Self-government is often mistaken for its legal, procedural, or institutional manifestations, such as voting, representation, majority rule, and the freedoms of speech, association, and press. These are necessary but insufficient conditions of self-government. Self-government is, at root, a culture of public responsibility among a citizenry; that is, a widely accepted norm that citizens can and should take a role in public decision-making. People must believe that they have the right, duty, and ability to govern themselves. If they stop believing these things, self-government is effectively dead even if the rituals are still observed.
Because self-government is distinct from its institutional embodiments, a government can undermine the substance of democracy even while retaining its formal appearance by undermining a culture of responsibility, citizens’ faith in democratic legitimacy, or their ability to engage meaningfully in the system. For example, elections are no evidence of self-government if they are rigged. The existence of a body of representatives may undermine self-government if they do not represent, or if they have no power. In other words, a government that claims to be democratic cannot be judged by the presence or absence of a few institutions, but by how well or poorly it promotes and protects the culture of self-government.
Certain features of American government undermine the culture of self-government. I am not here primarily concerned with specific policies of government–that the social safety net may engender a culture of dependency, for example, or that pure capitalism may atomize society. Rather, I am concerned with the structure of democracy and its relationship to civil society. How the machinery of government functions, where decisions are made, and how citizens are treated are more primal realities that shape the culture of self-government for good or ill in more fundamental ways than any individual policy could.
Two specific features stand out for the duration and extent with which they have insinuated themselves into the structure of American government while weakening it, like ivy that fatally compromises a fence and so becomes the only force holding it together. First, the concept of elected representation–virtually synonymous with democracy–has surprisingly anti-democratic implications in practice. Second, the American government’s inexorable distention–hardly a new phenomenon–has led it towards ever greater administrative centralization, which in turn crowds out meaningful opportunities for citizens to participate in the work of government.
Both are long-standing features of American democracy; both have troubling effects on the culture of self-government; and both are so closely identified with the American experiment that it is difficult to envision them changing.
The danger of “factions”
In approaching the question of representation, we should note that it occupies a curious place in the work of political theorists whose ideas shaped and gave expression to early classical liberalism. John Locke, for example, hardly gave the issue much attention in his Second Treatise (1690), being far more interested in articulating ways to limit government, protect individual liberty and property, and prevent abuses than in describing a scheme of representation. John Stuart Mill, like Locke, was more concerned with the philosophical bases for individual civil and political rights than with the machinery of government for protecting them in On Liberty (1859). It is noteworthy, if not troubling, that a central concept underlying modern self-government is so little discussed.
James Madison laid out the classic (and almost the only) case for a scheme of representation in the famous tenth essay of The Federalist Papers. He was concerned with the problem of “faction.” Madison’s “faction” is not synonymous with today’s “political party,” but something closer to what we might call “sectarian group.” A faction is a number of citizens “who are united and actuated by 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.” Subcommunities defined by some primal and exclusive identity marker, such as language, ethnicity, religion, or class (the latter two being the examples Madison actually gives) may grow so powerful as to seize the state. He was concerned with the possibility of the sort of sectarian conflict that political scientists today observe in countries with overlapping economic and religious or ethnic cleavages.
Madison’s concern was how to control factions that constituted the majority of citizens. Their takeover of the state could be, in theory, perfectly democratic, if democracy simply means rule by the 51 percent. Yet factions could be just as tyrannous as individuals, even if elected democratically, if they oppress the minority and use the state to perpetuate their rule. The essence of self government is in the participation of the whole self of the people, not the smallest portion large enough to seize power by force of numbers. That is why Madison rejects “democracy” in favor of a “republic,” which he defined as “a government in which the scheme of representation takes place.” The major distinction between republicanism and democracy are, in Madison’s elegantly economical phrase, “the delegation of the government…to a small numbers of citizens elected by the rest.” He also believed representation would allow a republic to be larger in geography and population than a democracy, a secondary difference between the two.
