Remember, Democracy Always Chooses Barabbas

Happy Easter, and a Good Reminder

“Don't forget that in the history of the world, there was a plebiscite, in which Christ and Barabbas were being judged, and the people chose Barabbas.” -Chilean President Augusto Pinochet, 1988

Thanks for reading! Because this Friday is Good Friday, this will be the only article published this week, though I will be doing a podcast tomorrow. It seemed sacrilegious to publish something on Good Friday, so I hope you excuse my lack of content. As a side note, I am getting married next week and will then be going on my honeymoon, so there will likely be a bit less content than normal for the next few weeks, though I am trying to get stuff scheduled ahead of time. In any case, thanks for reading, and as always please tap the heart button to like this article so Substack knows to promote it. Thanks again!

It is Easter, and so it is worth thinking about one of the least remarked-upon parts of the Easter story: Pontius Pilate knew Jesus was innocent, yet felt forced by the mob into allowing it a say in whether Jesus would be murdered or would go free.

The Jerusalem mob, riled up by subversive leaders jealous of their tenuous authority, then chose to free the murderous criminal Barabbas instead of the Son of God.

Then, after Pilate had Christ scourged in the hope that would slake the bloodlust of the democratic mob, they still demanded He be crucified. And so on Calvalry Hill the Son of God died for our sins. As was recorded in the Gospel according to Matthew, 27:15-26, New King James Version:

“Now at the feast the governor was accustomed to releasing to the multitude one prisoner whom they wished. And at that time they had a notorious prisoner called Barabbas. Therefore, when they had gathered together, Pilate said to them, “Whom do you want me to release to you? Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?” For he knew that they had handed Him over because of envy. While he was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent to him, saying, ‘Have nothing to do with that just Man, for I have suffered many things today in a dream because of Him.’

“But the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitudes that they should ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus. The governor answered and said to them, ‘Which of the two do you want me to release to you?’ They said, ‘Barabbas!’ Pilate said to them, ‘What then shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?’ They all said to him, ‘Let Him be crucified!’ Then the governor said, ‘Why, what evil has He done?’ But they cried out all the more, saying, ‘Let Him be crucified!’

“When Pilate saw that he could not prevail at all, but rather that a tumult was rising, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, ‘I am innocent of the blood of this just Person. You see to it.’ And all the people answered and said, ‘His blood be on us and on our children.’ Then he released Barabbas to them; and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered Him to be crucified.”

The story is, of course, not necessarily a political one. It’s religious, meant to show us how Christ suffered to save us. But, while that’s the main point and ought be focused on, it gets to a related, political point, the same one Pinochet recognized in the quote above: the mob makes quite poor, self-harming decisions, something best shown through its vote to murder the Son of God. Sadly, that is attendant to democracy, and a major flaw in such a system of governance.

This is something that, while best glimpsed at the climax of the Gospel, can be seen throughout history generally: the great democracies were not killed, but rather voted to commit self-suicide. Riled up by subversive agitators with ulterior motives, they voted to kill themselves out of ignorance, greed, or both. Whether Ancient Athens or modern America, the mix of fecklessness and insouciance that’s attendant to letting the mob choose what to do is a constant that always rears its ugly head at the worst moment.

One of the best examples of this is an incident from hundreds of years before the mob’s murder of Christ: the moment when Athens voted to destroy itself.

Listen to the audio version of this article here:

[AUDIO] Remember, the Mob Always Chooses Barabbas

Athens

That general point about democracy is true even of Classical Athens, the democracy given as the great example of how such a system ought to work. While those democratic aspects of its system are overblown,¹ particularly as regards its pre-Peloponnesian War days of glory, it is nevertheless true that Athens had plebiscites, had democratic systems of governance, and was growing more rather than less democratic when it reached its mid-Peloponnesian War peak of power.

It was at that point that, as Thucydides records,² Athens had gained the upper hand over the Spartans with a stunning victory at Sphacteria in which Athens captured hundreds of the irreplaceable Spartiates, leading to the Peace of Nicias.³

This wasn’t a complete victory, by any means, but it was a major one. The Athenians had bested the Spartans, preserved their financial and trading empire, kept their sacred system of governance from being replaced by the oligarchic one of their Spartan enemies, and managed to avoid suffering any debilitating losses of manpower, money, or territory. The Spartans, meanwhile, were humiliated by their stunning defeat, exhausted by having fought far more years of war than they initially contemplated, and were in a poor strategic position given the encroaching end of a treaty with the Argives.

In short, Athens was in a near-perfect position. All it had to do was avoid making any catastrophic mistakes, and its empire would remain intact while the Spartans suffered mightily.

But then Athens made a catastrophic mistake nearly immediately, thanks to its democratic system.

What happened was, as the ancient authors like Plutarch⁴ and Thucydides tell it, a young nobleman named Alcibiades wanted to make a name for himself. So, speaking to the crowd just a few short years into the Peace of Nicias, he deluded them with visions of invading Sicily, taking Syracuse, and then conquering the entirety of the island. Foreign emissaries supported him, convincing the democratic mob that there were untold riches piled up in Sicily that were theirs for the taking if only they invaded.

