Editor’s note: This letter is in response to the letter “Democracy, entitlements portend dictatorship,” published in the Tuesday issue of the Daily Lobo. In the letter, Ryan Boyle argues that the U.S. will become a dictatorship unless all government services and bureaucracy are done away with and all spending ceases.
Editor,
The historical claims in Ryan Boyle’s letter, “Democracy, entitlements portend dictatorship,” are so puzzling that they deserve a response from a historian.
The basic problem is simple: Boyle claims that “true freedom” was only achieved in civilizations that had slavery or lacked democracy, or both.
To hold up ancient Athens, ancient Rome and the early U.S. as exemplars of freedom is very strange indeed, because all three allowed people to own other people as property — surely the exact opposite of freedom.
In the American case, he suggests that the nation fell from grace during the Progressive Era, an odd idea because that was when women won the right to vote in federal elections — the greatest expansion of democracy in the history of the nation.
But perhaps Boyle views this as a bad thing, considering his overall argument is that democracy — “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as America’s greatest president described it — helps pave the way to dictatorship.
I invite Boyle to take some classes from my colleagues in the Department of History so that he can base his political theories on actual events in the past.
Either way, though, if Boyle is so adamant about “ending all government services” to “stop the impending dictatorship,” shouldn’t he start by volunteering to pay UNM $40,000 a year, the going rate for a private college, rather than the much lower tuition made possible by the state government of New Mexico?
A. K. Sandoval-Strausz
UNM faculty member
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