The wisdom of crowds
Representation and largeness, Madison believed, would inoculate a self-governing polity against faction by institutionalizing meritocracy, accountability, and moderation. Largeness creates the possibility for meritocracy by making available a large talent pool from which representatives might be chosen, while the mechanism of election allows the public to choose them. Assuming virtue and talent are randomly distributed in the world, the very bigness of America guarantees that there will be a large number of talented, moral men to compete with the “men of factious tempers.” As Madison says, ”if the proportion of fit characters be not less in the large than in the small republic, the former will present a greater option, and consequently a greater probability of a fit choice.” As a result, representative democracy enjoys the benefit of “representatives whose enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices and schemes of injustice.”
Secondly, large, representative governments are more accountable than small, direct democracies. Madison’s argument here appears to be that you can fool some of the people some of the time, but the more voters there are, the harder it will be to fool all of them all the time. In a large republic, he asserts, “it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practise with success the vicious arts, by which elections are too often carried” than in a small republic. Larger electorates, being harder to fool or manipulate, will thus keep a keener watch on their representatives and be more vigilant in holding them accountable.
The call of moderation
Thirdly, large, representative governments are more moderate. In larger republics there are a greater variety of interests, depriving an aspiring demagogue of the ability to appeal to a majority, or even a powerful plurality, of the citizenry. “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.” There is “greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties, against the event of any one party being able to outnumber and oppress the rest.” Representation also helps. A scheme of representation will “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice, will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” Larger republics also have the advantage of the raw “extent of territory,” over which it is more difficult to organize a conspiracy.
Representation and largeness, Madison believed, would save a self-governing polity from faction because it would imbue government with meritocracy, accountability, and moderation. The best men would be chosen by a large and sophisticated electorate. Their enlightened views would moderate the councils of state. The largeness and diversity of the electorate, meanwhile, would prevent any single interest or faction from outweighing the rest. The government remains responsive to the people through the scheme of representation–thus remaining a true species of self-government–but without losing the balance and maturity often missing from direct democracies. The two features go hand-in-hand. He acknowledges that representative governments in small polities may not always be moderate and accountable: “men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests of the people.”
But this danger, he argues, is overcome by the very largeness which representation makes possible in a republic.
What Madison Meant By Self-Governance
James Madison’s lofty expectations for representation are implausible. I am not here concerned with the historical record of the U.S. Congress, but with the theory Madison articulated in its defense. Some of Madison’s arguments may have been more persuasive in the 18th century but have been overtaken by technology and globalization: Madison’s belief that a populous, geographically spacious republic would present a forbidding challenge to would-be conspirators may have made more sense before the steamboat, railroad, and telegraph; much less so in the era of the radio, airplane, and internet. By concentrating the government into a few hands, representation in an era of instantaneous global telecommunications may actually make conspiracy easier, not harder, a point to which I will return below. For the moment, let us note that other aspects of Madison’s argument betray an naive understanding of human psychology that should have been evident even in his own day, and that is at odds with the otherwise realist tone of The Federalist Papers.
Madison does not explain why he believes that a larger electorate would be harder to deceive or manipulate than a small one, but he is evidently wrong. A candidate in a large electorate must necessarily speak to large numbers of people at once; voters thus encounter the candidate as a crowd or, worse, as a television audience. In crowds, voters can succumb to mass psychology, peer pressure, emotional manipulation, and spontaneity. As Madison should have known, large numbers of people do not exhibit the wisdom of numbers, but the passions of a mob. Today, as a television audience, voters are passive, focused on images rather than ideas, and unable to respond to or engage with the candidate.
This makes campaigning in a large electorate more dependent on emotion, symbols, and monologue instead of reason, interpersonal interaction, and dialogue. A candidate seeking office in a small electorate, such as for a town council seat, runs a campaign by walking the neighborhood and having one or two hundred short, face-to-face conversations with each and every single prospective voter. A candidate seeking office in a large electorate, such as for a U.S. House seat, attends fundraisers, speaks to crowds of several hundred to several thousand people, and, most of all, broadcasts television commercials to a viewership of hundreds of thousands. The first sort of campaigning requires interpersonal interaction and the ability to engage in a two-way, back-and-forth conversation with voters. The second requires the manipulation of symbols and words in a one-way monologue by the candidate. The first kind of campaign is insured against demagoguery because it is slow, plodding, and very human; the second kind is almost tailor-made for manipulation. The candidate for the town council seat is held accountable for his words because he has to repeat them to different voters dozens of times and respond to their questions, clarify their confusions, and engage with their ideas. The candidate for the U.S. House seat perfects one pitch–or a handful, tailored to different constituencies–captures it in a recorded advertisement, and repeats it as often as he can afford. The upshot is that candidates in large constituencies face much less of the face-to-face accountability of retail electioneering.
