Does Anyone Believe In Democracy?

Manifesto(es)

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a political essay, based on some more abstract thoughts following the DNC. At the partner site

Inner Life

,

<Mary L. Tabor>

writes on Elena Ferrante.

Best,

Sam

DOES ANYONE BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY?

The more I see of the world the more convinced I am that American-style democracy is an exception not a rule.

Maybe this seems sort of obvious to you, but I grew up in the ebullient ‘90s and ‘00s when the nearly-unstated belief was that America had worked out a superior system of government and it was just a matter of time until the rest of the world adopted it as well. That belief came up against a hard reality in Iraq and Afghanistan but also in the apparent ascendance of Putin’s Russia and Communist China, governmental systems that owed nothing to the American constitutional model but proved annoyingly intractable.

And, when I’m in other countries and in different ways under the philosophical shadow of other systems, the American model does start to seem, as much as anything else, like an historic and geographic quirk. Consider:

• The United States has two oceans as natural frontiers and no obvious neighboring enemies, limiting the need for some militaristic rule.

• The United States emerged out of a successful revolution, with its civic institutions already largely established and with the occupying colonist power more or less losing interest as soon as independence was established.

• The United States was for a long time in a uniquely advantageous position for obtaining a degree of harmony for the ethnic groups within the body politic. There was enough of a plurality of various immigrant nationalities to inhibit chauvinistic domination by a single ethnic bloc; and there was enough of a shared national identity to inhibit fractious power jockeying among different ethnic groups — as has been the problem in so many recently-formed democracies.

Within the confines of its ideal conditions, American democracy has done ok. For any exceptions to ideal conditions, democracy has provided very little help. With the uncertain frontiers in the era of westward expansion, America resorted to a military rule and a kind of law of the jungle to push around American Indians. With a group of people who fell outside the body politic — i.e. African slaves — American democracy never succeeded in advancing towards anything like enfranchisement (which was no problem for, say, the French Revolutionary regime or even Tsarist Russia) and it took the breakdown of the political entity and a bloody civil war to make progress. And the apparently-flexible and ever-evolving constitutional system has actually been far more static than expected — with only a handful of significant constitutional amendments since the 1780s and with obvious structural shortcomings (the electoral college, the composition of the Senate, the role of the vice president) left unaddressed.

But the critique of democracy turns out, actually, to be much deeper than that. The founders themselves were deeply ambivalent about the whole project, threw all kinds of hedges into the system, and consoled themselves with bits of political science gamesmanship like Federalist 10 — the idea that the different wings of the restive public would balance each other out and a centrist bloc of wise men would tend to prevail. The usual narrative of America (the ‘Whig history’) is that it was those hedges that proved quickly obsolete and the pure untrammeled democratic spirit gradually made its own case — with a popular will materializing in various benevolent American caesars, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, who transmuted populism into a united, effective executive branch that nonetheless stayed within the spirit of the constitutional frameworks.

But look under the hood and different frameworks start to present themselves. The courts have turned out to be far more of a shaper of policy than the framers intended — with a fairly coherent but nonetheless oligarchic system of justices and precedents in many cases holding a steadier system of order than the confused assortment of popular assemblies and their overlapping jurisdictions. The sorts of local legislatures and councils that the early republic was so plentiful in and that so enthused political theorists like Tocqueville and Arendt have largely been duds — power has tended to flow upwards rather than devolve; and entities like the militias that were so vital to the early republic’s conception of itself have entirely disappeared. Meanwhile, the party system — contained nowhere in the Constitution and greatly feared by the founders — became the de facto and largely unquestioned means of political organization. And what Hans Morgenthau called the ‘dual state’ — since transmuted in the popular imagination to ‘the deep state’ — features an entrenched civil service and a permanent establishment far removed from democratic principles. There really is an elected democratic system, Morgenthau argued, but parallel to that and operating largely in secret is the security state, which holds a sort of veto power over it.

Within the emergent reality of these shifts there is also a quiet consensus that this is the way it has to be. Party systems are more efficient methods of organization than the hazy, utopian vision of national unity that George Washington had in mind. The local systems of governance are a mess, Congress has almost always been fractious and unpopular, and stronger executive rule often seems a matter of necessity — particularly given the circumstance of America’s growing foreign entanglements. And the rapid turnover of elected officials seems to necessitate all by itself a permanent unelected stratum, whether of military officials, judges, or bureaucrats.

