Democracy is Not on the Ballot

Why Good Government Trumps Popular Government

As the November presidential election gets closer and Donald Trump’s chances of winning increase daily, the establishment Washington class has ramped up their “democracy” rhetoric in an attempt to scare American voters away from Trump. Democratic candidate Kamala Harris tweeted in early July that “Democracy is on the ballot in November” and posted a picture of Donald Trump and the ominous warning that “Donald Trump Vows to be a Dictator on Day One.” Later in July, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed, “Now more than ever, it is crucial that our party and country swiftly unite to defeat Donald Trump and the threat to American democracy.” Over at the Atlantic, Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev warn that the end of democracy has begun and that a creeping autocracy poses a vital threat to American freedoms. These sentiments are not only found on the Left: Elon Musk and J. D. Vance have both echoed similar warnings about how a future Harris-Walz administration will deliver a death-blow to the rule of law and our First Amendment constitutional rights.

By now the “threat to democracy” line is old and flaccid, and it has worn thin for weary Americans sick of open-borders, sticky inflation, and forever wars. Many voters have wised up to the fact that hysterical “democracy” rhetoric is wielded as a cudgel by our political class to whip their base into a moral frenzy and in support of whatever incompetent puppet the bureaucrats shuffle forward. In a recent AP-NORC poll, a majority of Americans agreed that the coming election will decide the future of American democracy, but they split over whether Harris or Trump is the real threat.

Is democracy in America really under assault? Is it “on the ballot” this November in any meaningful way? The answer to both is ‘No,’ but not for reasons you might expect.

“A Republic, Not a Democracy!”

Conservatives have long had a ready answer to the “democracy” debate in this country: America was never meant to be a democracy, but a constitutional republic. This response is so common in Movement Conservatism that it has rightly been labeled a “Boomer” cliché. Many younger Americans on the New Right are not impressed with conceptual or semantic distinctions (real or imagined). Even if America is a constitutional republic, so what? Whatever was left of that republic is now so far gone that new forms of government and leadership demand serious consideration. Besides, any kind of “government by the people”—call it democracy or republicanism or something else—is a god that has failed, a form of degenerate government that cannot help but turn into suffocating oligarchy.

We will return to this perspective in a bit. However, is the distinction between a democracy and a republic legitimate or just conservative blather passed around conference circuits? In The Federalist Papers, Publius sought to distinguish the two forms of popular government, arguing that American constitutionalism was the first of its kind of species of republican government. In Federalists no. 10, 14, and 51, James Madison spelled out the differences. Democracies, such as those of the ancient Greeks, were administered in person by all the citizens of the city, as the adult, land-owning males would gather collectively to debate law and policy in the assembly. This, Madison, argued, produced many defects: it necessitated that the city and geographic domain be small, otherwise the assembly would be too large and unwieldy; even in small cities, the size of the assembly was too big to undergo effective deliberation; public assemblies were prone to divisions, faction, and conflict, and thus could easily be seduced by demagogues; and so democracies were ever the “spectacles of turbulence and contention.”

The key to overcoming these defects was the invention (really the improvement and new application) of representative government. By electing a smaller number of representatives to deliberate in their stead, the people could overcome two hurdles simultaneously: a much larger number of people could be included in the political community (i.e., and “extended sphere”) while yet maintaining a small assembly capable of genuine debate and public disputation by august and capable political deputies. The great goal of representative government, Madison argued, was to “refine and enlarge the public views,” which was accomplished by passing these popular opinions “through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice, will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” The division of Congress into a bicameral legislature was intended for just this purpose: the House of Representatives, as the popular assembly of the people, was meant to gather and distill the “voice” of the people, while the Senate, as a more aristocratic assembly of virtuous and clear-sighted men, would translate the people’s voice into good law and just policy. (Unfortunately, the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913 destroyed this balance by making Senators popularly elected, instead of being chosen by state legislative bodies.)

