13. WESTERN RATIONALISM

"DEMOCRACY" AS THE RISING IDEAL OF AMERICAN POLITICS

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, as we have just seen, America was developing its own new thoughts on the matter of society, and how progress could be brought into play to make for a much better world. Interestingly, much of the American individualistic mindset found itself easily forming around this term that about this time was gaining great currency: "Democracy."

Democracy in the American context was not Marxist, Socialist or even particularly Darwinist – as was the case generally in Europe.  But it did have strong elements of Rousseauian utopianism in it. And it seemed also to be a natural fit to the spirit, the mood, of America as it entered the 20th century.  American Democracy was built on the instinctive idea of the full sovereignty of the millions of individuals that made up American society.  They alone as individuals were responsible for their futures.  They alone governed their lives.  They were truly members of a great Democracy.

Democracy or Republic? Thus it was that with the arrival of the 20th century, Americans began more frequently to refer to their society as a democracy rather than as a republic.  Probably Americans thought that the two were the same thing.
They were not and never have been the same thing.  America is indeed a republic, just as the framers of our Constitution intended. America is not a democracy.  Nor has it ever been a true democracy – though it certainly possesses a great spirit of full and equal sovereignty among its people.

The term "republic" makes reference to the question of ownership of the political system or government of a people.   It comes from the Latin res publica, meaning "thing of the people."   It is similar to the old Anglo-Saxon word "commonwealth," meaning the wealth or property of the commoners or ordinary citizens.   This term "Commonwealth" is still in use in America in reference to the state governments of a number of the states that were once part of the original thirteen colonies (such as the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, etc.)   It was also the title that was assigned to the government of England for the brief period (1649 to 1660) when England was without a king but was ruled by a Puritan Parliament and its Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell.   A republic or commonwealth is simply a government that belongs to the people.   How it operates is actually yet a different question.

The term "democracy" makes reference to the question of how a political system works, who rules it and how.   A democracy is the type of government of a society in which the citizens rule their community directly – that is, when all governmental decisions are made by the people themselves.   Certainly America has a democratic tradition in that in the early days of the American colonies each town was ruled directly by an assembly which brought all the adult males together to make that town’s vital decisions on all sorts of matters, political, economic and spiritual.   But beyond the local level, and really only in the early days of the colonies, there has never been much democracy in America.

American government is more properly termed a "representative" government, in which the powers of government are performed by representatives of the people.  This has a democratic feel to it in that these representatives are often (though by no means always) elected and thus ultimately accountable to the people at some point for their performance in office.   Elected representatives need to have their mandate renewed periodically (re-election).   But many "representatives" of the people are not elected at all – such as judges and members and officers of the civil service and the military – but are appointed by office holders.

A big part of the confusion over the idea of democracy is that since the early part of the 20th century high-minded Americans began to take on the old and well-failed mid-1700s idea of Jean Jacques Rousseau, that democracy is some kind of natural political condition of man – natural in the sense that if it were not for the corruptions of a bad culture or a corrupt government, people everywhere would live freely, lovingly, on the basis of a deeply instinctive desire to live peacefully in fellowship with each other as equals.  That is, they would live democratically.  They needed no autocratic authority to force them into social compliance.  They could live together freely, strictly on the basis of their own personal instincts towards social harmony.

For Rousseau, the reason we did not find man presently living in such a state of natural bliss was because of the corrupting influence on human behavior of societies built on wealth and power.  As we have just noted, Rousseau felt that the solution was to tear down the artificial structure of European civilization and go back to nature, where we would then live naturally in blissful harmony.

So, according to Rousseau – and most utopian Western intellectuals since then, including a growing number of American Progressivists (and virtually all 20th century American hippies!) – democracy is supposed to be instinctive to man.  And one day, through our evangelical efforts to spread democracy to the world, we will be able to bring our world to a state of perpetual peace by having everyone living democratically – that is, freely.  It was and is a beautiful, utopian dream.

But it was and is a dangerous dream because it is built on an entirely naive understanding of human nature.  It is an idea built on a great illusion.

