Sign Language, Morse Code, Semaphore and Gibberish (A Note on the Vocabulary of Democracy)

I want to clarify what I mean when I use the word "democracy,"  and I guess by extension how I think others should use it.

By the way, have I bragged about Plain Blog's commenters recently?  Really worth reading, at least in my opinion.  This item is brought on commenter Jeff, who frequently weighs in whenever I talk about democratic theory and the Framers.  He and I, as far as I can tell, agree on some things, disagree on others -- he's well worth reading, and the specific point I'm basing this post around is only a piece of what he has to say.

With regard to my comments on Congress, democracy, and other issues, Jeff noted:

As I've said before, I have real doubts that anything we're seeing today can fairly be called "Madisonian" or imputed to the "design" of the Framers. At the very least, we have to be careful about claiming that they valued "democracy," (a) because many of them didn't, and said so ("the Democracy" was a term of abuse well into the 19th century, often used in the same sentence as "the mob" or "the rabble"), and (b) because even where we find praise of democracy in the late 18th century, we have to be carefully not to read it anachronistically in light of our own understanding of the term instead of theirs. 

Jeff is certainly correct that pretty much everyone in the 18th century, certainly including the Framers, hated what they called "democracy."  What they wanted was something that they called a "republic."  Now, the question is how to treat that.

Following Robert Dahl, I'm convinced that the two words don't usefully distinguish between two different forms of government for us.  In other words, we should -- and I tend to -- use them as synonyms.  Both, it seems to me, refer to a system of popular government, a system in which all (more or less) people are formally equal, and in some sense the people rule.  Now, if we look back at the history of the words, what's obviously the case is that one is from Rome, the other from Greece.  But that doesn't really help us very much.  Rome and Athens had very different systems of government, but neither looks a lot like anything today, and neither came anywhere close to fulfilling conditions of formal equality for people.  That the framers looked  to Rome for their terminology is interesting, and in some ways may have mattered, but the United States Constitution isn't, in any meaningful sense, based on the actual institutions of the Roman Republic (other, I guess, than the absence of kings).

What we do want to distinguish are different forms or types of democracy: direct democracy, representative democracy, majoritarian democracy, what I call Madisonian (or anti-majoritarian) democracy, Athenian democracy, perhaps participatory democracy, and whatever others there might be.  I think that's what Madison and friends were doing, just in their own language, which was far less developed than ours since there had been so little democracy to that point.

So when Madison says he doesn't like democracy but does want a republic, we need to translate that into our own usage to make sense of it, and that's going to yield something to complete this sentence: Madison didn't like [one form of] democracy but did support [another form of] democracy.  Actually filling in those brackets is going to take careful reading (and perhaps careful additional research), and while I'm comfortable arguing that Madison opposed majoritarian democracy while supporting what I call, well, Madisonian democracy, I'm open to evidence that I have that wrong.  I'm reasonably certain, however, that simply saying that he (or the framers) opposed democracy confuses the issue.  What they were after was something in what we would consider today a part of the democratic family, even if Athens was out of fashion at that point.

Democracy = Republic

For all practical purposes, the words "democracy" and "republic" are synonyms, and should be used as synonyms. That's demonstrated nicely in a fine new post by Steven Taylor, who focuses on explaining how James Madison used those words in the Federalist Papers. Taylor and I are both listening to democratic theorist Robert Dahl. As I've said before, the difference between the two is that one is from Greece and the other from Rome, but since no modern nation really bases anything they do on Roman or Athenian institutions, there's no point in maintaining some sort of separation between them.

The best practice, as far as I'm concerned, is to simply refer to different forms of democracy: direct democracy, representative democracy, majoritarian democracy, etc. Moreover, there's nothing inherently "pure" about one or another form -- none of them, that is, are "pure" democracy.

At any rate, I completely agree with Taylor: "In terms of contemporary usage, especially from a political science point of view, the formulation 'we have a republic, not a democracy' is almost nonsense."

Majorities, Madison, and Democracy

More comments sparked by this Kurt Anderson essay (well, really, just using it as an excuse to talk about one of my favorite subjects, but plunging ahead)...

Madison's terminology (for example in Federalist 10) confuses people.  He contrasts "democracy" with "republic," and praises the latter.  But as the democratic theorist Robert Dahl says, the real difference between the two is semantic and cultural -- one looks to Greece, the other to Rome, but both are all about popular control of government.  Better to read "direct democracy" for Madison's "democracy" and "representative democracy" for Madison's "republic."  Both are forms of democracy, and neither is inherently better or worse (or, to use the word that makes me cringe in this context, "pure"). 

Democracy is rule by the people.  (See below for an important clarification).  At least in a first-order sense, it's democracy whether the people themselves decide public policy (as in a direct democracy), or if the people elect some subset who then decide public policy (representative democracy).  It's true even if decisions are made by a mixture of those directly elected by the people and those indirectly elected, as was true of the original Constitutional scheme (and is still true today with respect to the courts).  What matters is whether it comes down to the people or not.  And thus what makes a polity less democratic is if there are portions of its governance that are beyond the reach of the people (directly or indirectly).  Obviously, that would include anything like an aristocracy (by birth) or a monarchy, or an unelected dictator.  Democracy is also threatened, or diminished, when elected officials, once they're elected, can do whatever they want without any constraint.  Democracy is threatened, or diminished, when parts of the government are removed entirely from any sort of popular control -- if, for example, the actions of a bureaucracy (including those bureaucrats that are the armed forces) are beyond the reach of elected officials. 

Democracy, at least in my view, is also threatened and/or diminished if the government only represents a subset of the people -- even if that subset is the majority of the electorate.  I've quoted Hannah Arendt before on this subject, and I'll turn to her again:

...we commonly equate and confound majority rule with majority decision.  The latter, however, is a technical device...In America, at any rate [the Constitution was] framed with the express and conscious intention to prevent, as far as humanly possible, the procedures of majority decisions from generating into the "elective despotism" of majority rule (On Revolution, 164-165, or at least it was in the old editions).

This is true whether the minorities are ethnic or religious minorities, or minority interests (such as farmers in an overwhelmingly non-agricultural nation), or minorities of opinion or ideology. 

Madison has, roughly, two solutions to the problem of preventing the natural "technical device" of majority decision from become majority rule.  The one we're most familiar with is basically to generate any number of new technical devices to prevent simply majority votes from becoming simple majority decisions: representative instead of direct democracy, separated institutions sharing powers, bicameral Congress, and federalism are all Madisonian devices for this purpose.  This works, as Madison famously discusses in Federalist 51, because individual ambitious political actors will be unwilling to go along with any simple conspiracy of the majority; it also works just because a successful conspiracy of this type is so hard to put together.  The other solution, as I discussed earlier today, is just making the nation so big that there are no real natural majorities.

I should tie this to the filibuster, since that's what everyone is interested about...I don't think Madisonian ideas push anyone either for or against the filibuster.  To the extent that any particular set of rules makes governing impossible -- I'm looking at you, California -- then I think I'd object to them on Madisonian grounds (because if no one can rule, then the people are not ruling).  I don't think that's quite true of the filibuster, but it's a concern.  Of course, just as Madison didn't want any single majority to rule, he certainly didn't want any (single) minority to rule.  I don't think that's really the case in the Senate right now, but again it's a fair concern.

A couple of other notes.  First, on why majority rule (as opposed to majority decision) is problematic.  In addition to Madison's concern with tyranny of the majority, we can add two other issues.  One is the problem of intensity -- generally, our intuition is that in cases in which an indifferent majority opposes an intense minority, we feel that the proper -- the proper democratic -- solution is for the minority to win.  A pure majority-rules system cannot accommodate that intuition.  The other, more complex, problem has to do with mathematical properties of voting, and I hate explaining it because I'm not very good at it -- but, basically, voting doesn't necessarily do what we want it to do in cases in which there are multiple voters and multiple choices.  So what we think of as majorities may in many cases actually be artifacts of (arbitrary) voting rules.

Second, I said at the top that democracy is rule of the people.  It's extremely important to distinguish between The People, thought of as a united group with a single clear interest, and the people, understood as plural, with all kinds of differences and disagreements and colliding interests.  Democracy is interested in the latter -- the former is an excellent path to tyranny of all sorts of nasty kinds.  My advice is that whenever you hear anyone talking about "the people," be sure to think about which of these they're talking about.

Town Hall 5: Madison Democracy against the Goo Goos

Regardless of what happens to health care, is a factually compromised public discussion of issues a threat to democracy?

