The
stunning Brexit vote showed all too clearly a chasm between elite and mass
opinion, something that has always fascinated me, at least when it comes to
democracies. How do such splits happen
in political systems that have regular and fair elections? Or better, when they happen, why are they not
corrected over time by the election of new elites? In my armchair estimation, Britain is more vulnerable
to such splits than most because its elite is so homogeneous. But then again, America seems to be suffering
from its own version of this split.
Surely
the version of such a split most dangerous to a political and constitutional
order is when elites in both parties (in a two party democracy) are alienated
from mass opinion. Who favored NAFTA? The presidential wing of the Democratic party
and both wings of the Republican. Who
favored looser rather than stricter controls on immigration? Elites in both parties. And who was responsible for bailing out the
banks after the fall 2008 financial crisis?
All elites, although the congressional wing of both parties ran for
cover in 2009. I do not mean to suggest
that any of these policy measures were wrong.
But when elites avoid the responsibility of justifying their policies,
this can create a political crisis. The
almost unbelievable failure of political elites to justify the bailout measures
produced the toxic environment in which the Tea Party flourished. In many ways, the aftermath of the financial
crisis is still with us. When both parties fail (and do not admit it!),
American democracy does not have an easy way forward.
To
continue these somewhat fragmentary thoughts, these splits do not necessarily
pose a danger if the resulting policies deliver strong economic growth that is
reasonably well distributed. That hasn’t
been happening lately. But I think
shorter-term causes are more responsible for our present difficulties. Elites have to avoid making major mistakes,
what I term “policy disasters” in my book Broken
Trust (look to the right!). Policy
disasters bring the competence of the entire government into question and so
have the potential to reduce trust in government. And without trust the masses can, well, not
revolt but decide to take a hike off the beaten track.
In
the UK (and western states like California), the mass public has an outlet for
their frustrations, especially with legislative elites – the mechanisms of
direct democracy such as the referendum and the initiative. But the US has no such outlet on the national
scale – maybe lucky for us, right? Or
maybe not. Because the frustration with
elites so evident in the Brexit vote are right there in the US for all to see –
just not in the context of a one-off referendum. Instead, an entire political party is now
hostage to a populist demagogue who horrifies its nationally-minded leadership.
As a
lawyer, I was trained to value the Madisonian representative democracy we have
at the national level which deliberately denies the mass public a direct voice
in policy. As an academic who tries to
train a skeptical eye on what lawyers think they know, I have my doubts about
the elitist assumptions of Madisonian democracy. What I have called the “populist” (I do not
mean late nineteenth century populism) strain in American politics after the
early republic runs against the premises of Madisonian democracy. It is more participatory and anti-elitist,
especially anti-expert. The organization
of state governments and their constitutions displays a corresponding
alteration of the framers’ handiwork.
If
you are skeptical in turn of the populist strain, as many lawyers are, current
events are a major warning that the Madisonian system is not self-correcting as
advertised. It requires maintenance and
our active engagement. We must use our
own judgment based on the entirety of American history, our own “reflection and
choice” in Hamilton’s phrase, to guide our nation (and the world!) into safer
waters. Whether it succeeds or fails, Trump’s
candidacy should not lead to a simple reaffirmation of the Constitution but a
renewed dedication, similar to that in the progressive era, to the fundamental
political and constitutional reform of our basic institutions. And many different analyses (Howell and Moe’s
Relic is the most recent and useful)
point to the organization and performance of Congress as the chief culprit. Congressional reform should be a chief focus
of Hillary Clinton’s campaign – a way to demonstrate to the public that she
gets it and that business will not be usual in Washington if she is elected.