1. Democracy, rights, and welfare
Modern Western democracies have had a good four-hundred-year run since the Union of Utrecht gave birth to the glorious but tragically short-lived Dutch Republic, so much so that today freedom, equality more or less, democracy, and the rule of law are largely realized facts throughout the Western world and universal ideals where they are yet to be attained, notwithstanding the periodic assault on the rule of law and our Bill of Rights by one or another presidential administration.
Even in China and Myanmar, Iran as well, the question is no longer whether these ideals will triumph, but when and how, though the when may be a very long time because the starting-point is so low, and in the case of China, because the population is so large, the society so complex, and the weight of the past so heavy. I waive any detailed argument against those who lose heart with one massacre or coup d’état or even a whole string of them. To them all I say, read British constitutional history from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Rights (474 years), or French history since the Revolution of 1789 through the First Republic, a Reign of Terror, then the Napoleonic coup d’état and Empire, the Bourbon Restoration, Second Republic, Second Empire, Third, Fourth, and finally Fifth Republics (169 years). They must think very little of our own constitutional and political achievements if they expect other societies springing from very different pasts and with no tradition of systematic political thought nor a direct inheritance from the Socratic tradition of actively seeking and promoting, hence also tolerating relentless criticism of ideas to be able to secure the same fruits of freedom and law in a mere generation or two or even a hundred years.
In any case, in a general way and within the limits of their understanding the fighters for freedom in those countries where freedom has yet to prevail know exactly what they want. They want the rule of law, representative government, and intellectual, artistic, religious, and political tolerance much as we enjoy them in the United States and Western Europe. I say they know this “in a general way,” because with the possible exception of Aung Sang Suu Kyi, neither by living experience nor by book-learning do they seem to understand the details of how such a society and its political system actually work. The students at Tiananmen Square in 1989 certainly had only the vaguest idea of what a free society was. Nevertheless, their general aims have been laid out for them in any such summary of the political achievements of the modern West as I just gave. It is here in the cradles of modern democracy, however, that the same ideals, though still necessary, no longer suffice for our lives, that is, for the creation of our future.
I do not mean that either the civil rights movement or the women’s movement, for example, is finished. But both are programmatically and legislatively, hence institutionally pretty much finished. Such discriminatory practices as remain derive primarily from institutional and individual inertia on the one hand—it is hard to change fundamental feelings and attitudes as well as institutional make-ups in less than two, three, four generations—and from poverty and consequent deprivation on the other more than from racist or sexist policies. It would be tyrannical to legislate against feelings, ideas, attitudes, in many cases even institutional compositions. If we are right to oppose racial and sexual discrimination, as I am sure we are, then we must have the faith that confronted with effective criticism, the prejudices will gradually fade away with the increasing multitude and magnitude of black and female self-achievement and with the dying of generations, as analogous discrimination among the governing classes against the common people once did before. This process is necessarily slow. Witness the century that elapsed between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Voting Rights Act. Many may find this slowness unsatisfactory, even intolerable. But if you want abiding solutions, then you must await the transformation of the mentality of millions, which sometimes only the passing of generations can yield. This does not mean that we must not directly combat such discrimination where it manifests itself, but ideas and feelings do not yield to force.
Persistent, structural poverty is another matter. We exhausted effective policy ideas to secure its decisive and systematic elimination in the context of a more or less self-sufficient American economy only to find the persistent problem further complicated by an accelerating global economic transformation. What we do not know how to fix, we cannot decisively fix, which is no reason not to try, but ignorance and failure of imagination limit our effectiveness. Even so, we have been able to shrink the percentage of our population in poverty, so that on the whole, with the majority of Americans, perhaps even black people and women, the interests have moved on, as they must if the vigor of life is to be sustained.
In the United States the fruitions such as they are of the civil rights and women’s movements represent the crowning achievements in the realization of our founding ideals. For the moment Coke and Locke and Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton have very little more to say to us about the creative labor awaiting us in the coming decades and century.
