I was going to take issue with this post by Center for American Progress Action Fund fellow Matthew Yglesias yesterday, but I didn’t want to beat him up twice in one day.
That said, I think Matt’s thinking about the United States is fundamentally wrong and at total odds with any coherent grappling with modern or contemporary political philosophy:
The United States of America is a democracy, even though the Senate is malapportioned. Sweden is a democracy even though it has a king. Australia is a democracy even though it has a Queen who doesn’t even live in the same country. Switzerland is a democracy even though it relies on referenda much more than normal countries. Germany is a democracy even though it doesn’t use referenda at all. In other words, we refer to a wide range of republics and constitutional monarchies as “democracies” despite huge variance in institutional structures. What these countries all have in common is that governing authority is vested in elected officials who are constrained by the rule of law.
Matt once tweeted at me that what he would really prefer in the U.S. is a unicameral legislature. That’s all well and good, especially if what you’re after is a participatory direct democracy — which is what Matt says the United States are, if only for the “malapportioned” upper house. But the United States is not and never has been a democracy. The United States of America is a representative republic, and political satirist Tim Slagle captures the thrust of this idea nicely in a post about the stark differences between the tea party movement and the Occupy movement:
Tea parties are controlled by the rule of law and are planned in advance. They acquire proper permits, rent PA systems, Porti-Potties, and Tents. When they’re over, people pick up the trash and go home.
Occupy is famous for creepy chanting after every speaker finishes a sentence and a guy relieving himself against the side of a police car. Some of the Occupy residents have, ironically, used the facilities of McDonalds and Starbucks and even took ironic shelter from the rain in a Bank of America ATM kiosk (I’m sure the irony is lost on them, though). They loudly proclaim that “this is what Democracy looks like!”
Constitutional author James Madison would agree. In Federalist # 10 he wrote: “Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
Two years later, the French Revolution made his words almost prophetic. Absent an existing governmental structure to fill the vacuum, post-revolutionary France exploded into chaos. A Republic is necessary to defend the rights of the minority. Without such protections, government degenerates into mob rule.
And mob rule is exactly what we’re seeing in the Occupy protests. Their rally cry of “We Are the 99%” takes a triumphant delight in announcing that the opposition is way outnumbered. There is no clear message outside of anger. Attempts to write a list of demands have been hindered by the very democratic process they cherish.
Of course, since Slagle cites my favorite founding father, I’m probably a little biased. But that doesn’t change the fact that Matt Yglesias continues to categorically and ontologically reject our political institutions as they are currently conceived — and which haven’t changed (much) in over 200 years. It also doesn’t change the fact that the malapportionment of the Senate is a feature of the Constitution — not a bug — and the U.S. is not a democracy by design.
By the way, that our constitutional republic has survived as long as it has with relatively little incident (a four year civil war notwithstanding) is something of an anomaly.
