Freedom Without the Vote? Yes, actually.
How Limits, Not Headcounts, Kept Power in Check
We keep voting and keep getting ruled by memos. Maybe the problem isn’t the headcount. Maybe it’s the leash. For most of history, freedom meant the ruler couldn’t act on a whim—and if he tried, you could drag him into court. The franchise was a duty-bearing privilege, not a participation trophy. This series looks at five places where liberty was built on limits and norms, not universal ballots—and asks what it would take to bring that back.
There’s a way a city sounds when it’s being governed by instructions instead of laws. It’s quiet, but not peaceful. You hear it in the different tone at the permit counter, the HR-approved apology from a clerk who can’t help you, the fine print that changes between draft and final and nobody can say who changed it. A neighbor gets shut down, not by a statute, but by guidance. You push back, and someone emails you a link.
There’s no villain to confront, just a PDF with a section that begins “Non-binding” and ends with a penalty. You voted last fall. They posted the memo last Tuesday.
If that description makes your teeth clench, you already understand the thesis. The trouble isn’t democracy; it’s the way we’ve defined freedom. We’ve been trained to think freedom is participation, as if liberty were the applause track after the show.
The older definition is tougher and less sentimental. Freedom meant the ruler could not act on a whim. It meant the rule had to be known before it was enforced, the tribunal had to be open when you needed it, and the man with the seal on his ring had to look you in the eye and defend what he was doing—knowing he might lose. That was liberty. That structure came before wide voting. Often it survived without it.
We don’t like to hear that. It sounds like an insult to us educated moderns who haven’t looked at societies that didn’t have the franchise. It isn’t. It’s a reminder that a tool is not a house, and a ritual is not a leash. If you care about liberty, you care about the leash.
You could see the difference in Rome before Rome became an empire. Not the postcard Rome with the marble porches and Latin epigrams but the Rome of two consuls who had to share power and share the blame, of vetoes like brakes on a downhill cart, of laws recited in public because writing was memory insurance.
You could see it in medieval England when a sheriff dragged a man to the lockup and a judge afterward had to explain it to twelve of the man’s neighbors. You could see it in a Dutch town where a city’s privileges were written down in a charter and the next prince had to swear to them before he got the keys.
It was obvious in Venice, where suspicion of ambition was so baked in they used lottery machines to confuse the ambitious. You could see it on a field in Iceland, a parliament with no king, where law lived in the mouth of a speaker and you found remedies in procedure, not anger.
These weren’t egalitarian paradises. They were places that put a leash on arbitrary power so ordinary people could live. The vote, where it existed, was limited by property, guild, office, or duty. The leash was the point.
We universalized voting and let the leash rot. You can feel it every time you hit a rule nobody voted on. That is where this series is headed: a tour through older cities where the leash was visible and audible and enforceable—and a sober look at how and why those systems cracked when the culture that fed the leash ran dry.
But before we tour, let’s talk about how we got lost.
The fairy tale of counting
“More people voting means more freedom.” It sounds true. It isn’t. It’s a category error that treats liberty like a crowd, as if you could measure it with a turnstile. Counting matters; it’s just not the thing you think it is. Counting tells you who gets to hold the shovel; it doesn’t tell you whether the shovel has a handle or a blade or a rule about where you’re allowed to dig.
Power does not disappear when you count it. Power hides. If you give an office discretion, it will live in the corner of that discretion the way smoke lives in a cinderblock stairwell. If you cram a controversial rule through the legislature, it gets headlines and a court fight. If you whisper it as guidance, it slips under the door. When the door closes, you get the clerk shrugging at you: “It’s above my pay grade.” That shrug is the new face of arbitrariness—polite, trained, and helpless.
There’s an old expression from a different trade: measure twice, cut once. In politics, it should be: define freedom, then vote. We did it backward. We voted on freedom before we knew what it was. We got the show, we forgot the stage.