This, in turn, calls into question Madison’s belief that representation will introduce meritocracy into self-government. He simply assumes that elections are a mechanisms for identifying the smartest and most virtuous citizens. His argument seems naïve even in the 18th century context: elections do not reward intellectual merit or moral worth, but skill in campaigning. Those who have such skill gravitate to politics. In Madison’s day, it would have been rhetoricians. In ours, it is those most talented at the construction of emotionally manipulative imagery, what we might call visual rhetoricians, or YouTube sophists. It is precisely the skills required for large-scale campaigning–required for the geographically dispersed, populous districts that Madison championed–that undermine the meritocracy he hoped for.
The undermining of meritocracy is compounded by a cultural shift that Madison could not have foreseen. He assumed that there was a category of men who could be easily identified and recognized as “enlightened,” who exhibited “patriotism” and “love of justice.” But the collapse of public consensus over basic values and norms in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century means that no such category exists. Americans have no commonly-shared understanding of justice, no agreed-upon public philosophy aside from the very thinnest consensus on democratic procedure. Without a shared notion of justice, there is no shared criteria by which to judge a candidate as an enlightened lover of justice. One party’s enlightened statesman is the other party’s extremist. Even if the system was designed to reward merit–which it is not–Americans seem unable to agree on what constitutes merit.
Absent accountability, meritocracy, or enlightenment, should we expect elected representatives to exhibit moderation? Madison believed a large republic would encompass many different interests and factions which would keep each other in check; the very size of the republic would prevent any one of them from being able to take over. In our day, India, a successful democratic republic with scores of ethnicities and language groups, is probably the best example of what Madison may have had in mind: precisely because no single ethnic group constitutes a majority, all recognize the necessity of compromise to get along.
But Madison seems not to have considered another possibility: that the representatives, and the government they operated, might themselves become a faction separate and distinct from whatever factions held sway amongst the people. Recall Madison’s definition of a faction: a group of citizens “who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens.” The common interest of the representatives lies in getting re-elected; the common interest of office-holders generally is in staying in power. This interest certainly might be adversed to the rights of other citizens and harmful to the republic if the representatives used their power to rig the system in their favor. This would be the very definition of a faction seizing control of the state at the expense of the public, quite the opposite of the moderation Madison hoped for.
Madison is aware of the danger to self-government from within; he acknowledges the possibility of a “cabal” or conspiracy amongst representatives, and warns that “Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.” Madison’s solution is largeness, which I argued above is inadequate. Another difficulty stands out: no matter the size of the republic, human nature remains consistently untrustworthy, but Madison seems oddly trusting of men who have passed the test of campaigning in a large republic. Madison earlier showed admirable wariness towards mankind by explaining the necessary connection that “subsists between [man’s] reason and his self-love,” such that “his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves”–in other words, our rationality is biased by our interests. But Madison assumes this psychology does not apply to a select group of enlightened men who will be recognized and elected by the rest of the population, and who will thus disinterestedly moderate the passions of the people. This is a surprising lapse from the same author who wrote that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” and seemed to have such a keen and realistic understanding of human nature. In fact, elected representatives can be counted on to follow their self-interest (re-election) even at the expense of the common interest–which is neither more nor less than what Madison expected of other citizens. Madison hoped for moderation, meritocracy, accountability, and enlightenment from his scheme of representation. Examined more carefully, it seems that representation incentivizes manipulation and sophistry in pursuit of perpetual incumbency. If the essence of self-government is a culture of public responsibility, representation appears to be surprisingly unhelpful.
