“Those who want to avoid confusion, and insist on clarity in political thinking, by carefully trying to distinguish between liberalism and democracy and between democracy and republicanism, are probably fighting a losing battle. Most people are not usually aware of the fact that one of the most important differences between the Continental and the Anglo-Saxon tradition of representative government has to be found in the important alloy which has been, so far, the almost inseparable concomitant of the latter: whiggery, or liberalism in the classic sense. The names and works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers who have carefully distinguished between democracy and liberalism will be found in the next chapter (Note 58). But the vast majority of Americans and Englishmen talking about ‘democracy’ always include the liberal element in their concept of democracy — and this in spite of the fact that democracy and liberalism are concerned with two entirely different problems. The former is concerned with the question of who should be vested with ruling authority, while the latter deals with the freedom of the individual, regardless of who carries on the government. A democracy can be highly illiberal: the Volstead Act, quite democratically voted for, interfered with the dinner menus of millions of citizens. Fascism, National and international Socialism repeatedly insisted that they were in essence democratic — a claim which must be viewed in a strict philosophical and historical setting, and in this view becomes less hypocritical than observers in the Western hemisphere are wont to admit. The Soviet use of the ‘democratic’ label is by no means a shrewd political manoeuvre of recent years, but a terminology already adopted by Lenin and continued by Stalin throughout the nineteen-twenties. If we accept St. Thomas’ definition of democracy (De regimine principum, i. 1) we will find that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (provided the proletariat forms a majority) is more democratic than the American Constitution — in which, in contrast to the sacred books of communism, the word ‘democracy’ never figures.”
— Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, from Liberty or Equality (1952)
“Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.”
— Hans-Hermann Hoppe, from the essay Reflections on State and War (2006)