Not all in Athens were deluded. An elder general and statesman named Nicias,⁵ himself an enemy of the democratic faction in the city-state’s politics, did all he could to show the flaws in the claims of Alcibiades and dissuade the mob from embarking on a likely disastrous expedition. He, explaining the lack of wisdom in invading Sicily, said:

[T]he Sicilians, even if conquered, are too far off and too numerous to be ruled without difficulty. Now it is folly to go against men who could not be kept under even if conquered, while failure would leave us in a very different position from that which we occupied before the enterprise. The Siceliots, again, to take them as they are at present, in the event of a Syracusan conquest (the favourite bugbear of the Egestaeans), would to my thinking be even less dangerous to us than before. At present they might possibly come here as separate states for love of Lacedaemon; in the other case one empire would scarcely attack another; for after joining the Peloponnesians to overthrow ours, they could only expect to see the same hands overthrow their own in the same way.

The Hellenes in Sicily would fear us most if we never went there at all, and next to this, if after displaying our power we went away again as soon as possible. We all know that that which is farthest off, and the reputation of which can least be tested, is the object of admiration; at the least reverse they would at once begin to look down upon us, and would join our enemies here against us.

You have yourselves experienced this with regard to the Lacedaemonians and their allies, whom your unexpected success, as compared with what you feared at first, has made you suddenly despise, tempting you further to aspire to the conquest of Sicily. Instead, however, of being puffed up by the misfortunes of your adversaries, you ought to think of breaking their spirit before giving yourselves up to confidence, and to understand that the one thought awakened in the Lacedaemonians by their disgrace is how they may even now, if possible, overthrow us and repair their dishonour; inasmuch as military reputation is their oldest and chiefest study. Our struggle, therefore, if we are wise, will not be for the barbarian Egestaeans in Sicily, but how to defend ourselves most effectually against the oligarchical machinations of Lacedaemon.

Sadly for the Athenian state, such sage council made nary an impression on its ruling mob. Buoyed by visions of riches ripe for the plucking in Sicily, it voted with Alcibiades, choosing to send a huge expeditionary force to the island with him as the general. Before the ships even set sail, the rabble was counting its riches, and Alcibiades was dreaming of his soon-to-be-obtained glory.

But if there is one thing he should have known, it is that the mob’s love is a fickle thing: just as the expedition set sail, he was, likely falsely, accused of defenestrating the statues of Hermes that studded the city. His enemies and rivals spread the rumor, and the crowd that had loved him just moments before switched to hating him at the drop of a hat. And so, just as the flower of Athens landed in Sicily the crowd voted to recall Alcibiades and try him for religious crimes, a trial that could mean his execution...

Fearing the mob would be riled up by his enemies as he had riled it up, Alcibiades fled to Sparta and taught the Spartans how to win the war. At his direction, they built a navy, rallied their Corinthian allies, sent an expeditionary force to Syracuse to defend it from the Athenians, and, in the nick of time, saved the city from capture. They then defeated the Athenian navy, hemmed its hoplites in, and destroyed a force of 10,000 Athenian hoplites and 30,000 oarsmen, a blow from which Athens never quite recovered.

For Athens, no booty was captured, no riches won, no cities taken by storm. All the city received were the bitter fruits of its mob’s decision-making, and eventually, Athens lost its empire, the government Solon had created the basis of centuries beforehand, and the great wealth it had built over the generations.⁶ The city was never the same, and in the ensuing decades and centuries, it found itself dominated first by the Macedonians and later by the Romans,⁷ much to its humiliation.

All of that degradation and humiliation was downstream of the mob’s vote to invade Sicily and then threaten its greatest general — a trait by which the democracy had long been characterized (at the behest of the mob, nearly all its greatest men were exiled at one point or another⁸) and which eventually destroyed it. It cried out for Barabbas one too many times, and the wages of that sin were its death.

America

Flash forward two and a half millennia and here we are, dealing with much the same problem.

Whereas we used to be a republic, a system in which only the best could vote and exercise political power,⁹ now we’re just a democracy and have no real limitations on what adults can vote.

The results are as abominable as could be expected. Freed from every constraint, every tie that used to bind, the mob has allowed the worst sorts of people to take advantage of it, and so we have buy now, pay later delivery food¹⁰ and concert tickets¹¹. . . We have consumer debt for burritos.¹²

That gets to the Barabbas problem. When the mob votes for Barabbas, when the plebiscite chooses the worst thing imaginable, it is voting to hurt itself. It is voting to harm itself. In the case of Athens, that was destroying its empire with the invasion of Sicily. For us, though our publicly supported invasion of Iraq was certainly a disaster, it wasn’t catastrophic in the same way that the Sicilian Expedition was for Athens.

Rather, it is our ideologically enabled decision¹³ to eschew duties and responsibilities that is the disaster. The sort of predation that is characterized by usurious credit card rates, buy-now, pay-later fast food, and the rest of the consumer debt complex is the very image of the sort of destruction such an ideology brings with it. Whatever the faults of past societies, they at least kept such self-destructive usury away from polite society, rightly treating it as a disastrous and abominable thing. Now, freed from a sense of duty, noblesse oblige, or responsibility,¹⁴ we champion it as enabling an increase in consumption-driven GDP, with nary a thought to tomorrow.

