By Bruce Frohnen
For decades, now, professional students of politics have claimed that they are engaged in a science—the dispassionate, unbiased analysis of political behavior intended to test various theories about human conduct and provide the means by which we might predict it. Critics, at least since Eric Voegelin’s New Science of Politics, have pointed out the underlying and largely unexamined assumptions of political science, as well as the overwhelming tendency of its adherents to make arguments and predictions that push their audiences to accept their own radical political prejudices.
Nowhere is the tendency of political scientists to promote adherence to unexamined assumptions clearer than in regard to constitutional restraints. Supposedly neutral analysts from early twentieth-century progressives to “democratic theorists” like Robert Dahl to the present day have criticized the American Constitution in particular for failing to produce political action that accords with the wishes of presumed majorities of Americans. The argument is as simple as it is deceptive: if the United States is a democracy, then its Constitution must be faulted for failing to put the will of the majority into action as quickly and effectively as possible. The fact that the Constitution is designed in many instances and in a variety of ways to “thwart” the will of the majority is proof that it is designed poorly, or with bad intent.
One might think that the rise of the populist Donald Trump—so despised by the academic Left—would temper calls to end the “deadlock of democracy.” Sadly, this rethinking has been eschewed in favor of a common ideological maneuver. In the name of democracy, all one must do to delegitimize unfavorable electoral results is to reinterpret “democracy” to mean rule in the supposedly genuine interests of various people who either do not vote or vote on the basis of arguments and interests analysts deem fraudulent. Thus, for example, poor people and/or members of various minority groups who vote for disapproved candidates are painted as having succumbed to narrow self-interest or a kind of brainwashing by nefarious elites.
None of this addresses the more fundamental question of why we should assume that our government is, or should be, democratic in the sense of absolute majority rule. The Framers of our Constitution explicitly rejected such a vision, recoiling in horror from the political excesses of ancient Greek democracy and opting instead for republican government. Republican government, of course, is rooted in the consent of the governed but designed to require discussion, deliberation, and relative consensus in the making of laws. Most academics, even of the most radical kind, are aware of this fact; it is, after all, written clearly in the structure of the Constitution and in that most fundamental guide to our Constitution, the Federalist Papers. But this has been taken to delegitimize our Constitution’s Framers, not democratic ideology. Why? Because political scientists, like all of us, are normative creatures. They see the world through lenses shaped by conceptions of justice and the human good. Unfortunately, by hiding their biases these academics leave them unexamined. As a result, these academics are blind to the consequences of their own actions and to the necessity of the mechanisms they condemn for protection of the common good.
The calculus is simple enough: democracy is good because we all are equal, and democracy weights us all equally in politics, hence valuing us in the only fair manner possible. What is lost in this formulation is recognition that, while we all share equal humanity, we do not all exercise it in the same ways. Most of us form families—but different families, with differing needs and interests. Most of us belong to churches—but different churches, with differing doctrines and standards of public conduct. And the vast majority of us belong to a variety of distinct, even conflicting, associations in which we form our characters, and which have their own goals and visions of the common good. Our attachments to these varying communities lead us to value differing public policies. Moreover, being limited in our own rationality and capacity to take others’ interests into account, we seek conflicting political goods. This is the problem of faction so brilliantly dealt with by Publius in Federalist, no. 10. It is the problem addressed by our Constitution’s requirement that proposed laws go through a complex process requiring discussion and development of super-majoritarian support among varying representatives of varying people and branches of government.
Some political scientists are willing, on the basis of this reasoning, to recognize a limited legitimacy in constitutional structures. Separation of powers and checks and balances, on this view, are designed to require the people to consider their actions before writing them into law. Constitutional mechanisms are useful as the supposed appeal from the people “drunk” to the people sober.
This concession claims too much and provides too little. It claims that “the people” are a kind of unit that can become drunk, then sober up as a unit, with constitutional machinery merely serving to provide time for a natural process to take its course. Hence, this reasoning legitimizes only highly limited and relatively brief delays in the instantiation of majority will in law. Our Constitution demands more in practical terms of itself, though less of the people. That is, our republican Constitution recognizes that people do not simply become “drunk” with power or fear on occasion. They have genuinely differing and even conflicting interests and so cannot be made to see some great overarching common good on all issues. Hence, the purpose of constitutional government is to provide a means by which political conflicts may be addressed peacefully and without producing laws or other governmental actions that are oppressive.
Our Constitution is intended to serve the common good of Americans. Given the varied nature and interests of Americans, however, the genuinely common good is quite limited. Thus the Constitution does not merely delay action, it often intentionally prevents action at the national political level. Perhaps the most important, and inaccurate, unexamined belief of most political scientists today is that all problems are at least potentially liable to national political solutions. On a practical level we see around us massive evidence this is not true, whether the problem be welfare dependency, crime, or education. As important, however, is the political fact that a national government seeking to address all problems through political action would destroy the very associations it by nature should serve. Our Constitution in particular recognizes that the federal government is derivative of and dependent on more natural and fundamental governments in the states and their localities. Thus it represents not mere individuals but members of various associations, including political associations, with their own rights and duties—and especially their own right to self-rule.
The normative reality of man’s social nature is that we live more in families and various local associations than in a national political unit. And this means that the nation-state can act legitimately only when, where, and in the manner prescribed for in a Constitution that recognizes the primacy of those more natural associations. Legitimacy, then, is not a matter of calculating the will of an abstract majority but of mediating among social beings acting within their natural groups and protecting the nation as a collection of such groups, joined by a common underlying culture and commitment to preserve traditional ways of life. To ignore these facts is to be, not scientific, but intentionally blind to the nature and intrinsic goals of politics.
“The Problem of Democratic Prejudice,”
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