The Dogma

John Médaille

The Dogma of Democracy

Modern democracy has come to mean, in preference to all other possible forms, electoral democracy, where the officers of the state are chosen in periodic plebiscites determined by secret ballot. This has long since been the dominant form, and has become, in common usage, the only meaning of democracy. In the last 100 years we have fought numerous wars to make the world “safe” for this form; it is as if we believed that the right level of shock and awe would turn the citizens of Baghdad into good Republicans and Democrats, or convert Afghanistan into a suburb of Seattle.

Since this democracy is something we are willing to both kill and die for, it assumes the status of a religion, albeit a secular one. Like all religions, electoral democracy has its central sacrament, its central liturgy, and its central dogma; its sacrament is the secret ballot, its liturgy is the election campaign, and its dogma is that the election will represent the will of the people.

But is this dogma true in any sense? Is the “will of the people” really captured by 51% of the voters? Clearly, not everyone votes, so the will of the voters may not at all be the will of the people. One might respond that it is the will of the people who cared enough to vote. However, that ignores the fact that there are people (like myself) who care enough not to vote; people who find no party acceptable, or worse, find that both parties are really the same party with cosmetic differences for the entertainment and manipulation of the public.

I suspect that if there were a real choice on the ballot, such as a box marked “none of the above,” turnout would be higher, and this last choice the consistent winner. But in any case, it is not true that the will of a bare majority of the voters can easily be equated with the “will of the people.”

Further, we can ask if a bare majority is actually a sufficient margin for any really important decision, one that commits everyone to endorse serious and abiding actions. For example, should 51% be allowed to drag the rest into war? Or into the continuing war against children that is abortion? Certainly, there are issues that can rightly be decided by bare majorities, but the important issues cannot fall in that category.

There is yet another problem with the dogma of representation, because there are clearly two groups which elections cannot canvass: the dead, and the yet unborn, the past and the future. In an electoral democracy, the interests of the living predominate. Now, as to the first group, some say that we should not be bound by the dead past, and that our first freedom is freedom from our parents. There is, of course, a grain of truth in this; death is there for a reason. Nevertheless, life is bigger than the present moment, and no generation, no matter how scientific, can grasp the totality of life, can completely discern the correct way of living in the world.

The world as it is at any given moment is the result of decisions and actions that make up its past. The traditions we receive are the sum total of the distilled wisdom of the past about how to live in the world and with each other. It is, of course, an incomplete knowledge, and our task is to add to it, and to pass it on. Tradition therefore comes from the past but is oriented to the future. But democracies tend to erode traditions by pandering to current desires. G. K. Chesterton has labeled tradition “the democracy of the dead,” and a real democracy will accommodate these absent constituents.

In abandoning the past, democracy also abandons the future. We pile the children with debts they cannot pay, wars they cannot win, obligations they cannot meet; we allow the infrastructure to deteriorate and so weaken even their ability to earn a living. We vote ourselves large pensions at an early age, confident that we can live on the taxes paid by the children, even as we restrict the number of children we have, placing an even bigger burden on the ones that remain.

But in abandoning both the past and the future, democracy abandons even the ability to represent the present, because without the guidance of the past and the concern for the future, even the present moment loses its reality. The present moment is always ephemeral, because as soon as one grasps it, it is already history. Without tradition and an orientation to the future, the present moment becomes a kind of cultural Alzheimer’s, with no memory and no direction.

Uma Monarquia para Portugal

A Real Catholic Monarchy, by John Médaille

Concerning the king, he needs to have real authority, an authority that extends to the executive, legislative, and judicial functions. Of course, he should not be the only authority in these areas, nor even necessarily the ordinary authority; but he should, in some sense, be the ultimate authority. The king’s government also needs to have its own revenue stream, one fixed in the constitution and independent of any legislative body. A king who has to beg his bread from the legislature is no king, and whoever holds the power of the purse will soon hold all other powers. The legislature may by its own will supplement the constitutional revenues, perhaps to pay for a war or some other extraordinary expense, and they may control the funds they levy. But for the budgeting of the constitutional revenue, the king should be primary, or even the sole, authority. Other authorities may comment, they may even censure a king, such as when a king neglects the defense of the realm to build himself palaces. But in the practical world, control of the budget is control of everything else. The king should also hold an absolute veto over both the legislature and the judicial functions. And finally, there needs to be a difficult but peaceful means of removing a king; without this, kings themselves become the cause of revolutions.

The more difficult question actually concerns the aristocracy. Both Aristotle and Aquinas thought of aristocracy in terms of virtue and accomplishment rather than in terms of birth and wealth. The latter they considered to be a mere oligarchy. However, men often confuse wealth with worth, and this is especially true of the men with an excess of wealth and an absence of worth. In my opinion, even in cases where there is a requirement of wealth or birth, there should still be a selection process to choose the best of the wealthy or well-born. But whatever the process, the function of the aristocracy is virtue. I interpret this to mean that they should be a source of impartial commentary and judgment on political affairs. In the next installment, I will deal in greater detail with some solutions to the aristocratic problem.

Finally, there is the democratic problem. Democracy works best at the local level, and a national democracy is almost a contradiction in itself, since the staggering costs of national campaigns enforce an oligarchic control. Nor can this problem be solved by some sort of campaign finance reform or even public funding of elections, unless we are willing to forbid all political speech, save that funded by the public purse. But that would be a form of tyranny in itself. The best way to reduce the cost of elections is to make the districts small, which will keep the cost of campaigning cheap, and hence less susceptible to oligarchic control. Small districts imply large legislatures, and this has the advantage of making them slow and unwieldy, able to agree on laws only when they are most necessary. But if one wants a small and more agile legislature, then perhaps it would be wise to chose it by indirect elections, with electors chosen at the neighborhood level, who then meet in an assembly to choose the actual legislators. In any case, deliberative forms of democracy, such as the caucus or the town meeting, should be favored over electoral forms, such as secret ballot. But whatever the size and composition of the legislature, it should have clearly defined and limited powers.