Keeping the Republic

The Greeks themselves produced the first skeptics, most memorably Plato, who believed that “Democracy leads to anarchy, which is mob rule” and “Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny out of the most extreme liberty.” Thus began the line of thought that holds that most human beings are not capable of disciplining their appetites, postponing gratification for the sake of the long term, or deciding for the common good, and therefore cannot be trusted with the ultimate political control of society.

The logical conclusion from this assessment is that a nation can be well governed only by an elite class, which is wiser, more farsighted, and more benevolent than the citizenry in general. As Plato put it, “Unless the philosophers rule as kings . . . while the many natures . . . are by necessity excluded, there is no rest from ills for the cities.”

Plato had reason to be dubious. The earliest forms of what is often called Greek democracy would never meet a modern definition of the term. Sparta in the seventh century B.C. is often credited as the birthplace, but the franchise in its assembly, the apella, was limited to about 2 percent of the population, and even its members had difficulty exerting any real influence over matters of state. Lycurgus was a Spartan king whom ancient historians place in the seventh century and credit with creating a constitution. He is once said to have replied to an adviser who had asked him to establish a truer democracy, “Begin, my friend, by setting it up in your own family.” (Those of us men whose families consist of five females and one male are still waiting to be granted such suffrage!)

Later, Solon brought the rule of written law to Athens, and with it a broader range of freedom and political participation. It lasted only as long as Solon did. His successor, Persistratus, promptly set up a dictatorship, albeit a relatively benign one. Setting a precedent that would often be emulated in the future, he was careful to pay lip service to the popular will even while subjugating it. As Will Durant recorded in The Life of Greece (the second installment in his eleven-volume primer on Western history, The Story of Civilization), “He knew how to adorn and support dictatorship with democratic concessions and forms.” Unfortunately, similar lip service to democracy is in particularly active use today.

In halting steps, democratic principles advanced. Cleisthenes is credited with bringing the first true democracy to Athens around 507 B.C. But the strange new practice struggled to take root: the city-state of Syracuse instituted it in 495, but by 485 a dictatorship had displaced it. The Athenian archon (chief magistrate) Pericles was perhaps the greatest proponent of democracy in the ancient world, having instituted a number of democratic reforms in the late fourth century. But even his supporter Thucydides conceded that Pericles was often a demagogue, instituting laws that placed additional restrictions on who could be declared a citizen.

The Romans gave some space to popular sovereignty, though it was limited, and all affairs of state were overseen by the aristocratic Senate and, in most periods, emperors and tyrants. By 49 B.C., corruption, including the widespread bribery of Assembly members, was rampant. “Potential dictators maneuvered for position, the capital filled with the odor of a dying democracy,” Durant wrote in Caesar and Christ, the third volume of the Civilization series. Julius Caesar led his legions across the Rubicon, and leadership by princes returned. In 27 B.C., Caesar’s nephew Augustus installed himself as the first Roman emperor after years of military campaigns to consolidate his own power, establishing the Roman Empire.

After that, experiments in even limited political participation by common people disappeared for centuries. Although some medieval philosophers, most notably Thomas Aquinas, developed a political philosophy partially based on classical conceptions of democracy, a large-scale rediscovery of the history and philosophy of antiquity would not come until the Renaissance, in the fourteenth century. This revived study of the ancient humanities in turn spurred a fresh exploration of democracy, and by the eighteenth century, the ideas of the Enlightenment began to permeate society. The Skeptics appeared immediately. Voltaire opined, “Democracy seems suitable only to a very small country. . . . Small though it may be, it will make many mistakes, because it will be composed of men.” He was echoed more bluntly by innumerable others, such as the French philosopher Joseph de Maistre: “It is impossible to consider a human society, a people without a sovereignty, as it is for a hive and a swarm of bees without a queen.”

Rousseau, sometimes thought to be godfather to the French Revolution, was anything but a democrat: “In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy never existed, and never will exist. It is against natural order that a great number should govern and that the few should be governed.” Montesquieu was an ardent advocate of democracy but pessimistically predicted that free societies would be victimized by their own success, as the very virtues that produced them—thrift, self-reliance, self-improvement—would eventually become atrophied as a result of affluence.

The arrival of the American Republic was heard “round the world,” but it convinced few of the prominent thinkers of the time that self-government would actually work. The Skeptics viewed the French Revolution and its prompt collapse into Bonapartist monarchy as an affirmation of their arguments, and America as nothing more than the exception that proved the rule. Even the flowering of the United States, and its emergence from its Civil War stronger than it was before, failed to persuade the Skeptics. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche wrote contemptuously that democracy was not a mark of human progress but a step backward: “[T]he democratic movement is . . . a form of the decay of political organization.” Popular sovereignty will not elevate men to new heights of dignity and self-reliance, he argued. “The democratizing of Europe will tend to the production of a type [of man] prepared for slavery in the most subtle sense of the term: the strong man will become stronger and richer than he has perhaps ever been . . . the democratizing of Europe is an involuntary arrangement for the rearing of tyrants.”