What is freedom? Not the abstract kind, the engraved kind. If you dig through the people who lived it: Romans who said a magistrate could be prosecuted after leaving office, English jurists who thought the king’s will stopped at the courtroom door, Dutch merchants who demanded charters the way a captain demands soundings, a concrete definition emerges.
Freedom is a system that binds the rulers with rules. It doesn’t assume virtue; it builds suspicion into the architecture. It ties powers together, forces men to share them, times the rotation, and pays the officeholders so poorly so you do the work for honor and defence of your class, not for profit.
You can hear the objections warming up. This sounds nostalgic. It sounds aristocratic. It sounds like an apology for exclusion. It is none of those things. Nostalgia tells you the old days were purer. I’m telling you they were complicated and flawed, but useful in a way we’ve forgotten. Aristocracy says some men are born to rule. I’m saying nobody is born to rule safely; that’s why you lash three ropes to the mast. As for exclusion: yes, the vote was restricted.
And yet the remedies were stronger. Think like a homeowner: do you want a house where everyone gets a say on paint color, or a house where the fire exits open, the wiring is grounded, and the insurance pays out when it burns down? The right answer is both, but if you have to choose, pick the architecture. Paint doesn’t put out the fire.
The leash in practice
Let’s walk into a Roman day when the leash was visible. A magistrate orders a man whipped. The man says, “I appeal.” That word, provocatio, had weight because it meant a real stop, a hand on the arm, and a trip to a public forum where someone could say no.
The magistrate knew he might be dragged into court after his term and made to explain himself to men whose brothers he had offended. He knew his colleague, a fellow consul, could block him. He knew a tribune, elected by the poor, could stand up physically and interpose his body to stop the act.
If you were watching this, you weren’t seeing perfect justice. You were seeing a system that trained men to expect they would be resisted. That training is half the leash.
In England, centuries later, different tools were used to teach the same lesson. The king’s men could take your property or your person, but if they did it wrong, they might face a judge and a jury who were not paid by confiscations. The logic of the Magna Carta was not “we, the people,” but “you, the king, shall not.”
The jurist Coke, a stubborn man, stood up and said even the king is under God and the law, and the common law had the bad habit of being older than tyrants. A sheriff who cut corners knew a complaint could land him in front of neighbors sworn to judge facts. It was not a perfect world. It was a world where arbitrariness had to look over its shoulder.
Across the Channel, a Dutch regent had his own leash. He governed a commercial city. Power was shared among guilds, churches, and families. The taxes he wanted were not the taxes he got. Negotiation was governance. If he wanted to silence a pamphleteer, he had to navigate privileges promised in charters with seals older than his office. There was no mob voting on policy. There was an ecosystem of powers that kept the waterline steady enough for ships to come in and cargo to go out.
Venice, for five centuries, treated procedure like a religion. Offices were stacked like boxes in a warehouse; each had a lid. You didn’t get to sit long. You didn’t get to sit alone. Your cousins were barred from decisions that touched your business. Your ambition was not denied; it was domesticated. Venice invented the paper leash: the notice, the ballot, the rotation, the machine that mixed wooden balls to pick a committee so nobody could buy it ahead of time. The ordinary Venetian who never voted for a doge still lived in a city where coups were rare and reforms, such as they were, happened without midnight arrests.
And then there is Iceland, where the leash was law memorized and spoken, and the violence of men was bent into procedure like a river into a millrace. You could feud, but you could also settle, and settlement had forms. It’s not that the chieftains were gentle; it’s that the men around them believed the forms were their protection from endless blood. That belief is a leash too.
What connects these scenes? All of them aimed their energy not at inclusion but at resistance, resistance to the worst thing government can do: act without limits. They tied public voice to public duty. They considered office a burden you carried for your class or city, not the ticket to a stipend. They treated laws like contracts the rulers had to honor or be punished for, even after the robes were turned in at the door.
