Part 14 (1/2)
An early attempt to give expression to a modern demos with access to political life occurred in the so-called Putney debates during the English civil wars of the 1640s. In contrast to the const.i.tution-writing convention of 1787 in Philadelphia where there would be many delegates representative of the modern elites but none from the demos,23 at Putney the lower cla.s.ses and the poor were present and democratic arguments were advanced. Those debates also saw the appearance of a new and self-conscious presence defending the political hegemony of nascent capitalists.24 The events at Putney have been preserved in a verbatim account of actual debates when the demand for political members.h.i.+p was put forward. The debates reveal a moment when, by their own actions, people were struggling to become ”the people,” to create themselves as political actors. The exchanges were triggered when the spokesmen for the rank and file of the revolutionary army, representing the views of the Leveller movement, proposed that the army demand the nation's adoption of a written const.i.tution (”An Agreement of the People”) ensuring that ordinary men would be guaranteed the right to vote. That would have meant the abolition of the prevailing property qualifications then governing elections and parliamentary representation. Most of the officers, including Cromwell, the army's leader, opposed the demands; in the person of Henry Ireton, Cromwell's son-in-law, they would have an articulate spokesman.
The crucial importance of the debates was to expose the tensions between political democracy and economic power, between demotic claims on behalf of political equality and an elite defending the principle that political inequality was the natural, even logical reflection of economic inequality: between a claim that economic status should not determine political inclusion and a claim that economic status should dictate political status. Underlying these tensions was a further disagreement as to whether the nation was to be tended in the spirit of commonality, equality, and shared power, or governed by those who represented newly emerging interests-mercantile, professional, smaller landowners-intent on challenging the older dominant groups of aristocracy, established church, and wealthy landowners.
The Leveller position was put forward in a famous speech by Colonel Thomas Rainsborough: I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore . . . I think it's clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under. . . . [E]very man born in England cannot, ought not, neither by the law of G.o.d nor the law of nature, to be exempted from the choice of those who are to make laws and for him to live under, and for him (for aught I know) to lose his life under.25 Ireton responded by rejecting the view that natural right supplied a ground for ”disposing of the affairs of the kingdom, and in determining or choosing those that shall determine what laws we shall be ruled by here.” Only persons with ”a permanent fixed interest in the kingdom,” he argued, were qualified to serve as electors and as representatives. The reason: ”those who shall choose the law makers shall be men freed from dependence upon others.”26 Ireton then went on to identify those who represented the permanent interest of the society as ”the persons in whom all land lies, and those in corporations in whom all trading lies. This is the most fundamental const.i.tution of this kingdom, and which if you do not allow, you allow none at all.”27 The Levellers' appeal to natural right, he warned, put all property at risk: any man might ”take hold of anything that a[nother] man calls his own.”28 If ”you admit [as electors] any man that hath a breath and being” along with those itinerants who are ”here today and gone tomorrow,”29 if those who had no property were allowed to vote, then there could be no guarantee that they would not ”vote against all property.”30 Ireton also added a rea.s.suring note that those who had no property would nonetheless have an ”interest” under rule by the propertied, for they would be protected and enjoy the freedom ”of trading to get money and to get estates by” and would eventually join the ranks of the propertied.31
X.
In Ireton's argument wealth signified independence, autonomous actors. Dependence, in contrast, meant being compelled by need and circ.u.mstance to submit to the superior power of another. When power is organized in the form of an economy based upon private capital and the division of labor, then ipso facto the lives of most persons will be directed by others. Dependence is thus inst.i.tutionalized as inequalities of reward and, consequently, of power. A future task of intellectual elites is also set: to provide the ideology (e.g., meritocracy, freedom) by which inequality would be acceptable and consistent with principles of democracy and equality, thereby countering Rainsborough's argument that elections without a property qualification empower those who represent numbers but little or no economic or intellectual power.
Thus two forms of power were being pitted against each other. One claimed that superior economic power should translate directly into political power; the other that political life involved transactions among equals, a formula which required that social status, economic power, and religious loyalties be suspended temporarily so that citizens might deliberate as equals-a formula that realists would dismiss as magical while egalitarians would see it as magic realism, as a moment of possibility when the powerless are empowered and experience independence.
In the centuries that followed, the economy of capitalism became increasingly powerful, both as a system of production and as a system of inequalities. While, unquestionably, the new economy would raise the ”standard of living” of the ”ma.s.ses,” it would also succeed in translating concentrated economic power into political power. Rather than a purely economic system supplying ”goods and services,” capital acquired political attributes. Faced with that reality, the magic realists, in desperation, would introduce their trump card, the threat of revolution. This meant arousing the dependents, organizing their numbers, and confronting the realists with their worst nightmare-instability, uncertainty, and, worst of all, the subordination of economic to demotic power-compounded by a wholly novel development, a new species of leader who, instead of hoping to join the governing elite, opted to remain with ”the people.”
