Henry Adams: History of the United States of America during the Administrations of James Madison. New York: The Library of America, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, April 8, 1987.

 

‘Leadership’ obsesses political commentators today. Strong leadership is good, weak bad. ‘History’ is said to be going somewhere, and leaders are to take us there, quickly and efficiently.

But leadership is not statesmanship. A statesman may lead; he may also follow, or seem to. More than that, he cultivates. He cultivates the character and circumstances of citizens, with a view to a particular achievement of the human good.

Henry Adams’s history of James Madison’s presidency shows us an unusually intelligent, careful historian who is also a historicist—one who believes that ‘History’ wholly encompasses individuals—as he tries to assess a statesman who was no historicist. Adams exercises his considerable wit by turns sneering at leader-worship and deriding inept leaders. He overlooks statesmanship.

Adams wants to do justice to Madison: “always a dangerous enemy, gifted with a quality of persistence singularly sure in its results,” Madison “rarely failed to destroy when he struck.” But Adams’s judgment of Madison, and of what constitutes doing justice to him, is low. He complains of the “colorless character” of Madison’s oratory, while conceding it was “intended to disarm criticism,” not to quicken some historian’s pulse. A poor administrator, “never showing great power as a popular leader,” Madison lacked la grande passion . For that reason, Adams, devotee of force, falls rather out of patience with “this circumspect citizen”—who, unaccountably by Adams’s lights, “paid surprisingly little regard to rules of consistency or caution” when pursuing some “object which seemed to him proper in itself.”

Completed in 1891, the full, nine-volume History spans the administrations of Jefferson and Madison. There can be no question: It remains the most gracefully written, scrupulous, and penetrating major history ever written by an American. Adams shows how the Jeffersonians won resounding victories against the Federalist Party, then gradually adopted Federalist principles in practice. What began as a movement for states’ rights, ended by strengthening the Federal government. Adams takes this to illustrate the historicist thesis, that social and economic forces finally overwhelm the intentions of statesmen, and that historians therefore should study not individuals so much as society, in “the same spirit and by the same methods” as other scientists study “the formation of a crystal.”

In Jefferson’s case, Adams may well be right. All his life, Jefferson condemned centralized government, yet his Louisiana Purchase was a Hamiltonian exercise of presidential power at the service of (sound) geopolitical calculation if ever there was one. Madison, however, presents a more complex problem.

After all, Madison had collaborated with Alexander Hamilton years before, writing the two most important essays in The Federalist. His conduct throughout the 1787 Constitutional Convention promoted energetic national government and vigorous commerce—the bonds of union, not of ‘states’ rights.’

By the year 1809, when he succeeded Jefferson in the White House, Madison had of course publicly associated himself with Jeffersonian doctrines. How strongly did he believe them? If Jefferson could prudently relax his doctrinal muscles, the better to catch Louisiana, might not the circumspect Mr. Madison permit himself even less partisan dogmatism?

Eight years of Jeffersonianism had left the War Department in a shambles and the Treasury almost bankrupt. Mediocrities peopled both Congress and the Executive branch. Madison at first did little, and perhaps could do little, to resist the decline. Adams suggests that by 1811 the federal union itself was in jeopardy.

Madison “did not want a distinct issue of peace or war with England,” which had been harrying American shipping and impressing our sailors. He pursued a policy of “peaceful coercion”—commercial restrictions of English trade—so that American commerce could develop its own strength at its own pace. The English didn’t cooperate, and the War of 1812 began with the American Army guided by generals who combined the exhaustion of old age with the ill judgment of inexperience in war.

“The process by which a scattered democracy decided its own will, in a matter so serious as a great and perhaps fatal war, was new to the world; bystanders were surprised and amused at the simplicity with which the people disputed plans of war and peace, giving many months of warning and exact information to the enemy, while they showed no signs of leadership, discipline, or union, or even a consciousness that such qualities were needed.” The United States may have been the first nation in history “to hope that the war itself might create the spirit they lacked.”

Madison prosecuted the war energetically. The spikes of Adams’s criticism cannot quite puncture the statesman’s tough hide: “If a strong government was desired, any foreign war, without regard to its object, might be good policy, if not good morals, and in that sense President Madison’s war was the boldest and most successful of all experiments in American statesmanship, though it was also among the most reckless.” Because strong government was Federalist Party doctrine, not Jefferson’s, Adams doubts that Madison had this in mind. But Madison had read his Montesquieu, and had lived through the Revolutionary War. He knew war’s centralizing tendency, could not have been so naïve as to suppose America to be exempt from it, and, while perhaps not intending war, did not abase himself in order to avert it. When it occurred, he put it to use.

