The Friendships that Make Representative Government Work

L ast week, Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah) made headlines by posting a few home truths about democracy on Twitter. “Democracy isn’t the objective” of our system of government, he wrote. “Liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

Reactions to this statement among the chattering classes ranged from nonplussed agreement on the right, where Lee’s remarks were received as if he had written “1+1=2,” to indignant alarm on the left, where the tweet was taken to be the canary in the coal mine of an impending fascist dictatorship. In truth, there is scarcely a single statement that could better reveal the divisions between right and left on process questions than Lee’s did.

Democracy plays two very different roles for conservatives and progressives respectively. For those on the American right, the chief end of government has always been constitutional liberty under the rule of law. Within this framework, the state exists to secure pre-existing individual rights. Democracy is drafted into this system as the least defective safeguard for these rights against government encroachment: If all citizens are enfranchised, the theory goes, they will use their votes in a way that protects and defends their own liberties. Conservative democracy sees every voter as a check and balance against the power of the state.

Progressive democracy has its historical roots, along with a whole host of other maladies, in the French Revolution. Majority opinion was held up by the Jacobin revolutionaries to be inherently authoritative regardless of its content. The “general will,” as Jean-Jacques Rousseau called it, became, along with the blood of the guillotine and the dissevered heads of the nobility, a holy sacrament of revolutionary France. It was, to the perpetrators, the final cause and justification for everything that took place during the Reign of Terror. This is especially clear once one examines the Jacobins’ use of language. If “the will of the people” is the only just ground for political action, then it becomes expedient for those in power to make the concept of “the people” and the concept of “the state” co-extensive in their rhetoric. This the Jacobins did. No divergence of interest or identity was admitted between the rulers and the ruled. To admit of such a distinction would have been to create conceptual distance in the grammar of civic parlance between governors and governed, and to thus concede that just criticism of the regime was theoretically possible. As it stood, however, any criticism of “the state” in the First French Republic became, by the aforementioned transitive property of Jacobin politics, criticism of “the people.” And so a model was created whereby critics of the government could be easily repackaged as “enemies of the people” through the embrace of the idea that democracy is the greatest of all political values.

You see, then, why Senator Sanders’s insistence upon inserting the modifier “democratic” before the noun “socialism” isn’t at all comforting. Once the aggregate votes of an entire electorate are anthropomorphized into a single fictional “will,” the enactment of that will has to be entrusted to a single person or group. This delegation inevitably centralizes immense power over the lives of the many into the hands of the few. And yet, because the few are thought to be identical with the many within the rhetorical framework of unfettered democracy, they retain the illusion of acting on behalf of the nation when really they, and a small group of their confederates, are acting upon the nation. This is why the language of democracy can be volatile and dangerous when it isn’t subordinated to some greater good. Once the transitive identification is made between the people and the state, it’s quite easy for a leader to emerge who, in turn, identifies the state with himself and his own private interests with those of the people. Thus democracy provides a ladder up to power for tyrants to climb before throwing it down upon the masses who raised it. Thus the republic of the Jacobins gives way to the empire of Napoleon.

This, in a nutshell, is why Mike Lee is right. Democracy contains within itself the seeds of its own demise, and if it isn’t grafted onto a plant of more promising growth it inevitably terminates in despotism.

Of course, it isn’t just the transition from Robespierre to Napoleon that we would like to avoid in the United States. If it can be helped, we should look to avoid the politics of the French Revolution in the first place. And this is where we run into the opposite danger. In the wake of recent Democratic attacks upon America’s minoritarian institutions, many on the right have come out behind the politics of minority obstruction. Citing the points I made above, they argue that democracy is, in fact, so inherently dangerous to minorities that all available measures should be taken to resist majoritarian rule. Hunter Derensis at The American Conservative even went so far recently as to invoke the specter of John C. Calhoun to this end, calling the ideological progenitor of the Confederacy “one of the first-rate minds of the 19th century” and a potential guide for conservatives seeking to protect minority rights against an emerging progressive majority.