Nor, for that matter, did they figure in the struggle to overcome the appalling misery visited on industrial workers by the industrial revolution. When the founders of the United States were framing our Constitutional documents, the industrial revolution was already astir in Britain, but not yet significantly on this continent. Hamilton wanted to embrace manufacturing, whereas Jefferson feared that it would foster a mentality of dependence among the workers. In either case the facts of the industrial revolution were largely irrelevant to the founders’ constitutional labors. That is why it was not the Magna Carta nor the Petition of Right nor the British Declaration and American Bill of Rights that men and women turned to when faced with the industrial horrors documented in Marx’s Das Kapital or the inhuman division between the Two Worlds depicted by Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield. Instead, it was Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism and the various schools of socialism as well as the plain Christian love underlying both that saved the Western democracies from the excesses and inhumanity of the industrial revolution. The spate of constitutional challenges mounted against FDR’s New Deal legislation testified to the doubts about the constitutional provenance of utilitarian thought and political liberalism.
In truth, as I see it, the fundamental impulse of both utilitarian and socialist thought and the “liberal” political movement associated with them is in at least two respects radically at variance with the impulse that fueled the British-American constitutional struggles culminating in the founding of the United States and the ratification of our Bill of Rights.
First, when the Magna Carta barons rebelled against King John, they were objecting to his arbitrary ways. To John, as to the hapless Richard II, deposed and murdered in 1399 for saying it, the law was “in his breast”; he was himself beyond the reach of law. The historic greatness of the Magna Carta barons lay in their decision not to overthrow John and replace him with another, as countless risings against injustice before and after them and everywhere around the world would and continue to do to tyrants—including America’s repeated attempts at “regime change” in other countries, a pretentious political science expression for arbitrarily overthrowing governments we do not like, which is contrary to the United Nations Charter—but to insist on bringing royal conduct under law as it was understood others were under law. In this way, the Magna Carta barons set England in principle on the road to the rule of law as perhaps no other society before had known except the short-lived Athenian democracy or Republican Rome. It was to be a nearly five-hundred-year struggle to translate this principle into fact, because John’s successors down to James II, no less than John himself, would continually claim exemptions for themselves. But the Great Charter and the “rights of Englishmen” that slowly grew on the English imagination would become the rallying cry against royal despotism which British kings could not dismiss as a matter of course because King John had committed himself and all his successors to them.
Though by the Glorious Revolution of 1689 political power in the United Kingdom was decisively transferred from crown to Parliament, Parliament itself showed in its conduct toward the American colonists in the eighteenth century that it was not necessary to occupy the throne to be tempted by arbitrary power. So the struggle against the crown that had animated British constitutional development through the seventeenth century had to be reenacted against Parliament by fellow Englishmen in America in the eighteenth century; and the founders of the United States were at pains to ensure that no analogous tyranny could ever arise under our Constitution. (And yet, George W. Bush has now created a military commission, and with the consent of Congress, too!)
From 1215 through the ratification of the American Bill of Rights, therefore, the British-American constitutional development was overwhelmingly aimed at limiting the power of government, though in Britain this meant government primarily in the person of the king or queen, because once power was transferred to Parliament, Parliament has to this day remained reluctant to limit its own power, for example undo its own immunity to judicial review. But every article of the American Bill of Rights is a statement of what government must not do or trespass. In direct contrast, the spirit of utilitarianism, socialism, and liberalism is all about what government actively ought or must do or bring about. No wonder some upholders of our constitutional tradition were horrified. The question then arises, whether any tradition, however precious, should be so sanctified as to foreclose the possibility of solving urgent problems never anticipated by the founders of that tradition.