Now, we're back to perhaps the thing that people are most upset about. For them, democracy is all about a marketplace of ideas: democracy works when disinterested citizens openly consider all options, and the best ideas are supposed to win.

All kinds of things flow from this idea of democracy. In campaigns, negative advertising is bad, candidate debates are good (but never quite good enough, since the questions never quite pin those slimy politicians down). In campaign finance, pretty much any kind of private funding is bad. Voters should know the issues, and vote based on their analysis of the issues, certainly not because they belong to an interest group or a political party.

This good government (or Goo Goo) form of democracy is, in fact, threatened by misinformation.

But Goo Goo democracy is, I would argue, a hopeless idea in the first place. Sure, it has no defense against lies corrupting open debate, but that's not even the half of it. Just a bit of a tour through what's known about voters shows that they don't know what they're talking about much of the time, don't seem to care about public policy very much, and to the extent that they do get involved they learn only what they need to know to support their group or party prejudices. That is, not only do people vote by party, but they "know" things by party, too (here's just one example). It's not just Kids These Days; it goes back as far as we can study it.

So is democracy doomed? Not at all.

Goo Goo democracy is doomed, or at least that sort of democracy is and always was a false idol at best. Real-life democracy, however, can thrive. Real life democracy accepts that people (often, at least) act in groups. People use groups -- party, primarily, but other groups too -- as good-enough shortcuts. I don't have to learn anything about health care, because if I trust the (whichever) party in general, I can just trust them on this issue. There's nothing sinister about that. I have interests, or perhaps general preferences, and as long as I more-or-less align them with the right group, I'm going to be fine. It's great (really, no sarcasm intended -- it's how I write this blog, too) that there are individuals out there belonging to "no party or clique" and can analyze policy without regard to self-interest, but very few of us have time to learn the intricacies of urban planning and climate change and macroeconomics and whether the F-22 is really a boondoggle and health care and missile defense and whether cutting taxes does or doesn't lower revenues and Pakistan/Taliban/Kashmir/Afghanistan/etc. The hundreds, literally, of other issues.

And in the aggregate, the kind of democracy we do have seems to work pretty well. In elections, we don't actually express our issue positions (since most of us don't really hold positions on most issues), but many of us actively rally to the camp of our groups, and enough of the rest switch sides in ways that more-or-less effectively punish gross incompetence, or at least give incumbents strong incentives not to be grossly incompetent. Outside of elections, we support our groups (whether narrow interest groups or the larger parties) and those groups stick up for us in policy debates -- not (necessarily) the public debate that no one pays much attention to, but the real bargaining and power plays in Congressional committees, executive branch agencies, the White House, and courtrooms. It's by no means a perfect system (among the many potential problems would be that there's no guarantee that groups have influence in proportion to their strength in the population), but the way to judge it is within its own terms, not by whether the quality of public debate is good enough.

Public opinion in the aggregate does play a role, since politicians are (fortunately) massively risk-averse, and easily scared by polling data. It's an indirect role, however. And it rarely, if ever, has anything to do with an engaged public actively, and with dispassionate neutrality, debating the issues.

One last thing...none of this is to say that individuals are irrelevant. To the contrary: in my reading of James Madison, the whole system is designed to encourage interested individuals to get involved. There is no cap to the influence that those individuals who do get engaged and active can have in the American system, and as individuals we don't have to be simply the sum of our interests and group identifications. But the system is also designed to allow those who are too busy (or even too lazy) to have a say, too, through the groups that the activists among us create and keep going.

If looked at from this point of view, we can ask: does it matter a lot if there's misinformation out there? And the answer is: no, not really. No one in Congress is acting on the misinformation (yeah, it's likely that some GOP Members of Congress believe their own nonsense, but they weren't going to vote for health care reform regardless). I doubt if very many interest group leaders are acting on misinformation. Certainly the major players in the debate -- the doctors, hospitals, health insurance companies, the pharmaceuticals, large and small employers groups, the unions, the organized seniors groups -- they don't think that this is about killing granny and Stephen Hawking. Nor is it very likely that wild accusations having nothing to do with the real legislation is going to swing so many Democrats and other supporters of the president that the polls will bury the bill.

The health care bill may or may not thrive, but nutty lies about it are not a sign that the republic cannot hold. Madisonian democracy is much stronger than that.

Why We Get Majorities Wrong

Matt Glassman comments on my earlier post on majorities:

I totally understand why people are so keen to get rid of the filibuster. I cannot for the life of me understand why --- given the shining example of majority-rule just a football field south of the Senate --- they do not understand that there are both positive and negative consequences to doing so.

I think I know the answer to this one, although I'll admit it's speculative. And the answer is...political culture. Or, if you prefer, poor education.

Basically, there's incredibly widespread belief about two things in the US, one which confuses us and one which is just plain false:

1. Democracy is the best system of government (sometimes, but not always, with the Churchill qualifier; sometimes, especially these days among conservatives, with an essentially nonsense distinction between "republic" and "democracy"); and,

2.  In democracies, decisions are made by majority vote.

That the first of these is virtually uncontested winds up with everyone believing that whatever reforms they support make things more democratic. This matters because it gets in the way of clear thinking about what democracy actually is, since it becomes whatever it is we think best. It is, however, not actually true. Some of us have other things we care about; for example, we might care more about policy outcomes than the system of government that achieves them. It's OK that we're not all committed to democracy above all else; it would help us talk about this stuff if we were willing to accept that (and, in turn, accept that democracy isn't all "[t]he good guys are always stalwart and true. The bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day").

The second one is just plain wrong. At best, a pure, strict, majoritarian democracy is one of the many varieties of democracy, and not one that many democratic theorists (or, for that matter, democratic polities) actually subscribe to. But there are plenty of other forms of democracy. As always, I turn to Hannah Arendt on the difference between majority decision and majority rule:

...we commonly equate and confound majority rule with majority decision.  The latter, however, is a technical device...In America, at any rate [the Constitution was] framed with the express and conscious intention to prevent, as far as humanly possible, the procedures of majority decisions from generating into the "elective despotism" of majority rule (On Revolution, 164-165, or at least it was in the old editions).

We adopt the "technical device" of majority voting often -- not always -- because it works well enough in many instances. That's just fine. But thinking that the goal is majority rule, and that the job of democratic design is to find procedures to empower one particular majority as much as possible, is totally backwards.

None of which is to say whether majority voting is appropriate in any particular situation, or to ignore that the Constitution has plenty of anti-majoritiarian mechanisms which certainly matter in the question of what Senate procedures are more or less democratic. It's just that I think basic democratic (mis)education in the US far too often equates democracy with majority rule, and leaves people believing that these questions are obvious and easy.*

The truth? Democracy doesn't always produce the substantive outcomes we want. And: democracy is more complex than just taking a vote and whoever gets the most votes, wins. That your grade school teachers (and, I'm afraid, many of your college professors) didn't explain that to you is too bad, but it is nevertheless the truth.




*OK, I spent way to much time trying to work "lie to me" into that paragraph, and I'll just settle for this footnote...basically, we watched that episode again last night, and as usual it's with me all day today. My apologies.

Against Contarianism on Palpatine

Matt Yglesias says that a lesson of Star Wars is that "the idea of a galaxy-spanning Republic is just hopelessly naïve." He's responding to a pro-Palpatine (sort of) post from Jamelle. Matt cites Kant; I'll respond with Arendt, and I promise I won't go into anything as dull as European Central Banks (not that there's anything wrong with that; we're lucky we have policy bloggers who care about such things, and at least it's not Canadian Central Bank).

First...well, I'm not going to try to dredge up the argument, but Arendt is against one-world government more or less because she doesn't think that democracy is possible on that scale. It's more complicated than that, but hell if I'm going to remember it well enough to explain it for a blog post on Star Wars.

But back to the original post: Jamelle says:

All of that said, I’m not so certain that the operating philosophy behind the Galactic Empire — that despotism is necessary to maintaining the peaceful cohesion of a galaxy-spanning empire –is entirely wrong...[T]he Galactic Republic — collapsed largely because it was too large to be effective. The Republic didn’t even possess the strength or legitimacy to handle a trade dispute on a minor core world, much less an existential threat like the Clone Wars.

And:

[S]uccessful galactic dominion requires the kind of cruelty and brute force that we see on display in the movies. Otherwise the whole thing will collapse into petty-infighting and jealousy.