The furthest extreme between a democracy and a constitutional republic is the difference between rule by the participation and consent of the people alone (a pure plebiscite), versus the rule of the wise (a pure aristocracy). America is neither entirely but is supposed to balance both, since any stable polity must include both consent and wisdom to succeed. Even tyrants must manufacture some form of consent—even if installed wholly through fear—otherwise they will be assassinated and their statutes toppled. What’s important to grasp is that the balance in American system was not merely equal parts, but teleological: the end of government was the people’s good (the common good or public welfare), which demands wise leaders who grasp the nature of man and reality, the form of the Good (i.e., God), and the limits to what law and legislation can accomplish in tangibly achieving these goods. This is why Madison was just as insistent that “the aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first, to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous, whilst they continue to hold their public trust” (Federalist no. 57).

This means, among other things, that political representatives must grasp the proper ordering of public goods—that security and protection, national sovereignty, self-defense, and economic prosperity come first as conditions of mere life; but that these things are themselves conditions for a life well lived: a life that includes marriage, family, meaningful work, worship of God, and the fulfillment of moral duty towards others and piety towards God. It is highly unlikely that political leaders will understand such things, let alone see how to effectively pursue and achieve them through law and policy, if they are not themselves of a particular moral and religious character.

Therefore, the American constitutional system prioritizes good government over popular government. The people can and will often err in their self-understanding of their true interests. They are easily deceived by pseudo-scientists about changes in the climate or the causes of hurricanes and ice melts, or by sociologists regarding racial equality and lawyers on anti-discrimination law, or by doctors on what constitutes “women’s reproductive health.” To overcome the people’s ignorance, false opinions, and bias, even while still taking seriously their indirect participation and consent, political representatives must be drawn from the ranks of the hoi polloi while yet also being the best and wisest among them. They must be leaders of the common man and in touch with his needs and interests, not an isolated, professional, and permanent political class that lives behind gated communities in upscale, tony neighborhoods and that rules for its own benefit and the benefit of its overseas clients while the forgotten man suffers.

The Invention of American Democracy

Democracy should not be on the ballot because America was never meant to be a pure democratic plebiscitary. The rhetoric regarding “American democracy,” however, picked up in the early twentieth-century during the political movement of Progressivism and especially after the first and second World Wars. The leaders of the Progressive movement—intellectuals like John Dewey, Frank Goodnow, James Landis, and Herbert Croly, as well political figures like Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR—sought to undermine and displace the American constitutional order. Instead of a Senate chosen by state legislatures, the people would directly choose all of their congressmen. Instead of separation of powers and checks and balances (including non-delegation power, no combination of departmental functions, and administration under the executive), an administrative state created by legislative delegation and equipped with a combination of legislative, judicial, and executive powers would replicate parliamentary efficiency in order to make the government more responsive to the needs and wants of the people (as directed by experts).

The Progressives pushed for three major “democratic” reforms: the initiative and referendum, the recall of judicial decisions, and the direct primary among the states. Ballot initiatives were petition processes that, if garnering enough signatures, forced a direct vote on the matter by the legislature or among the people in general. Referendums were placed on the ballot as measures preliminarily passed by legislatures, but that could be approved or rejected by voters. The recall, either of duly elected representatives or of judicial decisions, empowered the people to deliberate over whether to remove officials of whom the people disapproved (before their term was over), or to annul judicial decisions that struck down popular legislative measures. The direct primary of political officeholders was meant to undermine the role of political parties and party bosses in choosing who would run and be supported for office. In the eyes of many progressives, political parties themselves were illegitimate institutions diluting the voice and action of the people; the direct primary (and the direct election of Senators) was meant to bypass parties and bring the voters into direct contact with the national government.

The progressive era also witnessed the expansion of the franchise to women with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. America had become synonymous with democracy which was equivalent to egalitarianism. If it was wrong to deny women the right to vote, then they should be allowed to run for political office as well. The ‘cult of domesticity’ and the nuclear family must be broken to pieces upon the altar of democratic equity. Blacks would fight for civil rights on the same basis, and immigration law would similarly strike down quota restrictions based on sex, race, religion, or national origin. American “democracy” demanded that not only every adult American be accorded equal political rights, but that everyone in the world be given an equal chance to become an American citizen.