It wasn’t just from the supposedly more authoritarian culture of Germany that the Skeptics emerged. In Britain, H. G. Wells wrote a book whose title tells all: Anticipation: An Experiment in Prophecy, the Passing of Democracy. He summed up his view as follows: “I know of no case for the elective democratic government of modern states that cannot be knocked to pieces in five minutes.”

The skepticism was not limited to academics and philosophers. Oscar Wilde declared, “Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.” America’s own H. L. Mencken said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” Reading these wisecracks amid the soaring debts and economic travails that self-indulgent spending has created in present-day America is enough to make the most committed friend of freedom wince.

It is worth noting, however, that none of this contempt for the “great experiment” would have surprised our Founders in the slightest. They were fully conscious of freedom’s past failures, of the arguments of the Skeptics, and of the ever-present temptation to dictatorship that exists within societies. They knew exactly what they were up against, and they worried about it before, during, and after they gave birth to the American project. In the first of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

Hamilton, whose co-authorship of the Papers was not revealed until he disclosed it in a postmortem testament prepared just before his fatal duel with Aaron Burr, posed perhaps the central dilemma: “Has it not . . . invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interest, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility, or justice?” When we examine the impossible fiscal corner into which “momentary passions” and “immediate interest” have painted us, we can almost hear Hamilton, Madison, and the other greats of that founding generation saying, “Weren’t you listening? Didn’t we try to tell you? Couldn’t you see this coming?”

Skimming the Skeptics, one quickly grasps that they are not really pontificating on political theory, or at least not on the alternative forms and arrangements by which nations can be governed. They are expressing their views on human nature. They simply looked into the instincts and behaviors of the people of their day and found them unsuited to self-government. The Platos, Nietzches, Wellses, and their ilk concluded that the adverb hopelessly should be included in that sentence. Even America’s Founders and admirers saw the problem (Federalist 6 reminds us that “men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious”), but they realized that tyrannies themselves were run by men. And they thought that the intrinsic characteristics of humans were surmountable, given two preconditions.

The first was a set of constitutional provisions that moderated the people’s more selfish impulses and short-term temptations. So, for instance, the Founders bequeathed us a system designed to enable factions to counter and offset one another’s attempted excesses. They devised a bicameral legislature, with a House of Representatives designed to reflect the current will of the people and a Senate geared for longer terms and presumably longer-term reflection.

The Founders understood, however, that what truly determines whether a democracy can survive is not the character of government’s structures but the character of the people who are to be governed through those structures. And they knew that the characteristics requisite to sustaining a government by the people do not come naturally but must be learned, fostered, and practiced. Writing near the end of his life, that great advocate of the common man Thomas Jefferson said, “The qualifications for self-government are not innate. They are the result of habit and long training.”

Even in the triumphant days of the late 1700s, as American democracy overcame the world’s most powerful monarchy and took successful shape in George Washington’s presidency and his voluntary relinquishment of office after his second term, the Founders worried incessantly that human nature would reassert itself. John Adams fretted that the “Republican virtues” would inevitably erode away, probably in no more than two generations. The most likely sources of this atrophy would be a loss of the historical memory that reminds us of the cost and responsibilities of liberty and the indolence that liberty’s very success, in bringing affluence to the multitude, would deliver.

Visiting the United States a half century into its experiment, Alexis de Tocqueville came away impressed but highly cautionary. “Republican government is fragile by nature,” he warned. “It relies only on a certain sentiment of order, virtue, and moderation on the part of the governed. The immoderate desires of parties . . . constantly threaten the existence of republics.” If he made a return visit today, to an America in which spending for the moment has been, to say the least, “immoderate,” in which both private and public debt have ballooned beyond any responsible level, de Tocqueville’s only surprise might be that it took this long for us to get in this fully foreseeable fix.

It seems only yesterday that one of the most incisive minds of the day could write about history ending in a permanent victory for free institutions. The sharp social interest in economic gain made possible through modern science, Francis Fukuyama wrote in The End of History and the Last Man, would be “driven by unlimited desire and guided by reason.” For countries to embrace the old model of success through conquest rather than individual liberty, he wrote, “in the modern world would mean a break with this powerful and dynamic economic world, and an attempt to rupture the logic of technological development.”

It is no wonder, then, that the seeming incapacity of the world’s leading free nation to discipline its own finances, or maintain the economic vitality that made it the world leader, has spawned a new host of Skeptics, many of them right here in the cradle of liberty.

