Consider political wars of religion, which I define as confrontations about whose preferences and values will be imposed on other individuals. They are not what any friend would wish you for 2021! President-elect Joe Biden does not seem to understand this as he declared (quoted by Deanna Paul, “Republican Electors Cast Unofficial Ballots, Setting Up Congressional Clash,” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2020):
Respecting the will of the people is at the heart of our democracy, even if we find those results hard to accept.
First, the United States (or perhaps more exactly, the US government) is not a democracy, but a republic, as John Grove argued in his article “Numerical Democracy or Constitutional Reality?” (Law and Liberty, November 12, 2020). Indeed, the Founders were not influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conception of democracy, where the “will of the people” or “general will” is paramount. Second, and contrary to what populists of the right or of the left believe, the “will of the people” has no rational, ascertainable meaning. It is not without reason that Rousseau has been called the “prophet of national populism.”
It is remarkable that populists of the left (such as Elizabeth Warren) and populists of the right (such as Donald Trump) both claim to represent or incarnate the will of the people. The reader interested to go a bit further on this topic may have a look at my recent review of Carlos de la Torre’s latest book (“The Standard Populist Playbook,” Regulation, Winter 2020-2021), my forthcoming Regulation review of Willian Riker’s Liberalism Against Populism, my forthcoming article on populism in The Independent Review, as well as my Econlog post, “What is Populism? The People V. the People” (September 11, 2020).
The “will of the people” does not exist or, at the very least, is totally unknowable. A methodological reason is that “the people” does not exist as a superindividual with a will of its own. There are only individuals with their several different preferences and values. A more practical reason is that, as economist Kenneth Arrow demonstrated, any voting method will give results that are either logically incoherent or dictatorial. What passes for the will of the people is, at best, the result of a numerical plurality within the electorate or, at worst, the clamor of a mob.
In a classical liberal perspective, the purpose of voting is only to allow a peaceful change of the rulers when a large proportion of the electorate have had enough of them. It is not to impose some individuals’ preferences, values, and lifestyles on other individuals.
Political wars of religion, on the contrary, are led by politicians (the ultimate altruists, as we know) who are fighting each other to incarnate the will of the people. And since the will of the people is unknowable, any politician can claim to represent it and is as right as any other politician who so claims (such a claim is the main feature of populism), just as leaders of wars of religion on both or many sides can claim to follow the will of God.
As Grove writes,
And from that expectation [that a single national vote should decide everything] springs partisan bitterness, fanatical political loyalty, and the sense that we must do whatever it takes to defeat our domestic “enemies” at the ballot box. … Samuel Adams wrote to Richard Henry Lee that such a government could not adequately craft laws suited to the great variety of peoples and interests within it, and would bring us only “Discontent, Mistrust, Disaffection to government and frequent Insurrections.” We most certainly have the first three. If we clamor for still more centralized democracy, we may get the fourth.
The problem is not extremism, it’s the desire to impose one’s own brand of extremism on others. Instead, live and let live! That’s my wish for the New Year.
READER COMMENTS
Greg G
Dec 29 2020 at 8:48am
“Republic.” If there ever was another term with an even more flexible meaning than “will of the people” this is surely it.
Plato had a better claim than anyone to have defined the term and he used it to describe an unambiguously totalitarian system so destructive to personal liberty that it replaced the family.
It has also accurately been used to describe everything from the U.S. government to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It covers basically every form of government that is not an autocracy.
By contrast “will of the people” is relatively much more precise than this admittedly very low bar. In conventional usage “will of the people” is just shorthand for “the decision a majority would make if given a choice on this issue.” Vanishingly few people actually think that there is unanimity on any controversy or that a “general will” exists apart from being the sum of a lot of individual wills.
If your point is that the founders really wanted something much more like an aristocracy than a democracy then you should just say that. But of, course, even that reasonably accurate claim implies that there was some kind of collective decision making going on and some figure of speech short of a paragraph that we might want to use to refer to the most popular position in that decision making process.
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 29 2020 at 6:30pm
@Greg G: As another commenter pointed out below, the problem is that “the sum of individual wills” does not exist because individual wills cannot be added (without logical incoherence or dictatorship of some individual wills over others–see Arrow).
Greg G
Dec 29 2020 at 8:03pm
Pierre, I didn’t mean by “sum of individual wills” that it was possible to perform some formal mathematical operation on these individual wills. I merely meant that there is a fact of the matter about which policy options are more popular than others. And that that is all that most people are referring to when they use the phrase “will of the people.” Very few people intend to suggest, by that phrase, that the popular point of view has any existence of its own apart from the views of the individuals in the relevant group.