The first two years of conflict actually weakened national unity, bringing the Anglophile Federalists of New England one step away from secession. But “little by little the pressure of necessity compelled Congress and the country to follow Madison’s lead.” He sent his best men to negotiate a peace treaty with England, and they did–after battlefield events convinced the British government to accept reasonable terms.

Madison underlined the lesson in his 1815 Message to Congress: “Experience has taught us that neither the pacific dispositions of the American people, nor the pacific character of their political institutions, can altogether exempt them from that strife which appears, beyond the ordinary lot of nations, to be incident to the actual period of the world”—the period of the Napoleonic Wars. “Experience demonstrates that a certain preparation for war is not only indispensable to avert disasters in the onset, but affords the best security for the continuance of peace.” And the preparation for war that secures peace requires a strong federal government.

Madison had known these truisms twenty-five years before the War of 1812. Had he forgotten them in the 1800s, only to relearn them as president?

It is more plausible to think that this quiet little man, “always treated by his associates with a shade of contempt as a closet politician,” more theorist than man of affairs, waited for years, with a farmer’ vigilant patience, for the seeds of 1787 to mature into the harvest of 1815. Then peace and prosperity” “put an end to faction.” In 1787, James Madison had predicted the diminution of faction’s effects, if not its “end,” thanks precisely to the soothing effects of peaceful commerce, prospering under the aegis of Constitutional union. By then, experience had taught Americans lessons that Madison and the other Founders arranged for our political conditions to teach.

And it may be that the resolutely unheroic Mr. Madison moved unobtrusively among such forceful men as Hamilton and Jefferson, allowing them to use him, the better to use them, in rather the same way Madison’s Constitution invites us to use it, pursuing our own purposes but bending them to our own good. Henry Adams admires force, albeit with a touch of irony. James Madison understood force, and used it for the good of his country. His “new science of politics” excels Adams’s newer science of history, because it is a genuine science, one that never confuses men with crystals.

 

2017 Note:
For the last decade, Robert Eden of the Hillsdale College Politics Department has been preparing a study of Adams’s History in which he will argue that Adams himself partook of a sort of literary statesmanship that featured exactly the sort of prudent indirection Madison practiced in politics. I happily expect to ‘stand corrected’ by Bob’s interpretation, as it should raise Henry Adams even higher than before, to or even in a sense above the level of the great men he studied.

Michael Hereth: Alexis de Tocqueville: Threats to Freedom in America.  George Bogardus translation. Durham: Duke University Press, 1986.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, December 24, 1986.

 

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America has educated Americans about themselves for 150 years. Other observers have held our attention temporarily. Charles Dickens, Lord Bryce, G. K. Chesterton among foreigners; Horace Greeley, Lincoln Steffens, Walter Lippmann among Americans: Who today reads their opinions on America? Writing about Andrew Jackson’s country for an audience of politically superannuated French aristocrats, Tocqueville nonetheless speaks to us, and more profoundly than any of our contemporary ‘pundits.’

Michael Hereth teaches political science at the Military College of Hamburg; Tocqueville speaks to him, too. Among the “ever-recurring problems in human social life,” the “search for the bases of a reasonable order in a society of equals and the questions regarding the criteria of reasonable community life of free citizens” remain serious today, in Hereth’s Germany and elsewhere, and no less so than in America and France in the 1830s. Today as then, Tocqueville fits no ideological or academic box. His kind of liberalism means the defense of political liberty, and requires intellectual independence above all.

Reasonable order and social equality, community with liberty: Tocqueville sought a balance among principles that cancel one another when they are pushed to extremes by political men—or rather, by impolitic men engaged in politics. Exhausted by revolutions and counterrevolutions, France in Tocqueville’s generation had lapsed into a merely economic life. The ‘bourgeois king’ who cheerfully advised his subjects to enrich themselves deliberately undermined political liberty by a strategy of distracting his subjects from politics. Exclusively economic activity narrows souls, makes them petty and grasping, vulnerable to a soft sort of despotism. For practical men, only political life enlarges the soul, engendering the love of self-rule—moderation, prudence, and responsibility for oneself and one’s country. “Behind this concept of the free way of life stands the image of the free aristocrat,” an image as old as classical Greece. Tocqueville wanted to bring the traditional “manly virtues” of the aristocracy, including constancy, civic courage, and honor, to an otherwise too-egalitarian regime. True freedom is not freedom from politics; on the contrary, it is “freedom for political citizens to act and perform.” More, in Hereth’s account Tocqueville thinks “speaking and acting have meaning only among fellow citizens”; public life enables human beings to achieve full development of their distinctively human faculties of speech and reason.