The Magna Carta barons also stood up first and foremost for their own interests as a class. No better evidence of this class interest can be found than in that chapter of the Charter in which the barons claimed for themselves a right to justice of their “peers.” John’s concession of the Charter notwithstanding, this particular “right” future English monarchs would wisely and consistently refuse to admit. The reason was that the “king’s justice,” first promulgated by John’s father, Henry II, and common throughout the realm, hence the “common” law, in contrast to the variable baronial justice that had prevailed before, was good enough for all. But in thus trying to advance their own class interest the barons merely followed in the footsteps of earlier class ascendancies or assertions marking British, indeed, Western constitutional history. For example, another provision of the Magna Carta reconfirmed the rights and liberties that had earlier been granted the city of London and “other cities and burroughs, and town and ports.”
As the wanderings of barbarian armies slowed and the Dark Ages in Europe slowly gave way to light, medieval trade gave rise to a new merchant class who had more money than ever the landed aristocracy and clergy could command. This money secular and ecclesiastic princes alike coveted, and the price for the loans and gifts that went their way was special liberties for the merchant class, which is to say, the cities and towns where it held sway.
Even earlier the Church had won her special liberties from the Roman Emperor Theodosius, which she retained even after the disintegration of the Empire. Chapter 1 of the Magna Carta reconfirms the English Church’s rights and liberties, and in the United States churches remain exempt from taxes, and we continue to hold their status as sanctuary to be inviolate.
In due course new classes of men would rise in power and stature in England sufficient for them to make their constitutional claims stick. Lawyers, for example, came into prominence in the parliamentary struggles against the Stuart kings, as they would in the American Revolution. That in each case they took care of their own kind first and foremost is demonstrated by the extremely limited franchise prevailing in both England and the United States at the end of the eighteenth century, franchise fraught with income and property qualifications, as Tocqueville found here early in the next century.
I must not, however, press this point too far. No human being can be entirely insentient of his essential fellowship with other human beings, and Jesus’ teaching of the universal brotherhood of men could not have been too far from the thoughts and actions of thoughtful men. So the Magna Carta contains several provisions securing the rights of all “freemen” to their properties, in their persons, and in judicial proceedings. By the time of Edward III, according to the Petition of Right of 1628, the same claims came to be stated in universal terms: “No man, of whatever estate or condition that he be, should be” deprived of these several rights. And we are familiar with how our own founders stated their claims in decisively universal terms, though they did not immediately provide for them universally.
Words were one thing and deeds another. The claim “All men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence clearly did not apply to slaves where the Constitution specifically required them to be counted each as only three-fifth of a person, and that for census purposes only, which is to say, for weighing the votes and taxes of those entitled to vote, which slaves and women were not. That is why black people and women in America ultimately have had to take their struggles into their own hands, but in doing so they have had the words of the founders on their side. And I say, in this way these struggles for black and women’s liberation were in direct line of inheritance of the British-American constitutional struggles, where a succession of classes or groups of people lifted themselves up in self-creation and asserted their rights by the power or importance of their self-achievement. And it is entirely right that this should be so, because, after all, what is freedom but self-creation, in contrast to creation or determination by others, which is tyranny?
In contrast, the nineteenth- and late-eighteenth-century utilitarian and socialist concerns were first voiced for those mired in the soot and grimes of industrial exploitation by men with lily-white hands: Bentham, Robert Owens, Saint-Simon, Marx, Disraeli. These men wanted to do good for others. This essentially altruistic impulse underlying utilitarianism and socialism represents their second departure from the classical British-American constitutional traditions.
It is, however, precisely because of this character that the practical success of putting utilitarian and socialist ideas to work is almost guaranteed to be problematical, as the practical success of Christian charity has always been. The reason is that, if one is determined to help oneself, success is usually a matter of time. So, whether or not they explicitly recognized their indebtedness to utilitarian or socialist thought, the laboring men and women in the Western world have raised themselves through command of skilled labor and combined their power of skills with union action. On the other hand, however determined one may be to help another, there is never any assurance of success unless the criterion of success is trivially defined or defined primarily in terms of the labor of the helper. This is again because human beings are by nature free, which means self-creative. With all the vigor and good will in the world we cannot urge forward the lives of men and women who cannot or do not sufficiently stir themselves or who come to take help for granted. Further, and this the recent public discussions of welfare reform have not sufficiently taken into account, in any community of significant size there will always be men and women hobbled by disabilities, and it is well to remember that intellectual, technological, industrial, and commercial advances are continually raising the bar on the individual capabilities needed to achieve a reasonable measure of self-sufficiency in the modern society, which is also to say, they may be continually increasing the number of people who cannot achieve that self-sufficiency for reasons not of their own making.
