As the recent demonstration against the biotech conference in Philadelphia reminded me, free speech -- especially contentious demonstrations -- can be a major pain in the ass. (For one Philadelphia police officer, they proved to be a fatal pain in the heart.)

As I remarked in the comments, professional demonstrators who travel from city to city are good at what they do. They want attention, and they get it. In the process they cost municipalities millions of dollars, but I'm sure that doesn't bother them at all, because their goal is to win. Winning means getting their way! (All in the name of "democracy," of course.)

Winning means encouraging cities to shy away from events like Biotech 2005. Eventually, it is hoped that increasingly timid city officials -- acting out of fear of lawsuits, insurance hikes, police overtime and disability claims, having to pay out death benefits (as just happened), or even just having to be yelled at and insulted by professional yellers and insulters -- will be cowed.

That's precisely what the professional demonstrators want. And it's what they already have.

Power out of all proportion to their numbers.

(In business terms, it's called leverage.)

The unique dedication to purpose of professional activists is often overlooked by politicians and lower level bureaucrats who mistake them for spontaneous grassroots-style citzenry (or even "neighborhood activists").

A fundamental mistake often made by those who should know better (a mistake the activists do everything to encourage) is to confuse an organized hard core of professional activists with the democatic process -- or with "democracy" itself. Hardly champions of democracy, the activists nonetheless use the "D" word constantly, and scream as if democracy itself is at stake at any obstacle they encounter. This naturally frightens the bureaucrats who issue parade permits, as well as officers on the scene, and it goes a long away towards making the people who have to live and work in these places more tolerant than they should be of things like having traffic disrupted, sidewalks littered, buildings graffitied, store windows broken, or even worse things.

Yet things like disruption and vandalism have little to do with democracy. Certainly they do not go to its essence.

Some lessons in democracy I remember vividly, and one of them was in the early 1990s at a meeting of Berkeley's Police Review Commission. A quasi-judicial review board, we were there not only to review policy, but to hear complaints brought against individual police officers. At the time there were two kinds of complaints; those brought by individual citizens who felt genuinely aggrieved, and those brought by activists to advance their political agenda -- the latest of which was the umpteenth in an ongoing series of "People's Park" riots. The Berkeley Police are about as tolerant and inclusive a group of officers as can be found anywhere. But the problem is, even they must respond when crimes are being committed, and when demonstrations become violent. Much as the officers hated doing it (and much as they knew the procedure that would inevitably follow), they had to make arrests in the People's Park riots. And of course, every time they did so, the arrested activists would proffer charges of police misconduct. Which we (including me!) had to hear.

On to the unforgettable "lesson in democracy" that absolutely galled me.

Unlike regular complaints brought by aggrieved citizens, the activists' complaints were:

I don't know whether it was the threats against me, the actual threats of violent attacks, actual violence, (vehicles belonging to commissioners were torched, but it's tough to prove any legal connection), or the fact that on several occasions, all officers were ordered to leave our hearings "for reasons of officer safety" (leaving us to the tender mercies of the activists), but I grew incredibly tired of what passed for (and had to be endured in the name of) "democracy." I remember one night I remarked to a fellow commissioner -- a Marxist activist himself -- how tired I was of sitting there and being not spoken to -- but yelled at.

Instead of being sympathetic, his face reddened and he indignantly told me that we were "living in a democracy!" "And it's vital that we hear from the people! And we have to then vote the way the people tell us we should vote!"

The problem is, these weren't "the people." "The people" who lived in Berkeley were for the most part nice people who didn't like riots, vandalism, trashing of stores, or any of that stuff. Some politically savvy neighbors who knew I was on the PRC once told me that they were afraid to go to downtown Berkeley and asked if there wasn't anything the police could do to make Berkeley safer. But when I asked them to please, please, show up and voice support for the cops, they almost laughed at the idea, because they knew they'd most likely be yelled at by the activists.

The common principle at work here is called intimidation.

The First Amendment protects many forms of intimidation, and I would defend to the death the right of people to intimidate me or others as long as they do so legally.

However, whether it is constitutionally protected or not, it is regrettable when a small minority manages to get its way by intimidation. While legal intimidation might be (and often is) constitutionally protected, that fact neither makes it democratic, nor does it make it an attribute of democracy. It's an unpleasant fact of life, and it's part of the price we must all pay for freedom.

It took me years to understand that intimidation is not a synonym for democracy. Yielding to the demands of a mob is actually the antithesis of democracy -- no matter how loudly the mob screams that they are engaged in "democracy."

I wish the two weren't so frequently confused.

I realize that others would disagree with me. In particular, the proponents of a hopeless contradiction between "democracy" and "republic" argue that even a lynch mob constitutes "pure democracy," but I think that our republic is also an orderly form of democracy -- one which attempts to balance between liberty and democracy:

One thing that we have done a very poor job of in this country is teaching people that democracy and liberty are not only not synonymous, they are often in conflict. The founding fathers knew this well. Indeed, the entire purpose of the bill of rights was to protect liberty from democracy, that is to protect the rights of the individual against the whims of the majority who would seek to deny those rights.

Protecting the liberty of the minority against the whims of the majority is important, but it is not "democracy." (And even if it were, the idea that it means the minority should rule by tyrannical tactics is absurd.)

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds links to Worstall's Rule (that we are ruled by those who stay awake on committees). And as Tim Worstall points out,

...we don't actually want to be ruled by those who stay awake in committee meetings.

My problem on Berkeley's Police Review Commission was not so much staying awake (adrenaline took care of that problem nicely) but forcing myself to endure the insults and tirades that never would have been aimed at me had I simply yielded to the demands of the mob. This is why reasonable people tend not to serve on city commissions

So, based on my experience, I'd offer an addition to Worstall's stay-awake rule:

All and any city commissions will in the end be run by those willing to agree to the angry demands of organized professional activists.