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America
’
s Broken
Political System
J
. Bradford DeLong
U.C. Berkeley
Economics and Blum Center, WCEG, and
NBER
http://bradford-delong.com
brad.delong@gmail.com
@delong
2018-06-01
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https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/james-madison-democracy-
by-j--bradford-delong-2018-06
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http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/06/a-voice-from-the-past.html
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http://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00e551f08003883400e551f080068834/post/
6a00e551f0800388340224e03ceae6200d/edit
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3493 words
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I. Voices from the Past
At the start of the American experiment, Founding Fathers Alexander
Hamilton and James Madison pulled no punches
<
http://
avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed09.asp
>
: admitting that the historical
record strongly suggested that a democracy, a republic—indeed, any form
of government that gave substantial political voice to those outside an
aristocracy of counsellors or advisors to a monarch—was a really bad
idea:
It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and
Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the... state of
perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.... The
[unflattering] portraits... sketched of republican government were too
just copies of the originals...
But, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison went on:
The science of politics, however, like most other sciences, has received
great improvement.... Distribution of power into distinct departments...
legislative balances and checks... judges holding their offi ces during
good behavior... representation... in the legislature... are means, and
powerful means, by which the excellences of republican government
may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided
…
The peculiar thing about this list, however, is that all of these great
improvements in the science of politics apply just as well to monarchies as
to republics.
Indeed, these institutional innovations have historical roots as actions by,
well, monarchs:
•
The Plantagenet kings of England professionalized the judiciary.
•
They set forth (not completely willingly) the principal that not the king
alone but the king-in-parliament held the power to levy direct taxes.
2
•
The professionalization and bureaucratization involved in distributing
power applied as much to the Council of the Indies or the Council of
Castile of Spanish sixteenth century monarch Filipe II Habsburg as to
any republic.
Thus the "great improvement" in the "science of politics, which Alexander
Hamilton and James Madison relied on held the potential to make both
monarchy or aristocracy and republican government better, not to change
the balance between them—a balance that seemed, according to the
history Madison knew—to weight heavily against forms that produced
"perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy".
From what source, then, did Alexander Hamilton and James Madison
derive their confi dence that the republican constitution of America that
they
had put so much effort into creating would, in fact, be a good idea?
The arguments
they
set forth in
their
contributions to _The Federalist
Papers_
<
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed01.asp
>
revolve
around two ideas: "representation" and "faction":
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison placed stress on
representation
:
"Cure... [in] the delegation of the government... to a small number of
citizens elected by the rest..." "The public voice", he wrote, when
"pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant
to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves..."
Representatives chosen by and responsible to the electorate will look
outward to the people, assessing their interests and drawing on their
knowledge and good ideas, but also looking inward to the government
and, via deliberation, discussion, and compromise, refi ne and elevate
policy. Thus a republican form of government could gain the advantages
of professionalization and expertise, the advantage of working in the
public interest, and the advantage in gathering ideas from all of society.
3
And Alexander Hamilton and James Madison placed stress on how a large
republic could avoid
faction
, which
they
defi ned as "some common
impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens,
or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community". A
monarchy or aristocracy, of course, is nothing but a faction: a faction in
control, with little pressure on it to work for the public interest or, indeed,
to be open to good ideas from outside its circles of concern. Madison saw
a republic as starting with a great advantage here: A faction could only
rule if it could command a majority. And in a large republic with
:
a greater variety of parties and interests... less probable that a majority...
will have a common motive to invade the rights of other[s]... or if such
a common motive exists, it will be more diffi cult for all who feel it to
discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other...
Of course, when a majority did have a common motive to invade the rights
of others and did discover its own strength and was able to act in unison—
then we have Jim Crow; then we have the herding of Japanese-Americans
into concentration camps; then we have the dispossession of the Cherokee
and the Trail of Tears. "John Marshall has made his decision", said
President Andrew Jackson
<
https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/
government-politics/worcester-v-georgia-1832
>
, speaking of a judge
holding offi ce during good behavior exercising a distinct department of
power and serving as a check, "now let him enforce it". If bureaucracy,
procedure, representation, and deliberation cannot elevate and transform
the passions of a majority faction into policies in the public interest, there
is then no "republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican
government".
A century and a quarter ago the constitutional and semi-constitutional
monarchies of Europe faced their crisis of political order which was
resolved by the move neither to centralized socialist dictatorship in the
interest of a progressive class nor to strongman plebiscitary leadership
focusing on the unity of an
ethnos
but, rather, by a reinvigoration of
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election, representation, and deliberation in the form of parliamentary
democracy.