Surely, that's completely wrong. The Republic wasn't defeated because it couldn't handle a trade dispute or the Clone Wars; it fell because it was the victim of a monstrous conspiracy by Palpatine. From what we see in the movies (and that's all I'm working from -- if I've ever read any of the books, I won't admit to it), all of the things cited here -- the trade dispute, the clone wars, even the petty infighting and jealousy -- were all just part of Palpatine's plan. In other words, the Republic is vulnerable to a massively powerful Sith Lord. Especially a Sith Lord with the ability to disguise himself from the Jedi, a power that the Jedi apparently don't realize can exist. I suppose that's a weakness of any government in a universe that has massively powerful Sith Lords, but it's not exactly a solution to, you know, turn the whole enterprise over to one.

At any rate, Obi-Wan says that the Republic lasted for over a thousand generations. The Empire didn't last for one. I don't think that's convincing evidence that it takes an Empire to get stability in the Star Wars universe. Actually, Palpatine's insane drive to bankrupt the Empire (although see Seth's post too) with easily destroyable superweapons is a great example of what actually happens with unchecked personal power.

I guess I can add one other thing...our concepts come from places, and have baggage that comes with them. Our idea of a republic contains within it the danger that republics will degenerate into empires, because a "republic" is a system of government invented by Rome, and the Roman Republic became an empire. That's why the political systems of Star Wars make intuitive sense to us, even when they aren't necessarily very well explained or internal coherent. The idea of "republic" does most of Lucas's work for him.

Let's Get Moving Into Action

I'm happy to see Monkey Cager John Sides guesting for Ezra Klein this week, and I recommend his first post over there, taking on Scott Rassmussen on the question of whether Americans really want to govern themselves.  John knows a lot more than I do about public opinion, so I have nothing really to add to what he says, but I'll use it as an excuse to talk about James Madison and the crisis of the 1780s, which is not exactly related but close enough, and something I'm interested in anyway, because it brings up an interesting question: why democracy?

One of the goofy things about the US is that we so much take it for granted that democracy is the best form of government -- and all other forms are in turn stigmatized -- that we really don't think about it very much or very carefully, which I think winds up producing a fair amount of sloppy thinking when we get around to doing institutional reform.  I'm not going to go through all of the ideas behind democracy in this post, but I'll just say that most of us have been mainly exposed to Lockean, liberal reasons for democracy, which I think for most people come down to questions about outcomes: democracy is best because it produces, or at least promises to produce, the best, or fairest, or most justifiable public policies.  Yet there are also participatory arguments in favor of democracy, which are related to republican arguments generally associated with a long line of thinkers often traced to Machiavelli.  Theorists in that tradition argue that public action is, at least for some people, self-fulfilling; that is, they believe that one of the things that set humans apart is that we have a capacity for collectively organizing the way we live, and those who get involved in politics for whatever motives often find that it is deeply satisfying.  Hannah Arendt talks about this capacity for "public happiness" extensively in On Revolution, noting that people caught up in revolutions often express surprise that getting involved was so personally fulfilling; see also Gordon Wood's discussion of the American revolutionaries, or, for that matter, what veterans of the civil rights movement have said about it. Arendt makes the point that Jefferson's odd formulation of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" contains an ambiguity (one can see our discomfort with that phrasing by watching the excellent Schoolhouse Rock on the Declaration -- if you haven't watched it recently, check out how they deal with pursuit of happiness).  Read as private happiness, Jefferson's formula is a good liberal equivalent of the more common "life, liberty, and property."  By that reading, government's main function is to protect individuals from encroachments on their private affairs, and at the same time to support those private activities, even if it takes government action to do so.  But read as public happiness, Jefferson is asserting that the opportunity to participate in collective self-government -- something that can only happen in some form of democratic republic -- is a core human right. 

Which gets us to the 1780s.  As Gordon Wood writes (see generally Part Four, especially Chapter X section 5), what alarmed the revolutionaries was that their assumption that an American republic would deliver both types of happiness was undermined by a turn away from public involvement: on the one hand, representative republican legislatures appeared shockingly prone to tyranny, and on the other hand the people seemed content to ignore politics entirely as long as they were left alone to enrich themselves.  Self-interest, in other words, appeared to be everywhere, and most shockingly it appeared to be perhaps the natural result of the revolution, thus making its higher goals self-negating.  Remove tyranny and establish republican institutions, and people will -- now that the threat of tyranny is gone -- turn away from public affairs to self-interest, thus establishing the conditions for a new, democratic version of tyranny. 

In my reading of Madison -- which I should say from the start is contentious, and hardly the consensus view -- the Constitution is a brilliant attempt to escape from that trap.  Centuries of Whig and republican thought had assumed that their project could only succeed if the people were virtuous, and public spirited.  Madison says: what if we turn the tables on all of that?  What if we take self-interest as a virtue, or at any rate as inevitable in a democracy, but use it against itself?  The genius of Madison's Constitution is that it encourages political participation even if it is originally motivated by selfish gain or ambition, but then counts on the complexity of the system to force people to actively engage in politics if they hope to get anything done. Simply registering one's preference or making demands will never be enough.  Moreover, by separating institutions through checks and balances and federalism, not only is tyranny avoided in the sense that private citizens are protected, (good for private happiness!), but also in the sense that opportunities multiply for citizens to become meaningfully involved in public affairs (good for public happiness!). 

Of course, if you don't believe that participation in politics can be good for its own sake, then you aren't very likely to care very much about that latter virtue of Madisonian democracy.  Even if you are, you may still believe that the costs of Madisonian democracy, the difficulties in translating popular preferences into government policy, aren't worth the benefits (although as usual, I'd caution people about assuming that election results can be easily translated into preferences for specific public policy choices).  And even if neither of those things bother you, if it turns out that capacity for enjoying and thriving at politics is unevenly distributed (the way that capacity for self-fulfillment in, say, music or fine art appear to be unevenly distributed), then it's not clear how we can justify the unequal influence over government that would result from natural sorting.  In other words, I don't really have any answers at the end of this long post.  What I think I can say is that those who write about public happiness, either in their personal stories or as political theorists, tend to emphasize the notion of discovery: people who became involved in politics for other reasons, whether it was self-interest or to right what they saw as an injustice, were surprised at what they found -- you hear versions of the idea that they felt truly alive for the first time, or something to that effect.  One could even perhaps bring in Ronald Reagan's notion of finding "the rest of me" in politics, no?  All of which suggests to me that one should not necessarily count the apathy of the uninvolved to be conclusive.  I'll end with a quote from Arendt (On Revolution, Penguin ed., 131):

And Jefferson's true notion of happiness comes out very clearly...when he lets himself go in a mood of playful and sovereign irony and concludes one of his letters to Adams as follows: "May we meet there again, in Congress, with our antient Colleagues, and receive with them the seal of approbation 'Well done, good and faithful servents.'" Here, behind the irony, we have the candid admission that life in Congress, the joys of discourse of legislation, of transacting business, of persuading and being persuaded, were to Jefferson no less conclusively a foretaste of eternal bliss to come than the delights of contemplation had been for medieval piety. 

The Framers and Constitutional Values

Via Ezra, I very much enjoyed Lexington's discussion (in the Economist) of Framer worship, Founder worship, and Constitution worship (second link is to his print column, which I won't discuss here until the end, but it's really highly recommended -- excellent stuff).

Lexington leans on a lecture by Michael Klarman of Harvard Law.  Having not read or heard the lecture, I'm reacting only here to Lexington's summary, so my apologies if I don't do justice to the original.  It's an interesting argument to think about, but I think I have a bit of a dissent.  Lexington:

Professor Klarman made four main points about what he calls "constitutional idolatry". They are (1) that the framers' constitution represented values that Americans should abhor or at least reject today; (2) that there are parts of the constitution America is stuck with but that are impossible to defend based on contemporary values; (3) that for the most part the Constitution is irrelevant to the current political design of the nation; and (4) that the rights that are protected today are mostly a result of the evolution of political attitudes, not of courts using the Constitution to uphold them.

Point (1) is surely unarguable: the protection of slavery, the restriction of suffrage and so on.

OK.  Point two I think is certainly correct, and as Klein points out is actually shared by the amendment-happy Tea Partiers and other Republicans, even if they might disagree with Klein, Lexington, and Klarman about which parts are hard to defend.  Point four is an empirical argument about the effects of court decisions...I know of the academic debate about that, but don't know enough to really endorse either side (I suspect the truth is in the middle, but, you know, isn't it always easy to say that?)  That leaves points three -- the relationship between the Constitution and the actual functioning of the government today -- and point one, the alleged abhorrent values embedded in the document.  I'll take #3 first.


