It’s been famously said that the general will cannot be represented—only a factionalizing “will of all.” And it’s been found, after man tore free, that Rousseau’s warning was correct.
Rousseau’s fears about representative institutions are everywhere confirmed within the politics of power: Leaders, players or actors become isolated from an audience. —Robert J. Pranger, The Eclipse of Citizenship, 1968, p. 27.
However, the general will can be incarnated in the State—“virtually” incarnated—by inserting a small, or “demitasse,” sample from the whole population. “Demiocracy” is the name I’ve adopted for this Demi-incarnated democracy.
It is rational to use a sample when using the whole would be impossible, awkward, or undesirable. We use a sample as juries for those reasons. Likewise, we use samples in focus groups, in surveys of TV viewership, and in opinion polling.
Demiocracy’s behavior will be revolutionary, though probably not (fortunately) as revolutionary as Rousseau hoped.
To make a revolution is a measure which, prima fronte, requires an apology. —Edmund Burke.
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas. —Alfred North Whitehead.
The state begins by being absolutely a work of the imagination. Imagination is the liberating power possessed by man. —Ortega y Gasset.
All great truths begin as blasphemies. —George Bernard Shaw.
A man with a new idea is a Crank, until the idea succeeds. —Mark Twain.
A really new idea affronts current agreement. —White’s Observation.
Distrust the obvious, suspect the traditional, … for in the past mankind has not done well when saddling itself with governments. —Robert Heinlein.
When you’re one step ahead of the crowd, you’re a genius. When you’re two steps ahead, you’re a madman. —Shlomo Riskin.
Democracy began, pure and uncorrupted, according to Rousseau, when dozens of peasants gathered under an old oak tree. In America, it began with the Mayflower Compact. It was supposed to express the considered common sense of the
community.
Democracy was subsequently suppressed in both France and America by an oppressive monarchy, and then was re-established on a larger scale, employing elected representatives, after revolutions.
As democracy’s scale grew, it became “scaly” (to use Bertie Wooster’s evocative term)—so scaly that its revolutionary founders would be agonized to see it now.
They might even be pained enough to say, with some rhetorical exaggeration, that “Man has torn free, and everywhere it’s been in vain.” In other words, man has jumped from the frying pan (of monarchy) into the “soup” of “DeMockery.” (A word I’ve coined because our factionalized representative system has developed into a mockery of what it was hoped to be.)
Everyone feels his responsibility far more distinctly as a trustee than otherwise. Let a man in an excited crowd be suddenly singled out and made a member of a committee to reflect and resolve for the crowd, and he will feel the difference in an instant. —Francis Lieber, “On Civil Liberty and Self-Government,” 167.
… the choice made by them [“a select body of electors”] would … be made under a greater feeling of responsibility. —John Stuart Mill, Representative Government, IX 193.
… it would be more in the spirit of our constitution, and more agreeable to the pattern of our best laws, by lessening the number, to add to the weight and independence of our voters. —Edmund Burke, “The Present State of the Nation”.
Self-government is in inverse ratio to numbers. The larger the constituency, the less the value of any particular vote. When he is merely one of millions, the individual feels himself to be impotent, a negligible quantity. The candidates he has voted into office are far away…. Increasing population and advancing technology have resulted in an increase in the number and complexity of organizations, an increase in the amount of power concentrated in the hands of officials and a corresponding decrease in the amount of power exercised by electors, coupled with a decrease in the public’s regard for democratic procedure. —Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958, VI.
My diagnosis is that the ills of modern representative democracy are due to its large scale, which promotes the growth and influence of certain of democracy’s ancillary components—the six “Pernicious P’s”—to the point where they largely displace and/or distort the general will. The six are:
- Political parties,
- Professional (careerist) politicians,
- Pressure groups,
- Propaganda,
- Press power (more generally, “the media”), and
- Pelf (money) power.
Also accompanying modern democracy’s expanding scale is the growth of “Dolorous D’s” among the citizenry, which influence the average voter to Diminish his/her political involvement, thereby further Displacing the general will:
- The weight of each vote is Diluted among many new ones, Decreasing its importance.