Man is, by all natural instinct, self-preserving and self-promoting. This is how all people start out life as babies, highly demanding of attention to their personal needs.  Their survival demands that. And that same sense of selfishness is vital to the process of socialization.  Man is able to live or function socially only because he is taught (as he grows up) that by living in cooperation with others, he will actually improve the benefits he personally draws from life.  Thus as he matures, he is taught by social authority how to cooperate with larger society in order to draw its tremendous benefits for himself.

The teaching process begins at an early age (the terrible twos), in his very first social context, that of the family (a family presided over by an authoritative mother and father).  He then continues to learn through schooling to extend this realm of social self-interest by cultivating a deeper sense of social self-discipline.

If any part of this process fails to take place, the individual will have a hard time coping with the demands of social life and will not know how to "do adult" and find a productive place in society.  Tragically, he might even fall into what society terms criminal behavior.

In short, the Rousseauian ideal, if actually undertaken, will result not in democracy but in anarchy, an anarchy however which will in no way resemble the beautiful anarchy dreamed of by the utopian anarchists!

Indeed, it is important to note that the Framers of the Constitution were definitely not intending to create a democracy.  For whatever reasons – partly historical (remembering how the Athenian democracy had been manipulated by Sophist demagogues who could move the gullible Athenians to support self-destructive policies and actions), partly Puritan, partly Aristotelian – they were not believers that pure democracy was possible … or even desirable.  The earlier Puritan understanding of man's inherent selfishness or sinfulness – and Aristotle's teaching about the susceptibility to tyranny of any kind of government, including democracies – made the Framers very cautious about turning all power over directly to the people.

They had built on the developing British parliamentary system of the 1600s and 1700s, one that the French political philosopher Montesquieu had pointed out (and Madison reaffirmed in The Federalist Papers) afforded all sorts of checks and balances against any one particular kind of political impulse (rule of one, of the few, or of the many) securing a dominant or controlling – or tyrannical position – in the governing program.  Power was cautiously allotted to this and to that part of the governing system, without it being concentrated in any one particular position. Power was purposefully spread widely across all these various political impulses to ensure that no power holder, not a presidential monarch, not a Congressional oligarchy, not an enlightened Federal judge, but especially not a democratic mob, could establish a controlling grip over the system.  To allow that to happen would be to allow tyranny to develop.  No indeed.  This was no democracy – nor for that matter an oligarchy or certainly even a monarchy that they had created but instead was a mixed-system Republic, one designed to best serve the whole society, present and future – for hopefully a very long time.

Representative government (as close as they got to democracy) was really provided for originally only in the House of Representatives, where the citizens were allowed a direct vote for their representatives in Congress.  The Senate was understood to represent the states and their governments, the two Senate seats each state was to receive generally being appointed by the state governors or elected by members of the state legislatures (the original Constitution did not specify how the states were to come up with their two senatorial representatives). In any case the U.S. senators were not originally intended to be elected by the people (the Seventeenth Amendment ratified in 1913, "democratizing" the Senate, would change that).  Likewise the Chief Executive officer, the president, was not to be elected directly by the people, but by the states, each state awarded special electors in the same number of their senators and representatives in Congress. These electors would be the ones who would elect the president (how the states were to choose their electors was also originally left up to the states to decide). And the federal judges were not elected by the people but were appointed by the president, subject to a confirming vote of the U.S. Senate.

Furthermore, the national officers were given only very limited jurisdiction – that is, they were permitted to govern only in very specific areas.  All other government functions were left to the state legislatures as their exclusive right to perform. Thus originally America's national democracy was quite limited in scope and subject to the checks and balances of the other branches and levels of the federal government, "federal" originally meaning the whole plan, including the huge governmental role reserved to the states as part of the federal system.

It must be remembered that the government set up by the Framers was actually a military-political alliance among thirteen independent-minded states, unifying them in the face of a threatening world outside of their own, such as the British wanting to come back to retake them, one by one – or even by greedy French or Spanish monarchs hoping to do the same.  It was never conceived as a government that would rule over the internal affairs of the thirteen states, as the Tenth Amendment states quite clearly.  The Framers neither desired nor needed such a government. They were very determined on that matter, having just gone through a huge war against the British King George III who had in mind to bring the thirteen colonies under his direct rule as their enlightened lord and master.