You yourself referred above to “when a large proportion of the electorate have” a particular opinion. How do you know its a large proportion and not a small proportion? You are able to reasonably have an opinion about that precisely because there is a fact of the matter about it and evidence in the world about that fact of the matter.
As for “dictatorship of some individuals over others” the only reason you ever have politics in the first place is because there is some issue that has to be decided by people as a group and there is a disagreement about that decision which is sure to leave someone unhappy. Group decisions that everyone agrees on aren’t political at all. It takes more than someone being unhappy with a group decision to make it fit the conventional definition of a “dictatorship.”
Greg G
Dec 29 2020 at 9:06am
>—“And since the will of the people is unknowable, any politician can claim to represent it and is as right as any other politician who so claims…”
This is a non sequitur.
Just because it is easy to make a false claim about something does not mean there isn’t a fact of the matter.
And just because no one can know the answer to some question with certainty doesn’t mean some people’s answers aren’t a lot closer to to reality than some other people’s answers to that question.
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 29 2020 at 6:34pm
@Greg G: If you understand your last paragraph correctly, it is precisely to (try to) meet this objection that I wrote “or at the very least” in my sentence “The “will of the people” does not exist or, at the very least, is totally unknowable.” Should we say that the will of a stone does not exist or that it is unknowable? At any rate, you wouldn’t want to be governed by one.
Greg G
Dec 29 2020 at 8:28pm
There is definitely a lot more that can be known about the will of persons than stones.
Can we agree that it’s not possible to “totally know” everything we would want to know about the will of a group of people but that doesn’t keep us from being able to learn a lot about the popularity of various ideas within that same group?
Just because the totality of information on the topic is not knowable doesn’t make “totally unknowable” a good way to describe the information that is available to us. Especially if we can use that information to conclude that “a large proportion of the electorate have” some particular opinion.
Cobey Williamson
Dec 29 2020 at 10:11am
That’s all well and good until everyone wants an iPhone (or an Android, or an iPhone, or an Android).
We live in a global society on a planet of finite means. The days of liberal economic organization driven by capital/preference led decision-making are in the past.
My New Year wish? That you and others like you put your significant mental capacity to work solving the actual problem at hand.
Jon Murphy
Dec 29 2020 at 10:23am
Why does scarcity negate the principle of “live and let live”?
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 29 2020 at 6:39pm
@Coby Williamson: Besides Jon’s pointed question, I would ask you another one: What does “capital/preference mean in “driven by capital/preference”? One may also wonder what “organization” (see Hayek on organization versus spontaneous order) and “driven” mean.)
Greg G
Dec 29 2020 at 10:55am
Yeah, but which “large percentage of the electorate”?
The great advantage of constitutional democracy is that it settles this question and arranges for the peaceful transfer of power. Tyranny of the majority is bad but tyranny of the minority is even worse.
Capitalism’s greatest virtue is that it ensures the replacement of firms that are too inefficient and continue to waste too many resources, not that it always guarantees a good outcome. You might say it is a system for the peaceful transfer of resources.
Constitutional democracy’s greatest virtue is that ensures the replacement of governments that become too unpopular, not that it always guarantees a good outcome from every election winner. The first thing every would be tyrant wants to do is end his accountability to the majority in a democracy.
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 29 2020 at 6:46pm
@Greg C: I agree with what you say except for the large sentence. Tyrants are often supported by the majority, at least tacitly. In ancient Greece, they were often elected or at least strongly supported by the demos; when they were not, they were not tyrants anymore.
Greg G
Dec 29 2020 at 8:49pm
Yes, tyrants definitely can be supported by a majority. Good point. Democracy is not a guarantee a tyrant can’t take power. It just makes it harder, not impossible. Making it harder is better than making it easier. The more power is concentrated in fewer hands the more risk there is of tyranny.
Mark Z
Dec 29 2020 at 1:35pm
Greg G, I don’t see why you think aristocracy is the default alternative to democracy. Constitutional constraints and degrees of separation between voters and policymaking (e.g. voters electing the people who make policy, or electing the people who elect the people who make policy) take us away from democracy but don’t make us an aristocracy. That, I presume, is what ‘this is a republic, not a democracy’ means. I think ‘republic’ is basically a just hypernym of democracy, and ‘republic vs. democracy’ debates are really just haggling over how many degrees there should be between voters and final decision-making (term limits, parliaments, constitutions, and independent judiciaries all basically ways of putting time and distance between public whim and state action).