But at this point we have to recognize the oddity of questioning the basic premises of the most successful form of government in history. If my criticism of Madison is valid, how does it account for apparent success of democracy in America for a century and a half? A political theory can hardly aspire to accomplish more than becoming the basis for a state’s claim to legitimacy that is widely accepted by a people for several generations of peace and stability, but that is what electoral representation has done in the United States since the Civil War. Is representation flawed only in theory, but not in practice?
Several historical developments have conjoined over the last century to make the weaknesses of representation gradually more apparent, eventually generating the contemporary crisis of confidence in the United States today. The voting population of the United States has grown exponentially since 1789 because of normal population growth plus the expansion of the franchise–but the number of representatives stopped growing in 1929, when Congress capped its membership at 435. The dramatic decrease in the ratio of representatives to voters–now at an all time low, and dropping–has fundamentally altered the relationship between the two, and thus between citizens and their government, rendering it less personal, more distant. The breakdown of party machines and rise of technologies of mass communication have increased the role of individual politicians during the same era in which they have grown more inaccessible. Finally, the dramatic increase in the size and scope of government, particularly since the early 20th century, has made government a more present reality in citizens’ daily lives. As a result, citizens encounter the rules, taxes, and bureaucratic coercion of the state in ever-increasing measure at the same time that they have by and large lost all personal ties to their representatives. (Note as well that during the same time period the western frontier closed and the unsettled areas filled up, shutting off what perhaps was a choice option for those seeking escape from government or a chance to live the libertarian dream.)
Sociologists have noted a general decline in trust in most social institutions in recent decades, but Americans’ distrust of government seems to have gone the furthest. My argument may explain why Americans have grown especially disillusioned with their Congress over the past generation or two. Some increasingly feel that their government is run by an unrepresentative, unaccountable, permanent governing faction–elites from both parties who rotate between Congress, K. Street, and Wall Street. It may also explain why so many Americans view with alarm the growth in the size and power of the federal government. Predisposed to put the worst interpretation on their government’s actions, some view the growth of government as the natural act of a self-interested faction in power: using their position to secure more power.
Earlier I suggested that a cabal amongst elites may be easier in the contemporary age because of technology and globalization. How might such a “conspiracy” play out? Rapid travel has enabled representatives, paradoxically, to spend more time in Washington, D.C. and thus to form a distinct subculture of political elites. Such a subculture would, over time, gradually evolve its own values, norms, and expectations tied to its own interests, separate from those of the people they are supposed to represent. Eventually, it becomes normal and accepted practice among political elites to use their positions for their own interests–re-election–rather than their constituents’. What might a cabal look like, if not incumbents on both sides of the isle allowing each other to gerrymander their districts to ensure perpetual re-election and to fill the ever-increasing government’s budget with earmarks to guarantee an ever-expanding stash of patronage with which to reward their supporters? “Conspiracy” is too strong a word–it implies a secret, premeditated, coordinated plan where there is, in actuality, simple inertia and the playing out of institutional incentives–but the effect may be the same. Such political maneuvers are perfectly legal–the representatives write the law, after all–but run directly counter to the spirit of self-government and would, one suspects, have horrified Madison.
How Tocqueville Anticipated Our Culture Of Dependency
Our concern over the size of government goes deeper than tax policy or the federal budget deficit. . Size flows from the problems with representation: representatives have an incentive to grow government because it enlarges the realm of their own power and gives them more resources from which to reward supporters. Ironically, Madison explicitly lobbied for largeness of population and landmass because he believed that largeness would protect America against the dangers of democracy. With hindsight, we can see America’s largeness would call forth a large and powerful government to govern it.