We do not yet face a crisis of the same magnitude. At the moment, our
problems seem overwhelmingly to be those Alexander Hamilton and
James Madison foresaw when they warned that "enlightened statesmen...
able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to
the public good... will not always be at the helm". But there is a defi nite
sense in the air that the two processes James Madison saw as the particular
advantages of democratic republics—representation with its triple
advantages of gathering ideas, working for the public, and refi nement
through deliberation; and control of faction—have gone awry.
They need to be rebuilt if the case for a democratic republic is to remain
an overwhelming and obvious one.
5
In the early years of the American republic, James Madison warned his
fellow countrymen that their chosen system of governance would only
survive if they adhered to the principles of representation and kept
factionalism in check. In the era of Donald Trump, it would seem that
these two conditions are no longer being met.
BERKELEY – From the very beginning of the American experiment,
Alexander Hamilton, one of the new country’s founders, had serious
doubts about democracy. “It is impossible to read the history of the petty
republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and
disgust at the … state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of
tyranny and anarchy,” he wrote in The Federalist Papers No. 9.
But Hamilton went on to praise such principles as, “The regular
distribution of power into distinct departments; the introduction of
legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts composed of
judges holding their offi ces during good behavior; the representation of the
people in the legislature.” These, he wrote, “are means, and powerful
means, by which the excellences of republican government may be
retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided.”
And yet those improvements in the “science of politics” that Hamilton
identifi ed could apply just as well to monarchies as to republics, and in
fact emerged from monarchies. The Plantagenet kings who ruled England
between the twelfth and fi fteenth centuries professionalized the judiciary,
and established the precedent of securing parliamentary consent before
levying taxes. Likewise, the professional bureaucracy and distribution of
power that one would expect to fi nd in a republic were also enshrined in
the Council of the Indies and the Council of Castile under the sixteenth-
century Spanish monarch Philip II.
If Hamilton’s favored political institutions had just as much potential to
improve monarchy as to improve republicanism, then why did he have so
6
much confi dence in the latter form of governance? He never addressed
that question, but another founder, James Madison, devoted considerable
attention to it.
Judging by his contributions to The Federalist Papers, Madison’s position
revolved around two core ideas: “representation,” which he welcomed;
and “faction,” which he warned against. With respect to representation,
Madison surmised that, “The public voice, pronounced by the
representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good
than if pronounced by the people themselves.”
Madison expected elected representatives to look outward, assessing the
people’s interests and drawing on their knowledge and ideas. But he also
hoped that elected offi cials would look inward, to the government and to
one another, to ensure that policies were well crafted. Through prudent
representation, a republican form of government can enjoy the advantages
of professionalization and expertise, as well as new ideas from society, as
it pursues the public interest.
At the same time, Madison stressed the importance of avoiding
factionalism, which he defi ned as, “some common impulse of passion, or
of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and
aggregate interests of the community.” A monarchy or aristocracy, of
course, is nothing but a faction – one that is fi rmly in control and under
little pressure to work for the public interest or consider new ideas. But in
a republic, Madison observed, a faction could rule only if it commanded
an electoral majority. That is why, when “you take in a greater variety of
parties and interests,” he wrote, “you make it less probable that a majority
of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other
citizens.”
The problem, of course, is that majorities with a malign “common motive”
emerge nonetheless. That is how the US got the near-century-long period
7
of “Jim Crow” racial persecution following the Civil War, the herding of
Japanese-Americans into concentration camps during World War II, and
other shameful episodes.
Or consider what today we would call the ethnic cleansing of Cherokee
land in the early nineteenth century – an act of state-sanctioned forced
migration known as the “Trail of Tears.” When the US Supreme Court
ruled in 1832 that the Cherokee were in fact a sovereign nation, then-
President Andrew Jackson simply ignored it. “The decision of the
Supreme Court has fell still born,” he told Brigadier General John Coffee,
and “cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.”
Jackson thus rejected a decision handed down by what Hamilton would
call “judges holding their offi ces during good behavior.” In doing so, he
confi rmed Madison’s fear that if bureaucracy, established procedure, and
deliberation cannot transcend the passions of a majority faction, then there
can be no “republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican
government.”
Meanwhile, it has been more than a century since the constitutional and
semi-constitutional monarchies of Europe faced their own political crises.
In the event, they did not move toward centralized socialist dictatorships
or strongman plebiscitary ethnocracies, but rather toward representative
parliamentary democracy.
The American experiment has not yet reached a point of existential crisis.
But there can be little doubt that the US in the Trump era is experiencing
the problems that Madison foresaw when he warned that “enlightened
statesmen” capable of making “clashing interests … subservient to the
public good … will not always be at the helm.”
The two primary advantages of republican democracy that Madison
identifi ed – prudent, informed representation and the transcendence of
8
factionalism – seem to have gone missing. For republican democracy to
remain the best form of government, they will need to be rediscovered.
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