- Each voter becomes Distanced from the rest—there can be no Town Hall gathering of All—so the elements of personal contact and force of character are Diminished.
- Members of such a mass society tend to become Distracted and Disconnected from, and “Disinterested” in, public affairs; and thence Dismissive and Disaffected—a “lonely crowd.”
- Thus, the politically active segment of the public becomes Deformed—i.e., unrepresentative.
The information gap between the politically active and inactive has widened by increasing technological complexity and secrecy. —Robert Dahl, After the Revolution?, p. 73.
A political structure established with the aim of implementing democracy may unwittingly establish the conditions for political apathy. —Rosenberg, in M. Rejai (ed.), Democracy: The Contemporary Theories, 1967, p. 257.
So-called citizens [retire], … leaving the political world above them to unchecked “activists,” “elites,” and “influentials.” —Robert J. Pranger, The Eclipse of Citizenship, 1968, p. 11.
The more some have the power drive, the more it seems to be necessary to the others to compete, or submit, just in order to survive. —Paul Goodman, in Patterns of Anarchy, 1966, 132.
These interacting P- and D-factors are a witch’s brew that Deforms democracy into its hideous parody, DeMockery.
Its legislative output is poor: far from what would be produced by the considered common sense and common decency of the common man (IOW, the general will)—which is what it ought to be.
If parliaments were judged by the theory of morally representative government—that they were the Will of the People, which in turn expresses their true interests—there is no condemnation of their modern form which would be too sweeping…. —Santayana, Dominations and Powers, 1951, p. 385.
And its chief executives are too-often preposterous and/or dangerous:
The same [electoral] machinery may throw up another such pale and incoherent Caesar, and one, indeed, much worse. —H.L. Mencken, “Epitaph” on President Harding, 1924.
Ambitious men often have a Caesar lying within. —Leland Baldwin, Reframing the Constitution, 1972, 91.
There are few minds to which tyranny is not delightful. —Samuel Johnson, Letters.
The ambition which aims at a place in the government is harmful to the community because the most incapable men may be consumed by such an ambition…. —Henri de St. Simon, Social Organization, The Science of Man, and Other Writings, 1952.
When I was a boy I was told anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it. —Clarence Darrow
Filed under: Ballot measures, Elections, Proposals, Sortition, Theory |
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Equality by lot 
> [democracy’s] revolutionary founders would be agonized to see it now
While it is a good bet that the American revolutionaries would not be particularly impressed with the modern system, attributing to them democratic ideals is utterly a-historical. They were a powerful elite that was designing a system of government for the perpetuation of their power. (Naturally, they thought that their power would be used for the benefit of all of society, but such self-serving belief is almost universal among elites, so it cannot be used as evidence of democratic ideals.)
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Hi Yoram, Roger here. Well, some of the Founders were quite democratic, namely Jefferson and Paine—but I concede that those two weren’t “Framers”—i.e., members of the constitutional convention. Jefferson wrote, aligning with your point:
“It must be agreed that our governments have much less of republicanism than ought to have been expected; in other words, that the people have less regular control over their agents, than their rights and interests require. [But] I apprehend that the golden moment is past for reforming these heresies.” —letter to John Taylor
The Framers also no doubt hoped that “electionism” would tend to elevate bigshot members of the gentry like themselves, and not many “commoners.” Top dogs still think that way:
“… many persons intuitively see campaign costs as a way of keeping the riffraff out of American elections.” —Dan Nimmo, The Political Persuaders, 1970, 195
The Framers in addition likely hoped that lingering traditional English deference to local notables would work in their favor.
They may have hoped that restrictive voter qualifications in certain states would benefit them, too.
Finally, the Constitution restricted the scope of federal activity in a way that implicitly favored property owners and ambitious go-getters, and—again implicitly—let the devil take the hindmost.
Of course the Founders were strongly opposed to arbitrary and authoritarian government, to corruption, and to self-interested cabals—all characteristic of the British parliament. (They were thus willy-nilly nudged in a democratic direction, in advance of the rest of the world.)