So the twentieth-century social welfare programs have inevitably bumped up against the limits of what such programs can do for the less fortunate in our midst. This is as true in Europe as in the United States. Also, in proportion as the civil rights and women’s movements have taken on the character of helping others instead of self-help, they, too, are reaching a limit to their effectiveness.
After the initial flush of success and when the assistance programs settled into routine with no conclusive triumph over poverty, ignorance, and unending dependence in sight—not that this triumph can ever be complete—reactions have inevitably set in. The welfare reform signed into American law in 1996 represents a culmination of these reactions. Similarly, opposition to affirmative action programs has been rising. The New Deal and Great Society chapter in our history has run its course; a great idealistic experiment spanning a century of buoyant American political life has exhausted its power as the dominant driver of civilization. So far no superseding political ideas have been forthcoming.
It is perhaps this intellectual or philosophical exhaustion that gave rise to the feelings of irritability and futility infecting American and Western European political life, until 9/11 and “terrorism” took over all our senses. But the fundamental problem is long standing and will remain long after the distraction of the Islamic revolt against an overbearing West has faded into memory, unless we can overcome it in the meantime.
2. The next stage in the development of modern democracy
Two centuries have elapsed since the founding of the American Republic. Democracy and the rule of law have been secured throughout Western Europe and north of the Rio Grande as well as Australia and New Zealand. They are also in various stages of growing depth and stability in India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and South Africa. In the United States they have been enhanced by the constitutional assertion, hence inclusion, of women and racial minorities, and by the effective advancement of the welfare of the laboring classes such that the latter, too, became middle class if for the moment we can overlook the once again rising number of the “working poor” in the new competitive economy of recent years. Notwithstanding the last, the foundations of Western democracies are now so much more solid than they were even fifty years ago because the bounties of freedom and equality are spread so wide. Our constitutional traditions as well as utilitarian and democratic socialist thought have done their work and, not least, spared the Western world of Marxist-inspired upheavals that have wreaked havoc on less fortunate societies.
Although the eradication of poverty amid plenty remains unfinished, and the nature of this problem is changing even as I write, the overwhelming majority of the peoples in the West no longer knows the sting of perpetual hunger and want, which have been the lot of a huge volume, perhaps even the majority of humanity through the millennia. For this present majority in the West, which can take freedom, equality, and economic security more or less for granted, the challenge of life has moved on to that last, elusive promise in our Declaration of Independence: the pursuit of happiness. Since the English word “happiness” carries a long history of imprecision of meaning, however, let me substitute for it the more precise expression “the height of existence,” after Alfred North Whitehead. The pursuit of the height of existence—self-realization or actualization is a more familiar if vaguer term—has a private component; it is reflected in the many-faceted exploration of creative or religious and spiritual life characteristic of our age. It has also a public component, which has so far been barely understood and is of main interest to me here.
Consider the following statistics. In 1870 there were 67,350 male college students in the United States. In 1910 the number of male and female college students reached 355,215. Aided by the GI Bill, college enrollment rose to 2,230,000 in 1948. Today it exceeds seventeen million. In 1869 one in 1927 men of college age went on to college. Today two-thirds of all men and women of eligible age do so. More than forty million Americans are college graduates. Even those who have no college experience mostly have more schooling under their belt than their forebears not long ago.
Whatever one may think of the quality of American education—and at its best in not just one or two or a handful of colleges and universities, but dozens of them, it is unsurpassed in the world—you cannot so dramatically change the average mentality of a society without also profoundly transforming its political complexion.