Such a description might perhaps seem applicable to revolutionary France of the 1790s; however, that attempt at creating a modern demos with a revolutionary leaders.h.i.+p was directed against the Old Regime of monarchy, aristocracy, and church, against forms of power that were already being undermined by modern science, skepticism, and rationalism.32 For the third moment of democracy, the attempt to resurrect the idea of a demos, we might look to eighteenth-century America, not to the contest over the ratification of the federal Const.i.tution of 1789, nor directly to the revolution of 1776, but to the political consciousness that emerged among the colonists early in the eighteenth century and intensified in the agitation of the 1760s against British taxation and trade policies. An American political system would have its origins in protesting imperial policies only to succ.u.mb later to the temptations of empire.
Our present-day hagiography celebrates Founding Fathers but almost entirely overlooks the emergence of an American version of a demos in the decades before and during the revolution.33 In the years preceding the war for independence new political actors appeared: artisans, workers, small farmers, shopkeepers, seamen, women, African slaves, and native Indians. Typically they were reacting to a particular grievance: a tax, an ordinance, mistreatment of one of their own, a dispute over land t.i.tles-even more broadly, the inst.i.tution of slavery. Under the imperial system there were no official inst.i.tutions in which the lower and working cla.s.ses, women, and slaves partic.i.p.ated or were represented. The typical colony was ruled by a royal governor appointed by and responsible to the British government; colonial a.s.semblies were largely composed of wealthy landowners and well-to-do merchants, while voting requirements invariably excluded those without considerable property or wealth.
If a demos were to form, it would have to act from outside and against the system. Consequently demotic action tended to be ”informal,” improvised, and spontaneous-what can be called ”fugitive democracy.” There were demonstrations, protest meetings, pet.i.tions, tarring and feathering of royal officials, burning of effigies, destruction of official residences, and storming jails to free one of their own. Because of property qualifications and financial requirements, few could vote or run for office; hence leaders.h.i.+p was frequently provided by middle-cla.s.s sympathizers who contributed organizational skills so that slates of candidates could be presented or committees of correspondence formed to coordinate common action with their counterparts in other colonies.
XI.
Demotic action is typically triggered by felt grievances-not, initially, by a yearning for political partic.i.p.ation. Because of the exhausting demands of making a ”living,” surviving under harsh circ.u.mstances, dedication to a political life is hardly a conceivable vocation. While governing is a full-time, continuous activity, demotic politics is inevitably episodic, born of necessity, improvisational rather than inst.i.tutionalized. It is ”fugitive,” an expression of those who lack leisure time and whose work skills in modern times would become increasingly foreign to the kinds of experience and prerequisites deemed essential to governing and, conversely, more hospitable to those with experience in command or possessed of technical qualifications.
A would-be demos is drawn to democracy not because ordinary people expect to rule, but because, in theory, democracy legitimates the expression of widely felt and usually deep-seated grievances, the possibility that those who have only numbers can use them to offset the power of wealth, formal education, and managerial experience.
Foreign observers were impressed by the intensity of political interest among ordinary Americans. During the years from roughly the 1760s to the Const.i.tutional Convention of 1787 an American demos began to establish a foothold and to find inst.i.tutional expression, if not full realization. State const.i.tutions were amended by provisions that broadened the suffrage, abolished property qualifications for office, and in one case inst.i.tuted women's suffrage. There were also efforts to ease debtor laws, even to abolish slavery.
Those ”attacks” on property and the concomitant threat of demotic rule were crucial considerations prompting several outstanding politicians (Madison, Hamilton, John Adams) to organize a quiet counterrevolution aimed at inst.i.tutionalizing a counterforce to challenge the prevailing decentralized system of thirteen sovereign states in which some state legislatures were controlled by ”popular” forces. A new system of national power was proposed, at once centered yet with authority coextensive with the boundaries of the nation, and designed to discourage demotic power both by reducing the authority of the states, several of which had enacted legislation favorable to the lower cla.s.ses, and by minimizing the role of the demos in national inst.i.tutions. Only the House of Representatives would be more or less directly elected.34 The theory was this: the less the demotic presence, the more likely that the populace would defer to men of talent, judgment, and political experience-a governing cla.s.s composed largely of lawyers, financiers, and plantation owners who would serve the common good although not necessarily all cla.s.ses to the same extent. Thus was reborn the idea of a republican elite. The aim, which Madison, Hamilton, Adams and several other members of the emerging political cla.s.s bluntly stated, was to ensure that the new regime, while abstractly based upon ”the people,” would be directed by the representatives of wealth, status (slave-owners), and achievement rather than of democratic majorities.