Tocqueville never supposes that love of political liberty will animate the majority of democratic citizens most of the time. For them, enlightened self-interest—restraining oneself now in the hope of gaining material benefits later—may be the best that one reasonably expects, from day to day. But can the few aristocratic souls survive and even share in the rule of a democracy? Tocqueville thinks they can, if the democracy is well-constituted as a republic, “so designed that existing morals, customs, and habits, as well as political institutions, teach the usage of freedom,” making the average citizen prefer it to comfortable, “administrative despotism” and admire those who energetically defend it. Few can be Churchill, but many can be English.

Freedom, then, is not ‘freedom from’ this or that governmental action, but “a special way of life,” “the actual practice of political activity in the republic, a matter of self-government under “God and the Law.” To love self-government is to love something innate in the human soul more than wealth or any other “external goals.” To this end, as Hereth emphasizes, Tocqueville promoted decentralization of political power. In small communities and in small voluntary organizations including political parties, democratic citizens would practice the political virtues, rule themselves, and help to delimit the powers of the central government. Such “cooperation of equals” can replace the hierarchical, aristocratic social structures that once served as bulwarks against centralizing despotism but now lack the strength to resist it. Tocqueville’s paradigm for France was the United States. Hereth ingeniously suggests that Tocqueville pretends the American founders planned decentralized power here—of course it already existed long before 1787, and the American Constitution in fact centralized power somewhat—because he wants the French to do just that, for their own very different country.

“Tocqueville is always a political citizen, even when he writes.” Unlike John Stuart Mill, who called Democracy in America “the most philosophical book ever written on Democracy, as it manifests itself in modern society,” Hereth regards Tocqueville as a rhetorician not a philosopher—by which he means a man seeking political power more than truth. In this he is mistaken, but his emphasis on Tocqueville’s rhetoric nonetheless brings him to propose an excellent solution to one of the most troubling problems readers find in the book: Why does this devotee of political liberty insist vehemently that democracy is inevitable, that is, not open to free choice?

By the 1830s, Tocqueville considered a regime based on social equality to be inevitable in France. But equality could go in either of two ways, politically: liberty or despotism. (Almost two centuries earlier, the British philosopher and monarchist Thomas Hobbes had noted that absolute monarchy guarantees equality to all but one member of the commonwealth, and that is the most equality one should hope for.) By refusing to debate the question, ‘Is Democracy desirable?’ Tocqueville could concentrate French minds on the practical question of “establish[ing] the political constitution of democracy”—very much a matter of free choice deserving careful deliberation. Tocqueville would educate the potential founders of a French regime of liberty. To this day, he educates all those who want to know how to defend and strengthen regimes of liberty.

Hereth addresses another paradox of Tocqueville’s thought, but does not resolve it. Despite “his knowledge of the evil consequences of foreign rule,” displayed in his writings against British rule in Ireland, Tocqueville supported the French conquest and colonization of Algeria, and even regarded military terrorism against Arabs as a necessary evil. Hereth denounces this, calling it proof of Tocqueville’s rhetorical, subphilosophic approach to politics. Tocqueville could not universalize his principles, rationally transcend his own political community in order to strengthen it with truth, he charges. Hereth soberly concedes that even a philosopher can do little to enlighten citizens: “The problem of an inquiring philosophical life is that it, too, does not pierce through the domination of opinions over society by withdrawing from politics, but thereby leaves the field open to those who are not even aware of the problem of a political way of life and who therefore are much more likely to be wrong. The problem is insoluble.” But he does claim that Tocqueville could not even conceive of solving it, being no philosopher. “Tocqueville fell victim to the reduction of reason to pragmatic rationalism, which characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinking,” the reductive rationalism of Descartes, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. “He was unable to define the criterion for specific actions through an understanding of reason, which inquires beyond intermediate goals” and established ultimate ends, as did Plato and Aristotle. As a rhetorician and a ‘modern,’ he could only appeal to opinions and passions. Appeals to the specifically political passion, the passion to rule, yield imperialism. In the end, he charges, for Tocqueville freedom “became a surrender to the passions,” leavened by merely occasional appeals to justice.

