, nothing but their own consent could bring them together into a society and subject them to any authority. "If this, then, be meant by the original contract, it cannot be denied," Hume observed, "that all government is, at first, founded on a contract, and that the most ancient rude combinations of mankind were formed chiefly by that principle" (468).
But even if government in its earliest and most primitive forms arose from "consent or rather the voluntary acquiescence of the people," it is not true, as Locke claims, that later fully developed governments as we see them today rest on no other foundation than the consent of the people.
Hume insists that "history and experience" should teach us that governments are not founded on popular consent:
I maintain, that human affairs will never admit of this consent; seldom of the appearance of it. But that conquest or usurpation, that is, in plain terms, force, by dissolving the ancient governments, is the origin of almost all the new ones, which were ever established in the world. And that in the few cases, where consent may seem to have taken place, it was commonly so irregular, so confined, or so much intermixed either with fraud or violence, that it cannot have any great authority (473-74).
When a new government is established by force through conquest by a foreign power or by usurpation when someone takes power in a society unlawfully, the people are commonly dissatisfied with it, but they obey from fear rather than feeling any moral obligation to obey. If the new rulers are careful to guard against insurrection, then over time, the people become accustomed to regard the new rulers as the lawful government, even though originally they were usurpers or foreign conquerors.
The original establishment was formed by violence, and submitted to from necessity. The subsequent administration is also supported by power, and acquiesced in by the people, not as a matter of choice, but of obligation. They imagine not, that their consent gives their prince a title: But they willingly consent, because they think, that, from long possession, he has acquired a title, independent of their choice or inclination.
Should it be said, that, by living under the dominion of a prince, which one might leave, every individual has given a tacit consent to his authority, and promised him obedience; it may be answered, that such an implied consent can only have place, whee a man imagines, tht the matter depends on his choice. But where he thinks (as all mankind do who are born under established governments) that by his birth he owes allegiance to a certain prince or certain form of government; it would be absurd to infer a consent or choice, which he expressly, in this case, renounces and disclaims.
Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artizan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her (475).
Anyone who has read Locke's Second Treatise will know that Locke actually agrees with almost everything Hume says here. The one clear point of disagreement is that while Hume cannot take seriously "that a poor peasant or artizan has a free choice to leave his country," Locke argued for an open borders immigration policy for England to attract peasant and artisan migration from other European countries that were less free than England. For example, Locke had seen in 1685, when King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had granted some toleration of Calvinist Protestants in Catholic France in 1598, that this created an exodus of French Protestants, also called Huguenots, who were forced to migrate to England and elsewhere. As I have argued, this continues today as people want to leave the less free countries and migrate to the freest countries (as measured by the Human Freedom Index). People vote with their feet for freedom, and that's Lockean consent, or the principle of "love it or leave it."
Locke agrees with Hume's claim that most governments today originally arose from conquest or usurpation. In his chapter "Of Conquest" (chapter 16), Locke recognizes that "in the noise of War, which makes so great a part of the History of Mankind, this Consent is little taken notice of: And therefore many have mistaken the force of Arms, for the consent of the People; and reckon Conquest as one of the Originals of Government" (ST, 175). But a conquering power can never erect a new government without the consent of the people, because without their consent, the people will look for an opportunity to overthrow the conqueror, which they can do by an "appeal to Heaven"--that is, war (ST, 176). Similarly, in his chapter on usurpation, Locke argues that the power of the usurper will not be secure until the people have consented to the lawfulness of his rule.
Now, it is true, as Hume says, that over time the people can become so accustomed or habituated to the rule of conquerors or usurpers that eventually, even though the people have not chosen the conquering or usurping ruler, "they willingly consent, because they think, that, from long possession, he has acquired a title." Locke agrees with this because he recognizes that many times, maybe most of the time, the people consent to a ruler not by originally choosing him but by their customary acquiescence to his rule: "People are not so easily got out of their old Forms, as some are apt to suggest. They are hardly to be prevailed with to amend the acknowledged Faults, in the Frame they have been accustomed to" (ST, 223). The Declaration of Independence expresses the same Lockean thought about the power of customary acceptance of government: "all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
Hume's fundamental agreement with Locke is most clearly manifested in two ways. What he says about government being founded on opinion coincides with what Locke says about government being founded on consent. And Hume agrees with Locke in saying that the only remedy for tyranny is resistance.
At the beginning of his essay "Of the First Principles of Government," Hume observes:
Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of EGYPT, or the emperor of ROME, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination: But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or praetorian bands, like men, by their opinion (32-33).
He then distinguishes two kinds of opinion. The "opinion of INTEREST" is the sense of the government's general advantage. "When this opinion prevails among the generality of a state, or among those who have the force in their hands, it gives great security to any government."
The "opinion of RIGHT" is either the "right to POWER" or the "right to PROPERTY." The opinion that the government has a right to power is most commonly rooted in the attachment that a nation has to its ancient government because antiquity begets the opinion of right. The opinion of the right to property is the sense that the governmental power of those with property is justified by their right to property.
What I see here is what some social scientists today call the theory of the minimum winning coalition. No ruler can rule alone. Even an absolute dictator needs a small coalition of powerful people who are loyal to him, and to win and maintain that loyalty, the dictator must buy them off with money and status. Once a dictator is abandoned by his loyalists, he loses his power. Strictly speaking, therefore, "one-man rule" is impossible. But as long as he has the support of that small winning coalition, he can rule successfully even when he oppresses the great majority of the people under his rule. The private interest of his small coalition of supporters is advanced at the expense of the public interest of the people at large.
A democratic leader differs from a dictatorial leader in that the democratic leader depends on a larger coalition of supporters. Because of the large size of a winning democratic coalition, democratic leaders must persuade a large number of supporters that he will advance public policies that serve the general welfare of this big coalition. But still this large democratic coalition is less than the whole community, and it does not have to be a majority of the citizens. So, for example, the minimum winning coalition for a president of the United States is a majority in the Electoral College and at least one third of the Senate voting against impeachment.