The same is true of most everything else as well.

America’s entitlement programs cannot be paid for and will bankrupt what remains of “our democracy.”¹⁵ Yet because any change to them would have to be voted for by representatives in thrall to their democratic constituencies, no change will come in time to save them. Instead, we’ll have to hope things are sorted out in the crisis that all know is coming but which no one is able to deal with.

Free trade, similarly, has hollowed out both our country and the machinery of our empire. A dearth of domestic manufacturing means it’s nearly impossible for the Navy to produce the ships and missiles it needs to guard the sea lanes,¹⁶ the very basis of our empire,¹⁷ but changing that would mean tariffs even higher than those that have so far led to the usual suspects howling. Sparta could choose short-term pain for long-term gain, as could the American republic of a century and a half ago. But “our democracy”? Not so much. It’d rather remain addicted to the free trade narcotic for as long as it can.

That’s not to say there aren’t men who warn of and try to fix such issues. Athens had Nicias, we have the desperate efforts of Elon Musk, Trump, and the rest of the waste-cutting team. But while the Roman Republic would have made such men “dictator” (importantly quite different from what that means today, which is something closer to the tyrants of Greece¹⁸) so that they could cut the Gordian Knot and solve the problem,¹⁹ as indeed they could if they had the power to do so, we have no mechanism for that. Though we honored Washington as a Cinncinatus,²⁰ we chose not to enable such men as Cinncinatus. And so we must rely on the mob to not choose Barabbas, which is a losing bet.

The Vote of Always

Those are just examples. The Sicilian Expedition, the unfunded liabilities crisis, our free trade mess . . . all that is an example of the wider problem rather than a definition of the problem itself.

The problem is that, as we ought to remember this Easter, on a long enough time horizon, the mob always chooses Barabbas. And so those forms of government that empower the mob (this is where a democracy is different than a republic) will find themselves eventually choosing Barabbas and that being the end of them.

Athens voted to destroy itself instead of capitalizing on its success. Britain destroyed itself because the envious mob desired it.²¹ America has gone from being a republic of self-starters to an entitlements-enabled democracy straight out of Atlas Shrugged. As Friedrich List recognized,²² the great trading democracies — namely the Dutch and the Hanseatic League cities — lacked the will necessary to put in a great deal of short-term effort and pain and then reap the rich rewards of having done so. Meanwhile, the imperial British, Japanese, and Prussians all managed to do exactly that, quite to their benefit, much as the somewhat non-democratic Asian Tigers eventually did as well, profiting off the fecklessness of their very democratic trading partners in the process.²³

That lesson is one that repeats, as it gets to the matter of time horizons. A policy of short-termism,²⁴ of limited horizons and going with the mob, naturally begets disaster. Whether the siren song of Alcibiades or the corruption and subversion of the Pharisees, something will push the mob into making a disastrous decision, one that can end it all if bad enough.

The point of alternative systems of government is to prevent that from happening, to make it so that the mob never has the power to choose Barabbas. I believe the best such system is a republic with a very limited vote, one not unlike the landed voting system of the early American Republic or the Responsible Government Rhodesian system.²⁵

Nothing is ever perfect, but the point is not perfection . . . much as with trade, it is the questing after such that often leads to total destruction in the name of efficiency. Rather, the goal is to avoid disaster, generally by limiting the power of the mob.

Much as Warren Buffet famously says that Rule 1 of investing is to never lose money and Rule 2 is to never forget Rule 1,²⁶ the first rule of good government is to ensure the mob can never choose Barabbas, and the second rule is to see the first. It is only by limiting the mob from exercising power via voting, as it now does, or by being a mob, as it did under Pilate and with the French Revolution, that such can be achieved. That must be remembered.

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1. https://x.com/CCrowley100/status/1898822303397376174

2. The landmark edition of his The Peloponnesian War is superb

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Nicias

4. Covered in this selection of Plutarch’s Lives, though really you should read them all: Lives of the Noble Grecians

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicias

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peloponnesian_War#Aftermath

7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy#Aftermath

8. https://www.csun.edu/~hcfll004/ostracis.html

9. Some of that discussed here:

10. https://www.businessinsider.com/doordash-klarna-buy-now-pay-later-bnpl-food-delivery-debt-2025-3

11. https://www-allsides-com.webpkgcache.com/doc/-/s/www.allsides.com/story/economy-and-jobs-60-ga-coachella-attendees-financed-tickets-through-payment-plans

12. https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/23/buy-now-pay-later-for-a-burrito/

13.

14.

15.

16.

17. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/sea-power-us-navy-and-foreign-policy

18. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2117/tyrants-of-greece/

19. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Roman-dictator

20. https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/cincinnatus

21. Some articles on that:

22.

23.

24. Discussed here:

25.

26. https://www.investing.com/academy/trading/warren-buffett-investment-strategy-rules-fortune/