The problem with collective will is also more than just that it’s never unanimous. Arrow’s impossibility theorem and the inability of voting to reflect intensity of preferences means it isn’t even a reliable summation of the individual wills.
Finally, I don’t think remotely the most important thing constitutions do is ensure the peaceful transfer of power. In the US, the constitution mostly enshrines taboos that constrain the government from doing things. It is yet another buffer between the immediate will of the people and public policy decision-making. Slavoj Zizek I think wrote ruefully that the American constitutional system of government is designed to prevent change, and I think that’s right. Its point is to require more than a mere majority to want something done, and consistently want it done without changing its mind, for it to actually happen. The peaceful transfer of power, though important, is a secondary purpose, judging from the context in which the constitution is actually discussed in the US
Greg G
Dec 29 2020 at 3:16pm
Mark,
I didn’t say or mean that an aristocracy was necessarily “the default alternative to democracy.” I did say it was the alternative that the founders preferred.
They intended a government by an aristocracy of wealthy, white, male Christian landowners like themselves. I don’t say that because I have any desire to condemn them or tear down their statues. Historical figures should be judged in the context of the times they lived in, not modern times.
What they accomplished was brilliant and heroic but certainly not something even they thought should be unchanged more than two centuries later. In the context of their own times they were agents for radical change in a much more democratic direction.
Everyone wants government more constrained when their political opponents are in power than when they are in power. The founders gave us the Alien and Sedition Acts and routine packing of the Supreme Court. Luckily we have used the constitutional tools they gave us to evolve in a more democratic direction than that.
In science it’s easier and more practical to get people to agree that something is falsified than that it’s proven. In politics, it’s easier to get people to agree they want to vote out a group of politicians than to get them to agree on what to replace them with. Sure, there are problems with a more democratic constitutional democracy. There are a lot more problems with its alternatives.
Mark Z
Dec 30 2020 at 10:48pm
The expansion of franchise and other rights along race, gender, class, etc. is orthogonal to the question of whether decision-making should be put in large part in the hands of certain ‘elites’ who inhabit key institutions rather than put directly in the hands of the voters, whoever they may be. IOW, E.g., there’s no reason convincing someone that women should get to vote should also convince them that judges should be elected rather than appointed. Becoming more of an ‘open access’ society, in Douglass North’s terms, doesn’t necessarily entail becoming a more democratic society. There were far more radically Democratic statesman around at the same time in France that I’d say compare unfavorably to them, so their (the founders of the US) were also praiseworthy for their moderation.
And, the routine court packing of the 18th/19th century is a way in which they were more democratic than we are today. It would be even more democratic if the majority-elected president could replace justices at will. That the president is constrained by a fixed number of officials appointed often decades ago is rather undemocratic. Inasmuch s it’s a good thing, that means becoming more democratic isn’t an end in itself.
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 29 2020 at 6:51pm
Mark Z (and Greg G): Thanks for your interesting points. I think that, if not already done, you would find many good ideas (some supporting your arguments, others deflecting them) in the Grove article linked to in my post.
Greg G
Dec 30 2020 at 7:17am
Thanks for that link Pierre. It was very relevant to the debate here.
The Grove essay is clever enough and disingenuous enough to be misleading with a selective use of the historical facts. It is true (and not misleading) to point out that the founders were very afraid of the kind of democracy where it would be easy for a majority of the people governed to get their way.
How did they propose to put these “firm restraints on majorities”? By radically REDUCING the restraints on one particular minority at the same time they increased the “firm restraints” on everybody else’s ability to influence government. Most of the founders were state level politicians so they devised a system to give outsized influence to state level politicians. Many of them were slaveholders so they devised a system to give outsized influence to slaveholders (all in the name of liberty of course). All of them were male so the right to vote was limited to males. Most of them were Christians so states were allowed to establish a religion with no worries that any non-Christian religion would be established.
What Grove carefully avoids admitting is that the “broad consensus for national action” that the Constitution was designed to require was NOT a broad consensus of all those governed or even all citizens. It was indeed intended to require a broad consensus…but ONLY among a narrow demographic of people very much like the founders themselves.
And so today we find that the same people selectively celebrating our government’s requirements for “broad consensus” are usually the same people most enthusiastically supporting voter suppression and minority rule.
Mark Z
Dec 30 2020 at 11:40pm
You’re conflating different issues to muddy the waters morally by reducing their support for subsidiarity to being like racism or sexism, just another thing they did to cynically hoard power for themselves. And even if true, the merit or fault of state-based subsidiarity does not rest on whether black people should be allowed to vote.