Consider a family in which the parents are only high school or elementary school graduates. Suppose they send a son or daughter to college. What will become of this family, which is to say the complex web of relationships binding the members of the family? These relationships will inevitably be transformed by the understanding and intellectual confidence and command conferred by college education on the child. If nothing else, the college student, later graduate will likely claim a measure of autonomy in ideas, beliefs, and action significantly greater than if she had not gone to college.
The same claim of intellectual and moral autonomy multiplied millions of times is today crowding our national decision-making. This is reflected in the proliferation of organized interest groups that have converged on Washington and state capitals, the mushrooming nongovernmental organizations working every conceivable cause under the sun, as well as the frequency and political magnitude of voter-initiated ballot actions. More than ever before, millions and millions of American citizens want to play a more active part in the formation of public policies and the legislative process affecting our lives than merely casting ballots for political candidates at periodic intervals. We remain formally and constitutionally a representative democracy, but the mentality of men and women who think and act for ourselves demands a governance more participatory in nature. This demand, which is psychological and not necessarily explicit, our political class has so far not fully understood, still less responded to.
There was a rule in ancient Roman private law, known to at least some of the drafters of the Magna Carta, which says, quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur (“what touches all ought to be approved by all,” Justinian Code V, Tit. 59, 5, cap. 3.). This rule underlies our political theory of consent. I note that it says nothing about representative consent. When we in the modern world agreed to representative democracy, however, we understood that modern societies had become too populous and geographically extended for direct democracy of the Athenian kind to be practically feasible. But we believe that consent is constitutionally required because we know and feel its psychological necessity, and the latter is often indifferent to constitutional or political compromises. When, therefore, there is not adequate popular consent, no legislation nor, in the United States, even Supreme Court decisions are secure, and no great national effort can be successful.
What is true of our national political life is in this case also true of businesses and corporations, for that matter, any organization where increasingly brains counts for more than brawn. Those who are accustomed to using their brains want their brains and creative imagination to count in more than just narrowly specialized areas of work.
The history of American business in the nineteenth century was marked by a great managerial revolution in which owners of businesses increasingly turned over the management of their ever more complex business activities to “professional” managers, who knew, for example, how to schedule trains running on hundreds of miles of single tracks so that they would not collide: decisions more complex and fraught with greater risks than had ever been encountered in running stagecoaches. Among the early recruits to this new managerial class were many military men, the country having just been through a great Civil War. Therefore, the military model of command and control characterized the early operations of many of America’s great corporations. This habit of management as giving commands and exercising effective control remains strong.
Nevertheless, more and more businesses have come to appreciate that people who are being paid for their understanding and imagination especially will not be satisfied with being told what to do. There is a growing psychological demand that “what touches all ... be approved by all,” more, that it be shaped or constructed by all. While it may not be feasible to consult on everything, businesses nevertheless have begun to adapt, which is one important reason for the trend toward flatter corporate organizations and ever more consultative way of business decision-making. It is also the reason that chief executives increasingly understand that at the height of corporate decision-making their function in respect to corporate strategy is increasingly to preside over a process of strategy formation involving extensive consultation up and down and across the management hierarchy. This is not to say that they may not begin by projecting their own strategic vision and that this vision may not survive the consultation and criticism intact, but without the consultation there can be no assurance of effective consent or buy-in, hence no assurance of effort at effective, hence successful implementation.
In the United States presidents have never been able to tell the Congress what laws to pass and then expect his will to be done. Legislation has always required the building of Congressional consensus, often a painstaking process. But the explosive growth of organized interest groups and nongovernmental organizations in recent decades indicates that even such consensus as Washington was used to building is no longer enough for American voters. So far organized interest group politics has reinforced the corruption of our political process by money, as indicated by the repeated campaign financing scandals, but they also point to the possibilities of more energetic, hence satisfying, political solidarities in the United States and the Western world.
