For A People's Aristocracy

For a Peoples’ Aristocracy

Anthony Mansueto

The recent Supreme Court decision striking down certain campaign finance laws has brought to the fore once again the question of structural constraints on democracy in the United States. It has long been a commonplace on the Left that our election finance system is one of the principal obstacles to significant social reform. If only the candidates for office were not dependent on donations from large corporations, the reasoning goes, the people would, at the very least, be offered a much larger range of electoral options and would eventually come to understand that their interests lie not with the neoconservative or neoliberal Right, or the technocratic Center, but rather with whatever tendency on the Left is mounting the argument at the moment.

There is, to be sure, some significant truth in this argument. While the people may be free to decide from among the electoral alternatives presented to them, presenting a credible alternative takes a great deal of money, and failing some system of public finance, that money is going to come from those who have it, and who therefore benefit from the status quo. You will get no argument from me against public financing of political campaigns --or other changes in the electoral system which might increase the range of electoral alternatives.

But we deceive ourselves if we believe that greater democracy alone will automatically lead to a politics ordered to the Common Good. The current travails of the Obama administration provide ample evidence of this. While the legislative stalemate on health care and climate change is due in significant measure to the fact that legislators are beholden to, among others, insurance companies and energy producers who stand to lose from authentic reform, the larger political stalemate around these and other critical issues is due at least as much to the fact that addressing the strategic civilizational challenges we face will require change --and pain-- on the part not only of Capital but also broad layers of the working class and the middle strata. Any real attempt to address climate change will, for example, at least double energy costs. This, and not only the influence of the petroleum sector, which lost the last election decisively, is not stalling congressional action. And while diluting the political influence of the insurance companies would certainly make health care reform easier to pass, and make it possible to put more alternatives (including single payer and limited single payer options) on the table, it is above all the unions and highly paid professionals, not Capital who are standing in the way of efforts to end market-distorting tax preferences for health care which contribute to the percentage of GDP devoted to this sector.

The Leninist Left has, to be sure, long recognized that life under capitalism renders the working class itself unable to understand the Common Good. Thus the need for a conscious leadership which grasps “the conditions, line of march, and ultimate general result” of the historical process. But we have seen where the leadership of such parties has led. Far from making the working class or the people into the subjects of their own history, they have made the development of rational autonomy impossible for anyone, including the party leadership insulated from the challenge of authentic popular deliberation.

The Right, on the other hand, would have us turn to the Founders for help on this question. They certainly recognized this problems of democracy and they gave us a solution to it: the Senate, the function of which is to restrain the popular passions expressed through the House of Representatives and provide the wise leadership which real statecraft requires. But of course the Senate as currently constituted is a big part of our problem. The way the Senate is elected (two Senators per state, regardless of population) privileges backward agrarian and extractive interests. And while the Senate is certainly the locus of significant influence on the party of sectors of Capital resisting action on health care, climate change, and other critical issues, other aspects of the Senate’s intransigence, such as Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson’s insistence that his state be exempted from the costs of certain aspects of the health care reform, reflect pandering not to Capital but to the people.

It is useful, in this regard, to consider the intervention of one of the great interpreters of American Civilization on this question. I am referring to Alexis de Tocqueville. A French aristocrat who is probably best located philosophically on the center left the traditionalist movement, de Tocqueville was, in many ways profoundly critical of the social forces he saw at work in the United States. Indeed, he was at best ambivalent about democracy in the first place. On the one hand, “democracies, because they vest authority in the people as a whole, tend to promote the welfare of the greatest possible number,” while aristocracies “concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the minority.” But aristocracies are “are infinitely more expert in the science of legislation than democracies ever can be,” and specifically tend to have more long-term vision. He was, however, especially concerned about the tendency of democracy to promote individualism. Aristocracies, he though, embedded people in a community extending “from the peasant to the king.” Democracies cut people off from their past, from their neighbors, and even from their own descendants.