Those blots also characterize our current DeMockeries, so naturally, as you say, the Founders would be disappointed with how the system they created has turned out.
But they would also be disappointed, as I implied, by the way the Pernicious P’s displaced the general will. The Founders, as everyone knows, did not anticipate the dominating role that self-interested Political Parties and Professional Politicians would assume, and that the latter would “run” for the presidency.
They (e.g., Madison and Hamilton)were appalled, for instance, that party-dominated state legislatures voted to award all their states’ electoral votes to the winner of the statewide presidential contest, instead of giving a single vote to the winner in each congressional district, as the Founders intended. Once one state did this, it incentivized the rest to follow suit or lose influence. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College
The current electoral college arrangement, democratic reformers now recognize, is not as democratic as it should be, and needs to be changed. But Founders like Madison would agree with them! The Founders were more opposed to party-partisanship than to empowering the citizenry. This is what comes through to me in The Federalist Papers, and other material, at any rate.
What they really wanted, implicitly, was a system in which “the office seeks the man.” This is what the “chosen by their neighbors” passage by Wilmoore Kendall was suggesting:
“… its Framers intended it [Congress] to be … a deliberative assembly made up of uninstructed men, chosen by their neighbors because they are ‘virtuous’ men.”
They just didn’t realize how a mass-election system is unable to operate that way for long., and how vulnerable it is to partisan divisiveness and factional manipulation.
The “bal-lottery” is what they would endorse now, were they here today, as it is the only way to provide neighbors—i.e., the citizenry, the embodiment of the general will—with agency, and to recapture agency from the Pernicious P’s that have usurped it.
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Roger,
I am quite unfamiliar with Paine, but as for Jefferson, it seems to me you vastly over-estimate his democratic sentiments. His ideas about government are as far as I know very well aligned with the those of the framers. The following fairly well-known quote from an 1813 letter of his to Adams is indicative:
https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch15s61.html
> The Founders were more opposed to party-partisanship than to empowering the citizenry. This is what comes through to me in The Federalist Papers, and other material, at any rate.
I would be interested in any indication that they were open to the possibility that they would find themselves rubbing shoulders with commoners in the hall of power. To me it seems that they (quite rightly and based on common sense as well as on historical examples) took it for granted that the hoi polloi would not be able to win elections. The idea that elections reflected democratic commitments was a later re-packaging of their overtly elitist ideas.
In fact, Bernard Manin devotes much space in his book Principles of Representative Government to what he termed “The principle of distinction”, which is the empirical fact – accepted at the end of the 18th century – that commoners always elect their betters.
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I see that Paine was viciously critical of the quite a few of the founders, so his political commitments may very well have been different than theirs.
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Roger here. I asked Google, “What did the Founding Fathers think about democracy?” Here are responses:
Google AI:
The Founding Fathers believed that direct democracy could lead to tyranny of the majority. They also worried that democracy was a bad form of government because it would allow everyone to participate, which could lead to the election of a demagogue.
John Adams wrote in 1814 that democracy “never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide”.
The Founding Fathers also wanted to make it difficult for one person, party, or group to gain control of the government. To achieve this, they proposed a national government where power was divided between three separate branches of government: the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judiciary.
The Founding Fathers were also concerned about the rights of minorities. In their day, this meant worrying if the rights of property owners would be overrun by the votes of those who did not own land.”
VOA (Voice of America, I assume):
America’s Founding Fathers were among the wealthiest people in the Colonies when they drafted and signed the Constitution, and that’s pretty much who they expected to continue to guide the young nation.
“It was never meant to be a sort of direct democracy, where all Americans would get to cast a ballot on all issues,” says Andrew Wehrman, an associate professor of history at Central Michigan University. “The vote itself, they thought, ought to be reserved for people of wealth and education, but they certainly didn’t want to restrict all those other kinds of political participation.”
The founders expected the common people, the poor and uneducated, to participate indirectly, through their local government, at town halls and meetings and through protest actions like boycotts.
Some of the founders were particularly concerned about populism and mob rule.
“These were the kinds [of people] that thought that democracy was a dirty word. Even John Adams said stuff like that. He didn’t want poor people to vote, he didn’t want women to vote,” Wehrman says.