Is it true that "for the most part the Constitution is irrelevant to the current political design of the nation"?  Here Lexington (for Klarman) talks about the administrative machinery of the government, but he might as well be talking of political parties, or the press, or interest groups, or the ways that the each of the Constitutional branches performs legislative, executive, and judicial tasks.  That's true. Add it all up and the actual functioning of the American political system isn't easily recognizable from a literal reading of the Constitution.  And yet...the reason that things work the way they do, with dispersed and multiplied power, and separated institutions sharing powers, and all the rest of it, is in my view fundamentally tied to Constitutional design.  For example, the fact that the American bureaucracy is more political (in the sense of partisan and electoral politics) than bureaucracies in other democracies is a direct consequence of the mixed masters the Constitution gave the "executive" branch.  So while plenty of our current institutional arrangements evolved over time, I would strong argue that the core political theory embedded in the Constitution is quite relevant to how they evolved, and the institutional arrangements detailed in that rulebook are quite relevant today.


Now, to the much harder case, regarding the values of the constitution.  Do "the protection of slavery, the restriction of suffrage and so on" mean that "the framers' constitution represented values that Americans should abhor or at least reject today"?  I'm not so sure.  It is certainly the case that many of the framers had values Americans today abhor and should and do reject.  I tend to support those who argue, however, that most of those values were not, in fact, found in their Constitution (and are certainly not in ours, which contains the Civil War Amendments, among other improvements). 


Steering away for the moment from race, think just about the question of democracy.  Yes, the Framers as a group were afraid of what they thought of as democracy; feared the masses and did nothing specific in the Constitution to enfranchise them; and had ideas about citizenship and virtue that were interesting but also deeply problematic (interested?  Want to read something terrific?  Try Hanna Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman).  Yet it's also the case that the ideas of self-government they derived from liberalism and republicanism turned out, in practice, to be intensely democratic.  In other words, whatever they thought about "democracy" at the time, and whatever their own personal prejudices about elites and masses may have been, what they actually put into the Constitution was extraordinarily democratic.  That's not only true in the sense that it was amazingly democratic for its time (which it was), but in that whatever they thought they were doing, what they actually did was to create self-government.  In other words, the values of the Constitution are in my view democratic, even if we should and do reject the anti-democratic side of the Framer's values. 



But, yes, race.  The Constitution protected slavery, no question about it.  Still...I'd argue that even there, the values of the Constitution are not values of racism and dehumanization -- not even the odious 3/5 clause.  The values of the Constitution are pragmatism and compromise in the spirit of self-government among real people in the real world.  The values of the Constitution say: in a democracy, in true self-government, one sometimes has to learn to work with bigots, with really hateful people, and find a way to keep things together anyway.  Now, that's a tough lesson, and it will without a doubt lead to mistakes...there's no question but that Americans who were not themselves bigots have, over time, made many mistakes of pragmatism and compromise that never should have happened.  But I'm not unhappy that the Constitution forces us to see that self-government involves making terrible choices.   The alternative is a kind of happy-talk democracy, in which we pretend that The People are good and pure, and that if only we properly listened to The People then everything would be hunky-dory and flowers and rainbows.  Democracy, by that conception, is equivalent at all times with what's good and right.  The Constitution, however, says: no!  Self-government means nothing more than self-government, and sometimes that's going to mean tragically horrible choices.  Believing in democracy -- really believing in democracy -- means accepting that abhorrent things are going to be done in your name, because you are a citizen, not a subject.  Even worse, believing in democracy -- really believing in democracy -- means that sometimes you will have to grudgingly support abhorrent things because the alternative is something even worse, and because, as a citizen, you have to choose. 



Of course, that's not the final word.  It's also a Constitutional value of self-government that if you lose this round (or find yourself having to "win" a terrible compromise), you can move forward and try to do better.  You can find better politicians, convince more voters...you, you, can try to improve things.  Self-government doesn't mean that the bigots lose, but it does mean that you can educate people, you can find allies, you can choose the party that you believe fights for justice, and if it doesn't you really can stand up and change things.  Or at least you can try.  The Constitution reminds us that actual people, part of We the People, supported slavery and "had" to be bought off if the United States of America was going to happen.  That actual people, part of We the People, have been bigots and won plenty of battles, with terrible and terrifying consequences.  But also that actual people, part of We the People, fought back and won some battles of their own.  And we can remember the specific elections and candidates and political parties in which those battles took place.



Last bit...I want to think a bit more what Lexington says about one aspect of the Constitution:

[Tea-partiers] say that the framers’ aim was to check the central government and protect the rights of the states. In fact the constitution of 1787 set out to do the opposite: to bolster the centre and weaken the power the states had briefly enjoyed under the new republic’s Articles of Confederation of 1777.

I think that's somewhat, but not completely, true.  Madison and Hamilton may have wanted to weaken the power of the states.  What the Constitution actually does, however, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, isn't to weaken anyone's power: what it does is create power.  That's the secret of "separated institutions sharing powers," and the secret of federalism; by creating many different institutions that matter and that can do things on their own (and/or with the cooperation of or in rivalry with other institutions), the system as a whole is far more energetic and dynamic than any one hierarchy could be.  Not to be too sappy, but in this sense "Yes we can" is one of the most important values of the Constitution of the United States of America.  We the people can do all these things (Establish justice! Promote the general welfare!), by creating a government that represents us and can do all these things. 


So, yes, the Framers had all sort of values that we can and do reject.  But for whatever reasons, the Constitution they created through a spirit of pragmatism and compromise doesn't, I don't think, stand for those values.  The real values of the Constitution?  Those, we can admire.

When Madisonian Democracy Breaks Down

Hans Noel is blogging Madison and parties over at the new blog. I agree with much of his approach to Madison, but I figured I should jump in and give my own version of this, which overlaps with his.

Madison, as I see it, considers majority tyranny the worst enemy of democracy.* I think he sees it primarily in practical terms: under true majority rule, the minority will revolt and, if possible, impose some other form of government, because permanent minorities will be better off if democracy is overthrown. Madison is acutely aware that the history of republics is one of failure, usually before very long. No one has ever figured out how to make a democracy last, and Madison thinks that the trick, which involves making it very difficult for majorities to act. He proposes to do that two ways. In Federalist 10 he suggests a very large polity, so that interests are diverse and therefore no natural majorities will form (that is, no single faction will be very large). And in Federalist 51, he proposes a scheme of checks and balances; by breaking up the government into many competing branches, unified control will be difficult.

As Hans says, this focus on faction, or what we would call interest groups, overlooks that which did not yet exist: political parties, which can knit together smaller interests into a majority and which can co-ordinate across branches of government. Still, I'd argue that this does not, in fact, under most conditions, violate Madison's plans.

I count three threats to Madison:

1. Everyone begins to care deeply about the exact same issue, especially one which appears to everyone to have only two choices. This is, essentially, the story of slavery; we can think of the Civil War as the consequence of everyone believing that everything hinged on slavery and all compromise positions disappeared, leaving only two choices.

2. The party one: everyone begins to be passionately partisan. In this case, not only are the stakes very high if your side loses and election, but a loss threatens to be permanent, because if everyone is partisan then there will be few if any swing voters.

3. Ideology. Everyone becomes convinced that all issues are linked together in some fashion so that if you support X then you also support Y and Z and A and B and C.

What they all have in common, I think you can see, is that they return to Madison's original problem: if elections are high-stakes and at least threaten to be permanent decisions, then the losers will prefer other options to democracy.

Now, we clearly in my view do not have a situation matching situation #1 or #3, at least among the general public. I'd argue that we also don't have a situation #2 situation, although we're closer to it than we once were.

So what to do? Hans suggests:

Rather than trying to fix our party system, Madison would advocate fixing out institutions, so that they would, in his words from Federalist 51, "oblige [government] to control itself." In short, we shouldn't be trying to fix our parties to make them work within our institutions. We should be trying to fix our institutions so that they can handle our parties.

I'm not sure where Hans is going next, so I won't try to guess. But what I think Madison would suggest is that the institution(s) needing fixing are the parties themselves, and that you do that by finding new and different incentives for party actors.

Can that be done? I really don't know. I guess I tend to think that the big problem is neither ideology nor partisanship, but something else that's wrong with the Republican Party that winds up with that party (1) undermining democratic norms and (2) advocating a principled aversion to compromise.

That's not to say that a round of institutional tinkering would necessarily be a bad thing; in particular, I do think that the current (post-1993, post-2009) de facto rules of the Senate are dysfunctional and should be reformed, and I've advocated other reforms in other areas. But while I certainly agree with Hans about Madison's point concerning the virtues of allowing participation in whatever form it winds up taking, I also don't know that we should necessarily take the current state of the parties as a given. And to the extent that governmental design can nudge everyone away from Madison's three problematic situations, that would be a good goal.




