More Than Kings
We find ourselves once again in the midst of a depressing spectacle: election season. In my role as a political scientist I had to pay attention to electoral politics, even though I thought the art of governing was far more interesting. That art, however, was increasingly obscured by the secret machinations of distant bureaucrats. Politics is at its most interesting when transparent and engaged directly. National politics, I’ve long thought, is a very boring enterprise.
But not as boring as elections, with their focus groups and sound bites and fake debates and endlessly annoying commercials interrupting an otherwise distracting episode of Top Chef with candidates making promises they have neither the intention nor the capacity of fulfilling. I suspect that, knowing that, they turn on one another in mutual efforts at character assassination. Election years are powerful arguments for leaving your television and computer permanently in “off” mode. Like many Americans, I find the whole process dispiriting. I take it to be very much to Gerald Ford’s credit that he is the only President never to have been elected to the office.
Elections serve the purpose of staffing political offices. There are, of course, other ways we could do this. Personally, I think there is a lot to be said for drawing lots as a way of determining who holds office. It'd be a lot less expensive and might produce better results. My favorite method was presented in the movie Black Panther: a death match between the two candidates at the edge of a waterfall. If only.
In our reflection essay this week, we mention Alexis de Tocqueville’s claim that American democracy was splitting into two pieces that, while seemingly contradictory, are actually symbiotic. On the one hand, we have isolated and alienated individuals who increasingly retreat into private life. Tocqueville reminds us that the whole purpose of writing Democracy in America was to encourage public association among free and equal persons. Instead, over this mass of atomized individuals stood the tutelary power of the state, which sought to keep individuals in a position of weak dependency. Probably nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in recent COVID policies.
Toward the end of Democracy in America, Tocqueville draws our attention to a genuinely peculiar aspect of the American paradox: on the one hand, more and more power is directed toward the centralized administrative state, which insinuates itself deeper and deeper into our private lives; and on the other hand, we citizens are expected somehow to direct that “inquisitorial” and absolute and detailed power through the electoral process. He does not gainsay the importance of elections. They remain invaluable for holding officials accountable, most significantly by providing a safe and non-violent means of removing them from office. But they are relatively toothless enterprises when the vast majority of political offices in a centralized power are held by unelected officials.
Tocqueville goes further, however. Democratic elections obscure the nature of power because they lead us to believe that the capillary power that rules over the details of our lives is one of our own design. Thus, “the oppression that it can make individuals suffer is sometimes greater” because we believe that we are submitting to our own wills. While elections may “diminish the evil” of a centralized power, they cannot eliminate it.
He considered it a special type of vanity to suppose that, having made everyone dependent on the central power in all the small affairs of life that they can be expected to exercise wisdom in the large ones. Their dependency rendered their minds feeble and their judgments suspect. The problem we face, he suggested, resulted not from making bad decisions, but from a system that renders the whole electoral process suspect. A servile people cannot be expected to rise above their condition to direct the whole enterprise.
I add that they will soon become incapable of [properly] exercising the great and sole privilege remaining to them. Democratic peoples who have introduced liberty in the political sphere, at the same time that they increased despotism in the administrative sphere, have been led to very strange peculiarities. If small affairs, in which simple good sense can suffice, must be managed, they consider that the citizens are incapable of it; if it is a matter of the government of the whole State, they entrust these citizens with immense prerogatives; they make them alternately the playthings of the sovereign and its masters, more than kings and less than men.
Tocqueville indicates what we have repeated often in this space: voting in a presidential election is the least consequential thing we do as citizens. Not only mathematically — for we are only one of 170 million votes — but also practically. “It is,” Tocqueville continued, “difficult to imagine how men who have entirely given up the habit of directing themselves, could succeed in choosing well those who should lead them; and it cannot be believed that a liberal, energetic and wise government can ever come out of the votes of a people of servants.”
Freedom involves purposeful self-direction, and in a free society such purposeful self-direction takes place alongside and with others, with whom we form relationships of mutual solicitude and mutual dependence for the purpose of forming a common life. Only by recovering the natural human condition of mutual dependence can we overcome the unnatural condition of being in a one-way dependent relationship on a distant and anonymous power. Do elections actually reflect or will or diminish it, seems to be a question that Tocqueville would ask. When our most public act, voting, is also one of our most private ones, taking place behind a screen, shielded from our fellow citizens, we have reached a stage of incoherence. Democracy can't work when people spend their lives behind screens.
I have had a number of occasions to meet my district’s representative to the national Congress. I did not vote for her, and I disagree with her on many, many issues. But I like her, and I think she is conscientious and hard-working and doing her best to serve the interests of her district. I have the luxury of not hating her because I’ve come to know her as a good person, even if I think she has some bad ideas. But the vast majority of Americans will never have that opportunity. Only at the local level, in relationships marked by familiarity, can we have a government that is transparent, responsive, accountable, limited, trustworthy, and deserving of the respect and obedience of its citizens. Only then will we have citizens engaged in the world outside their head and home. Otherwise, we are merely subjects of a strange and distant power.
Discussion Questions:
Does voting in local elections matter more to the daily lives of Americans?
What reactions do you have to elections? How motivated are you to participate?
Describe what practical differences it makes when one party holds the reins of power rather than the other, and also where it would make no difference.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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