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20th September, 2007
Michael Oreskes,
Executive Editor,
The International Herald Tribune
We live in a remarkable political age. More people than ever before in history live under governments that could reasonably be described as democracies, possibly a majority of all the people on earth. The enormity of this can only be grasped by going back, as we have done in our new book, to that moment in the late 1700’s when democracy as we now know it barely existed in the world. Indeed, the very word democracy was essentially an insult, a synonym for mob rule. Yes, there were places where the king had ceded some measure of power to aristocracies or even to semi representative parliaments. There were commercial cities on the continent that had allowed considerable popular participation in decision-making.
But nowhere was there anything like what a group of men, desperately trying to save their fledgling country, invented in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. They invented, as James |Madison proudly described it many years later, “a Constitution which…has brought such a happy order out of so gloomy a chaos.” They wrote a Constitution that invented a new kind of representative government. A new kind of government that ushered in what we can now see as the age of democracy.
Two years ago a scholar—a Cambridge scholar—by the name of John Dunn published a lovely book on the rise of democracy. He wrote that James Madison’s pride in his handiwork from the summer of 1787 was understandable given the long-term impact of the constitution he and his fellow delegates invented.
The constitution, Professor Dunn wrote, “secured the new republic extremely effectively, and, as we now know, for a very long time. In doing so, it turned the United States into the most politically definite, the best consolidated and the most politically self confident society on earth. It also, over time…opened the way for it to become the most powerful state in human history.”
It was quite an impressive summer’s work for Madison and his compatriots.
But where are we in the life span of this invention?
I spent a lot of time contemplating this question as I worked on our book. I think I can sum up, without exaggeration, by saying that Democracy is going through a mid-life crisis.
At least, I hope, and believe, it is a MIDLIFE crisis.
The talk about democracy’s crisis is everywhere these days. Of course since the rise of modern democracy is inextricable linked with the rise of the united states of America it is sometimes hard to disentangle the discussion about America’s current—and considerable—crisis in the world from the mid life crisis of democracy itself.
But I think we can see they are obviously related but also distinct. Various experts and scholars have taken a stab at describing the crisis.
Stein Ringen of this very University opens his new book on democracy, by saying that democracy is strong in quantitative terms, in the number of democracies in the world, but weak in qualitative terms. In how well those democracies perform.
He examines the major democracies of the world, the ones usually thought to be most robust, and finds them wanting—and, as he gently puts it, possibly on the decline.
“Citizens are turning away,” professor Ringen writes. “They care less for democracy, believe less in it, participate less in it, and have less trust in its governance.”
You can read professor Ringen’s book and decide for yourself on the detail of his analysis. But clearly, if he is even partly right, the midlife crisis I am speaking of is not only an American phenomenon.
Robert Reich in his new book observes this same phenomenon, of citizens around the world feeling frustrated with their democratic government.
He suggests that the reason is that the longstanding link between capitalism and democracy, between freedom, free markets and growth has snapped, or at least frayed. Certainly that link is what made the US Constitution and the rise of America such a testament to the power of democracy.
But now, Reich in effect argues, after 220 years Global capitalism has outrun democratic institutions.
Reich says,
“A sense of political powerlessness is on the rise among citizens in Europe, Japan and the united states, even as consumers and investors feel more empowered.”
The title of Reich’s book is super capitalism. But when the editors of Foreign Policy magazine ran an adaptation this month they headlined it “How capitalism is killing democracy.”
You can embrace, or not, the details offered by Stein Ringen or Robert Reich. But they are both describing a phenomenon of weakening democracy, of drift away from the democratic institutions the west has spent two centuries developing.
I came to a similar conclusion in our book, which is specifically about America and its constitution.
The constitution was a brilliant invention because it solved the problem of letting people govern themselves without any external authority—god or king—to ensure order.
The framers had figured something out about human nature. They understood the lessons of history were against their effort to grant liberty. They had learned from experience that individuals set free pursed their own interests. Large numbers of individuals pursuing their own interests led to chaos. Chaos invited dictators, home grown or external, to intervene to restore order, snuffing out the very liberty people had fought to establish.
They understood this cycle from their reading and, more, from the first eleven years of their own nation, which from 1776 to 1787 seemed to them to be descending into the gloomy chaos Madison wrote of later.
The country, if it even was a country, was a seething mess of self-interest. The country nearly let its Continental army starve to death in the field of battle. States threatened border wars against other states. In 1786 the farmers of western Massachusetts were so disappointed by the direction of the country they felt they had helped create (correctly so) that they took up arms against their state government.
That was the challenge the framers confronted in 1787. People wanted what they wanted for themselves. The framers solution, wonderfully modern and in 1787, totally original, was to adopt a more realistic view of people and adapt their design for government to that view of human nature.
They enlisted vice “on the side of virtue.” They set out to prove that “an avaricious society can form a government able to defend itself against the avarice of its members.”