Additionally, because of the disconnect between citizens and their government, it is easier to see that bigness is itself a more basic threat to self-government than any specific policy or tool. The growth of government is a danger to self-government not because the state is on the verge of abrogating the constitution and installing a socialist junta, but because the raw size of the government crowds out private initiative and supplants opportunities for individual participation–and once individuals stop taking initiative, they will actually need a larger government to shore up an increasingly brittle civil society. Alexis de Tocqueville described this reciprocal cause-and-effect with remarkable and prophetic insight. “The more government takes the place of associations, the more will individuals lose the idea of forming associations and need the government to come to their help. That is a vicious circle of cause and effect.” Tocqueville believed the growth of government, even if for benign purposes, was threatening to liberty because it subtly undermined the cultural underpinnings of a healthy democracy. “The morals and intelligence of a democratic people would be in as much danger as its commerce and industry if ever a government wholly usurped the place of private associations.” Taking over retirement insurance, health care, the banking system or the auto industry isn’t just bad economics: it teaches people an unhealthy dependence on the public doll, which may then force the government to continue running private industry as people forget the skill of doing it themselves.
But government cannot recreate by fiat the culture of democracy that its own programs undermine. “A government, by itself, is equally incapable of refreshing the circulation of feelings and ideas among a great people, as it is of controlling every industrial undertaking.” The effort itself takes government beyond its rightful sphere. “Once it leaves the sphere of politics to launch out on this new track, it will, even without intending this, exercise an intolerable tyranny. For a government can only dictate precise rules. It imposes the sentiments and ideas which it favors, and it is never easy to tell the difference between its advice and its commands.” Once the government arrogates to itself the responsibility to nudge citizens into good behavior and foster good habits, it is acting less like a democratic government and more like a church—a church with armed police, tax collectors, and an army.
This is, Tocqueville believed, a new kind of oppression, different from the cruel tyrants of the ancient world. Despotism in America “would be more widespread and milder; it would degrade men rather than torment them.” American tyranny will not rob and kill people. It would be “absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle.” It appears benign, but has the subtly dangerous effect of engendering a culture of dependency. “It would resemble parental authority if, father-like, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tried to keep them in perpetual childhood.” It grows so large and powerful that it does not just push out the private sector; it pushes out individual agency. “It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances. Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living? Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties.” It does not kill men, but it does kill their spirits.
The all-powerful nanny state does not stop at engendering a culture of dependency among individuals. It seeks complete control over society through “administrative despotism.” Tocqueville feared the potential of the regulatory state to smother innovation and energy. “It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s wills, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.” Big government undermines public-mindedness. “Administrative centralization only serves to enervate the peoples that submit to it, because it constantly tends to diminish their civic spirit,” as Tocqueville put it.
The struggle for lasting change
The American government’s size and apparent unaccountability are therefore rooted not in the budget or the makeup of its elected officials, but in its very structure and in the theory underpinning it: the budget and gerrymandered elections are the results, not causes, of what ails American democracy. That being the case, much of the conservative agenda is beside the point. Conservatives policymakers have understandably focused on taxes and the budget because they are the most visible and concrete areas in which the growth and unresponsiveness of the government is apparent, but those battles are inherently shallow and ephemeral. Victories can be undone in the next budget cycle or by the next Congress.
The solution is not simply to cut taxes and spending, shrink the state, and repeal Obamacare. Nor is the answer simply to ban abortion and gay marriage. Legislating healthy cultural practices, like Prohibition, treats the symptoms, not the causes, of social breakdown. More importantly, laws like Prohibition have a tendency to not work and, in the course of failing, discredit their advocates. “Laws are always unsteady when unsupported by mores,”—that is, habits and beliefs—“mores are the only tough and durable power in a nation.” Passing a law that the people don’t believe in and are not habituated to obey—like Prohibition amongst hard-drinking Americans, or a ban on abortion is our sexually promiscuous culture—is unlikely to work. Using government to enforce good culture is like a parent moving into his kid’s college dorm room to ensure he doesn’t drink or have unsafe sex. If you haven’t inculcated good habits in your kid before they move away, you’ve already failed; trying to catch up by moving to college with them is not good parenting; it is overbearing and kind of creepy.
