Elites and “Our Democracy”

Dec 14

In recent years, we’ve heard a lot of talk about assaults on “our democracy” and about protecting “our democracy,” usually from people we might call “elites” in government and the news media. In one sense, they should know better, as James Madison insisted that the United States was to be a republic, not a democracy. In Federalist #10, he said that one of “the great points of difference between a Democracy and a Republic” is ”the delegation of the Government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest,” that is, the principle of representation.

I want to focus our attention on that “small number of citizens” that Madison regarded as crucial to our form of government. His opponents at the time, the Anti-Federalists, worried that the small number would consist almost exclusively of “men of the most elevated rank in life,” as the minority in the Pennsylvania ratifying convention put it. Writing to John Adams in 1813, Thomas Jefferson asserts that “that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government,” and insists that we should “leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general, they will elect the real good and wise.” There we have one way of stating the issue: do we citizens of a democratic republic elect a small number of natural aristoi, or pseudo-aristoi, to govern our country? What kind of elites do we or should we have?

A good point of departure for considering this question is to contrast two great 19th-century political thinkers, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, who were contemporaries and sometime friends. While there are multiple dimensions on which this contrast could be drawn, for the sake of brevity, I’ll focus on their views of local government.

Tocqueville is justly famous for his celebration of the New England township:

It is…in the township that the force of free peoples resides.  The institutions of a township are to freedom what primary schools are to science; they put it within reach of the people; they make them taste its peaceful employ and habituate them to making use of it.  Without the institutions of a township a nation can give itself free government, but it does not have the spirit of freedom (Democracy in America,I.1.5, 57 – 58).

The township, Tocqueville says, combines independence and power (I.1.5, 63), which is what makes it interesting and engaging for those who live in it. Township citizens understand that they have the authority and wherewithal to address problems and issues that are within the compass of their experience and imagination. It is there that they begin an engagement with public life that can carry and be extended to more distant and perhaps more profound concerns. Thus, Tocqueville says that “by charging citizens with the administration of small affairs, much more than by leaving the government of great ones to them, one interests them in the public good and makes them see the need they constantly have for one another in order to produce it” (II.2.4, 487). To be sure, he concedes that the result of this local civic engagement will not satisfy those who are fastidious about excellence in government and administration (see I.1.5, 90); a government controlled by certified experts would produce a more polished and regular result. But human freedom, i.e., human initiative, indeed in some respects humanity itself, would be lost or threatened thereby.

In his review of the first volume of Democracy in America, Mill seems largely to agree with Tocqueville:

It is a fundamental principle in his political philosophy, as it has long been in ours, that only by the habit of superintending their local interests can that diffusion of intelligence and mental activity, as applied to their joint concerns, take place among the mass of a people, which can qualify them to superintend with steadiness or consistency the proceedings of their government, or to exercise any power in national affairs, except by fits, or as tools in the hands of others (XVIII, 60).

I do wish, however, to call attention to the twice-repeated word “superintend,” whose significance comes to the fore a little later in Mill’s review, where he distinguishes what exists in America from what’s possible in England. It would be “useless,” Mill says, “calling upon the people themselves to bestow habitually any larger share of attention on municipal management than is implied in the periodical election of a representative body” (XVIII, 63). And even this is too much to ask of people in the rural districts who “are so much more backward.” Mill’s local government is not the direct engagement of the New England township, but the election of a representative body to do what the New Englanders do for themselves. What’s more, Mill’s conception of representation implies a distinction between the representatives and those they represent. He distinguishes representation from delegation in a way that resembles the differences between the Federalist and Anti-Federalist conceptions of representation. Delegates closely resemble the people who elected them and can thereby be trusted to do their bidding when assembled. Representatives deliberate regarding the public good and can be presumed to be better informed and more intellectually sophisticated than their constituents. In addition to its responsive and responsible dimensions, the representative’s role is also tutelary. Because they may not be capable of recognizing it for themselves and on their own, the people have to be led to what’s good for them. Here’s how Mill puts it:

Provided good intentions can be secured, the best government…must be the government of the wisest, and these must always be a few.  The people ought to be their masters, but they are masters who must employ servants more skillful than themselves… (XVIII, 72).

Where Tocqueville is willing to accept variation, unevenness, and even ineptitude for the sake of maintaining human freedom, Mill seems more concerned with what we might call professional excellence or technical proficiency. This doesn’t mean that he’s willing to countenance the manipulation of people by their intellectual betters, but he seems willing to sacrifice initiative and freedom for the sake of better legislative and policy outcomes.

In a sense, Mill is more of a “meritocrat” than a democrat. In the last sentence of a very important essay on “Civilization” (XVIII, 147), he says that “[t]he main thing which social changes can do for the improvement of the higher classes [my emphasis]…is gradually to put an end to every kind of unearned distinction, and let the only road open to honour and ascendancy be that of personal qualities.” He hopes that an aristocracy of unearned distinction will be replaced by what we now call a meritocracy, whose members will lead and elevate the tone of a commercial civilization, characterized above all by technical proficiency, specialization, and the pursuit of wealth (for most people). In our terms, those pursuing the American Dream will be superintended by this meritocratic elite. They will comprise, as is stated in an essay Mill cites favorably at the end of his review of Volume II of Democracy in America, the administration, whose purpose is “to introduce more and more into the mass of the public elements of order and forethought” (XVIII, 201). This elite is a product of a rigorous education which systematically excludes or marginalizes the kind of religious thinking and sensibility that was in the 19th century (and still to some degree is) characteristic of what Mill calls “the public.”

The question is how the gap between this highly educated elite and the public will be bridged and managed. Tocqueville’s fear is that without a compelling alternative (which elite intellectualism is not), ordinary people will sink into a kind of materialism, which paves the way for what he calls at the end of Democracy, the kind of despotism democracies have to fear. Unlike Mill, he would not promote a technocratic rationalism and either disparage or marginalize the religious elements of ordinary life. In Tocqueville’s view, our longing for the infinite and our dissatisfaction with the finite limits of this world are deep-seated and genuine.

So there you have it: a contrast between a Tocquevillian elite that shares with everyone a common human longing and that recognizes that bolstering our common humanity is a messy irregular business, and a Millian elite that looks forward to the governance of technocratic experts, who are certainly willing to coopt others into their ranks, but have no patience for the irregular desires and infinite longings of often “deplorable” (as was once said) ordinary people. Everyone will be “improved” to the extent of their capacity, at the expense, Tocqueville might fear, of their genuine humanity.

I have drawn a very stark contrast here, perhaps even overdrawn it a bit for the sake of clarity. And I have treated a very homely and ordinary topic—local government. But that point of departure leads us to think about whether we look up with ordinary people at a humane and humanizing prospect or down on them as subjects and clients to be managed for their own good. “Our democracy” is indeed at stake.