Every Right We Have Was Pried From a Closed Fist, and Look What Is Still in It

Look at the rights that have been argued over in free countries in my lifetime. The right to end a pregnancy. The right to smoke a plant. The right of a dying person to choose the hour. In every case the pattern was the same: a large part of the public wanted the right, the system withheld it for decades, and it was eventually granted grudgingly, partially, with conditions, and only after a struggle that consumed a generation of activists.

The representative system is stingy with rights. Not with all things. It hands out subsidies, contracts and exemptions freely enough. But a right, a decision returned to the individual, it gives up only when it must.

The Money Explanation Does Not Cover It

The usual account is economic. Rights are withheld because someone profits from their absence: the prison industry from prohibition, an employer from a population that cannot afford to refuse work.

Sometimes that is true. But euthanasia refutes it as a general theory. Nobody makes money from a terminal patient being denied the choice to die; if anything, the hospital and the insurer would save. There is no lobby for prolonged suffering. And yet the right was among the last to be granted anywhere and is still refused in most places.

So something other than money is holding the fist closed.

What Is Actually Being Protected

What is being protected is the act of governing itself.

A system that exists to make decisions for people has an interest, whether anyone in it intends this or not, in there being decisions to make. Every question that is returned to the individual is a question the system no longer answers. Every citizen who gets used to deciding for himself in one domain is a citizen who might ask why he does not decide in others.

So the system has to do three things to keep governing. It has to keep the decision-making mechanism at its own level, so that the natural place to settle a question is a legislature rather than the person concerned. It has to maintain, through schooling and public culture, a population that does not think of itself as the decider. And it has to resist, in each particular case, handing over a choice, because each handover teaches the wrong lesson.

I want to be clear that none of this requires a conspiracy. Nobody in a ministry says: withhold the right so they do not get ideas. It is simply what an organisation whose function is deciding does when asked to stop deciding. The reluctance is the institution's, not the officials'.

The Rights Nobody Even Asks For

Here is the part that I find more instructive than the struggles we have watched.

The rights that were pried loose, over abortion or drugs or dying, share a feature: they are individual and private. They concern what one person does with one body. That is the easiest category of right to demand, because the claim is obvious and the harm to others is small or nil. And even those took decades.

Now look at the rights that are not even on the table. The right to decide how the country's income is distributed. The right to decide whether the country goes to war. The right to decide what its children are taught, what it sells to whom abroad, how its money is created. These are not private matters; they are the central matters, the ones that determine most of what happens to most people. And they are so far outside the range of what the representative system will consider that nobody organises to demand them. There is no movement for the right to vote on the budget.

The fist has been closed so long on these that we have stopped noticing it is a fist. We measure our freedom by the small rights we managed to extract and forget that the large ones were never in play.

What the Stinginess Tells You

If a system fights for decades against giving a dying man his own death, a right that costs nothing and harms nobody, then its reluctance to give anyone a vote on the budget or the war is not an accident of the current parties. It is the same reluctance at a larger scale, and it will not be overcome by asking more politely.

That is why I do not think of direct democracy as one more right to be requested. It is the demand that the fist open, rather than that it release one more finger's worth.