The effort to renew self-government is too broad and deep for any of these policy proposals to have much of a lasting impact. The effort is fundamentally a cultural and spiritual one. “Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another.” Alexis de Tocqueville believed that the way to sustain and renew democratic civilization, was to encourage face-to-face human relationships. It is trite and clichéd but true: the first step in saving democracy in America is to go to school, get and stay married, spend time with your children, and go to church. Investing in relationships with the people immediately around you—in your family, at work, in church, in your neighborhood—is the single most important thing you can do because those relationships will renew your ideas, develop your understanding, and enlarge your heart. Relationships make you smarter, wiser, and more loving.
And forming relationships is a political act. Relationships are the strong bulwark against the encroaching state. Relationships take place outside the government’s writ, create a society beyond the government’s reach, and foster ideas and activities government cannot direct. And this is especially true when we go beyond our immediate household and neighborhood. Tocqueville wanted to see men and women engaged continuously in relationships with other citizens, perfect strangers, to discuss and decide upon common problems.
Tocqueville called this the skill of association. For Tocqueville, association was the act of gathering with other citizens—not just family members, friends, and neighbors, but also perfect strangers—for a public purpose. Association is nothing less than the practice of self-government at ground level. Tocqueville believed self-government didn’t simply mean voting (he hardly mentions elections at all in his entire work). Self-government means actually participating in the decision-making process. A true democratic republic puts the power of government into the hands of the people. City council meetings, town halls, the school board, your neighborhood watch are the most real institutions of democracy with which citizens will actually come into contact. Participating in them is more important than voting in elections for the U.S. Congress. “The most powerful way…in which to interest men in their country’s fate is to make them take a share in its government,” Tocqueville argued, “The civic spirit is inseparable from the exercise of political rights.”[iv] The face-to-face relationships we need to form are with our fellow citizens, even our political opponents. “If men are to remain civilized or become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.”
The challenge of opportunity
Here is where political advocacy can make a difference. Government can either allow or usurp people’s opportunities to engage with other citizens on public matters. A highly centralized government gives me no incentive to talk to my neighbor about our common problems or to form an association to solve them. A highly decentralized one depends on my associating with others. The more opportunities to participate, the better. “[The Founders] thought it right to give to each part of the land its own political life so that there should be an infinite number of occasions for the citizens to act together and so that every day they should feel that they depended on one another,” Tocqueville wrote, “Local liberties, then, which induce a great number of citizens to value the affection of their kindred and neighbors, bring men constantly into contact, despite the instincts which separate them, and force them to help one another.”
If this description of our present situation is accurate, the most important initiative for restoring American democracy is the repeal the 17th Amendment. The 17th Amendment to the Constitution establishes the direct election of Senators by the people of each state, cutting out the state legislatures. The Founders intended the various branches of government to check and balance one another. But it is almost entirely forgotten that the Founders intended the checks and balances also to operate between the levels of government. Hamilton and Madison wrote in Federalist 51, “In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments [Federal and state], and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments [branches]. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.”
In Federalist 28, they wrote, “Power being almost always the rival of power, the General Government will at all times stand ready to check the usurpations of the state governments; and those will have the same disposition towards the General Government. The people, by throwing themselves into either scale, will infallibly make it preponderate. If their rights are invaded by either, they can make use of the other, as the instrument of redress…It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the state governments will in all possible contingencies afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.” The states were supposed to help control Washington, D.C.
The states were given a powerful tool with which to exercise this power: the United States Senate. According to the original Article I, Section 3, of the U.S. Constitution, state legislatures were to elect Senators to represent the state’s interests in Washington. For a century they did so, and states remained the preeminent polities in America. Even after the Civil War and the great centralization effected by the 14th Amendment, states remained considerably more powerful than they are today.
That ended in 1913. Well-meaning Progressives believed the Senate was an undemocratic institution (an accurate description the Founders would have taken as a compliment), and successfully fought to overthrow it. The states lost their check on the federal government. This is no arcane bit of procedural minutiae. The Founders set up the checks because they knew “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Federal officeholders and bureaucrats in Washington are ambitious. They have legitimate powers and responsibilities. But unless someone else’s ambition is made to counter their own, they will go beyond their legitimate powers. This is as certain as a law of nature.
