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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Too Much or Too Little Democracy?

The American political class is perennially obsessed with which party will come to power and what agenda it will implement, but, in some respects, this is a shortsighted view. Ultimately, victories for partisan legislation may pale in significance to constitutional changes. (Here, I use “constitutional” in the sense of the broader political system, the balance […]

The American political class is perennially obsessed with which party will come to power and what agenda it will implement, but, in some respects, this is a shortsighted view. Ultimately, victories for partisan legislation may pale in significance to constitutional changes. (Here, I use “constitutional” in the sense of the broader political system, the balance of ruling elements in the “regime,” rather than just the text of the Constitution itself.)

The Framers consciously constructed our political institutions to check the worst tendencies of each element. The Senate was supposed to be embody something of an aristocratic quality, the House the democratic element, the Presidency a monarchical component, and the Supreme Court the rule of law beyond day-to-day politics. Since the Founding era, though, we have seen tremendous changes in this balance. The Senate is now elected by popular vote and the nature of the Presidency has been transformed through reform of the Electoral College and the development of the primary system. On top of all that, the federal bureaucracy has taken on a life of its own. So our modern political system is a strange amalgamation of despotic, democratic, oligarchic, and bureaucratic elements overlaying the framework of the Founding. The question I’d like to pose: do we have too much or too little democracy at the present?

In an era of judicial legislating and the “imperial presidency,” it would be tempting to assume more power to the people would be the solution. Speaking from a conservative point of view, democracy sometimes furthers our ends (i.e. the passage of Prop 8 over the designs of California’s legislature and courts), but it’s less clear in other cases. For instance, if we did not have the less-democratic Senate, we would clearly have Obamacare by now. According to Tocqueville, more democracy would lead to more concern for equality and less respect for liberty, especially the right to property. So conservatives who rail against “elites” in the name of democracy are often entirely justified, but they are playing with a dangerous fire indeed, one that could burn them in the end.

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