Government of laws remains our ideal, largely realized in the United States. But as Saint Paul indicated to the Galatians, laws are themselves not the end nor the ultimate ideal. Also, love is oblivious of laws. Laws are inevitably compulsory in its application. Where there is compulsion, freedom is compromised, as are the buoyancy and satisfaction of life. Communal solidarity is also less than what it can be, because there is then the inevitable divergence of feeling between the institutions, which is to say people, who do the compelling and those who submit or are made to submit. Increasing citizen participation in the formation of public policies means that there can be deeper, wider, and more spontaneous solidarities of public action arising from freely given consent. Such solidarities may be secured and institutionalized by laws, but are themselves the primary good, not the laws.
In my judgment nothing Bill Clinton did as President ever equaled in brilliance his organization and conduct of the national economic summit in Little Rock shortly after his electoral victory in 1992 and before his inauguration. Although some opportunities opened up by this summit—for example, the consensus on the need to rationalize America’s health care system—were squandered by subsequent political ineptitude of the administration, the agreement on attaching economic priority to bringing the federal budget into balance held throughout the Clinton presidency, powerfully reinforcing the monetary discipline exercised by the Federal Reserve. The American economy then hummed along and soon achieved the best shape in nearly three decades.
That national economic summit disclosed political possibilities that unfortunately the Clinton administration failed to advance. The kind of consensus built for balancing the federal budget can also be built for other national efforts: for example, on environmental protection in general and global warming in particular; combating the once again growing inequality of income and wealth in America; improving American education; heath care again along with a long-term solution to the looming Social Security and Medicare funding problems, not to mention a coherent foreign policy. And what could not be achieved in one concerted three-day conference may yet yield to more sustained series of concentrated national discourse.
Governing America has never been merely a matter of passing legislation and executing it through regulations. Lincoln’s power as President was as much moral as executive and military. So also were the Roosevelts’. Better-educated Americans may no longer respond well to preaching as from a bully pulpit, but will eagerly embrace imaginative invitations to more active political participation. Such participation is becoming ever more feasible on a massive scale because of recent technological innovations.
The dream I am offering for the next stage in the Western world’s political development is, therefore, the possibility of new solidarities of public action invested with the creative spontaneity of millions of citizens who now yearn for more active participation in the political process than merely going to the polls. It is the transformation of modern representative democracies into something more directly participatory without violating either the letter or the spirit of our constitutions. This is one dream that, in the United States, can supersede the dreams of the New Deal and the Great Society without repudiating them; indeed, it is precisely what is needed to take them to greater heights of realization. After all, given the recent economic transformations of the United States and the world, we need to reach for a deeper national consensus if are to effectively bridge the once again growing economic divide between the haves and have-nots. We certainly need the active cooperation and participation of every American if we are to prevent global warming from reaching a stage of no return beyond any human ability to safeguard the long-term existence of our species on earth.
Just as important, our feeling of national belonging, of being one people and one nation will be enriched by effectively working together on the details of great issues.
In 1984 Gary Hart’s presidential ambition was undone by his own monkey business, but his campaign rhetoric about “new ideas” was also decisively punctured by Walter Mondale’s inimitable echo of a line from Wendy’s commercial, “Where’s the beef?” The same complaint was directed at the talk of “holistic government” and “changing the whole culture” urged on Tony Blair’s Labour government in its early days by the British think tank Demos. Yet, the lure of “new ideas” persist.
Whether what I just suggested amounts to beef others will have to judge, but if adopted, it will surely amount to a different “reinvention” of government. But it is not really “reinvention” so much as advancing the nature of our democracy. And I salute Ségolène Royal for taking precisely this step in France in her desir d’avenir, even if ultimately her quest for the presidency was unsuccessful.
So now amid the cacophony of presidential candidates’ policy proposals let us, the people and voters, come work together on the vital issues confronting America.
(Website link coming within the week.) 12/3/2007
No comments:
Post a Comment