*Two clarifications: one is that yes, I know that Madison used a slightly different vocabulary, but I think we're better off translating into modern vocabulary; we should use "republic" and "democracy" as synonyms. And, yes, we cannot assume that the Constitution is the perfect embodiment of Madison's ideas, or that Madison's words written in the context of a political fight are always the best guide to what he thinks.

Town Hall 3

Here's the deal: organized groups are disrupting Congressional Town Hall meetings; organized groups and individual politicians and activists are spreading extraordinary misinformation about health care reform; and it appears, as Brendan Nyhan tells us, that bad information tends to drive out the good.

Consequently, a lot of people are upset. I quoted Publius from Obsidian Wings already. James Fallows is more measured, but still:

I have to say that it is striking to come back -- from the world of controlled media and not-always-accurate "official truth" in China -- and see the world's most mature democracy, informed by the world's dominant media system, at a time of perceived economic crisis and under brand new political leadership, getting tied up by manufactured misinformation. No matter what party you belong to, you can't think this is a sign of health for the Republic.

Fallows and everyone else are quoting Steven Pearlstein from the WaPo:

Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society.

So, is it true? Is there something gravely wrong with our democracy if faux-angry astroturfers can shut down Congressional Town Hall meetings, and if clever liars can poison the public debate?

Well, no, it's not true (and, yes, I'm sure experience blog readers saw that one sauntering down 5th avenue quite some time ago).

I think there are four issues at play here:

Is manipulating the public debate with Big Lie techniques apt to sink health care reform?

Is shutting down town halls bad for representation and democracy?

Regardless of what happens to health care, is a factually compromised public discussion of issues a threat to democracy?

And, are false claims of "death panels" and the rest of it a good partisan political tactic beyond the current debate, so that parties have an incentive to engage in that sort of thing. In particular, is the current debate good for the GOP?

I'm going to come down on the negative side of each of these. The first one, about sinking the health care reform bill, I've already covered; basically, while Members of Congress are highly risk-averse, I think that they are unlikely at this point to believe that the Town Hall confrontations are evidence of a broader unrest within their districts. They still may conclude that voting for whatever bill winds up on the floor is too dangerous of a vote -- and in fact it may be that the eventual bill is unpopular -- but I don't think the Town Halls are going to carry much weight with anyone who isn't looking for excuses. I also think it's relatively unlikely that gross misinformation (death panels, euthanasia, etc.) will sway public opinion. More likely, that sort of thing will fill in the reasoning of those disposed to oppose the president and Democrats in the first place; those disposed to support them will ignore such information. (The same would happen with factual information cutting against reform; in that case, Democrats and supporters of the president would tend to ignore it).

This will, eventually, be an empirical question, subject to real investigation; whatever happens to the bill, we'll get some research into what was going on with the marginal votes in the House and Senate.

OK, that leaves three questions, and they touch more on theories of representation and democracy than they do on empirical research.

Heroes of the Republic

I've said this before, but while I have no problem at all with recognizing the heroism and bravery of those who risk their lives for the United States of America, the people who get underappreciated at times like these are the politicians, other political leaders and actors, and other government workers.

If you want a republic, you need these folks. You need Bob Gates, dragged out of retirement by George W. Bush and then retained by Barack Obama. You need Leon Panetta, who could have stayed in sunny California instead of taking on one more (and soon, yet another) job for his nation. You need Hillary Clinton and Condi Rice and Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright. You need the Members of the 9/11 Commission, who tried to figure out how that disaster happened and how to prevent a recurrence, and you need the Members of Congress who pushed to make that commission happen. You need Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and a bunch of other cabinet secretaries dating back to the Clinton years, and three Vice Presidents, and various Congressional Committee Chairs of both parties, and then the White House and Congressional and Commission staff, and diplomats and others who work at the relevant agencies...you need all those people. You need, too, the activists, pro- and anti-, who march and donate and petition and go door-to-door. You even need the losing candidates, from president on down.

No, most of them aren't risking their lives, and no, not all of them did things that I consider to be positive contributions. But all of them -- especially the ones you've heard of -- risk their reputations. All of them choose, for whatever reasons, selfish or otherwise, a form of public service. Even the worst of the lot. Without them, no democracy. No republic. No freedom and liberty, as we think of them, including both public and private liberty.

We do a lot of honoring "the troops" in present-day USA, and as I said, I'm all for that, and proud to do so. But they're not the only heroes of the republic. Don't forget to honor the rest of them. And don't forget that you, too, can be one.

Polite. Prudent. Politicize.

There are three kinds of issues properly surrounding whether it's appropriate to invoke political discussions in the wake of the events in Aurora.

The first is etiquette. Etiquette suggests that it may be appropriate to wait a bit before we discuss policy options, electoral effects, or any of the other practical stuff of life, or it might be appropriate to use quieter voices in the initial aftermath. May be appropriate. Whether it is or not depends on the particular circumstances of the calamity, as well as the particular context of who is talking and where and how. Who are you speaking to? How do they feel about, how are they connected to, the victims? Etiquette tells us to respect people's emotions and try not to offend; we want to follow that just as we would if we suffered a death among our family or our workplace or some other group. But what it exactly entails may be not entirely obvious.

The second is prudence. Making policy pronouncements immediately isn't just crass; it's foolish. Politicians and pundits need to constantly remind themselves: initial reports of sudden events are always confused, and may include things that turn out to be absolutely incorrect. When in any doubt, waiting another hour, or even another day, may be the wisest course.

But the third is: of course it is at some point and in some way appropriate to discuss the political implications, including policy implications, of these types of events, and to advocate for the policies we prefer.

One way of thinking about politics is that it's about how we collectively decide how to organize ourselves. That includes decisions over which aspects of our lives we will choose to treat as within the realm of politics, and which we choose to treat as beyond that realm. In a democracy, all sorts of questions like that -- not just what to do, but which things we should even consider to be "political" at all -- will be contested. David Waldman put it well this morning: "If you live under a regime of self-government, everything is political. Even the decision to decline to address things politically."

And there's more than that. In my view, the best justification for democracy is only that we want to have the ability to collectively choose how we wish to live (including, always, the leave-each-other-alone options big and small). The idea that democracy gives the objectively best policy answers is, as far as I can see, an unproven assertion at best; the idea that democracy means that the correct people are policy winners is not only theoretically silly in my view but, again, another unproven assertion.

What this means, however, is that things are political and politicized because ultimately we want them to be. The United States is an invented nation, invented in order to allow its citizens to engage in politics, and so virtually everything is open to politicization. I don't accept what Jamelle Bouie said over the at Plum Line this morning -- that "we look at this from the perspective of our culture and not our politics." The democratic answer is that our culture is at least from one point of view part of our politics as well. We may well choose that government-influenced cultural change is worse than leaving culture to its own devices; we may choose that even if we actually agreed on what cultural changes were positive and that government could effect those changes, just because we feel strongly that government shouldn't be involved in that area. But that, too, is a political choice.

Oh, and that goes for extra-governmental politics, too -- private organizations organizing boycotts, for example, or people publicly arguing for some sort of cultural changes. That's politics, too, and it's also part of what the American Republic is about. Suggestions for such as Jamelle's that we should collectively change our culture are in at least one sense political suggestions even if they are meant to be carried out without any electoral or governmental involvement at all.

(To be fair, I suspect Jamelle agrees with what I'm saying here and just didn't word what he said the way I would have; his post is just the closest example at hand).

So: be polite; be cautious. And then, if you believe that change is needed (or if you believe that proposed changes should not take place -- there's nothing in what I'm saying that is meant to imply that advocating change is on any different ground than advocating the status quo), do not hesitate to propose it and work for it, and (as long as you're attending to etiquette) ignore anyone who says that it's wrong to politicize or to exploit an awful situation. There's nothing more patriotic in the United States of America than engaging in political action.

Those Carville/Greenberg focus groups 3

Continuing the discussion of the Democracy Corps examination of the conservative Republican base...here's the first part (in which I argued that this is a problem for Republicans, but not for the republic), and here's the second part (in which I asserted that what Carville and Greenberg are hearing is echoed from talk show hosts).

Before leaving the topic, however, I think I have to talk a bit about C/G's comments about race. C/G's first conclusion is that race is "beside the point" in the attitudes of the Republican conservative corps, and several commenters have bought that idea (here's TPM's item, and here's Political Wire), but their own focus groups tell a very different story -- in fact, race-based narratives seem, as I read it, to be critical to the world view expressed here.