Republican theory emerged as the counterforce to demotic power, thus perpetuating a dualism that had first appeared in ancient Athens. As noted earlier, republicanism promoted the notion of a governing cla.s.s, an idealized aristocracy, virtuous, able, and public spirited. When the theory was transported from Britain to America, it had to accommodate to bourgeois values of wealth and competence and to acknowledge in some degree the presence of democratic ideas and practices.35 In America republicanism had to find a place for democracy, eventually even endow it with sovereignty-if only in the abstract-while contriving obstacles to popular power that simultaneously advantaged the Few (e.g., a property qualification for voting) and defined governing in ways that corresponded to the abilities of a new cla.s.s of merchants, bankers, lawyers, and manufacturers.
Thomas Jefferson, more than any other early national hero, antic.i.p.ated the form that the republican-demotic dualism would take in the ”first new nation” and the possible terms of reconciliation. Jefferson defined a republican system as ”action by the citizen in person, in affairs within their reach and competence.”36 That formula pointed to the split nature of the new system. Although claiming that the people were ”const.i.tutionally and conscientiously democrats,” Jefferson proceeded to circ.u.mscribe ”action by the citizens.” Thus while citizens were ”competent to judge of the facts of ordinary life,” as when serving as jurors, they were ”unqualified for the management of affairs requiring intelligence above the common level.” In these higher matters their powers should be delegated to more intelligent representatives whom, if necessary, the citizens could remove by elections.37 Jefferson's a.s.sumption of an unproblematical transition from ”democracy” to representative government, from situations (jury trial) where the competence of citizens is deemed adequate to the task, to the ongoing, continuing ”management of affairs” where their ”intelligence” is ”unqualified,” testified to a conception of democracy's limited role even among its sympathizers. The tacit conviction was that when it came down to the actual work of governing, an elite (”intelligence above the common level”) was a prerequisite.
While governance might be connected to democracy by elections, the act of voting for representatives and a president would seem more demanding than jury service. Not surprisingly that conclusion was drawn by the Founding Fathers, who proceeded to configure and ”refine” elections so as to control their demotic potential and thus take the first step toward managing democracy. The Const.i.tution of the Founders compressed the political role of the citizen into an act of ”choosing” and designed it to minimize the direct expression of a popular will. As noted earlier, the citizen would not directly elect the president. Instead the citizen chose electors who would cast votes after deliberating in the Electoral College where, presumably, they were not necessarily bound by the wishes of voters. Similarly the citizen was not invited to vote for a senatorial candidate; senators would be selected by the legislatures of the states. As for the courts, the citizen had no part in the process: justices were initially nominated by a president chosen by the Electoral College and then confirmed by senators selected by state legislatures.
While later efforts at expanding the suffrage may have contributed to improving the lot of some groups previously excluded, such as women, elections mainly posed a challenge to the arts of management. Those arts soon became an integral, even a decisive element in the electoral process. Thus, early on, while the people were declared ”sovereign,” they were precluded from governing. That distinction, between pa.s.sive sovereignty and active governance, would be contested, defined, and redefined over nearly three centuries as Jacksonian democrats, abolitionists, suffragettes, Populists, and Progressives fought to promote and defend demotic power while the political elites-many of whose representatives early on would defect and transfer their loyalties to the Southern pro-slavery cause-worked to professionalize politics and to make governance a technical art.
XII.
In past centuries, with their economies of scarcity, the struggle for democracy was often described as a war between ”the haves and the have nots.” The element of truth in that formula throws into sharp relief the crucial changes in the stakes. In times past democracy struggled against the ”old regimes.” Today in the United States the status of democracy and the role of its adherents are the opposite of what they have been in the past. Put simply, the early democrats fought for what they did not have. Today the challenge for democrats is to recover lost ground, to ”popularize” political inst.i.tutions and practices that have become severed from popular control. It involves renewing the meaning and substance of ”representative democracy” by affirming the primacy of Congress, curbing the growth of presidential power, disentangling the stranglehold of lobbyists, democratizing the party system by eliminating the barriers to third parties, and enforcing an austere system of campaign finance.