You don’t have to like the whole picture. You just have to see the leash and notice that it worked—often better and cost far less than ours.
The modern reversal
We took the vote and thought the leash would come with it. Instead, we got an industry called Process. It prints paper, builds websites, and writes compliance manuals thick enough to choke a donkey. That paper is not law in the way Coke meant law. It is the seedbed of discretion. It comes with words like “flexibility” and “equity” and “holistic.” It lets a bureau do what a legislature couldn’t get past a headline. It tells you a policy is “non-binding” until you fail to comply.
The modern state discovered a clever trick: make the punishment the process. Drag a man through hearings for two years and he’ll settle before you lose. Investigate a business until its insurance runs dry and the message lands on the rest: do not resist. Nobody signed a law that said “we will ruin you as a warning.” It’s not necessary. The ruin is an emergent property of having a thousand hammers and no cost to swinging them.
It also discovered emergency, a drug with a sweet aftertaste. Wars used to come with declarations and victories or defeats. Now emergencies come in waves and linger like humidity. Under an emergency, discretion expands. Under discretion, the leash breaks. When the emergency passes, the powers don’t fully retreat; they nest in the woodwork. We learn to accept the memo as a kind of weather. We vote, we argue, we post, and then we go back to the counter and the clerk says, “I’m sorry, but the guidance.”
This is how free people become a supervised and controlled people. It’s not that the vote is meaningless. It’s that the people you vote for hand the pen to people you can’t reach. And when you try to reach them, they show you the PDF.
The logic of stake
In the older world, a vote wasn’t a participation trophy. It was a tool issued with a responsibility. You had a stake in the field, you showed up with the militia, you paid the scot and lot, you served on juries, you took your turn on the parish board, you kept accounts that your neighbors could inspect.
The logic was brutal and fair: if you can spend it, you should help earn it or defend it. Freedom was guarded by those who stood to lose from bad choices. That logic had exclusions we rightly refuse today. But the logic had a point: weight your voice with your duty so your yes or no costs you as well as the man across the street.
Somewhere between the first televised convention and the fourth government Facebook page, we lost that link. We decided voice should be costless. The person who pays is the person who gets regulated. The person who speaks pays with nothing but opinion. The people who draft the memos pay nothing at all.
I am not arguing to return the franchise to landholders and guild masters (I could, but I won’t. Not yet). I am arguing that a voice with no duty is a kite in wind. Tie it down. Attach civic obligations to civic privileges in a way that respects equality under law and punishes arbitrariness where it lives, in the office where the pen meets the signature block. If we want adult politics, stop treating voting like a sacrament and start treating political office like a job someone can be fired from for cause, by you.
The trap of means and ends
You can watch the means-end confusion in a hundred small fights. A legislature passes a sweeping bill with an aspirational title. The real work happens in the subparagraphs that authorize an agency to define terms later. “Later” is a door you’re not invited through.
An agency writes rules that are too ambitious to survive court. It doesn’t matter. The first four years of enforcement will drive the small players out, the big ones into quiet deals, and the public into habits of silence. By the time the courts push back, the political class has found a new cause. The old rules remain like abandoned scaffolding; ugly and in the way, but useful to anyone who wants to climb.
Meanwhile, we pat ourselves on the back for higher voter turnout. We mistake the energy of the line outside the school gym on election day for the strength of the chain. We confuse a spectacle with a structure. Then we go home and get surprised by a rule the legislature never touched.
This is not accidental. It is the natural behavior of power in a system that rewards discretion, hides costs, and measures success in press releases. A politician wins points for passing a bill with big words. A manager in an agency wins points for making the numbers. The person who loses is the person who needs a predictable rule to plan a life. That person is you.
Stories from the old cities
When you want to remember what a leash looks like, it helps to hold a picture.