History bears out the verdict. The history of federal policy since 1913 includes the New Deal, the Great Society, the departments of labor, education, health and human services, housing and urban development, energy, transportation, and homeland security, the FDA, SEC, EPA, FCC, NEA, NEH, NIH, TVA, AID, DEA, ATF, NASA, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Amtrak, Fannie Mae, Sallie Mae, Freddie Mac, and scores of other agencies, boards, commissions, and corporations. Some are good programs, some are not. The point is that their existence as federal programs dates after the 17th Amendment. Virtually everything the federal government does today, outside of taxation, trade, and national defense, started after 1913. The federal budget in 1913 was roughly around $20 billion in today’s dollars. It has grown 20,000 percent since then.
The 17th Amendment not only handed the federal government unprecedented power to centralize lawmaking and administration in the United States. As a consequence, it also deprived citizens of the opportunity to engage meaningfully in self-government. Self-government is not voting: it is participation. Three hundred million citizens cannot meaningfully participate in a deliberation about anything. Meaningful democracy is impossible at the federal level. Biennial voting is not democracy. “It does little good to summon those very citizens who have been made so dependent on the central power to choose the representatives of that power from time to time. However important, this brief and occasional exercise of free will will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculty of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves,” wrote Tocqueville. The more centralized the decision-making, the less citizens are involved, the less informed they will be. The right to vote is important and we should not disparage it. But under a centralized government the simple act of casting a vote between two, and only two, parties means very little.
Participatory democracy is not a romantic ideal or a utopian vision. The goal is not the direct democracy of ancient Athens (which horrified the Founders). The goal is something closer to deliberative representative democracy instead of sound-bite mass media democracy. The goal is to lower the ratio of citizens to representatives. That increases the likelihood that citizens will actually know who is making decisions that affect their lives, call their representative, attend a town hall, vote in elections, give money to a candidate, talk to their neighbors about public problems, and even run for office. (It may also diffuse the impact of money in politics. The hundreds of millions of dollars of political money that is generated every two or four years is currently highly targeted on influencing campaigns for 536 federal elective offices. As power shifts to state legislatures, some of that money would follow and be spread over the 7,382 state legislative seats in the United States).
The solution is not to increase the number of representatives in Congress. In 1788 there were 30,000 citizens for each member of the U.S. House of Representatives. A similar ratio today would require a Congress of some 10,000 members. Because that is obviously impractical, Congress capped its membership in 1929 and the ratio has simply climbed higher and higher. Today it is close to 700,000 citizens per representative. But there are, on average, about 40,000 citizens for every state legislator in America. It is impractical to maintain a meaningful ratio for the federal government, but it is practical to move policy to the states where something closer to the original ideal of representative democracy can be revived.
“Local liberties” are the answer. The solution is to devolve power away from the federal government, diffuse it among states, individuals, civil society, and the market, but also to strengthen its exercise through our participation. This should be the unifying theme of American conservatism. It reflects an agenda based on the bare essentials, the common philosophical convictions of different strands of political thought: diffusing power among individuals (libertarian), civil society (social conservatives), and the market (entrepreneurs). Decentralized government disperses power among fifty states, six territories, three thousand counties, ten thousand cities, millions of associations, and one-third of a billion citizens. It compels citizens to stand up, take part in self-government, associate with one another, and form real human relationships. The solution is not to cut government, but relocate it. The solution is not to shrink government, but rebalance it from Washington to the states and localities. The solution is not to attack government as the enemy, but take it over as our right.
Repealing the 17th Amendment will restore a fundamental check on the federal government. Senators representing states’ interests will be far more conscious of the 10th Amendment—“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” They will be far more resistant to the federal government’s tendency to pass laws and create programs but delegate implementation to the states. They will never pass another unfunded mandate. States will start to assert their authority to pass the laws that they are in charge of enforcing and funding. These are good goals and worthy to be at the heart of a new conservatism. But even most states are too big to afford much of an opportunity for meaningful participatory and representative democracy. Repealing the 17th Amendment will begin to move power away from Washington and back to the states, but it is only the beginning of the revival of American democracy.