First, here's the Democracy Corps summary:

Instead of focusing on these intense ideological divisions, the press and elites continue to look for a racial element that drives these voters’ beliefs – but they need to get over it. Conducted on the heels of Joe Wilson’s incendiary comments at the president’s joint session address, we gave these groups of older, white Republican base voters in Georgia full opportunity to bring race into their discussion – but it did not ever become a central element, and indeed, was almost beside the point.

But that's not what they report. What they report is a group that is highly race-conscience, a group that sees race as central to American politics, although certainly not a group that expressed explicit race hatred. One would think that people might start to understand that in an era in which some idiot in Louisiana could get national attention for refusing to marry people on explicitly racial grounds while loudly proclaiming that he's not a racist. So, let's see what C/G's focus groups are telling us.

1. They are acutely aware of charges of racism, and feel oppressed by those charges. While C/G do not report any of their focus groups repeated Glenn Beck's charges that Obama hates white people, or Newt's accusation that Justice Sotomayor is a racist, I think it's fair to say that intense awareness of (real and supposed) accusations of racism exist on the same dimension. The common denominator, here, is one of acting besieged by blacks and their allies, and seeing American politics as one of a fundamental conflict between blacks and their allies, on the one hand, and everyone else, on the other hand. I don't think there's much of a point to arguing over whether to label that lens "racist" or not, but it surely means that race is not "beside the point."

2. I agree with those (I associate this with Glenn Greewald, but I don't have a citation at hand) who argue that the attacks on Bill Clinton from conservatives were at least as intense and vicious as the current attacks on Obama. However, I don't recall accusations that Clinton was only a figurehead for a shadowy conspiracy. Clinton could be accused of many things, and it is true that conservatives thought of him as a illegitimate usurper, but no one that I recall denied Clinton himself agency. That's not true with Obama's attackers:

I just think that Obama was molded and I think that he is being fed what he can and cannot do and what to do next and it seems like he is a puppet in this whole game. I don’t know who the people are behind him really but I don’t think it is him. I think it is somebody, I think he is just the figurehead… I think it is George Soros… I do too… Is he the guy with money?… Yes… They say follow the money.

I think he has a money person behind him that has planned this long before because he has gotten pushed into a position that is unbelievable for a community organizer…I come from Chicago so I know how he got there and I don’t like his tentacles into ACORN and everything else that are subsidiaries and it all goes back… He couldn’t do it by himself.

Since Clinton and Obama share similar biographies in many ways (obscure origins, elite education, new to the national scene), it's not much of a stretch to conclude that race is a reason for the difference. For these respondents, it apparently seems improbable that a black man "couldn't do it by himself," while as far as I can recall Clinton evoked no such concerns. As far as who the cabal Obama is fronting for really is, here's Andrew Sullivan's interpretation:

These people believe there is a hidden plot to destroy America, and it has something to do with black community organizations and Jewish money.

(Don't worry, Andrew -- I'm sure you're not left out; the "cosmopolitan" stereotypes evoked here are both Jewish and gay, so we're in it together).

3. Just an obvious point: C/G note that their focus groups also feel betrayed by the Republican Party, but miss the race-based explanation given by at least one respondent:

They’re so worried about pandering to the Hispanic vote that they’re going to alienate their base.

Note that here the base is defined in opposition to "the Hispanic vote." Is race really "beside the point?"


Well. I think there's a lot to sort out here. Democracy Corps finds a "clear sense of shared identity" among their focus group attendees. For C/G, that's based on a sense of being an oppressed minority, of holding special knowledge, and of having been called to action (although apparently that doesn't involve much, you know, action; they hear about Tea Parties rather than attending them). The core question here is to what extent this "shared identity" is about ideas, and to what extent it is about race. C/G dismiss race, but their own data shows that race is, indeed, an important factor in what this group sees as "us" and what they see as "them." Note that I said it's a factor: I can't know from the evidence they give us how important a factor it is, and I'm sure that it varies across individuals.

I also think there's a lot of work to be done understanding the relationship between these race-centered narratives and the source material, which as I've said is invariably going to be
Rush, Beck, Savage, and the rest of that crowd. Are those media types popular among this group because they evoke race talk that resonates with people who have a propensity for accepting it? Or are Rush & Co. using other frustrations (or, in many cases, honest and simple partisanship) to instill racial awareness where it previously didn't lurk? To put it way more bluntly than I should (because the truth is certainly much more murky than this will imply), are Rush & Co. teaching bigots who don't want to think of themselves as bigots a vocabulary to use to express their bigotry without feeling bad about it? Or are Rush & Co. teaching non-bigots to use racially-loaded language and concepts to explain politics?

One would certainly hope that, in 2009, conversation about these matters can progress beyond the racist/not racist stage; I feel like this should be all fairly obvious, but obviously quite a few people including Carville and Greenberg don't see it that way. No, the nation is not filled with a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth bigots who express a hatred of African Americans and would be Barack Obama's biggest fans if only his father had shared ethnic origins with his mother. But to conclude that it is Obama's supporters who need to "Get Over" race is myopic in the extreme. Raced-based narratives are, as Democracy Corps data show, central to the way that core conservatives talk about politics today, and there's no way to understand them and what they are saying without thinking about race.

Representation and Public Opinion

Seth Masket asks:

Shouldn't public policy reflect public opinion?

It's a good post -- I'll wait while you go and read it.

OK, I'll summarize for lazy readers. Seth points to some interesting examples, including the odd case of the estate tax, which apparently has always been unpopular not because people thought it was inherently unjust, but because most people mistakenly expect to be hurt by it (well, I guess they mistakenly expect their heirs to be hurt by it). He also uses the fictional example of West Wing President Bartlet, who doesn't care about public opinion on a complex arms control question because he (presumably correctly) doesn't believe that the public knows or even can know enough to have reasonable, informed opinions. Seth says:

Obviously, a democratic republic should be biased toward following public opinion, but there are legitimate cases for ignoring it. The trick is figuring out when.

tiI have two responses. The first is that this question is partially solved by political parties. Democracies don't need people to understand nuclear physics; they just need people to choose between Martin Sheen and John Goodman...er., between the Democrats and the Republicans. There are all sorts of complexities that follow, but that's one direction one can explore.

The second (and in my view complementary) way to look at it is through representation. Here, what matteres is the representational relationship between elected officials and constituents, which as Richard Fenno tells us involves cycles of promises, interpretations of promises, actions in office, and explnations of those actions in light of the original promises. The key to understanding this is the nature of promises. Promises made by politicians can be issue promises, such as the ones that Politifact tracks. But sometimes, and I think more importantly, they can be about how the elected official will do his job: "I'll listen to you, not to Washington lobbyists." "I'll fight for the little guy." "I'll be a strong conservative voice." "I'll make sure that our town gets its fair share of the pie." "It's time that we sent a woman to the House."

Fulfilling those promises sometimes means sticking to specific issue positions, but sometimes it doesn't. It may be that different promises, even ones that sound similar, require a different action in Washington. Consider two same-state Senators, one of whom promised to fight for the little guy, while the other promised to listen to her constituents. If both Senators agree that public opinion opposes the estate tax but that the tax would be on balance good for middle and working class voters, the "fight for..." Senator might feel obliged to support estate taxes, while the "listen" Senator may feel constrained to oppose such a tax. Sometimes, however, it's more about the way that elected officials explain their actions and interpret their promises than about policy positions per se. Here's an example: Jed Bartlet was elected in part because he was a real smart guy; he promised, in effect, to be a real smart guy in office. He can't break that problem by taking any particular position on arms control, but he could break it, at least in part, if it were revealed that he didn't understand the issue himself.

Back to Seth's claim that "Obviously, a democracy should be biased toward following public opinion." I think this perspective suggests that Seth isn't right. Democracy should be biased toward developing and supporting strong representational relationships. Sometimes public opinion will be important to those relationships, but sometimes it won't; that's up to the particular politician and the particular constituency, and how they interact with each other.

What's nice about that perspective is that it gets around a whole lot of messy things that we know about public opinion itself (such as how inconsistent and uninformed most voters are on most issues). The representation perspective suggests that it's OK if voters don't have opinions on the details of arms control, or that their opinions about other issues are clearly just a function of following opinion leaders. The important thing, for democracy, is only that they elect politicians who try to keep their promises (properly understood).