And yet this would always be the temptation of the powerful, to bring the less enlightened ones of society under the better rule of their natural superiors.  Such is always the temptation of the Enlightened Ones, who have fed themselves on the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Such self-awarded enlightenment is the worst of all human sins, for it gives the Enlightened Ones the false impression of being sacred and all-powerful, like gods.

However, the original American caution concerning unchecked democracy began to be set aside in the early part of the 20th century.  In part this development was the outgrowth of the Progressivist Movement, as America became very self-critical of the many corruptions in American government and society, and always on the lookout for improved ways to bring to the surrounding society.

Rather naturally, it was to the national government that reformers ultimately looked, in the hope that wise legislators might remedy America's various social problems.  And indeed the national government did just that, at least to the extent of stepping into the game of laissez-faire capitalism in order to referee the behavior of capitalism's prime players in the market place – thus the government's trust-busting of the financial monopolies that had come into ownership of huge sectors of the American economy.  But governmental reforms also included the safeguarding of the lives of America's workers, and the inspection and enforcement of standards of quality of the agricultural and industrial products sold to the public.

The government also began to put pressure on urban bosses to be open and fair about how elections and political business were conducted in American cities.  The party candidates for public office were usually selected behind the scenes by party bosses.  But in a move state by state over a period starting in 1902 and involving all the states by 1915, candidates for office came to be selected through the primary system, where the voters themselves were given the right to select (vote for) the candidates of their parties.  To this key democratic reform was added the ideas of popular recall of corrupt public officials.  And finally, to move urban government to work along more professional lines was added the idea of hiring a professional city manager who would supposedly be neutral in the realm of party politics, and simply supervise the functions of urban government on scientific principles!

And in early 1913, two new Amendments to the American Constitution went into effect, ones designed to give both the voter and Congress new powers, thus enhancing democracy.  However, these Amendments would also lessen greatly the effect of the checks and balances of the original Constitution.

The Sixteenth Amendment gave Congress the right to expand its ability to function on its own by allowing Congress to tax directly the incomes of Americans.  This would give Washington a new independence of operation from the states, which were viewed as too dependent on party machines and thus supposedly (supposedly by the Progressivists anyway) more susceptible than Washington to political corruption.

The power to tax is of course a great power – and the Progressivists had just given the government in Washington extensive powers not previously possessed. What they did not realize was that they had not solved the problem of corruption but had simply transferred the potential for that problem from the states to Washington – for they failed to understand that corruption always finds a path to wherever power is located.

The Seventeenth Amendment also diminished the power of the states by democratizing the U.S. Senate, making it now a body of government officials elected directly by the people rather than directly by the States.  Again the supposition was that it would operate more responsibly if it were answerable directly to the people rather than to the states and their political machines.

This was widely understood at the time to be an excellent idea – this idea of democratizing further the operation of American government, discarding the suspicions of the original Framers of the American Constitution who held no particular form of government, including democracy, to be ideal.

And certainly democracy was ideal – as long as the people themselves were sophisticated in their understanding of the process of national government, remained vigilant with a detailed following of national politics, and were not easily manipulated by clever voices that could spin ideas and turn hearts easily.  The Progressivists were confident that a well-educated electorate – under proper guidance (namely that of the Progressivists themselves) – could meet all these high standards.

But in doing this, this changed the very constitutional nature of American government from being a federal union of states (as in the United States) and instead a democratic republic (as in all modern dictatorial Socialist or Communist systems claiming to be People’s Democratic Republics).  This would remove one of the key pieces in the Constitution put there by the very wise Framers of the Constitution to check the growth of accumulating central power founded on democratic political instincts, well known in history to be so very easily manipulated by demagogues.  Indeed, the French soon (1789) clearly – and violently – demonstrated this problem inherent in pure democracy.

This Seventeenth Amendment now opened the way for the Washington government step by step to override the states' role in governing the internal affairs of the country, which indeed was the purpose of this Amendment.  And justified by supposedly the more Progressivist political professionalism found in a political bureaucracy which could now take its place in the nation’s capital in Washington, D.C., this amendment would gradually take real government from the hands of the people themselves, instead, leaving the democratic masses increasingly dependent on the political favors coming their way from the Washington political professionals.

Thus the irony of "democracy," repeated so often in the coming 20th century: Lenin and Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, Kim's North Korea for instance ... "enlightened" dictatorships claiming to best serve the interests of the people!