In other words this was not a government as good as its people. It was a government designed to produce results better than the desires of each individual person. And that is how the American people ensured their own liberty. Out of many one, E Pluribus Unum.
It has not worked perfectly, of course, just better, to paraphrase Churchill, than any alternative.
But even as democracy has taken root from that initial planting…even as America has gone from an experiment on the edge of the world to the most powerful nation in the history of the world…even as the alternatives of right and left have crumbled in the face of democracies power to rally both human spirit and capital resources…
Even with all of that success…it is a crowning irony of our age that as democracy has triumphed around the world it has grown weaker in the place where its modern rise began.
American’s as both Reich and Ringen describe more generally of citizens of the great democracies have grown frustrated, dispirited, disillusioned.
For thirty years now the country has been drifting away from engagement with—even understanding of—its own constitutional system.
This is a particularly dangerous situation for America, which is not a country bound by blood or national origin or common religion. Rather more than most other democracies, it is a country bound together by its shared creation.
Bound together by the constitution itself and the democratic principals it embodied.
That is exactly what the framers were trying to create. Because for their system to work each citizen had to be willing to give up some self interest, some goal, some local desire, in exchange for the larger benefit of participating in the larger nation.
You weren’t being asked to sacrifice just for the good of others but for your own good as well.
In other words, the constitution implied certain principals of democracy and counted on them. Prominent among them were compromise, tolerance of dissent and a willingness to accept the outcome of the process even when it was not exactly what you wanted.
But over the last 30 years, as we describe in The Genius of America, America has drifted away from these constitutional moorings.
American politics has become brittle and uncompromising. The former majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, Tom Delay, summed the political mood up in the title of his book, “No retreat, no surrender.”
This political environment has made it increasingly difficult for the Country to act effectively, at home or on the world Stage.
There are many examples of this:
The inability to repair the American health care system.
The ineffective response of The United States to the clear and present threat of terrorism in the eight years BEFORE September 11.
The war in Iraq, which neither opponents nor proponents of the war can feel was well debated or thought out.
In each of these cases the constitutional system of balanced government did not work well.
We argue in the book that the reason for this is that political leaders—not just ordinary citizens—have lost sight of their constitutional roles and are not executing them as the framers intended.
Why is this? Because for a generation America has stopped teaching, or preaching, its own system to its own people. Democracy has become something America sells to others more aggressively than we educate our own citizens about.
Ronald Reagan warned this was happening in his farewell address nearly twenty years ago.
Reagan warned that the country had stopped teaching its own history. “If we forget what we did we wont know who we are,” Reagan said.
But the spiral continued, measured by any number of reports on how little American’s know of their own system (including one this September showing American high school and college students can not pass a basic civics test).
The teaching of civics has almost vanished from the American classroom, squeezed out in many cases by a desire to teach more math and science so the nation can compete in the new world economy.
But of course a nation’s strength on the world stage is not just about its economic might but about the strength of its principals, the very principals Reagan warned that Americans were no longer learning.
The problem gets worse with time.
The political leaders today came of age amidst the anti government spirit of the 60’s and 70’s and the drift away from history that Reagan described.
They enter government without any strong bond to the countries historic principals.
This prompted the great institutionalist of the US Senate, Robert Byrd, to remark:
“People revere the constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.”
The framers believed process was vital.
The process assured a clash of interests and a balanced result.
But in today’s political world outcome is everything.
No leader is rewarded for working well within the system.
Only for what he can wring from the system.
I fear that the citizens of many democratic countries are disillusioned because they have forgotten what democracy is for (which by the way is the title of Professor Ringen’s book).
Democracy was not invented to give us everything we wanted.
It was invented to allow us to live together in liberty without bowing to any authority other than our own.
It was invented not to transcend our differences, as one historian noted, but simply to reconcile them.
It was invented to allow us to pursue our own desires to the maximum extent possible, and then stop us when those desires trample on others.
It is a system well worth preserving. For all our difficulties, we would be inestimably worse off without democracy, as professor Ringen notes.
But perhaps the heart of the problem, and the hope for solution, is really very simple.
When Ben Franklin was asked what kind of government the constitutional convention had produced, he replied:
“A republic, Madame, if you can keep it.”
He and the other framers understood what a fragile creation democracy was.
They would have been stunned by their success.
Perhaps part of our problem is that we have come to take their success for granted.
Most citizens of modern democracies, even as they drift away, and fail to participate, probably never even consider that they might be endangering democracy itself.
They take democracy for granted.
Madison and his friends invented the first modern democracy because they had their backs to the wall. Because they thought their country was failing. Because they could not conceive of giving up the liberty they had just fought so hard to seize.
Without any seeming threat to that liberty, or to the democratic systems that assure it, we have become indifferent, even cavalier.
Maybe if the citizens of democracies around the world understood that nothing about the past success guarantees the future success of democracy they would engage more energetically to make it work.
Thank you
This talk is adapted from The Genius of America, By Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes, Bloomsbury 2007).
