Democracy and Totalitarianism Are Not Mutually Exclusive Terms; the "isms" That Have Menaced Liberty from the 18th Century to Our Days Were Called Democratic

Monarchs, in a way, skated on thin ice. They desperately tried to bequeath their countries to their heirs, for if they failed, they sometimes had their heads chopped off. They could not conveniently retire to a quiet law office like deputies or presidents who fail to get reelected. There are totalitarian and monolithic tendencies inherent in democracy that are not present even in a so-called absolute monarchy, much less so in a mixed government which, without exaggeration, can be called the great Western political tradition.

Inescapably, then, democracy and totalitarianism are not mutually exclusive terms. Professor J. L. Talmon has rightly entitled one of his books (on the French Revolution) The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. Nor is it an accident that the isms that have menaced liberty from the eighteenth century to our days were called democratic. Their proponents all claimed that the majority, nay, the vast majority of the people supported their particular "wave of the future." . . . De Tocqueville saw only too clearly that while democracy could founder into chaos, the greater danger was in its gradual evolution into oppressive totalitarianism, a type of tyranny the world would never have seen before and for which it would have been partly conditioned by modern administrative methods and technological inventions.

--Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1990), 22.