Wehrman points out that the framers of the Constitution saw to it that only one part of one branch of the federal government, the House of Representatives, is popularly elected by the people. The Electoral College chooses the president, the commander in chief selects the Supreme Court justices and, originally, senators were selected by state legislatures.
“It’s another attempt to kind of whittle away at the direct participation of a large group of people in the political process,” Kuklick says. “So there are all these other constraints that they write into the Constitution to shore up what they think might be a leaky vessel, where too many ignorant, poor people get the right to vote.”
“Clearly, the Constitution was written and enacted to pull back some of the actions that were taken by state legislatures. People like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton thought that the state legislatures and voters in most states had gone too far, that too many people were participating in politics, too many people were voting,” says Wehrman.
OTHERS:
“They (the founders) thought that there were too many voices in the state legislatures, that states were becoming too radical, that they were beholden to the interests of the common man, when they needed to be more reserved and more accommodating to wealthy, educated business-interest types,” Wehrman says.
Madison concludes that a small democracy cannot avoid the dangers of majority faction because small size means that undesirable passions can very easily spread to a majority of the people, which can then enact its will through the democratic government without difficulty.
Madison authored 29 of the 85 essays. In The Federalist No. 49, Madison eloquently explicated the idea of popular sovereignty by which “The people are the only legitimate fountain of power, and it is from them that the constitutional charter, under which the several branches of government hold their power, is derived.”
Although democracy in action today might not be exactly what the founders envisioned, money and power do continue to play a vital role in U.S. politics. And, given that the vast majority of American presidents have been independently wealthy, the founders’ aim of reserving a prominent place in government for the rich has essentially been realized.
————-
Roger here, again. I think the Founders were alarmed by Shay’s rebellion of the previous year in Massachusetts by indebted farmers. This was likely the motive for the Constitution’s prohibition of any law impairing the sanctity of contracts—e.g., mortgages.
I think you’re right that the Founders anticipated that few commoners as such would be elected, for a variety of reasons: Lack of leisure, lack of education (including training in rhetoric and the law), and long-standing deferential habits.
But they realized too that non-gentry, “common” (I.e., less couth) types (like Paine and Sam Adams, for instance) could or would appeal to commoners and win elections. This was already happening in New England.
So the Constitution assigned the directly elected House of Representatives for them. As counterweights, they specified indirect election for the Senate and Presidency.
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Ok, if I understand correctly, your description of the mindset of the Founders support my point.
Whether or not the Founders set up the House so as to appease popular pressures, what is important is that they had no democratic sentiments and thus living up to their ideals or to their intentions should not be seen as a goal for a democratic reform. This line of argumentation (much as it appeals to common American jingoism) should therefore be avoided.
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Hi Yoram, Roger here. You wrote, “what is important is that they [the Founders] had no democratic sentiments and thus living up to their ideals or to their intentions should not be seen as a goal for a democratic reform.”
I think they were reluctant democrats, like Churchill. I.e., they thought it was the worst form of government, except for all the others. They didn’t want any extravagantly elitist governors like the ones the Crown had foisted on them. So they held their noses and did their duty, as they saw it.
I think though that they had an admirable vision of an Ideal Democracy—one that bases legitimacy on Neighborly Nominations, as Wilmoore Kendall wrote. That is a more humane vision than that of the majoritarian democratic visionaries who followed them. Majoritarianism requires antisocial, and ultimately anti-democratic, vote-getting entities, and puts power up for grabs, with unhappy outcomes. So I respect the Founders more.
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Oops— I forgot to include these final paragraphs when I posted the above.
They just lacked the imagination to work out their Ideal’s mechanics (the bal-lottery) and the courage to write out its equations.
You wrote, “This line of argumentation (much as it appeals to common American jingoism) should therefore be avoided.”
Invoking the opinions of a nation’s icons in support of political cause is good politics. It could be a great help in “selling” Demiocracy here.
You would and should quote any Founders who had a good word to say about sortition. There might be more than Paine. That would help sell sortition. I won’t chide you if you do.
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