SOME THINGS ARE TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO THE PEOPLE (via ef brown)

'The Modern Prince': Machiavelli offers a few lessons we could use to fight terrorism. (BRIAN M. CARNEY, August 21, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

Borrowing from Plato and Aristotle, [Carnes Lord's book The Modern Prince] warns that "the people" can be a fickle lot and that often their will and the rule of law are at odds with each other. It is precisely to temper the passions of the people that we resort to representative rather than direct democracy. Such a form of government, in turn, imposes an obligation on our elected leaders--not merely to follow public opinion but to shape it.

This argument is at the heart of "The Modern Prince." The book is in many ways a call to action, much as Machiavelli's original was an exhortation to the Medici princes to drive out the "barbarians" and unify Italy. It is also an attempt to re-create Machiavelli's handbook in modern form and to place its lessons, together with some new ones, in our age. [...]

It might seem odd, or even worrying, to exhort democratic leaders to hew to the lessons of a man whose name has become synonymous with a cynically amoral approach to governing. And indeed, Mr. Lord does not shy from prescriptions that could well alarm ardent democrats. The preface begins with a kind of declaration of first principles: "The theory of democracy tells us that the people rule. In practice, we have leaders who rule the people in a manner not altogether different from the princes and potentates of times past."

The statement is descriptive, but it has a normative force: Leaders rule that way--and they should. The alternative is drift, directionlessness and decline. At times, Mr. Lord's affection for forceful leadership is taken a step too far, as with his full-throated praise of Lee Kwan Yew's Singapore, but on the whole his emphasis is sound. [...]

Mr. Lord's understanding of the workings of government, both ancient and modern, is profound, and his ability to assimilate the two makes "The Modern Prince" indispensable. The book may never acquire the notoriety of its predecessor, but as a handbook for leaders it deserves to become an instant classic.

Fareed Zakaria's book, The Future of Freedom, makes the important distinction between democracy and freedom and spells out the danger to the latter of too much of the former, a problem we have even here in the U.S., the world's most successful democracy. He originally showed how the divergence is affecting the rest of the world in his influential essay, The Rise of Illiberal Democracy (Fareed Zakaria, November/ December 1997, Foreign Affairs):

FROM THE TIME of Herodotus democracy has meant, first and foremost, the rule of the people. This view of democracy as a process of selecting governments, articulated by scholars ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to Joseph Schumpeter to Robert Dahl, is now widely used by social scientists. In The Third Wave, Samuel P. Huntington explains why:

Elections, open, free and fair, are the essence of democracy, the inescapable sine qua non. Governments produced by elections may be inefficient, corrupt, shortsighted, irresponsible, dominated by special interests, and incapable of adopting policies demanded by the public good. These qualities make such governments undesirable but they do not make them undemocratic. Democracy is one public virtue, not the only one, and the relation of democracy to other public virtues and vices can only be understood if democracy is clearly distinguished from the other characteristics of political systems.
This definition also accords with the commonsense view of the term. If a country holds competitive, multiparty elections, we call it democratic. When public participation in politics is increased, for example through the enfranchisement of women, it is seen as more democratic. Of course elections must be open and fair, and this requires some protections for freedom of speech and assembly. But to go beyond this minimalist definition and label a country democratic only if it guarantees a comprehensive catalog of social, political, economic, and religious rights turns the word democracy into a badge of honor rather than a descriptive category. After all, Sweden has an economic system that many argue curtails individual property rights, France until recently had a state monopoly on television, and England has an established religion. But they are all clearly and identifiably democracies. To have democracy mean, subjectively, "a good government" renders it analytically useless.

Constitutional liberalism, on the other hand, is not about the procedures for selecting government, but rather government's goals. It refers to the tradition, deep in Western history, that seeks to protect an individual's autonomy and dignity against coercion, whatever the source -- state, church, or society. The term marries two closely connected ideas. It is liberal because it draws on the philosophical strain, beginning with the Greeks, that emphasizes individual liberty. It is constitutional because it rests on the tradition, beginning with the Romans, of the rule of law. Constitutional liberalism developed in Western Europe and the United States as a defense of the individual's right to life and property, and freedom of religion and speech. To secure these rights, it emphasized checks on the power of each branch of government, equality under the law, impartial courts and tribunals, and separation of church and state. Its canonical figures include the poet John Milton, the jurist William Blackstone, statesmen such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, Baron de Montesquieu, John Stuart Mill, and Isaiah Berlin. In almost all of its variants, constitutional liberalism argues that human beings have certain natural (or "inalienable") rights and that governments must accept a basic law, limiting its own powers, that secures them. Thus in 1215 at Runnymede, England's barons forced the king to abide by the settled and customary law of the land. In the American colonies these laws were made explicit, and in 1638 the town of Hartford adopted the first written constitution in modern history. In the 1970s, Western nations codified standards of behavior for regimes across the globe. The Magna Carta, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the American Constitution, and the Helsinki Final Act are all expressions of constitutional liberalism.

SINCE 1945 Western governments have, for the most part, embodied both democracy and constitutional liberalism. Thus it is difficult to imagine the two apart, in the form of either illiberal democracy or liberal autocracy. In fact both have existed in the past and persist in the present. Until the twentieth century, most countries in Western Europe were liberal autocracies or, at best, semi-democracies. The franchise was tightly restricted, and elected legislatures had little power. In 1830 Great Britain, in some ways the most democratic European nation, allowed barely 2 percent of its population to vote for one house of Parliament; that figure rose to 7 percent after 1867 and reached around 40 percent in the 1880s. Only in the late 1940s did most Western countries become full-fledged democracies, with universal adult suffrage. But one hundred years earlier, by the late 1840s, most of them had adopted important aspects of constitutional liberalism -- the rule of law, private property rights, and increasingly, separated powers and free speech and assembly. For much of modern history, what characterized governments in Europe and North America, and differentiated them from those around the world, was not democracy but constitutional liberalism. The "Western model" is best symbolized not by the mass plebiscite but the impartial judge.

In the book, Mr. Zakaria is a tad timid about proposing reforms to reduce the deleterious influence of democracy--mostly he seems to think we should have more governmental institutions like the Federal Reserve--but if our goal remains freedom, rather than just democracy, there would seem some really basic things we could do. Here are a few:

(1) Rerestrict the franchise, to those who generally have a vested interest in freedom (rather than security and the resulting dependence on the State): adults (age 25 and up), net taxpayers (those who give the government more money than they get back every year--with an exception for the military), people of property, married women only, etc.

(2) Repeal the 17th Amendment: let state legislatures select their senators.

(3) Do away with all campaign reform laws: in particular there should be no limits placed on how the parties choose their nominees.

(4) Close congressional hearings and stop recording committee votes.

Folks must have some other ideas, both positive and negative--I'm working on my review of the book and have a book group next week on the topic, so we'd enjoy hearing what y'all have to say. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 21, 2003 11:36 AM