Rome, first. A tribune of the plebs stands in front of a magistrate like a man standing in front of a team of horses, palm up, certain he will be trampled if he flinches. He’s allowed to do that. His office exists to do that. He doesn’t win every time, and sometimes he’s braver than he is wise, but the fact of him changes behavior before he shows up. Ambitious men wake up knowing their plans must pass through bodies that can say no. That knowledge is liberty.
England, later. A smallholder’s cart is seized for a tax he did not know he owed. He knows the man’s name who seized it. He knows there is a day when he can stand in front of neighbors and tell the story. He knows the judge is paid a salary, not a bounty on fines. He knows the law was written down years before this day and somebody like him is always on the jury. He does not have universal voting. He has something better for his problem: recourse. He can be told no, and he can be told why, and if the telling is dishonest he can make it expensive.
In Amsterdam, a man prints a nasty pamphlet. The prince does not like it. The city may fine him or confiscate the lot, but it is hard to imprison him for long without a fight. Why? Because the city’s privileges—the very ones that make it rich—require a habit of toleration and a wrangling among churches and guilds that blunts the prince’s anger. The liberty is not perfect; it is practical. Commerce hates confusion. It buys predictability with negotiations. The result is a rough freedom with dirty edges and silver in the middle.
Venice does not trust men who want to be doge very much. It gives them a mask and a procession and a palace that is mostly corridors connecting rooms filled with other men. If you are ambitious and you want to capture Venice, you need patience counted in years and cousins counted in dozens. Every office is a fence. Every fence has a gate you can’t open alone. In writing it sounds like a machine. In life it was a city that rarely panicked. That’s worth more than speeches.
In Iceland the leash was memory. The law existed in mouths and habits. Outsiders romanticize it; locals would have called it normal. The point is that forms mattered enough that a hot temper could be shamed into settlement. Settlement is a kind of leash. It says: we would rather repair the tear than keep picking at it. That preference makes liberty possible in places a map would call empty.
These stories weren’t written to flatter the franchise. They were written to keep men with power inside lanes. And if you look closely at what we now call “democracies,” the shame is not that they expanded the franchise. The shame is that they let the lanes collapse into “whatever the policy team wants this quarter.”
The adult objection
For those of you with a hand up asking, “Are you arguing against democracy?”, let me answer cleanly. No. I could. What I’m arguing against is arbitrariness, which democracy increasingly enables far less than it restrains.
If you want universal voting, keep it. But if you want it to mean what you think it means, weld it to a frame that does not bend when the heat rises. If your favorite senator or parliamentarian can whip votes for a bill that says “the secretary or minister shall” and then go on television to tell you he passed a landmark reform, you don’t have democratic government, you have a magic show. He sawed the law in half. The girl in the box is you.
This is the adult position: tie the hands of the men you elect, then vote for the ones who complain the least about the rope. Make hard limits your platform. Make power explain itself on paper. Demand venues you do not control where you can lose in good faith. That is freedom.
What we lost when we won the vote
When you let yourself feel the difference between “we voted” and “we are free,” you start to notice where your freedom leaks. The leak is quiet. It looks like a compliance meeting where nobody can point to the statute that requires the new procedure. It looks like a rule that changed by newsletter. It looks like the temperature in the office when you mention suing—the way the word pulls oxygen from the room because everyone knows the penalty isn’t the damages, it’s the next inspection. You did not vote for a future where you must smuggle common sense into a conversation like contraband. You got it anyway.
We also lost the embarrassment that used to keep ambitious men polite. In a world where lawsuits were a real risk for officials, and offices rotated, and a judge might not like being told he was a rubber stamp, people hesitated. That hesitation, the small pause between impulse and order, is civil liberty’s best friend.
We replaced it with trainings, and the trainings teach the opposite: never admit, never apologize, never concede. That’s how you get a culture that calls every critic a threat and every question a “safety issue.” That’s how you get arbitrariness with a soft voice.