I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically right or wrong about each state being equal in some ways (and not in others). But that’s what what was contractually agreed upon by the states, so it can’t just be ignored as a ‘concession to political reality.’ That senate-wise equality of states, moreover, doesn’t ensure minority rule but rather minority veto, because the majority still controls the House. That’s why it’s accurate to describe it as a system that ensures more than a majority to change policy. Other factors like the increasingly imperial presidency have allowed electoral minorities to do more than just veto, but that’s not an argument against having a minority veto mechanism, which can be utilized by the most desperate citizens as well as the most powerful.
Greg G
Dec 31 2020 at 8:04am
Mark,
We agree on more than you realize so let me start there.
Yes, it is crucially important that minorities have institutional and normative protections against a tyranny of the majority. Yes, subsidiarity, federalism, separation of powers and judicial review should remain a part of that. Yes, court packing would be more democratically majoritarian but also more likely in the end to put minority rights at risk. Yes, the French Revolution would not have been a better model for us even though it had majoritarian support for a while. Yes, we wouldn’t have a United States of America to argue about in the first place if small states had not been given constitutional political power disproportional to their numbers in the population.
Our disagreements have to do entirely with that fact that you insist on confining the discussion to how these institutions and norms should and could work in principle while insisting that how they actually have worked in over two centuries of American history is somehow much less relevant than that.
My point is that the same tools that could, in principle, protect minorities have very often been used very selectively only to protect certain elite and powerful minorities. For example, you say that the Senate “doesn’t ensure minority rule but rather minority veto because the majority still controls the House.” As for the Senate, that veto depends entirely on which minority is being represented. As for the House, Gerrymandering of swing state representation has created a situation that will actual ensure that the party that has won the popular vote for the House lately needs much more than a majority of voters to enjoy the majority in House. In 2017 and 2018 we had all branches of the federal government controlled by a party that won the popular vote in none of them. That is something much more than a veto.
You say that “if true” that the founders designed a system to hoard power for themselves the merit of the principle of subsidiarity is unaffected. Is it really a big mystery to you whether or not it IS true they designed a system to hoard power for people like themselves? Why do you insist on ignoring the most obvious historical facts? There is no reason you can’t still defend the principles important to you while acknowledging this.
Matthias
Dec 31 2020 at 4:19am
Arrows theorem is fun, but not a big constraint by itself in practice.
Eg it doesn’t apply when you are free to use non-deterministic voting mechanisms.
(The most famous perhaps being sortition.)
Jon Murphy
Dec 31 2020 at 10:50am
Arrow doesn’t apply because non-deterministic voting methods are non-deterministic. Given that Arrow was trying to see the necessary conditions to determine the “general will,” the fact that his reasoning doesn’t apply to methods that do not try to determine the general will doesn’t imply it’s not a constraint.
David B
Dec 31 2020 at 7:33pm
Pasted below are selections from pages 72-74 of Democracy: A History, by John Dunn (2005). The participants in this thread bring a greater capacity for informed, fine-grained arguments than I, so I offer this on the chance that the points made by Professor Dunn overlap with and/or inform some of the questions discussed above.
“The term democracy played no role at all in initiating the crisis of the North American colonies, and no positive role in defining the political structures that brought it to its strikingly durable close.”
“Only in retrospect, as America’s new constitution was put to work and the new nation went on its way, did the perspective alter sharply.”
“America’s Revolution was an anxious response to a widely perceived threat to liberties long enjoyed, the very liberties which, as time went by, were to form the evidence of its protracted democratic past. Once those liberties had been successfully defended, or won back by force of arms, the constitutional order which the Americans constructed to secure them in future came in retrospect to seem a uniquely clear-sighted exercise in thinking through the requirements for political liberty and implementing the conclusions of this remarkably public process of deliberation. Nothing quite like it had ever occurred before; and no subsequent episode in constitution making has fully matched the acumen in diagnosis shown by the new nations’ political leaders, still less the remarkable longevity of the remedies on which they settled. Ninety year later William Ewart Gladstone, Queen Victoria’s great and infuriating Prime Minister, describe the product of their efforts as’ the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man’. In the aftermath of America’s savage Civil War, the grimmest evidence of the limits to diagnosis and to remedy, this was a generous assessment. But it scarcely conveyed the levels of effort, the range of participants, or the fluster and animosity of the process of decision-making which had made it possible.”
NeedleFactory
Jan 5 2021 at 12:29pm
Typo Alert: The WSJ article referenced in your lede is dated December 28 2020 (not January 28, 2020).
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