More than anything the American founders intended or did, the modern discourse and conceptuality of “democracy” has been almost completely formed by developments in twentieth-century political thought. It is progressivism’s pure democracy that everyone conceives of and references in their chatter about how Trump is a “threat to democracy.” If Trump is truly a threat to this kind of insidious democracy, then good, he should trounce it and burn it to ash. Yet there is little evidence that Trump would do anything to undermine the American constitutional system as it was originally conceived. The greater problem, however, is that Trump is neither running to preserve that original system nor would he govern under it, since it no longer exists.

The Destruction of Good Government

One of the consequences of the advent of pure democracy in the first third of the twentieth century was that the political power of the state governments was severely eroded. The states and their legislatures, which had long been the republican engines for the majority of domestic, moral, economic, and religious legislation under the original federal constitutional order, were weakened while “the people” and the national powers (primarily the courts and bureaucratic agencies) were strengthened. The growth of the size and scope of the federal government in the twentieth-century has been well-documented; and it has, of course, been an enduring critique of a ‘limited government’ obsessed conservatism for decades.

Yet the issue is not primarily about the size of government, but whether government (whether large or small) is able to govern for the well-being of its people or not. Four developments in the last hundred years have effectively destroyed good government in America and saddled us with a kleptocracy that oscillates between first neglecting and then greedily devouring the American citizen. First, after World War II, America took Britain’s place as world imperial hegemon. We created and then sustained the Liberal International Order, using the military threat from a Communist U.S.S.R. to vastly increase our military size and presence around the world. American commerce was at the center of global capitalism, and without our business, encouragement, and money, China could not have become economically (and now also militarily) prosperous from the export of cheap and toxic goods into American homes. American foreign policy in the twentieth-century was both successful and disastrous: it succeeded in defeating the U.S.S.R. without a nuclear war, but it did so at the expense of American solvency, good will, and military preparedness. In the “unipolar moment” after 1989, America squandered the opportunity to reform old alliances and balance her role in the world; instead, we sought to project our power further abroad, even being so foolish to attempt ‘democracy building’ in regions that would never accept Western-style democratic governments.

Second, in domestic life administrative rule came to dominate American politics. The development and growth of the administrative state (i.e., the ‘deep state’) has been documented and explained at length. Administrative rule sought to isolate itself from the world of electoral and party politics. Its purpose was technical expertise and efficiency in pursuit of lofty and socially-engineered goals of human ‘progress.’ The result was massive government expansion and reach, unaccountability and waste in financial expenditures (especially after President Johnson’s Great Society domestic programs that targeted poverty and racial matters), and the increasing difficulty of controlling government representatives and unelected bureaucrats by the people (including the President’s inability to remove political officials culminating in Nixon’s ouster in the Watergate scandal after he opposed bureaucratic action and independence). The current nature and function of the massive, byzantine labyrinth of a bureaucratized Washington means that both constitutional republicanism and Progressive democracy are dead.

Third, the backlash against the Progressives, mid-century liberals, and administrative experts took form in the 1950s and 1960s with the civil rights and countercultural movements. These movements sought to not only unsettle political trends and challenge the power elite’s claim to rule, but demanded a complete inversion of traditional social, moral, and religious customs. Stressing authenticity, total autonomy, and calls for cosmic justice to repair historical wrongs, these “radicals” rode the wave of feminist, race, gender, and sexual identity politics into power. Many were academics and so infested the Ivy Leagues with new theories of power dynamic analysis and critical, post-colonial theories of social relations, politics, and justice. The result was not only moral and religious tumult as pornography and obscene material was constitutionally protected, rights to ‘privacy’ and abortion invented, and no-fault divorce and re-marriage made commonplace, but the entire educational system in America was corrupted. Ivy League colleges and state universities, long the educational engine for forming and preparing America’s future political leaders, predictably churned out ideologically indoctrinated and mediocre administrators that promptly filled the bloated ranks of the American bureaucracy. The formation of a New Left elite, isolated from mainstream America and entitled in their indignancy and opinions, led to where we are today: an elite ruling class, shorn of any traditional aristocratic sense of noblesse oblige, enriching themselves off the rest of the country and demanding that Americans give up their constitutional rights and traditional ways of life.

