Nostos : Fri Oct 25 2024
America is not a democracy.
Dear Friends of Odyssey,
The presidential election is 12 days away. Have you noticed more and more signs and flags cropping up in our town? This is very beautiful because it shows that we care. We are a spirited people — we’re in the game, we’re thinkers, we’re proud citizens.
These new signs, though: while most are of the garden variety simply featuring the candidate’s name, some are more philosophically interesting. These more philosophically interesting signs are worried about “democracy,” and they say things like:
“Save democracy now.”
“The future of democracy is in your hands.”
“Our democracy is at stake.”
I have bad news: America is not a democracy. It’s partly democratic, but not entirely. And that’s on purpose. So how ought we to respond to these bold signs? Let’s try to understand more deeply what’s happening — because that’s what we do around here.
If America is not a democracy, what is it? It’s what ancient Greek philosophers would call a mixed constitution, and what our founders call a compound republic. You see, there are only four ways to organize communal power:
One: Concentrate it in one person. At its best this is a kingship, at its worst a tyranny.
Few: Concentrate it in a few people. At its best this is an aristocracy, at its worst an oligarchy.
Many: Concentrate it in many people. We just call this democracy.
Mixed: Delegate some power to one, some to a few, some to many. This is a mixed constitution.
Put that permanently in your brain: one, few, many, mixed.
The kind of political arrangement we have is a republic, whose defining feature is self-government. And the primary beauty of the U.S. Constitution are the structural parts that it creates to enable and sustain this self-government: one part is the legislative, one part the presidential, one part the judicial. Underlying some of these parts are the popular elections by the masses of ordinary citizens.
Notice how this creates a mixed constitution since our “branches” roughly correspond to the various options for concentrating power:
One: Our executive branch is like a kingship or monarchy.
Few: Our legislative and judicial branches are like an aristocracy or oligarchy.
Many: Our popular elections are like a democracy.
James Madison, in Federalist Paper 48, refers to the legislative, executive, and judicial branches as “departments of power.” But notice: there’s no “democratic branch” or “democratic department of power” in the U.S. Constitution. Why?
Here’s the true and easy answer: Ours is a representative democracy, where we choose humans to make decisions on our behalf, and those chosen humans fulfill roles in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
Here’s the true and hard answer: Democracy is inherently unstable and therefore needs to be restrained. Face it, most human beings, and therefore most American citizens, are so ignorant about human nature, the causes of human flourishing, and the purposes of government that their voices and choices in a communal context can only contribute to a decline of the society.
And yet, there are also significant dangers inherent in excluding the great mass of relatively uneducated citizens because, despite our collective ignorance, we all nevertheless possess a deep collective wisdom. Was it Buckley who quipped that he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard? Regardless, you get the point.
Finding this balance is one of the Holy Grails of governmental theory, and the subject of long debate in humanity’s great conversation on flourishing and freedom. America’s founders discovered and designed a nearly miraculous system to include as many citizens as possible in the decision-making processes of our republic, while preventing any one of them, or any single group of them, from concentrating power.
And they did this by studying great books — books which constitute one huge conversation about knowledge, ethics, and governance. In fact, we might think of the American experiment in self-government as one spoken contribution in this conversation.
The discussion is open to all. Ready to join? If so, you might want to catch up on what others have said about mixed constitutions before. Here’s your reading list:
The earliest source for a vigorous discussion of constitutional types and the potential of a mixed constitution is Herodotus’s Histories 3.80-82. We often refer to this part of Herodotus as “the constitutional debate.”
Next read Book 8 of Plato’s Republic, which features a famous conversation about the types of constitutional arrangements, their deviant forms in the state and in the human person, and how they devolve and transition one to another. FYI: Democracy does not fare well, nor does current America if analyzed from the framework of this passage in Plato.
Aristotle’s Politics 3.7—18 is the absolute locus classicus, and provides the clearest exposition of government by one, few, and many, outlining the good and bad form of each: kingship/tyranny, aristocracy/oligarchy, politeia/democracy.
It is Cicero’s Republic 1.39—69, however, that really gets the ball rolling in arguments against the pure form of one, few, and many, and arguments for a mixed constitution. And by the way, the American founders were steeped in Cicero (see Carl Richard’s The Founders and the Classics)!
The following Federalist Papers discuss the type of government that we have at a high, theoretical level:
39 — The Conformity of the Plan to Republican Principles: “The first question that offers itself is whether the general form and aspect of the government be strictly republican. It is evident that no other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.”
47 — The Particular Structure of the New Government and the Distribution of Power Among Its Different Parts: “The several departments of power are distributed and blended in such a manner as at once to destroy all symmetry and beauty of form, and to expose some of the essential parts of the edifice to the danger of being crushed by the disporportionate weight of the other parts…The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
48 — These Departments Should Not Be So Far Separated as to Have No Constitutional Control over Each Other
51 — The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments: “It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
Finally, we may paraphrase Winston Churchill on democracy: It’s the worst form of government, except for all the others.
I do wonder, though, if Winston was up-to-date on the intellectual history of pure and mixed constitutions. Given his intellect and the fact that he could write books faster than I can read them, I’m guessing yes. But that’s a question for the likes of Larry Arnn — another day.
For today and for those of us in Ocean Grove, we may now wonder how to respond to these philosophically interesting “Save democracy!” signs. America is not a democracy. It’s a compound republic — on purpose, and with the weight of human wisdom behind it.
So the authors of these signs are either unknowingly ignorant or willfully deceptive. Either way, what we owe them is education. And in the meantime we ignore them, and get on with the business of attempting to understand which of today’s parties and their candidates will fulfill the executive “department of power” in “the compound republic of America” (to quote James Madison) in the way that it was designed.
At Odyssey, we are resolutely nonpartisan but philosophically vigorous, and we hope some background reading on the kind of thing that we live in will help all of us make it as beautiful and virtuous and free as humanly possible.
To that end we work,
Joey