Surveying the incapacity of our current political system to change either large or even small federal programs, Robert Samuelson laments, “The system can no longer make choices, especially unpleasant choices, for the good of the nation as a whole.... The trouble is that, despite superficial support for ‘deficit reduction’ or ‘tax reform,’ few Americans would surrender their own benefits, subsidies and tax breaks—a precondition for success.” Samuelson describes the situation as “suicidal government.” The Skeptics of earlier days would have seen it not as suicide but as the expected, geriatric failing of an aging democracy near the end of its natural life.

Bestselling savants such as Thomas Friedman write wistfully of the superior ability of authoritarian regimes such as China’s to act quickly and plan for the long term. On television’s Meet the Press in May 2010, Friedman blurted out, “I have fantasized—don’t get me wrong—but what if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions.”²

The tone of some modern Skeptics has turned fatalistic, and harsh. Richard Longworth spoke for the defeatists when he wrote, “Basically, America has thrown in the towel. We owned the 20th Century, but we’ve conceded the 21st Century to China.”

Like Friedman but more explicitly, Longworth thinks the answer is to be more like the Chinese: “China’s regime is a top-down leadership, promoting a guided prosperity. It decrees that something will be done, and then does it.... [N]ot only our economy but our political system is being judged here.”

In other words, when we Americans let everyone in on the decisions, we just can’t cut it in today’s world. The only way to compete is to let a few smart people—Plato’s philosopher kings—have the power to do what is best for the rest of us. As we have seen, these ideas have a long, if not proud lineage.

Reams have been written about our “dysfunctional” and “gridlocked” political system, with fingers pointing to a variety of failures in that system—from the pernicious lobbyists to our political fund-raising rules to the noncompetitive districts created by gerrymandering. All of these structural issues are real and contribute to our predicament.

But the most critical, and chilling, of the modern Skeptics are those who locate the fatal failure of our current political system in the American people themselves. Everywhere it is alleged, by people of the left and right alike, that we are just no longer up to the job of governing ourselves.

From the left, home to those whose philosophy naturally favors rule by enlightened elites, this conclusion is unsurprising. It is how they justify the need for the state, run of course by the well-educated and well-intentioned (namely, them), to take charge of all our affairs.

Despair comes from the center, too. On a cable talk show in December 2010, I listened as former Colorado governor Richard Lamm, a moderate and thoughtful Democrat, sounded this defeatist note: “I guess that America is now sufficiently overindulged that a majority of voters are never going to vote to do the kind of things that are necessary to reform entitlements, balance the budget, do those other things that I think we know are necessary.”

Increasingly, and even more alarmingly, one finds the supposedly strongest advocates of freedom, those on what we call the right, lamenting the degraded character of their fellow Americans. They despondently point out the high and rising percentages of Americans who depend in part or even entirely on government for their income; the ignorance by most citizens of even the most basic of facts of our history or principles of our Constitution; the decline of the cultural commitment to self-discipline and personal responsibility; and so on.

The criticism is most sobering when it comes from outside. Edmund Morris, the brilliant Kenyan-born British biographer of Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, could be thought of as a current de Tocqueville, a visiting observer sympathetic to our principles but clear-eyed about their health status. On a November 2010 television show, Morris was asked about the condition of the U.S. nation and its politics. He replied by describing the American people as “lazy, obese, complacent, and increasingly perplexed as to why we are losing our place in the world to people who are more dynamic than us and more disciplined.”³ Ouch.

Hard as they are to hear, comments like these are essential for us to digest at this moment in our history. If they prove true, and there is ample evidence to support them, the American prospect is exactly the one that the Skeptics, in all their variety, so smugly told us to expect.

But I have some data of my own. It comes from the years I have spent as the employee of six and a half million of those allegedly degenerate Americans we so often read about. It comes from direct experience in restoring public finances damaged by years of overindulgence; from asking free citizens to accept at least modest measures to live within our collective means, to think about the future more than the present, to build for that future so we might leave our children a stronger and more prosperous state.

It comes from years of firsthand, intimate exposure to the entire crosssection of people in a state that is, as much as any state I know, reasonably representative of America as a whole. It comes from eight years of constant travel, to the smallest towns and the densest inner cities; from more than a hundred overnight stays in the homes of my fellow Hoosiers; from thousands of personal conversations in their businesses, stores, schools, barns, and coffee shops.

Of course, we Americans, like every human who has ever lived, have our obvious weaknesses. But without denying any of our shortcomings, I choose to believe we can and will fight our way out of today’s dangerous corner of debt and economic stagnation. We will summon the fortitude to face down our challenges and bring back into view that brighter future that Americans, uniquely among the world’s peoples, have always assumed awaited them. In so doing, we will refute the Skeptics and prove that, yes, government of and by the people can “long endure,” and is in fact the model to which people everywhere should aspire.

I admit there is a strong element of faith involved. But faith is at the core of every great endeavor. Early currency printed by the infant American Republic bore the words Exitus in dubio est. “The outcome is in doubt.” Resolving to put this doubt to rest once again is the task of our age, and as noble an assignment as any generation could wish for itself.