Is American democracy committing suicide? Our principal public institutions — the Constitution and the political and governing bodies to which it gave rise — were designed to put boundaries on the mischief we could do to ourselves.
In the Federalist Papers, James Madison argued that the greatest danger to “popular government” (what we would call democracy) was the rise of factions. Their seed was sown in the nature of human beings.
Factions sometimes formed around differences of opinion (what we might call ideology). Or they could arise from attachment to “different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power.” Madison goes on at some length about the dangers posed by such individuals (demagogues), how they “vex and oppress each other” rather than cooperating for the common good. Judging by our current experience, Madison may have dismissed the danger of demagoguery to American prospects too quickly.
In any case, he goes on to say that the “most common and durable source of faction” in a republic arises from the unequal distribution of property. There was a remedy for that: to extend the boundaries of the republic so that it would include many different kinds of property, none of them alone constituting a majority, whose conflicting interests would force them to devise strategies of cooperation and compromise behind policies that would serve the general interest.
With the benefit of over 200 years of experience, we may view Madison’s solution critically. The struggle between different forms of property has not resulted in stability in American politics. What Jane Mayer has called “dirty money” has corrupted our politics, and it is certainly part of what is wrong with American politics today.
The problem is compounded by the enormous power the Constitution vests in the president. Its reach and range would be the envy of a potentate. But Alexis de Tocqueville argued in the 1830s that in America, isolated from the rest of the world by vast oceans, there was no chance to exercise or abuse such powers. This circumstance, coupled with a deep cultural aversion to the cost and dangers of maintaining standing armies, meant that these powers remained latent through the 19th century.
In the 20th century, with the trauma of two world wars and the invention of military technologies unimagined by our nation’s founders, circumstances changed. Gradually the animus against standing armies eroded. Fear of communism and the menace of the Soviet Union meant that the demobilization following World War II would be our last.
In general (that is, until Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon), what Lincoln called the “war powers” have been exercised relatively carefully. But modern presidents have shown that the Constitution’s safeguards are thin. A demagogue, equipped with a standing army, can run amok.
Donald Trump is not the main cause or source of our current troubles. He may have accelerated them, brought them into focus. But whatever happens to him, they will persist. They will outlive him.
Trump’s supporters and detractors alike recognize that his administration has flouted the customs that undergird the Constitution and the laws that constrain a president’s behavior. Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona said it best. After receiving a medal at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia earlier this month, he called the president to account on this score.
“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”
Who can stand up to such a menace?
Right now there is a civil war among leaders of the governing GOP. Brave people like senators Susan Collins, John Thune, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker and Ben Sasse have taken stands against him, and some have aimed their fire directly at him. But they have not articulated a compelling case for liberal democracy and its benefits.
Who can do that? It is hard to do it without looking soft and weak in the face of withering, distracting fire from the president. The GOP wants to “fix” health care, reform immigration and the tax system – in short, to make a record they can run on. If they fail in this, it leaves the field entirely to Trump, Steve Bannon and their minions, who are experts at promising to drain the swamp and attributing their failures to the resistance of corrupt elites.
How do you make the case for reforming a system in the midst of a campaign for office? Will voters pay attention if you do? Jimmy Carter in 1976 did it, in the midst of a regime crisis, in the wake of Nixon, that was almost as dire as the current one. But Carter’s political appeal did not last long.
What we desperately need is leadership that will call us back to our true basic interest: the preservation of liberal democracy. We need leaders who know how to make that case, steadily, honestly, inspiringly. People like Angela Merkel. Winston Churchill. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Harry S. Truman. Not men and women for all seasons, necessarily, but able to make a critical contribution to the preservation of liberal democracy. Bernie Sanders? Elizabeth Warren?
In the meantime we have a permanent military establishment, perpetually on a wartime footing. A good case can be made that we need it, that the world needs it. Careful American deployments, backed and supported by a strong diplomatic effort, are a necessity in this age. It takes a terrible toll (remember “Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow’s brilliant film), but there is no substitute for it.
There are dangers here. The emergence of military men as leaders of the federal government threatens one of the fundamental tenants of our democracy: civilian control of the military.
Trump is so bereft of support generally that he has been forced to surround himself with these “adults.” The nation has no alternative, in the current atmosphere, but to rely on these people. They have become the principal reliance in a situation where otherwise, it would be Trump’s mercurial finger, alone, that controls our nuclear arsenal.
Don Robinson, a retired professor of government at Smith College in Northampton, writes a regular column published the fourth Thursday of the month. He can be reached at drobinso@smith.edu.