Fourth and finally, mainline Protestant denominations sharply declined throughout the century, both in attendance and in institutional and financial leverage. Much of this was due to the liberal bent and theological (and then moral) compromises the mainline denominations (Episcopalians, Presbyterian Church, United Methodists, American Baptists, Evangelical Lutherans, etc.) made toward secular demands. This was compounded by Supreme Court decisions favoring ‘neutrality’ between competing religious claims, the growth of religious plurality and non-religious factions, and the demands of inclusion and recognition by Jews, Catholics, and other religious sects into mainstream American commercial and political society. Although American Christianity saw a brief resurgence in the late 1980s due to the Moral Majority, evangelical fervor was not able to replicate the staying power of Protestant mainline religion that had shaped the country for hundreds of years. 

These four trends, as well as other factors, severely eroded the ability of the state and national powers to govern well. Corrupt, godless, and vicious persons filled the ranks of political offices and administrators; staggering amounts of prosperity allowed individuals to amass personal fortunes and gamble with stockholder money; increasingly debauched celebrity life and digital entertainment created endless opportunities for gossip and useless distraction; sexual degeneracy and abusive exploits became common place among the upper classes. These depressing trends were not contained to elites, but were picked up by middle and lower income Americans as well. The result has been societal decline and spiritual malaise.

The Twilight of Republicanism and the Urgent Need for Wisdom

For republican government to be possible, certain conditions must be met. Those conditions include, at the minimum, a generally virtuous and religious people and a virtuous leadership class that possess requisite knowledge of genuine human goods and the prudence to obtain and preserve these goods for society. Yet America in 2024 is full of degenerates: first and foremost, a degenerate political class that is more loyal to corporate lobbyists and overseas clientele than the working class American man or woman; and second, degenerate Main Street Americans who have been miseducated, propagandized by state-run and -owned media, and inundated with sexual brokenness, toxic food, drugs, and a stagnant economy. Even if democracy was “on the ballot”—or better yet, a recovery of some kind of constitutional and federal republicanism—it wouldn’t work. America is no longer capable of democracy; we are no longer a constitutional people.

This is why the 2024 presidential election is not about democracy, for in no possible world will a Harris or Trump victory result in either the “preservation” or “recovery” of democracy. Instead, serious Americans who understand these matters and see the landscape clearly must act for the long-term goal of restoring good governance in this country—regardless of whether the consent of the people is involved in every step of the way. This is not a call to end elections. But it is to realize that even good and fair elections will not solve our problems, but might even make them worse (if, for instance, a majority of Americans in all the states vote for more lenient abortion rights). Democracy, as the founders knew, could result in the tyranny of the majority or the tyranny of the minority. We find ourselves in the unenviable position of facing both tyrannies at once: a reckless and wicked ruling class that is currently destroying the country in a deliberate and malicious fashion, and a decadent majority willing to profane themselves and vote death upon millions more.

Any escape from this Scylla and Charybdis will be only by the grace and Providence of God. Perhaps He will be pleased to raise up for us a Josiah or Cyrus who will, in wisdom, virtue, and piety, tear down our high places and rebuild our country out of the ruins. This is why talk of a “Protestant Franco” is neither surprising nor unwelcome. For it is far more likely that we will restore good government by placing our hope in truly great men, than in the likelihood that we can magically restore millions of American voters to virtue, wisdom, and prudence. Such men, through their dynamic and noble leadership, just might inspire the American people to return to their God and to their traditional heritage.

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Image Credit: Unsplash

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