Recently, from all sides of the political spectrum, there has been a greater willingness to speak out of school, as it were, and to acknowledge the limitations of the democratic model. The right flirts openly with Putin. The left fantasizes about constitutional amendments and constitutional overhaul, out of the persistent belief that the popular will is, all appearances aside, actually progressive in orientation. The great unacknowledged secret of contemporary politics is an envy towards China — China’s ability to generate rapid growth; and to seamlessly integrate private and governmental sectors; and, as reporter Bethany McClain put it, when Covid hit “the US more or less just copied China’s draconian policy.” And the handoff of the Democratic Party from Biden to Harris is, in many important respects, the smooth culmination of the non-democratic strains that I have been describing. The parties are ascendant, foreclose a wide-open multi-candidate race and also impose an ingrained party loyalty. The parties nod towards a democratic process in the primaries, but, when the chips are down, they forego that and no one minds especially. The ostensibly free press falls in behind the coronated party leader, and the general response to this quite-undemocratic process is…euphoria. The general reaction from all good people (and I share this sentiment actually) is that the Harris ascendancy represents sanity and stability holding the line against an unruly ‘populism.’

This general misgiving towards democracy seems to be widespread and deeply-felt and it also gives me the opportunity to link to the funniest video whose existence I am aware of.

But I also went through middle school civics and I get teary-eyed every time I think about checks and balances, and at a moment where faith in democracy seems to be everywhere waning I am very reluctant to throw out the baby with the bathwater — to avoid which requires the delicate task of figuring out what the baby is; and what the bathwater.

The most important baby is — needless to say but important to emphasize — term limits. I remember getting appropriately misty during Obama’s 2008 inauguration, but the real joy was when the network cut to Dubya, down to a skeleton crew, leaving the White House by a back exit — and, great warlord and potentate as he once had been, there was no doubt that he would depart. Whatever else one may think of elections — of the circus of campaigns, of the disarray of incoming administrations, of the various gimmicks by which a political in-crowd seems to float from administration to administration — that orderly succession of power is well worth everything else. The counter-example of Russia, in which a reasonably intelligent and efficient administration stays on long past its constitutional end-date and then gradually squeezes out the civic life of the society while itself going progressively insane, should all by itself serve as a reminder of how essential ironclad term limits are.

Out the back door

Next in importance, I would say, is the constant wrangling over budgets. And this is one of the ways that American democracy has quietly fallen apart. The idea of representative government is to constantly return the question of expenditures to the people — this is the purpose of the frequent elections to the House of Representatives. That frequency helps to some extent — it reduces to a minimum the personal corruption that tends to beset entrenched courtly elites — but that project has been outmaneuvered by a set of giveaways, which all but minimize the effective power of legislation. Long-lasting programs like social security lock into place a tremendous chunk of federal spending. The ‘Washington Consensus’ with the rubber stamped Defense Department allocations accounts for much of the rest. And locked-in union contracts, in addition to contractor cartels, tend to obviate the power of local governments to work out the best deals for their constituencies. All of these locked-in deals have their own points, but, in aggregate, they almost completely remove the public, or the public’s elected representatives, from their primary constitutional responsibility, which is to assess financial priorities. Participatory democracy movements — like the attempt to submit budgets to referendum — seem to have gotten nowhere.

Next in importance is an open civil society, and an ability for the popular will to hold its elected representatives in check. This is where the Russian and Chinese counter-examples are particularly telling. It’s perfectly possible to have elections and parliaments — as in the Russian case — but for those elections to be meaningless if the powers-that-be have already orchestrated consensus throughout the society, whether through direct repression or through cunning manipulation of media organs. This is where the United States seems to be at a tipping point. The legacy media institutions are undergoing a deep crisis of conscience trying to decide if their primary purpose is to prop up what they regard as sane, stable governance; or to genuinely be a Fourth Estate and sort of permanent opposition to whomever is in power. This is not at all an easy question, especially in the era of Trump, but it is worth understanding that the founders, and early observers of American democracy like Tocqueville and Whitman, regarded the free press as part-and-parcel of the democratic experiment. In other words, democracy, to work, does not stop with elections and representatives. Democracy is a sort of pervasive spirit and, to succeed, it has to enter deep into the psychology of a civil society. That can only occur through a healthy, free press, and a cantankerous system of civic debate. The rubber-stamp ‘democracies’ that have become so prevalent in so much of the developing world are above all missing this streak — the forms of democracy are there but the tendency of elected officials is to revert to an autocratic mean, while a supine public and press feel it is somehow indecent to hold them to account.

What is important to recognize — and what I take to be the overall lesson of the last ten or twenty years — is that democracy is not a panacea or inevitability. Fukuyama was wrong to think that liberal democracy had simply prevailed in the battle of ideas and would carry all before it. Dubya was wrong to think that regime change followed by elections would inevitably produce more liberal systems of government. And, meanwhile, American democracy seems to be getting steadily narrower and more and more symbolic. But the more time I spend in other parts of the world, and the more I see of democracy’s arbitrariness, the more convinced I am also of the very real limitations of the alternative forms of government. Democracy is very far from an inevitability, it also has unique vulnerabilities compared to other forms of government. It still is very much enmeshed in the battle of ideas. But my contention is that the nub of democracy has incalculable benefits and is worth fighting for. That fight starts above all in the US, modern democracy’s cradle, and, above all, in the civil sphere. If we don’t believe in democracy, no one else will.