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The Consent of the Governed

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I’ve got a new column up at The Week about a topic that has me increasingly frustrated, and I’m not sure the column adequately expresses my frustration. The subject is whether American politics is broken because it has become too democratic.

A couple of months ago, Andrew Sullivan argued the case in his usual hysterical style, with inevitably frequent reference to Plato; I responded to him here. Now Jonathan Rauch makes the subtler argument that well-intentioned reforms aimed at greater accountability and transparency have made the dirty work of sausage-making impossible, and that this largely explains American politics’ manifest dysfunction. And I’m sorry: I just don’t buy Rauch’s soberly centrist lament any more than Sullivan’s hysterical screed.

In part I don’t buy it because the case feels cherry-picked to me:

For one thing, American government genuinely improved after many of the reforms Rauch cites. No Ted Cruz emerged as the result of the direct election of senators. The increased importance of presidential primaries did not neuter party leaders — indeed, earlier this season most political commentators dismissed Donald Trump’s chances by citing The Party Decides. Congress operated with no more than typical inefficiency after the post-Watergate reforms. As for the rise of the congressional free agent, the Gingrich reforms were specifically intended to increase party discipline — and to concentrate that disciplinary power in the hands of the speaker and whip, as opposed to the previously-powerful committee chairs. And, indeed, congressional Republicans have proven far more disciplined than, say, the Democrats were in the 1980s, when the Republicans regularly peeled off conservative Southern Democrats to pass the Reagan administration program.

Outside groups like super PACs are troublesome for politicians because they are formally forbidden from coordinating with campaigns. They are even more troublesome for the parties with whom they compete. But is there any structural reason why they should be especially ideologically extreme or resistant to compromise? If there is, Rauch doesn’t articulate one. The parties themselves were a response to the need for a new organizational scheme that reflected the divergent interests within the new nation; the rise of political patronage machines, similarly, were a way of reflecting the interests of voters who saw themselves inadequately represented. Why couldn’t extra-party pressure groups work similarly, and compromise just as well as parties themselves did?

I can suspect how Rauch would respond to each of these contentions. For example, he might argue that the defections of Southern democrats in the 1980s proved his point about the possibility of compromise when there was pork available to grease the wheels, and that  Gingrich’s concentration of power in the hands of the speaker ultimately empowered radical factions who could threaten to withhold support. But these counter-arguments actually prove my point about cherry-picking: they amount to saying that party discipline is good except when it’s bad.

But the main reason I reject the premise is more fundamental:

[W]hether well-intentioned government reforms have unintentionally made governance harder, they are not the cause of the insanity that has gripped American politics. Rather, that insanity is driven by a crisis of legitimacy in one of our major political parties. For a variety of reasons, the Republican Party has completely lost the confidence of the Republican electorate. In response to that loss, the GOP has tried to maintain loyalty on the basis of appeals to identity and ideology, appeals whose effectiveness have steadily declined, until we have now reached the point of open revolt.

Rauch calls for a restoration of mediating norms and institutions as a solution to a surfeit of transparency and accountability. Give party leaders the tools to make deals, and deals will be made once more. Call it the good government case for the dirty business of sausage making. The problem, ironically, is that the prescription suffers from the same defects of good government reforms generally, of elevating process over the conflicts of interests that the process must manage to achieve any kind of result.

Authority, in any political system, rests on the consent of the governed; democracy just provides the most effective means for the political class to determine whether the governed continue to consent. So long as the GOP’s voters lack confidence that the party is responsive to their interests, attempts to insulate the political class from direct accountability will only inspire greater ructions and revolts. Inasmuch as its donor class is indifferent or actively hostile to any such effort — and plenty of evidence points to the fact that this is the case — we should expect those disturbances, and their chaotic impact on America’s political system, to continue for some time to come.

I feel awkward arguing against these critics of too much democracy because I don’t particularly believe in the ideology of democracy. That is to say, I don’t believe the people have a will in the first place, much less that the government is obliged to follow its dictates.

What I believe is that, as I say in my column, authority rests on the consent of the governed – and it does so in every system, in monarchies, autocracies and one-party dictatorships as well as in democracies. That consent can be tacit or active; it can be achieved by means of open debate or demagogic persuasion or through education in a set of traditions and norms that the citizenry doesn’t even think to question. But as a practical matter, authority depends not on force but on consent. Once it resorts to force, authority is revealed as tyrannical.

Democracy is, from this perspective, best viewed as a mechanism for the processing of information. It’s a feedback mechanism that allows for changes of policies and/or personnel in response to a decline in popular consent. It’s the best means we know of to communicate whether the people consent to be governed.

Rauch – and Sullivan, for that matter – may be right that a less-transparent, less-accountable system might actually achieve a more stable level of popular consent. But that’s the metric that matters, not whether it would achieve better policies or a more efficient operation of government. There is no particular reason to believe that, at any given moment, the people will be content merely with what is best for them. They have to believe that the government is in the best position to know what is best, and that it has the proper authority to act on that knowledge. They are unlikely to believe that if, in response to their manifest discontent, the government basically says that they are fools or knaves who should actively be ignored.

The reason you listen to the people is not that the people are necessarily right or know what is best, nor because your political theory requires you to be a mere conduit for what the people command, but because the best way to convince the people that you are listening to them is to listen to them. And until they are convinced you are listening to them, they won’t listen to you. And if they don’t listen to you, then you have no authority.

That’s my view of why American politics has gone insane: the Republican Party no longer has any authority over the bulk of its voters, while the Democratic Party is viewed as an illegitimate authority by those same voters. One or the other party – or a new one – needs to win the trust of that bloc of voters, and then either win power, or lose and accept the loss with grace.

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