Breaking Democracy's Spell

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Diagnosing Democracy's Power

It is natural today for Americans (and at least tempting for many others across the world) to think of democracy as a synonym for good government. On recent evidence in high places, it is even intuitively plausible to some Americans to assume that this linguistic equivalence somehow carries through to practical causality, so that endowing a very foreign country with the facilities for democracy could somehow automatically generate the capacity for it to govern itself well. To hear that meaning lurking in the word itself may simply be ingenuous, but the practical equation has proved altogether less innocent. One way or another, the modern world's romance with democracy has shed at least as much opacity and confusion as it has light. There is something quite central to the political world we now inhabit that we very conspicuously fail to comprehend, and it is hard by now to miss the fact that one major element in generating and amplifying our confusion comes from the deep unclarity and instability of the master idea through which we seek to take our bearings.

The principal aim of this book is to bring that unclarity and instability into much sharper focus. It pursues that aim first by exploring the sources of democracy's current claim to authority and then by seeking to identify the processes through which that claim has won its in so many ways remarkable ascendancy. On that basis it then attempts to pin down the main mechanisms through which that ascendancy has impaired our collective political judgment. In conclusion, it assesses the resources still open to us to recover our bearings and learn to judge less disastrously in the future.

This is a flagrantly un-American agenda. All that can be said in its mitigation at the outset is that its purposes are far from un-American and in no sense hostile to the people of the United States or the great state that has loomed so large in the destinies of the world throughout my own lifetime, a state that, in my early childhood, in fragile union with the Red Army and the tattered remnants of still-free Europe, saved the possibility of civilized life across the globe at its darkest hour. It required some temerity to discuss these questions so bluntly in a very public setting at Yale, of all universities. No one who studies political science in the United States could fail to register the huge impact, over at least the past six decades, of Yale's great interpreters of the drama of American democracy, most of them still very dynamically alive and still living in New Haven: Robert Dahl, if no longer Charles Lindblom, Robert Lane, and David Mayhew, along with the generations of younger scholars who have followed in their wake, some of whom I proudly call my friends. But it is still appropriate to press these questions under the aegis and in memory of Henry Stimson, a great American statesman in the crucible of postwar reconstruction and a figure who, more than most, was forced by the exigencies of his public responsibilities to view the interests of American citizens in the global context in which their successors will continue to have to live.

A simple formula for the goal of this inquiry is to de-parochialize the understanding of democracy for today and tomorrow—to disentangle the skein of ideas the term now evokes and the political phenomena associated with those ideas, as far as practicable, from the contingencies of local political experience and to relocate them back in the intractably global setting that the term itself so unmistakably occupies. That is not a modest project. Every human being comes from a very small and hopelessly parochial setting and can scarcely hope to succeed dramatically in de-parochializing anything, still less the sources of the allure of the single most powerful political formula in today's world. The sole comparative advantages within anyone's reach in pressing this inquiry are a due sensitivity to the continuing perils of political parochialism in the hectically interactive world we all now live in and a sustained effort to grasp how the ecumenical reach of this charismatic category trades off against the insistent parochialism that each of us necessarily apprehends it to signify and refer to.

In America's case in recent years, that acutely parochial sensibility has done many millions of people very grievous harm, as it was doing by the end of my own first stay in the United States in the mid-1960s, and as it had done in my own country a quarter of a century earlier, by the year I was born. Through the harm it was doing to America's citizens then, it was also at that point, as it is once again now, inflicting massive collateral damage on their enduring human interests. It matters very greatly how the citizens and political elites of the United States apprehend democracy: what it means, what it causes in the world, what was required for it to come into existence in the first place, and what is now needed for it to persist with any security in any given setting. It matters for huge populations of which they know almost nothing, and because it matters so much for those, it has long mattered and will continue to matter for Americans and their children and grandchildren after them.

Why does this word democracy now hold such singular political authority? Where is the power that lurks so strangely within it? What exactly is it that modern populations are consenting to when they subject themselves to democracy's sway?