Reforming these inst.i.tutions is not the same as democratizing them: to only a limited extent can the citizenry itself and by itself inject democracy into a political system permeated by corporate power. It can provide the initial impetus but not the sustained will. Or, stated differently, democracy has, first, to find itself, become a self-conscious demos; and, then, it has to reconceive its relations.h.i.+p with its ancient nemesis, elitism.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
Democracy's Prospects:
Looking Backwards.
I.
Generally when I ride it is the one time when I feel
alone, even though I know people are behind me. I ask people
a lot of times not to be in my line of vision because all I can
see straight ahead is, you know, s.p.a.ce.
-President George W. Bush.
At the critical moment when a volatile economy and widening cla.s.s disparities require a government responsive to popular needs, government has become increasingly unresponsive; and, conversely, when an aggressive state stands most in need of being restrained, democracy proved an ineffectual check. A public fearful of terrorist attacks and bewildered by a war based on deceit is unable to function as the rational conscience of the American state, capable of checking the impulse to adventurism and the systematic evasion of const.i.tutional constraints. A politics of dumbed-down public discourse and low voter turnout combines with a dynamic economy of stubborn inequalities to produce the paradox of a powerful state and a failing democracy.
But is it only democracy that is failing? Every day brings fresh evidence that American power is being challenged throughout the world, that its imperial sway is weakening, that its global economic hegemony is a thing of the past, and that it has been sucked into an unwinnable and interminable ”war against terrorism.” Is failing empire the opportunity for a democratic revival, or does that failure leave intact the tendencies toward inverted totalitarianism?
A democracy failing in what ways? What was democracy supposed to bring into the world that was not there before? A short answer might be this: democracy is about the conditions that make it possible for ordinary people to better their lives by becoming political beings and by making power responsive to their hopes and needs. What is at stake in democratic politics is whether ordinary men and women can recognize that their concerns are best protected and cultivated under a regime whose actions are governed by principles of commonality, equality, and fairness, a regime in which taking part in politics becomes a way of staking out and sharing in a common life and its forms of self-fulfillment. Democracy is not about bowling together but about managing together those powers that immediately and significantly affect the lives and circ.u.mstances of others and one's self. Exercising power can be humbling when the consequences are palpable rather than statistical-and rather different from wielding power at a distance, at, say, an ”undisclosed bunker somewhere in northern Virginia.”
What is at stake today is the choice between the two forms of politics, Superpower and democracy. The contrasting nature of those two forms was best revealed by the invasion of Iraq. Beyond those stark and familiar facts about the war-the poor planning that preceded it, the hapless attempts to administer the country following the fall of Saddam, the sacrifice of American lives to a shameful cause, and the incalculable harm done to the country and its inhabitants-there was the political loss of nerve among Democrats, the press, and the punditry, a failure so profound as to call into question the health of the political system as a whole. That failure extended to all but a minority of the citizenry; the vast majority waved an occasional flag and then, when possible, heeded the advice of their leader to ”fly, consume, spend.”
While there are many lessons to be learned from the war's debacle, there is one that is crucial to any future which democracy, especially partic.i.p.atory democracy, may have. It concerns the primary importance of truth telling and the destructive effects of lying.
II.
If democracy is about partic.i.p.ating in self-government, its first requirement is a supportive culture, a complex of beliefs, values, and practices that nurture equality, cooperation, and freedom. A rarely discussed but crucial need of a self-governing society is that the members and those they elect to office tell the truth. Although lying has figured in all forms of government, it acquires a special salience in a democracy, where the object of deception is the ”sovereign people.” Under nondemocratic forms of government, where the people are politically excluded as a matter of principle, lying is typically done by the sovereign or its agents, usually in order to mislead those presumed to be enemies or rivals of the sovereign. In modern dictators.h.i.+ps lying to the public was a matter of systematic policy and a.s.signed to a special ministry (sic) of propaganda. Statecraft as an especially bad joke . . .
Self-government is, literally, deformed by lying; it cannot function when those in office a.s.sume as a matter of course that, when necessary or advantageous, they can mislead the citizenry. This is especially true when democracy has been reduced to a form of representative government. Such government is, by its nature, distanced from the citizen. And instead of a representative's politics representing the citizen, the reverse is true: Beltway politics is re-presented to the citizen. The less viable and flouris.h.i.+ng democracy at ”home,” the less democratic representative democracy and the more prevalent a ”re-presented” politics, a politics lacking directness, authenticity. And never more so than in the age of spin doctors, public relations experts, and pollsters.
In the face of declining political involvement by ordinary citizens, democracy becomes dangerously empty and not only receptive to antipolitical appeals to blind patriotism, fear, and demagoguery but comfortable with a political culture where lying, misrepresentation, and deception have become normal practice.