Listening to our public commentaries, one would think that our democracy sits at the precipice of its own destruction. Had I a penny for every intimation that one public figure or another attacked our institutions, our constitution, or our way of life, my need to sustain gainful employment would diminish quite markedly. Truthfully, the charges themselves have some merit to them. My difficulty with them lies less in their nature than in their target. If we are indeed a democracy, and if our democracy is under attack, then we ourselves are the aggressors in some sense. In another sense, though, we are no democracy at all, and nor do we wish to be.
If I voice some skepticism as to the democratic status of out polity, it is only because the American public scarcely wants to find itself held accountable for anything. According to a quote oft attributed to John Calvin, when God wishes to judge a nation, he sends them wicked rulers. I am skeptical of this because I see little evidence that we need God’s help when we pick them so readily ourselves. We blame our political leadership so frequently that, as with the turtle on the fence-post, we forget who put them there and why. We determine, then, that they ought to be removed, scrounge around for some replacement, and when we find fault with the replacement conclude that the blame lies solely with the person we put in office. It couldn’t be our fault, of course. As I once said, perhaps impertinently, to a colleague: all of you ex-boyfriends share but one common variable. If we find the quality of our political leadership lacking, maybe the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
When something goes wrong, you see, it is never really our fault. Like the King, the People can do no wrong. If a democracy makes bad choices, it cannot be that the people had bad desires or motivations – the body politic cannot wish itself harm – the blame must lie with lobbyists, or with cable news. They could not have actually wished to do the things they did; the Russian hackers must have manipulated them. And the King could not wish work ill on his own realm, he could merely act on the bad advice of wicked ministers. Always we find the culprit where we intend to find him: in someone other than ourselves. For all of the moaning about the two party system and quality of the candidates we vote for in November, you would think someone had stitched this state of affairs into the fabric of the universe. That bad people come out ahead in primary elections casts aspersions less on the process than on the people who participated in them.
The situation would be better if we did not then demand these people behave in un-democratic ways once they attain office. The only acceptable answer a presidential candidate can give in a society like ours to the question “what will you do in your first hundred days” is “propose my legislative agenda and sign or veto the bills Congress sends me.” Congress refusing to do what you want does not create an excuse to govern like a Caesar. I admit I have no formal legal training, but the eye strains to find a “do-nothing Congress” clause in Article II. That we expect our magistrates to behave this way and get disappointed when they don’t demonstrates amply how feeble the body politic has become. If we want a democracy, we had better start acting like we want to live in one.
Hand-wringing about the state of democracy in this country, with alarming frequency, amounts to complaints that voters didn’t do as they were told. It is the commitment not to a particular regime or a political process, but to a set of outcomes. And that’s fine, just don’t imagine that what you defend is actually rule by the people. It is particularly galling coming from those who cannot find a single example of norm-busting they will not defend provided they like the outcome. If cries that our democracy is under siege ring hollow, could it not be that what people want isn’t actually democracy? It is far more likely that we really want is some mild flavor of Bonapartism, a soft despotism that does what it will so long as it cloaks its endeavors in a veil of revolutionary ardor. If indeed we no longer wish to commit ourselves to genuine rule by the people then, like Abraham Lincoln, we may wish to pull up our stakes and go to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.