Good Hold, Bad Holds

The Majoritarian Caucus -- Drum, E. Klein -- today are using the decision of Bernie Sanders to place a hold on the renomination of Ben Bernanke to trot out their opposition to all holds. Kevin Drum says:

Aside from my general dislike of the whole hold process, this is a pretty good example of a big specific problem with it: namely that I don't think Sanders has even the slightest hope that his hold is genuinely going to keep Bernanke from being confirmed...So all this does is gum up the gears and force the Senate to spend time on Bernanke instead of the million other things it should be spending time on.

I disagree: this is exactly why the "hold" is, or at least was, a worthwhile mechanism.

Oversight is one of Congress's important responsibilities, and the confirmation process is one of the best means of insuring meaningful oversight -- with the Fed, it's almost the only way of insuring oversight. Yet if Congress is only able to vote nominations up or down, then oversight becomes, essentially, a function of the will of the majority party, and nothing more.

The hold allows the minority, whether it's members of the minority party or small factions of the majority party, to participate in a little oversight of their own. Used properly, it allows small numbers of Senators (even one!) to say: hey, wait, I have some concerns, too. How are you going to address them?

It doesn't mean that small factions can automatically get their way; Bernanke (as Drum says) is going to be confirmed in the end, and may not have to make any commitments to Sanders before the hold is lifted. He will have to address Sanders' concerns. It seems to me that those concerns are both substantive and reasonable, and worthy of being answered. So what's the problem? Spending a little extra time on Bernanke doesn't seem like a bad thing to me at all.

A hold that forces nominees to address (not necessarily agree to, but address) real concerns of small factions of Senators seems like an excellent plan to me. I'd call those good holds.

Now, what Republicans seem to be doing -- what Democrats are calling hold abuse -- is different. In those cases, Republicans appear to be using holds not to achieve oversight on specific topics with specific nominees, but to just derail the ability of the administration to function at all. I generally agree with the Democrats on this one -- not just that these are "bad holds," but that it's an abuse of the hold.

I'll try to say something a little broader here...the various procedural protections for minorities in the Senate are justifiable because pure majoritarian democracy has a lot of problems. For example, in cases in which an indifferent majority is opposed by an intense minority, it's not at all clear that democracy requires the majority to win. More generally, there's a difference between the rule of the people and the rule of majorities; I would argue that only the former really qualifies as the best definition of democracy. The rule of the people often uses majority decision rules, but that's not the same thing as saying that majorities are supposed to rule.

Senators like to talk about the "rights" of individual Senators. I think they are quite correct to do so. In a democratic republic, it's wrong to think that the people of, say, Alabama should be entirely ignored for the next two years just because the candidate they supported lost the general election, and his party is in the minority in the Congress. They don't, of course, deserve to automatically win -- but they don't deserve to be ignored. It's rule of the people, not just the majority.

The trick, however, is to find rules that allow for everyone to have a say without allowing the minority to dictate things. To find, for example, ways to let intense minorities to (possibly) defeat indifferent majorities, without also allowing all minorities to defeat all majorities.

Now, whether particular antimajoritarian rules "work" or not is certainly open to debate. My sense of it is that in moderation, during an era of relatively weak partisanship, little ideological extremism, and willingness to abide by informal norms, holds and filibusters work pretty well. In the current era, which features strong partisanship, strict ideological separation of the parties, and a Republican party willing to exploit rules to their fullest extent without regard for old norms and practices, it may be that the hold and the filibuster are no longer viable methods of antimajoritirianism.

But that's not what Bernie Sanders is up to. What he's doing doesn't show what's wrong with holds or the Senate; it's exactly what the Senate should be doing, and why some of us would be sad to see the demise of that practice.

I Wish I Were Big

Via Ezra, Kurt Anderson makes a common error about Madison and democracy, but compounds it by getting the size argument all wrong.  Anderson:

The framers worried about democratic government working in a country as large as this one, and it’s possible that we’ve finally reached the unmanageable tipping point they feared: Maybe our republic’s constitutional operating system simply can’t scale up to deal satisfactorily with a heterogeneous population of 310 million. When the Constitution was written and the Senate created, there were around 4 million people in America, or about one senator for every 150,000 people. For Congress to be as representative as it was in 1789, we’d need to elect 2,000 senators and 5,000 House members. And so I wonder, as I watch Senate leaders irresponsibly playing to the noisiest, angriest parts of the peanut gallery, if the current, possibly suicidal spectacle of anti-government “populism” in Washington isn’t connected to our bloated people-to-Congresspeople ratios. As the institution grows ever more unrepresentative, more numerically elite, members of Congress may feel irresistible pressure to act like wild and crazy small-d democrats.

It is true that until the Constitution was drafted, virtually everyone who ever thought about the matter believed that republics could only work if they were small.  The genius of Madison is that he reversed that logic.  Madison saw that republics had always failed because intense minorities, if they couldn't get their way, would prefer a system of government more responsive to all the people, not just the majority.  For Madison, republics fail because of majority tyranny.  But what, Madison asked, if there was no natural majority?  If that was the case, then the various minorities would bargain and negotiate to find solutions that everyone could live with.  And the easiest way to eliminate the possibility of a natural majority was to have a very large polity, the astonishing leap that Madison makes in Federalist 10:

The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. 

I have more to say about this, but I think I'll stick it in a second post.  For now, it's just important to note that as far as Madison was concerned, size was a strength, not a weakness, of American democracy.  

 

I'll add that there's no particular reason to believe that today's Senators and/or Members of the House are any less representative than were those of the past.  Anderson says that Congress "grows ever more unrepresentative," but why should we think so?  Certainly the electorates are a lot closer to the democratic ideal of the whole people than they ever were before (most felons, non-citizens, and the pre-18 crowd are all that are formally excluded, and while the actual electorate is not a perfect match for all eligible voters, it's surely a better match now than it was in the past).  For better or worse, Members of Congress are much better able to know what their constituents are thinking than they were before polling, modern communications, and modern transportation put them in constant touch with their districts.  The Senate remains malapportioned (and that one can't be defended on democratic grounds), but one person, one vote is the law of the land in the House -- another relatively recent (post-1960) development.  On the whole, it seems to me that today's Congress is certainly much more representative of (and/or provides better representation for) the underlying population than the 1960 Congress, the 1910 Congress, the 1860 Congress, or the 1810 Congress.  

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Tim Minear, 50.

Good stuff:

1. Regular readers will know that I strongly agree with Ilya Somin about the words "democracy" and "republic." There are two reasonable choices: treat them as synonyms, which is what we should do in most contexts...or treat them as about the concepts of Athens vs. Rome, which is interesting and all but has nothing at all to do with the USA or any other modern polity. I mean, of course some of our ideas come from Athens and Rome, but our institutions really don't, and can't. See more here -- really the first three, which are all more or less repetitive, but if you go down a bit you'll see a pretty good point about why it might matter if a nation thinks of itself as a Republic, and also some stuff about Palpatine.

2. Joseph Neeley on "The Republican Brian." I'm no expert at this stuff...but my inclination is to believe it's mainly bunk.

3. And Kevin Drum on Medicaid and transferring money from Republican states to Democratic states.

Those Carville/Greenberg focus groups 1

Lots of people have been discussing the Democracy Corps (Carville/Greenberg) focus groups that show the extent to which the Republican base is...well, there's no other way to say it: they're just cut off from reality.

They believe Obama is ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism. They overwhelmingly view a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of this country’s founding principles and are committed to seeing the president fail.

Conor Friedersdorf, who has his own data -- a fascinating survey of GOP leaders around the country -- says that the Carville/Greenberg conclusions ring true to him, and argues:

Talk radio and FOX News are so tremendously influential among the most dedicated movement conservatives that it is creating an alternate reality of ill-conceived paranoia — those who regard this stuff as hilarious, amoral entertainment underestimate the harm it causes.

So: does it cause a lot of harm? Two points:

1. It does seem to hold a lot of danger for the Republican party. We're talking about a lot of Republicans -- C/G estimate 20% of the population, so if that's correct it's going to be over 50% of many GOP primary electorates -- who hold beliefs that are simply cut off from reality. In contested primaries (whether for president or lower office) , a candidate who can draw their votes will win. And such a candidate might have a great deal of difficulty winning general elections in all but the most lopsidedly Republican districts. In fact, one of the biggest questions, in my opinion, about the 2010 cycle is whether we're going to see a lot of the good recruits that the GOP has put together wind up burning out in primaries, with Charlie Crist as the most obvious test case. OTOH, it's certainly possible that mainstream Republican candidates will learn to dog whistle to that crowd (Fairness Doctrine!) successfully enough to win their primary election votes without saying things that will alarm swing voters.