You can hear that question in a number of different ways and try to answer it accordingly. One way to do so is to retrace in outline the story of how it won that ascendancy. But to do that, it is first necessary to address a prior issue: What does the ascendancy itself really consist of? That question has two elements. What exactly is it that has gained ascendancy in democracy's sway; just what is democracy as we have come to understand and experience it? And what is it about democracy that equips it to establish and sustain that sway?

What has gained ascendancy is elusive enough in content but easy to recognize in form. In essence, democracy is above all a formula for imagining subjection to the power and will of others without sacrificing personal dignity or voluntarily jeopardizing individual or family interests. The standing of any such formula is necessarily precarious in political use, since subjection itself detracts painfully from dignity in the first instance, and since it also rationally precludes complete assurance of protecting any interests at all.

You can see the imaginative pressure on the formula at once if you call to mind the fact that three hundred years ago, virtually anywhere the word democracy might possibly be written or spoken, it was very close to a synonym not for good but for bad government. It is perhaps a bit strident to claim that democracy four centuries ago was a pariah word. As my friend Quentin Skinner pointed out to me sternly when I did so refer to it, democracy did, after all, elicit a measure of respect on one prominent occasion from a figure as unlikely as King Charles I of England, though admittedly under some political pressure. No one, however, could readily mistake Charles's sponsorship for unequivocal endorsement. The point he meant to concede was not that democracy on its own was a sufficient condition for, or even a helpful contribution toward, good government, but merely that democracy, painstakingly inserted into a highly constraining structure of countervailing powers, could contribute something distinctive to the mix of benefits that mixed government (government that combined elements of democracy with usually rather more salient and consequential elements of monarchy and aristocracy too) could be trusted to supply, and that under these constraints and these alone, democracy could supply that benign supplement more dependably than unmixed monarchy or unadulterated aristocracy could be relied on to provide it.

That special additive, as Charles identified it in his celebrated Answer to the XIX Propositions in June 1642, was liberty, a term of great ideological resonance in England's lengthy history and a value that no English monarchs could safely align themselves against. This was no anodyne concession to politeness by a ruler (in any case not noted for his tact), since there are grounds to see liberty in that rich and diffuse English sense as a fair counterpart to the freedom that the democrats of ancient Athens viewed as the principal benefit of their own democratic way of political life, and since the political setting in which the liberty of democracy featured in England's governmental structure was the elected House of Commons, which Charles had painstakingly prevented from meeting for over a decade precisely in order to free himself from its harassments and obstruction. For Charles himself, whatever else might be in doubt about how best to govern England, what was in no way dubious was who was entitled to do so: who was the sovereign and who must submit themselves to being governed—who were the subjects. It was he who was the sovereign, and all the other native born persons in the kingdom were the subjects; and the gulf between the two was categorical and unbridgeable. As he stood on the scaffold nearly seven years later, in January 1649, he insisted for the last time:

Truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever; but I must tell you their liberty and freedom consists in having of government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having a share in government, Sir, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clear different things.

That is not a tone we are still accustomed to hearing in the English language (still less the American). Yet at any moment when sovereignty is located and applied, Charles was certainly right then; and he must still be just as right today as he was in 1649, even though by that year his own argument had turned so brutally against him. Seen from the receiving end, what sovereignty asserts, requires, and imposes is indeed subjection. Whenever it no longer dares to assert or impose subjection, sovereignty itself has vanished away (not merely been parceled out into a miscellany of vaguely demarcated jurisdictions, as for many purposes it frequently now has). Subjection is an inherently distasteful and degrading condition, most disconcertingly so at the point of incidence—at where it is applied. The special and enduring allure of democracy in competition with other regime titles is not that it better ensures the service of the interests of the citizens. How far it does assure anything of the kind is a complicated and elusive causal calculation across time and space, precariously related to regime form, and one in which democracy has sometimes come out badly wrong and will surely often do so again.

