When democracy threatens politics

Might democracy threaten ordinary politics? The American founders were not democrats in the contemporary sense of that term but were building a republican constitution with limited democratic elements, embodied especially in Congress’ lower chamber, the House of Representatives. Nearly a century later, Canada’s Fathers of Confederation established a constitution “similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom” (Constitution Act, 1867). Here too the new dominion was to be a careful balance of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements, although the term republic was not used for obvious reasons.

Beginning in the 20^th century, however, both systems came to be described as democracies without qualification. In Canada, the powers of the nondemocratic institutions, especially the governor general (representing the monarch) and the Senate (appointed by the governor general on the prime minister’s advice), effectively atrophied, with the prime minister gaining more power—all in the name of democracy.

In the United States, the Progressive Movement succeeded in democratizing Senate elections (1913) and gradually empowered the president at the expense of Congress, a trend exacerbated by the back-to-back crises of two world wars and a great depression. In the first months of his second term, Donald Trump has issued 162 executive orders, equalling Joseph Biden’s 162 during his four years in office. But Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke all records and issued 3,725 during his twelve years in office.

Some might deem it paradoxical that, as acceptance of democracy has increased, executive power has increased along with it. But the paradox is only apparent. The constitutional architects of the past were generally well read in the classics of political theory. The American founders paid special attention to Cicero, as he lived during the transition from the Roman Republic to the Empire. As such, they sought to set up political institutions that would disperse power and enable political opponents to settle their differences peacefully. This required, among other things, a willingness to compromise within the context of deeply rooted traditions of civility, as Walter Lippmann called them.

However, as the appeal of mass democracy increased, along with efforts to democratize more thoroughly the system as a whole, the unintended long-term consequence was to increase executive power at the expense of other political officeholders. The people taken as a whole proved incapable of limiting the power of a chief executive, now willing to use his electoral mandate as a cudgel against the very institutions set up to constrain him. Mass democracy, or what I’ve labelled democratism in my Political Visions and Illusions, is based on the mistaken notion that public opinion is unitary, requiring only a single leader to express it and give it force. Moreover, democratism, admittedly a neologism, is based on a religious faith in the ultimate goodness of the people, however that nebulous entity be defined.

In the real world, public opinion is anything but unified. It is an amalgam of diverse interests better represented in a deliberative body authorized to make policy for the general welfare. The resulting policy may not elicit unmitigated enthusiasm from everyone or even anyone. But such a body is better equipped to serve the public than a single actor locked into his or her own vantage point and unwilling to share the stage with others.

The late British political scientist Sir Bernard Crick observed that politics is less a means for implementing specific—and contestable—visions of society and more a way of conciliating peacefully the ordinary diversity found in the typical polity. Any effort to do an end run around the hard work of building favourable coalitions in a legislative body is in effect a repudiation of politics and an embrace of something intrinsically non- or even anti-political. Crick recognized that democracy itself, if unconstrained by other elements, poses a threat to politics in this sense. Recovering politics requires a strengthening of those institutions most representative of the true diversity of our polities, even against an executive claiming uniquely to embody the popular will.

This has relevance for both the United States and Canada, where executive power has to a great extent attenuated the other political institutions established to constrain it. In the US the personality cult surrounding Donald Trump has overtaken the Republican Party, which has rendered the latter incapable of defending the country’s political institutions against the threat he has posed to them, particularly during his second term. In Canada, we have recently elected an untried political leader, who, even if he lacks the charisma of a Pierre Trudeau, has inherited a system in which prime ministerial power has been inadvertently enhanced by misguided efforts at further democratization. In both countries there is a pressing need to rein in executive power and to recover the balance of powers that our respective founders saw fit to create as a means to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty” and to facilitate “peace, order, and good government.”