Democracy, what is it good for?
American politicians and their love-hate relationship with democracy
Americans love democracy, right? In many ways it is our democracy that defines us as a nation, born as we were out of a revolution over “taxation without representation”. I mean, we export this stuff to other countries for heaven’s sake.
And yet with his domestic agenda stalled and his super-majority in the Senate eliminated by the voters of Massachusetts, President Obama has turned to arguably less democratic tools to push his policy proposals. And liberals as a whole, The Weekly Standard claims, “have assigned responsibility for the mess they’re in…to larger, structural faults in American politics and society. Beginning with you.”
The turn against democracy should come as no surprise. Every President faces falling approval ratings. Every Congress sees its electoral stars fading. And almost every time, the instinctive response is to scorn public opinion and “stand on principle.” In some peculiar way, we even encourage our politicians to ignore us. A January Allstate/National Journal poll found that 83% of Americans would trust politicians more if they made a “stronger effort to stand up for principle.”
As much as we claim to believe in it, as much as we claim it defines us, we are quick to turn against democracy when it gets in the way. If Republicans truly loved democracy, they would have lauded the Obama campaign as a triumph for citizen engagement in the democratic process. If Democrats believed in democracy like they claim to, they would applaud the Tea Partiers for rallying and organizing and participating in local politics.
But while democracy is certainly important to us, for most, it is but one among many values. And while democracy is not inherently incompatible with most other values we hold, democracy as a process only sometimes produces them, and rarely in full. The debate, I believe, is not as simple as the “morality as process” vs. “morality as outcome” debate I’ve detailed before. For most of us, I suspect, morality is a balance between the two. We may want the President or our representatives to buck public opinion and pass health care reform, but we would never support canceling elections in order to realize this goal. Maybe our belief in democracy is limited to majority rule voting. We want the chance to keep our politicians in check by voting on them every few years. But we have no interest or belief in a more robust conception: a democracy in which an informed polity engages in a continuous debate of ideas. Or maybe we do, but we also believe in other things. Democracy, at times, simply conflicts with our belief in limited government or in public education.
How do you choose between two things you believe in when you can’t have both? You decide which is more valuable at the time. For many politicians, it seems, democracy will have to wait.
-Marc
Photo by Flickr user aprilzosia used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
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