What Is Democracy For, Anyway?

By Dan McLaughlin

Wednesday, April 21, 2021

 

National Review has lately had a lively debate about democracy — what it is good for, what are its limits, and how that should shape its structure. As usual, that debate involves some different perspectives among my colleagues, as well as a bunch of left-wing critics willfully misreading those perspectives and ascribing them to National Review as a single, monolithic, permanent institutional point of view. Let me step back and ask the fundamental question: What is democracy for?

 

The American Way

 

There are four basic pillars to the American experiment:

 

·        Republicanism: government without a monarch.

 

·        Democracy: government chosen by, and accountable to, the people.

 

·        Liberalism: government that respects core individual liberties such as freedom of religion, free speech, property rights, and due process of law.

 

·        Constitutionalism: government whose powers are constrained by a written document setting forth the rules, which the government cannot easily change at will.

 

All four pillars are equally essential. The United States was the first nation on earth with a government that was simultaneously republican, democratic, liberal, and constitutional. For roughly the first 75 years of its existence, it was the only one. Yet, historical example as far back as the democracy of ancient Athens and the republic of ancient Rome showed that each of these elements tended toward self-destruction. Combining all four was a bold act. Through experience, Americans from the Founding forward relied on two more related elements to secure the system:

 

·        Separation of powers: the division of government both horizontally into different branches, and vertically into federal, state, and local governments each accountable to different electorates, such that Americans who are in the majority in some electorates may simultaneously be in the minority in others.

 

·        Deliberation: a variety of structures — including separation of powers and a written constitution — designed to slow down popular democratic majorities from trampling all the other elements.

 

The earliest Americans did not set out to found a democracy, yet they continually found that self-government protected their liberties better than anything else. Virginia’s General Assembly dates to 1619. The Pilgrims came to Massachusetts seeking one limited form of liberalism: They wanted religious liberty, but for a religious community, not individuals. They signed a constitution of sorts, the Mayflower Compact, aboard their ship before they even established permanent homes on land. Its implicit assumption was that the “body politick” they were forming drew its legitimacy from the consent of the governed.

 

The Declaration of Independence did not declare that the colonists were rebelling over democracy, but over liberty:

 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

 

The colonists were rebelling against a government that was not republican or constitutional. The British government was in some ways democratic, but its Parliament was elected through a very narrow suffrage and did not even pretend to be composed of districts of equivalent population, and its king was then locked in his own battle to assert more monarchical control over Parliament. What mattered the most to the colonists was that Britain’s government was liberal at home, yet it violated their liberty.

 

Yet, from the beginning, not only did the Declaration emphasize that the legitimacy of government derives “from the consent of the governed,” it also listed among its grievances against King George III his offenses against representative government, which the Continental Congress saw as dangerous both to liberty and to a right “inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only”:

 

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

 

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

 

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

 

We therefore see in American thinking from the outset a division between two theories of the value of democracy. One is the instrumental theory: Government exists to safeguard liberty, and democracy is simply one possible tool to accomplish that, but we prefer it because it is the most effective of the available tools. The more the people have a say, the less likely it is that the government will trample their liberties.

 

The other is the inherent value of democracy: that because government is legitimate only where it rests on the consent of the governed, it is imperative for the governed to have a say. A monarchy may be legitimate if it is broadly accepted by the people — which has been true of many monarchies in history — but that is not necessarily so. Democratic participation strengthens and safeguards the legitimacy of any government in general, as well as the legitimacy of specific actions taken through elected representatives. That inherent value could also be seen in Revolutionary-era slogans about “no taxation without representation.” It also emerges in the shift from the Articles of Confederation — which declared that it was the work of “we the undersigned Delegates of the States” and was ratified by the state legislatures — to the Constitution, a decade later, declaring that it was forged by “We the People” and was ratified by special conventions in each state elected to decide on ratification.

 

The inherent-value theory also accords with a broader conservative observation that bleeds over into the instrumental case: Democracy is valuable as such because the more people are involved in any decision, the more the benefits of collective experience ensure that better decisions will be made. This is the conservative case for popular sovereignty over government by unelected experts, judges, and bureaucrats. It is also the conservative case for free markets of the many over central planning by the few, and for traditions developed over many generations over the new ideas of one generation. In that sense, while conservatives clearly do not all agree on why or how to value democracy, it is broadly the case that American conservatives are more democratic in their thinking than liberals or progressives, by virtue of placing more value on free markets and tradition and less value on the judgments of experts and administrators and on the moral intuition of jurists.

 

The two strains of conservative thinking about democracy are, in practice, often more complementary than conflicting. People who like democracy for instrumental reasons will usually be just as pro-democracy as people who value it as a good in itself. Still, conservatives — at least those of us who are classically liberal-minded and thus oriented toward individual liberty — are philosophically inclined to see the two arguments as distinct, and to see the instrumental case for democracy as the more indispensable of the two.

 

Right-democrats and Left-democrats

 

Liberals and especially progressives, even when attempting to describe conservative thinking in good faith, tend to misunderstand this distinction for a variety of reasons. Partly, this is because they are disinclined to acknowledge that different values may sometimes be in tension or conflict. To a larger extent, it is because their value system is more focused on equality than liberty. Democracy is in theory egalitarian, valuing everyone’s vote equally, so in the abstract, progressives like it. In practice, however, they tend to prefer that elites have the real power to override democratic outcomes whenever popular opinion stands in the way of their vision of equality or impedes institutions that advance progressive values. Ask yourself, for example: When was the last time a state referendum passed that advanced some conservative cause and was not immediately challenged in court from the left?

