I should have commented on the November elections
right away. Or probably it wasn’t necessary. The few who read this blog should
know well that I don’t like Obama, not just a little, but a lot. As always,
though, expressing opinions, likes and dislikes, is less important than arguing
about “things themselves”.
At times like these I wonder about the destiny of
democracy. In the US and out of it there is talk about the decline of America.
I rather ask: is there in the US an apt understanding of America, and, with
America, of democracy? In short: what about democracy? In the US, I don’t know
whether they can still be called of America, as in Europe?
As far as America is concerned, my friend the LD wrote
a beautiful book entitled The soul of a
nation, for which I am pressing him to find a publisher to make known his
enquiry, historical and philosophical, into her formative idea. As far as her
connection with democracy is concerned, well, who doesn’t know the brilliant Democracy in America by Alexis de
Tocqueville? Amazing how he was able to draw, just from a journey through the young
United States in the thirties of the Nineteenth Century, such essential an
insight into the kind of society that was taking shape in them!
Mind me. I said that “society was taking shape” in the
united ex British colonies, meaning that a certain ordering of human affairs
found in the American constitution, wisely empowered by the Constitution, the
institutional setting that allowed it to flourish. I didn’t say that the state newly
formed by the ex colonies shaped society.
Let’s call, as it has been called, this ordering of
human affairs “democracy”.
It had already started taking shape before the
independence in the colonial period, over against the modern European
experience of the absolute monarchies, by which it was the states that tended
to reshape society. The same tendency, though, was not overthrown but confirmed
and strengthened by the French Revolution. Again on this, de Tocqueville makes
an interesting reading, with his less famous but no less important The ancient regime and the revolution.
Also to the ordering of society from on high, on the absolutist model confirmed by the
French Revolution, it has been given the name of “democracy”.
It is legitimate then to ask: which is democracy, the
one or the other?
A widespread opinion identifies democracy with the
possibility to hold elections – or at least so it looks from the pressing in
this direction exercised by the US on countries where elections weren’t
previously held. What is happening for example in Egypt shows how illusory that
opinion is: an elected president took the first chance he found to make his
power absolute. But it’s not just this. To be elected implies the capability to
obtain consent, and to stay in power doesn’t require suspension of further
elections, it is enough to control the organization of consent. Moreover, the
idea of democracy thus expressed is that consent by itself is all that is
needed: nothing it is said in this way about the consent obtained, whether it
is for good or for bad. To maintain consent by itself as good, qualifications
are added on the way it is obtained that little have to do with elections.
I’m not saying that elections are not important. They are
quite so, mostly for the understanding of man they show, when by elections we
mean universal suffrage: one man (or woman), one vote. This implies that sense
of equality in which de Tocqueville rightly sees the main mark of democracy.
Let’s not trust our democratic sensitivity, which
makes the affirmation of men’s equality almost a truism. It is not. Men are
different, starting from the most patent difference of sex and age, to all
other kind of differences, physical and moral, ethnic and cultural. If we still
hold their equality, this needs to be accounted for by saying in what it rests,
what is it that equalizes them.
By the answer to these questions come the different conceptions
of democracy I spoke about, still at play in the partisan search for consensus in
our countries. We could call them, following what I said, the first “American”
and the second “European”, if we only remember that they are embattled both in
the USA, quite strongly, and, to a lesser degree, in Europe.
*****
I was wandering how to carry forth my argument, when I
run into an interview with Harvey Mansfield, and this interview prompted me to
look into his home site. Professor emeritus of Government and teacher of
political philosophy at Harvard University, he ironically declares himself to
be the “conservative mascot” in that
home of liberalism, the token dissenting voice necessary to show that liberals
tolerate criticism. Now, liberalism is the European way to democracy, which
threatens the American way – if threat it is. That such is the case, it is
precisely the point to argue.
Let’s hear Mansfield’s words, from the review of a
book on de Tocqueville entitled Soft
despotism:
Soft despotism (despotisme doux), according to him, is
a new despotism found only in democracy. It is not based on making the people
tremble with fear, as Montesquieu said of the usual despot, but on providing
benefits and offering good will to the people as individuals.
"It does not break wills; it softens them, bends
them, and directs them," says Tocqueville. It even teaches you how to
improve your life. But the price of the benefits is to hinder and discourage
all political or associational activity in the people, leaving democracy in the
condition of a mass of dissociated individuals governed by an "immense being"
known today as Big Government. This new democratic despotism, rather than any
direct enemy of democracy, is the greatest danger in our democratic age.
At danger, with democracy, is liberty, that freedom
with which we are used to associate it. Now, freedom is as hard to define as
democracy. But I don’t need to enter into all the disputes surrounding it. It is
enough to make explicit what is implicit in the dispute concerning “Big
Government” or “Small Government”. Classical Nineteenth Century liberalism
advocated the latter, Twentieth Century liberalism advocates in the US the
first. But they share a common assumption: that the State is superiorem non ricognoscens, doesn’t
recognize anything above, or for that matter below, itself.
This means that for liberalism there is no divine or
natural law ordering human relations in society; or, in other words, that there
is no order immanent to personal relations prior to their ordering by the
State. The famous separation of powers: legislative, executive and judiciary,
however important, doesn’t change the simple fact that the governing body of
society, made of the three corresponding branches, claims for itself the
absolute power of making laws. Granted this assumption, it can be disputed
about big or small government.
Let’s hear again Mansfield on de Tocqueville:
[…] he presents the idea of democratic liberty
in an account of the facts of American democracy, above all in the discussion
of the New England township with which he begins his presentation of American
government. Here one sees the natural, spontaneous association of free men to
address a need before their eyes, such as laying a road, that cannot be
satisfied by one individual alone. He goes on to describe and praise the
complex, artificial, theoretical Constitution that presides over the more spontaneous
"civil society" of American democracy. But he never mentions the
Declaration whose fundamental principles inspired the Constitution.
[…] Tocqueville appears to have had an aversion
to abstract principles and to have considered them a menace to democratic
liberty. In a democracy, abstract principles, including the Declaration's statement
that "all men are created equal," will be democratic ones and will
accelerate the democratic revolution rather than guide it. Democratic citizens,
lacking any sense of hierarchy either in society or in their own souls, are
likely to reject demanding ideals and to prefer immediate, material enjoyments
that are easy, obvious, and palpable.
A government led by an abstract idea of men’s equality
to be implemented in society has an intrinsically despotic bent. Be it of a
soft despotism. Then a tendency toward conformity in the minimum common
denominator of desires is guaranteed by
the State, definer, as supreme legislator, of life and death.
What was it then the worth, if this were to be the final
outcome, of having left absolutist Europe?
HP
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