This is just as dangerous as the Jacobin approach, if for no other reason than that it would create the conditions in which revolutionary sentiment could fester. The Founders knew that in an open society, the majority would always eventually carry the day. They designed the Constitution to filter the formation of this majority opinion over time and across space so as to prevent rash action or malformed policy from being executed. But it remains the case that, practically speaking, no minority can successfully resist a majority intent upon some course of action. Calhoun’s doctrine of the concurrent majority sought was designed to protect the particular minority he represented: the mid-19th-century slave states. Under its auspices, minority parties to any political decision would have veto power over the policy of the majority. This veto power would then force the majority to make concessions to the minority until some unanimous agreement could be reached that might satisfy all.

Needless to say, if any state attempted to incorporate this doctrine into its constitution, the result would be complete paralysis. Drafting a piece of legislation that commands unanimous consent is exceedingly difficult in any nation, let alone one that encompasses 50 states and more than 300 million people with an amazing variety of backgrounds and interests. The entire political process in such a scenario would be held hostage by each and every minority faction with an axe to grind.

Some conservatives will, no doubt, find the prospect of everlasting political gridlock attractive: After all, it would mean a government that did many fewer things. But this attitude is mistaken — and dangerous. When there exist popular, majoritarian demands among the people for certain measures to be enacted by legislators, and efforts to meet these demands are repeatedly thwarted by minorities, the majority will eventually cease to treat the regime as legitimate. The French nobility played its own part in bringing about the revolution by engaging in just this kind of obstruction. People need to believe that the rules of the game that they’re playing when they enter the public square are fair and just. If this belief begins to wither on the vine among the electorate, then eventually the regime will lose the popular buy-in it needs to sustain itself.

The most pressing problem facing democratic countries, then, is that there is ultimately no referee to adjudicate between the prerogatives of majorities and the rights of minorities. Even the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court, which ostensibly serve that purpose, are merely at the far end of a majoritarian process that put them there in 1787 and that can remove or alter them if it so chooses. In the last analysis, the preservation of democracy depends upon agreement between all parties on the matter of which rights are beyond the reach of majorities. As James Madison writes in his essay, “Sovereignty:”

Whatever be the hypothesis of the origin of the lex majoris partis [law of majority rule], it is evident that it operates as a plenary substitute of the will of the majority of the society for the will of the whole society; and that the sovereignty of the society as vested and exercisable by the majority, may do anything that could be rightfully done by the unanimous concurrence of the members; the reserved rights of individuals (of conscience for example) in becoming parties to the original compact being beyond the legitimate reach of sovereignty, wherever vested or however viewed.

For Madison, there are certain fundamental rights that are “beyond the legitimate reach of sovereignty.” The safety of these rights depends upon agreement as to what they are, so that no party, if it finds itself in the majority, will dare trample on them. The function of democracy then depends upon at least as much friendship as is required to come together around certain unanimous principles. Unlike Calhoun’s concurrent majority, this unanimity doesn’t exhaust political action, but constrains it, so that losing minorities can give their consent to the majority’s will after an election without feeling as if their dearest interests are threatened.

Civic friendship is, in short, the last recourse for regime continuity in any democratic country. It’s what Jefferson was looking for when he said, “We are all Federalists. We are all Republicans.” It’s what Lincoln pled for at the magisterial conclusion of his first inaugural address:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

To say that the health of democracy in America depends upon friendships forged between Democrats and Republicans is not to traffic in ineffectual, sentimental platitudes. It’s to appreciate the hard-headed facts of political philosophy, bequeathed to us through the ages by men such as Lincoln. Democratic life, like eternal life, is conditioned upon the love we show for our enemies. If Americans want their political opponents to acquiesce in defeat whenever elections are lost instead of vandalizing the constitutional order, they have to make friends across the aisle. For when trust and faith cannot be sustained between victor and vanquished, democracy will not long endure.