2. I don't think, however, that this is a grave danger to the republic. It is possible that some nut-job out there will be pushed over the edge by all this to do something violent that he or she wouldn't have done otherwise. (Yes, this is depressing, although as always I'll remind everyone that two different people tried to shoot bland Jerry Ford, and that terrorists shot up Congress in the seemingly dull mid-1950s...and I also suspect, alas, that threats to this particular president would be high even if he was polling in the 80s and all Republicans were of the Carville/Greenberg "nice independent" variety). But the conservative base isn't putting on sheets and burning crosses, and it isn't lynching anyone, and America survived those episodes of extreme violence. Tea parties, silly as they are, and paranoid as their rhetoric may be, look to the peaceful and symbolic Boston Tea Party and not to any paramilitary group as their model.

So: great danger for Republicans, but not for the republic. More on this topic soon.

Balance of Power

As regular readers know, I'm a big fan of Ezra Klein (want to understand what's going on with health care right now? See what he says here and here), and I'm certainly all for quoting Mann and Ornstein, but I don't think this post really gets things right. Ezra says:

[I]t's worth reminding folks that the legislative branch is the first branch mentioned in the Constitution, and the powers of the House are outlined before the Senate is discussed. Scholars of this stuff will tell you that the Founders meant for Congress to be more powerful than the president and the House to be more powerful than the Senate. The proof is in the pudding, or at least in the Constitution: Congress can write and pass legislation, while the president can merely veto, and his veto can be overridden. "All bills for raising Revenue" must originate in the House, while the Senate doesn't get a special power of its own. The hierarchy is pretty clear, and makes sense: The House is, after all, the most democratic body in our government.

Well...yes and no. Yes, Congress is in some sense the "first branch." I wouldn't say that the framers of the Constitution "meant for Congress to be more powerful than the president." I think a better way to think of it is that they believed that in a democracy (they called it a republic, but I've been convinced that it's best to think of those terms as synonyms in most cases), the "democratic" parts were apt to dominate -- and that therefore a guiding question of the Constitution was how to restrain representative bodies chosen by the people. Their problem, as they eventually realized, was that in America there wouldn't be anything with which to constrain democratic institutions. There would be no aristocracy, or crown, or offical Church -- no other Estates. Eighteenth century doctrine followed Montesquieu and insisted on a balance of powers, but in America there was nothing to balance. There were no Powers ; there was only one power, the people.

I think there are two ways to interpret the Constitutional solution. One is that the framers somehow managed to create something other than the people -- that the (original, at least) Senate and the presidency are somehow less democratic than the House, and that the Constitution is all about constraining democracy. That was, more or less, the anti-federalist argument at the time, and it's been a popular interpretation ever since. In large part, the Federal Papers are a response to this argument. There are lots of very defensive essays about how the president isn't going to be a king -- No Really! He has hardly any powers at all! -- and the Senate isn't going to be an aristocracy, and so on.

I think a better interpretation of what the framers were up to, however, is that they realized that in America there would be nothing other than the people, but that institutional design could still achieve the benefits of balance of powers by duplicating the people into different parts of the government. Even in their original forms, that interpretation argues, the Senate and the presidency (and, perhaps, even the courts) are just as democratic as the House of Representatives, because they ultimately depend on the same constituency: the people. Yes, election was indirect, while election in the House was direct, but that's not nearly as important as the obvious fact that ultimately it all comes down to the same electorates. From the very start, there was nothing of the House or Lords or the Roman Senate in the United States Senate. In that sense, both the Jacksonian idea of the presidency as the people's branch and the eventual decision to remove the indirect election of Senators and (mostly) the president are contained within the original idea of those institutions. They always were intended to be democratic.

Why, then, balance of power? Two reasons, one familiar and one less so. The familiar reason is Madison's in Federal 51; everyone, even the people, need constraints, and separated institutions sharing powers (in Neustadt's wonderful phrase) is the way to do that. Ambition checks ambition, and so on. And that's fine as far as it goes. It is a mistake, however, to see balance of powers as purely a negative force. Mixed government is powerful -- Rome was powerful -- because each element adds something to the mix. So we can turn Madison's "ambition must be made to counteract ambition" around and emphasize not the "counteract" part but the creation of power -- the creation of lots and lots of ambition, seen in this sense as a good thing, a creative energy. As Hannah Arendt argues, power is not a zero-sum game, and one can argue that the American system is especially good at generating lots of power.

So which is the most powerful branch? That's not a question that the Constitution answers. Yes, the House is given some Constitutional advantages (revenue bills, a Speaker, direct election), but so is the Senate (more control over the executive and judicial branches through nominations, long terms), and so are the president and the courts. Each branch, and each House of Congress, can throw down roadblocks; each branch, and each House of Congress, can also innovate and initiate action. I would say that Ezra is wrong in concluding that "the House is less powerful than the modern Senate and Congress has taken a back seat to the president." It's true that, as he says, attention is focused on the Senate, but that's not the same thing as the Senate having the most power. Indeed, to the extent that the Senate is unable to act, it becomes a weak player in the system. As for the president, we're accustomed to attributing policy changes to the White House (see for example here), but that's mostly convention and simplification, not analysis. What I would say is that the Constitution gives plenty of opportunity to a shockingly large array of actors to create policy, while leaving the outcomes of their efforts largely undetermined by formal rules.

I feel like I should add a few footnotes, or at least references...I highly recommend Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic; William Lee Miller, The Business of May Next; and Hannah Arendt, On Revolution.

Question Time

I've refrained from saying anything about Barack Obama's appearance at the House Republican Conference, because I hate to be a spoilsport about these sort of things -- liberals were enjoying it so much and all, not to mention the goo goos, who love this sort of thing.

As far as Obama's performance, the best thing you can read is by Kevin Drum, who noted that "The guy at the mike always has the advantage."  Yes, I think that George W. Bush would have done just fine in that format.  Granted, there are some skills that help: knowing policy details, knowing facts from fiction, and being able to compose word sequences that look suspiciously like sentences on the fly are all useful.  Of the last five presidents, I'd say that Obama is second best to Clinton in those abilities -- Reagan had problems with the first two of those skills, George H.W. Bush with the third one, and George W. Bush took the trifecta -- all three!  And despite all that, I'm sure Bush would have done just fine.

The larger question is whether such confrontations are a Good Thing, and one that we should borrow from the Brits.  Oddly enough, however, nothing I've seen has referred to a good 'ole American tradition that allows for what Ross Douthat wants -- for the president to be "publicly cross-examined."  That institution is the full dress presidential press conference, an institution that has been sadly neglected by Barack Obama.  Press conferences have several advantages over a direct confrontation between the president and Members of Congress.  First, the press is free to ask questions that Congress -- including the opposition party -- may not want to raise.  Second, whatever bias individual members of the press corps may have, at least they are not pre-programmed partisans, more interested in partisan points than in eliciting information.  Third, while it is certainly true that individual reporters are apt to be self-aggrandizing, they are much more likely to...how do I put this...um...to tell the truth, I guess, than are Members of Congress.  Accuracy is much valued among reporters; it is not exactly a major calling card for Members of Congress, especially those from the opposition party. 

The institution of Question Time is also more appropriate for Britain's system than for the American version of democracy for a couple of other reasons.  First, Congress holds plenty of reasonably high visibility hearings, in which members of both parties have plenty of chance to question, and attack if they choose, executive branch officials.  In Britain, a back bencher from the majority party might challenge the government by asking a question; in the United States, unhappy Members of Congress can convene a hearing.  Moreover, in Britain the minority party really has no way of influencing events, beyond raising issues, asking questions, and campaigning for the next election   In Congress, the minority has real opportunities, if Members so choose, to help make policy -- being the party of "No" is to a large extent a choice, not a constitutional arrangement. 

When John McCain was peddling the proposal during the campaign, George Will said, "President McCain would not lack ways and venues for conversing with legislators without reducing Congress to a prop in a skit of president-centrism."  That's exactly correct -- that's what Obama did to the House Republicans last week.  The thing is that in Britain, ordinary Members of Parliament really are inferior to the Prime Minister and the members of the Government.  Not in the United States: the Constitution envisions equal branches.  There is no more reason to expect Members of Congress to quiz the president than there is for the president to question them.  They are Constitutional equals.

So: more press conferences.  If people like, add regular YouTube press conferences to supplement, but not replace, regular press conferences.  More attention paid by the press to meaningful Congressional hearings (today's DADT hearing?  Yes.  Is Mark McGwire a threat to the republic?  Not so much).  And leave Question Time to the folks who know how to do it; if we're to get all bent out of shape by Justice Alito's mild faux pas, I really don't think we want to even think about what might happen with a real Question Time.