At the same time, Tocqueville was also fascinated by the fact that American democracy had not resulted in the descent into violence which had characterized revolutionary France. He was also impressed by the ability of the United States to temper its radical individualism with effective civic engagement. He attributed this success to the existence of a network of voluntary organizations between the family and the state which brought people together people and cultivated collaboration for the common good. Indeed, he thought that participation in civil society made ordinary Americans act “in just the same way as a man of high rank .”

I have argued elsewhere that that optimum political system integrates broad democratic participation --preferably incorporating some element of party-list proportional representation, because it focuses attention on ideas rather than individuals-- with a “true” Senate, that is one composed of the society’s principal sapiential leaders (those who authentically lead humanity‘s ongoing deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value). But such a system runs counter to the profoundly democratic ethos of American society. And it is difficult to determine just how such leaders would be chosen. We certainly could not rely on our universities and religious institutions to identify them. The first have largely abandoned engagement with fundamental questions of meaning and value. And too many of the latter value dogmatic conformity above real wisdom. And constituting such a body outside the Constitution, as a kind of autonomous dual is very difficult. It is not clear that, were a group of authentic sapiential leaders were to declare themselves a true “Senate” that the people would be more rather than less likely to listen to them.

But perhaps de Tocqueville offers us a way forward towards a “second best” polity. I am not referring, at least in the short run, to a Senate actually elected by or through the intermediate organizations of civil society (though some countries, notably Ireland, have just such a system) but rather the constitution of a real Senate outside the constitution. The Left has long had dreams of dual power on the model of the soviets or workers’ councils. And there would be great benefit to be derived by bringing together representatives of popular organizations to deliberate around the strategic challenges facing our civilization. But what about a dual power constituted by the intermediate organizations of civil society --and more specifically those which are founded to advance and defend meanings and values, rather than group interests, which thus have something to say about the Common Good. Such a dual power would, among other things, give authentic sapiential leaders someone to talk to, a real deliberation regarding fundamental questions and strategic civilizational challenges which they could lead.

This is, of course, the vision of interfaith community organizing as it has been developed by networks such as the Industrial Areas Foundation, the Pacific Institute for Community Organizing, and Gamaliel. But the original vision notwithstanding (the Industrial Areas Foundation, at least, talks about “institutionally based organizing) these organizations are largely composed of Catholic, Liberal Protestant, and Jewish congregations. They fail to reflect the full religious diversity of the United States, and they rarely include what they call “civic” organizations (secular neighborhood improvement organizations, for example). And I am unaware of efforts to reach out to fraternal and service organizations such as the Lions or the Masons, the first of which mobilizes truly heroic efforts on the part of the Common Good and the latter of which has always understood itself as a kind of “people’s university,” devoted to the cultivation of wisdom and justice. Finally, most interfaith community organizations, while they formally eschew “ideology” actually occupy a very narrow segment of the political-theological spectrum. The congregations which join are almost all from the center or moderate left of the theological spectrum: there are very few Evangelicals to be found and even fewer Wiccans or New Agers. And essentially all of the policies they advocate are those of the moderate pragmatic center left. This is not bad, by any means, but it does not indicate the kind broad deliberation across a broad spectrum which is necessary to break the current political --and civilizational-- stalemate. We need to bring together people with differing values for common deliberation as well as those with common values for collective action.

Just what this would look like concretely remains to be seen. The interfaith organizing networks don’t like to work with each other and are resistant to anything beyond tactical cooperation with other types of organizations. And organizations such as the Lions and Masons have thrived, in part, on remaining “nonpolitical.” Any beginnings would no doubt have to be tentative, cautious, and perhaps private. But the strategic challenges we face are enormous and on some of them, such as climate change, we may not have much time. Perhaps the spirit which moved these good people to found their organizations in the first place will move them to transcend the limits they have set for themselves and answer this call. I, for one, and going to keep on knocking.