Where the allure really lies is in the reconciliatory offer of the chance to assume subjection for yourself and to share, on notionally equal terms, in selecting the person or persons who is going to deploy it. It is hard (and also sometimes wrong) not to be suspicious of this reconciliatory promise: not to see it quite often in practice as largely a mirage, a vision of water in the desert where the water alas is not there. But the water itself is a real-enough need. What is illusory is where it appears to be—almost within reach. Any theory of sovereignty, any conceivable way of imagining and interpreting what it consists of, why it is there when it is there, and why in some form or other it is genuinely required will over-authorize in practice. It will endorse far more claims than carry any critical validity. It will license more power in wholly untrustworthy hands than a steady vision of what is going on could possibly sanction. Democracy is no exception, and American democracy no more of an exception than any other nation's interpretation or experience. Indeed American democracy's greatest claim to historical distinction, its impressive longevity and spatial amplitude, guarantees that it must have encompassed, as it indubitably by now has, a huge range of excess authorization of the outcomes of sovereign choice. If you want power and attain it on any scale, you cannot also hope to elude responsibility. Every sovereign state, to speak crassly, has blood on its hands. The older and bigger, all but inevitably the more so.

In purely analytic terms, there is no reason to attribute democratic sovereign over-authorization to any distinctive speciousness lurking in the category of democracy itself. It is wrong to defame democracy, though equally wrong to try to shield it from any infamy it richly earns in use. But all of us for the present, at least in countries that distantly resemble the United States in their political arrangements, are caught up in the distinctive imaginative deceptions of democracy and exposed more deeply than we can possibly realize to its particular propensities to over-authorize and distort political and moral orientations as it does so.

There is a need on the part of its subjects to which sovereignty answers: above all, the need to establish and sustain a framework within which they can hope to live securely. But it can respond to that need only by removing from them in practice, sooner or later, any right or responsibility to judge for themselves how the sovereignty itself is to be exercised. Democracy in any defensible understanding (any interpretation that is not explicitly mendacious) restores that right and responsibility, however fleetingly, to every citizen, at least in leaving to them the choice over who exactly is to judge how the sovereignty itself is to be exerted. They personally authorize (however unwillingly or inadvertently) the judge or judges, and their own judgment therefore figures explicitly in the terms of their subjection. Just how legibly it so figures—quite how accurately it calibrates and enforces their judgment—is open to serious dispute in any possible institutional rendering of democracy, and is in fact actively disputed in almost all decisions under democracy in which the citizens (between them) particularly care about the outcome. It is not characteristic of democracy, as Plato and Hobbes each definitively pointed out, that its reconciliatory offer of inclusion is reliably experienced in practice as either soothing or normatively unerring.

Seen from that angle, the reconciliatory benediction of democracy looks to be a very poor bargain, an all but vacuous gesture in exchange for a dismayingly complete alienation of autonomy. In the United States in particular, it violates the intimations of a remarkably wide range of sensibilities, from the Kantian elevation of devotion to equality of respect for every member of an often vividly unedifying species, to the surly defiance of governmental intrusion into any sphere beyond defense of life, limb, and personal property, which extends more widely across the American citizen body and which is especially evinced at present by the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party. To see just why the democratic bargain has come to be so widely accepted in America of all countries, and why its acceptance in that setting has come to seem to so many to be a good reason to believe it uniquely eligible for the rest of mankind, it is necessary to see three elements in close relation to one another: first of all, the drastic need for government that arises out of the practical economic and social organization of the human world as it now is; secondly, the all but complete exhaustion of every rival or earlier reconciliatory formula for motivating the acceptance of subjection; and thirdly, but every bit as consequentially, the degree to which citizen acceptance of subjection is in practice inauthentic—provisional, often insincere or impatient, and always open to decisive withdrawal. That, psychologically, is how citizenship now is, and very plausibly how it always has been and was always bound to remain. If citizenship, then that. This third element in the bargain is perhaps intuitively obvious and always recognized at least tacitly by everyone, though it certainly conflicts sharply with what most of us care to be heard saying. You could say that it is the democratic counterpart to prerogative or reason of state: the unstated intention to breach our own personal version of the social contract whenever we deem fit. In that sense, this tacit contract, with its understandably tacit reservations, is indeed, in a memorable phrase attributed to the late Robert Nozick, "not worth the paper it's not written on."