The path back is not a march
If that sounds grim, it’s because I’m describing plumbing, not politics. Plumbing is grim until it works. Then it’s a relief. The path back to freedom is not a march or a petition with a million signatures. It’s a reconstruction project with boring words: jurisdiction, standing, venue, rotation, conflict of interest, sunset.
These are not slogans; they are tools. You use them to rebuild the leash. You do not need perfect people; you need people who know they have to walk into a room where the other side can win.
Do not trust anyone who sells you “more democracy” without limits. That person wants more discretion. Do not trust anyone who sells you “efficiency” without appeal. That person wants to close a door. Do not trust anyone who says “equity” and then refuses to show the rule they are applying. That person has a result in mind and will find a principle afterward.
Trust the man who says, “Here is the rule, here is the forum, here is how you can beat me if I’m wrong.” That man may be wrong, but he is not arbitrary. He is living under the leash. If he wins, you lost a fair fight. If he loses, you remain a citizen, not an object to be arranged.
What the essays in this series will do
We will visit five places that treated liberty as a leash: Rome, England, the Dutch Republic, Venice, and the Icelandic Commonwealth. We’ll walk their streets, not the tourist streets, the procedural ones. We will not whitewash them. Rome fell in love with strongmen and paid for it. England flirted with tyranny and bled to correct it. The Dutch were tolerant until they weren’t. Venice wore stability like armor and then died by a general who didn’t care about procedures. Iceland’s law, strong in peace, bent in the wind of clan ambitions.
But by seeing where they succeeded and where they failed, we’ll recover a sense you can’t learn from a civics poster: freedom is practical. It’s engineered. It lives in the pause a tribunal imposes, the oath a man fears to break, the accounting another man knows he must deliver when the books are opened in public. It dies not from one bad leader but from a thousand tiny corruptions of habit: “this time, we’ll fix it by memo.”
When we’ve taken that tour, we will return home and ask the only question that matters: not “who should vote?” but “who can be sued, by whom, where, and when?” The answer to that question, prosaic, unromantic, exact, will tell you whether you live in a free country or a supervised and controlled one.
One last scene
Imagine a city council chamber on a Tuesday night. The room is half full. A man stands up to complain about a new rule that will make his business impossible. The council members nod sympathetically and explain their hands are tied by state policy. The state policy was recommended by a board. The board was guided by an expert panel. The expert panel took public comment online. The comments went into a report with a conclusion that matched the directive drafted the year before. Everyone followed the process. Nobody used judgment in public. The man sits down and realizes he needs a Plan B. Democracy happened. Liberty didn’t.
Now imagine a different room. The council announces a rule. A man stands up and says, “Point me to the statute.” He is sent to the state or provincial office, which knows it must answer with a citation, not a press release. The citation is thin. A judge says so, out loud, in a courtroom where the state loses sometimes. The council revises. The man walks home with a smaller fight ahead of him and enough predictability to keep his employees. Nobody sings. There’s no montage. It’s dull. It’s freedom.
We can build the second room again. We know how. We’ve known for over two thousand years. Tie the hands. Rotate the seats. Publish the rules. Keep the doors open. Make wrong decisions expensive for the decider. Give citizens venues they can reach and remedies that arrive before ruin.
We keep voting and keep getting ruled by memos because we love the applause more than the architecture. This series is a blueprint. Not a perfect one, no blueprint is perfect, but better than the pamphlets we’ve been living under. Starting with Rome, we’ll look at how real people kept power on a leash long enough to get on with their lives, and how we might again.
Freedom is not a mood. It is not an anthem. It is a set of constraints that bite, a culture that praises restraint over victory, and a habit of forcing power into rooms where it must speak in the declarative tense. Ballots decide who sits in the chair. The leash keeps the chair from rolling over you.
Next up: Rome, where the law was written, the offices were timed, and the most powerful man in the city had to share his title with another man he didn’t like. That’s not a fairy tale. That’s a design decision. And for a while, it worked.