 

Free speech and due process of law can be valued by progressives so long as they are seen as instruments of equality, but because progressives do not see liberty itself (besides sexual liberty) as having much inherent value, they are quick to jettison those liberties whenever they can be cast as obstacles to equality. This is why religious liberty provides such a difficult case for them: It has no necessary connection to political egalitarianism, so it is easily shoved aside when it stands in the way of either the majority’s will or the egalitarian project. The same is, of course, pervasively true of property rights. Conservatives see property rights as a bulwark of liberty: A man in his own home can do as he pleases in many different ways, while a man whose property can be held hostage by the government will be swifter to surrender his liberties. To progressives, by contrast, the security of property is problematic precisely for these reasons.

 

Deliberation and the Vote

 

In addition to the different theoretical approaches, a crucial element of the conservative view of democracy, which liberals and progressives tend to reject, is deliberation. Deliberation is the idea that the people may be right in the long run, but they are frequently wrong in the heat of a moment. As Tommy Lee Jones’s character says in Men in Black, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.” The goal of a representative republic is to channel the collective wisdom and life experience of the people without devolving into a panicky mob. This is the same reason why we prefer juries to lynch mobs, even when both are composed of the same people, convened for the same purpose. The Founding Fathers had seen enough of both assemblies and mobs to know the difference.

 

A good deal of deliberation is built into how our system functions before and after the people vote. Legislation requires the president, a majority of the House, and 60 percent of the Senate (due to the filibuster) or two-thirds of each house without the president. Our Constitution protects fundamental rights, but who decides what is too fundamental to be subjected to the whims of a majority of the people? A supermajority of the people. And they make that decision through a complex process that involves both Houses of Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures. Replacing the Senate takes six years. Replacing the majority of the Supreme Court takes decades. In the end, a large and determined majority of the people always wins — but the system’s many hurdles are designed to make swift, wrenching changes hard to accomplish. That is more rather than less democratic, by expanding the window of time in which people are heard.

 

The progressive position, by contrast, is that there should be as little deliberation as possible; the system should be stampeded into action as quickly as possible, and then the “experts” get to decide later on whether those actions are sufficiently progressive to be given effect. Because progressivism envisions strong elite-class checks on democratic decisions, and because those checks are not constrained by any prior democratically specified written laws, progressives do not worry overmuch about the quality of democratic inputs in the first instance.

 

To the extent that progressives do concern themselves with the quality of democratic decision-making, it is again to urge elite-class restraints on the information presented to voters. Thus, Democrat-sponsored legislation seeks to greatly constrict speech to voters; the Citizens United case, as you may recall, sought to ban a movie critical of Hillary Clinton from airing during an American election campaign. In recent years, the progressive campaign to police the information available to voters has extended to social-media bans and, of late, even mainstream media outlets denouncing newsletters on Substack.

 

Thus, the conservative view of voter deliberation is, again, more rather than less democratic than its progressive counterpart. Conservatives treat voters as adults, allowing them more information, and giving more effect to their enactments unless they conflict with something explicitly adopted by a supermajority. And voters should have the right and even the freely chosen duty not to vote if they have not paid attention or see no meaningful choice between the candidates. All that conservatives ask in return is that voters, too, act as adults: Take the time to register to vote, show up within a few days of the election, and gather some proof (for most voters, an easily accessible form of identification used regularly in daily life) that you are the person who registered.

 

None of this will, or should, prevent any voter, or class of voter, or party or faction of voters, from voting. If any group of voters is most likely to be deterred by bare-minimum requirements for advance preparation to vote, it is the youngest voters, and being young and immature is a transitory phase that people outgrow.

 

Still, my point is not that we should make voting harder in order to encourage deliberation. It is, to the contrary, that requirements that exist for other legitimate reasons — the orderly, secure, and fair conduct of elections and the swift and reliable counting of votes, once cast — should not be distorted and discarded simply to chase after the momentary participation of those voters who are least willing or able to exercise the most minimal forms of planning and organization that we expect to be characteristic of adulthood.

 

The deliberate nature of the vote is why we give it such special and serious power to make laws that bind our neighbors. It is a serious civic obligation. We should not make it a goal of our society to water that down.

 

Missing the Point

 

Finally, of course, the critics are just silly. Because National Review and its website have long been a platform for the Right’s internal debates, it has always had voices who urge a more stringent view of voter responsibility and protection of individual liberty. Kevin Williamson takes a decidedly more curmudgeonly and misanthropic view of the voters than I do and would be fine banning anybody under 30 from voting. Trump’s election is, in fact, Exhibit A in Kevin’s skepticism of the wisdom of crowds, not that you could tell this from people such as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump and Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley telling readers who would not know better that Kevin and I have our long-standing views on democracy just because we are mad that Trump lost. There is a respectable pedigree for Kevin’s view, if one I do not subscribe to. It has in no sense ever been a requirement of writing for National Review to agree with either of us.

 

Majorities can be wrong, sometimes disastrously so. Our system of government constrains them for that reason. But it is designed, not to stop the majority, but just to slow it down so it has time to think things through. We trust nobody to overrule a majority except for a larger, prior majority. The rest of the system is simply a series of speed bumps and sobriety checkpoints. Here, the people rule. All we ask is that they act as if they do.