Hereth is right about politics as practiced almost everywhere, almost all the time. He sees something important about the Machiavellian core of modern philosophy. It is harder to say if he is right about Tocqueville. Although much of his work reads like a dialogue between Montesquieu and Rousseau, Tocqueville explicitly criticizes Descartes. With a true scholar’s integrity, Hereth concedes that Tocqueville at least once appeals not only to passions but to justice. One should add that Tocqueville also distinguishes among passions—as when he praises the “manly and lawful” passion for equality—what we now call ‘equality of opportunity,’ which aspires to greatness and comports with liberty—and condemns the “depraved” passion for equality—the passion compacted of envy and resentment, which tears down greatness and establishes despotism. He also criticizes passion itself in this haunting sentence from “The European Revolution”: “When passion begins to rule, the opinions of men of experience are often less important than are schemes in the minds of dreamers.” Rhetorician or political philosopher? Or something in-between—a statesman? Only a careful textual commentary on Tocqueville’s writing would tell us.

Meanwhile, we have this lucid, measured book—along with the writings of the American scholar Marvin Zetterbaum, a fine introduction to Tocqueville.

The following essay was written in 1986, at a time when bills had been introduced to the New Jersey State Legislature proposing to amend the state constitution to permit legislation by means of citizen initiative and referendum. Initiative and referendum would enable voters to propose laws, first by collecting signatures on petitions and then, if a certain percentage of qualified voters signed, to place the proposed laws on the ballot for enactment in a statewide referendum. This would enable voters to bypass the process of legislation by the state legislature.
The essay was distributed to New Jersey state legislators and media outlets.

 

Direct Democracy versus Representative Government
Initiative and referendum are tools of direct democracy. They have no place in the United States Constitution; they have a more or less limited place in state constitutions. In the New Jersey Constitution, there is no provision for voter initiative, although certain kinds of referenda are provided for: Constitutional amendments, bond issues, and non-binding resolutions. The New Jersey Constitution has no provision for referenda on proposed statutes.

On the eve of both the bicentennial of the United States Constitution and the fortieth anniversary of the New Jersey Constitution, we are reminded to examine with care any proposal to dilute representative government, a regime proven to combine stability, justice, and energy to a greater degree than any other. The framers of our two constitutions fully discussed the principles that empowered their foresight. They foresaw the success of representative government because they saw the past so clearly. Direct democracy, in some respects the antithesis of representative government, imitates a much older form of popular government, a form that failed the test of historical experience and earned thoughtful rejection by the American Founders.

Arguments in Favor of Initiative and Referendum
Initiative and referendum entered American politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sponsored by the Populist and Progressive movements. Along with political primaries and trust-busting, initiative and referendum were designed to weaken or destroy political “machines” and the “special interests” or “invisible government” behind them. [1] “A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world. If not met and overthrown at once, it forebodes terrible social convulsions, the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of absolute despotism.” [2] In this narrative, verging on mythology, the virtuous, agrarian American West must oppose the corrupt urban centers of the East.

Replacing these dark forces would be the “New Citizen” or “Man of Good Will” who, as depicted by Progressive writer William Allen White, dissociated himself from all special interests, examined all issues fairly and with care, and worked through civic organizations to replace partisan bosses with high-minded professional administrators sensitive to the Good Will of these disinterested, not to say disembodied, altruists. “Democracy,” White explained, “is, at base, altruism expressed in terms of self-government.” [3] In its more extreme formulations—as in the orations of William Jennings Bryan—the defense of direct democracy was said to inhere in its practicability; moral intuition, Bryan believed, serves as a better guide to political practice than does experience. The average citizen’s uncorrupted character makes him far superior in political judgment to almost any politician—except, of course, Populist and Progressive politicians, now adroitly renamed ‘public servants.’ Most advocates argued, more moderately, that initiative and referendum should supplement, not replace, representative government “in those states where the people feel that they must have what they have somehow lost and wish to recover—a control over their own representatives.” [4] In the 1912 Presidential election campaign rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson, initiative and referendum were “not mean to create a new system of government” but rather to enable “the people” to recover representative government. [5] It is, of course, impossible to determine the extent to which such politicians intended their moderation to serve their radicalism, or their radicalism to serve their moderation. Both Wilson and Robert M. LaFollette, for example, did not so much abolish “machine politics” as retrofit them.

The best-known historian of the Populist and Progressive movements, Richard Hofstadter, judges initiative and referendum to have been “disappointing as instruments of popular government.” Complex ballot questions discouraged voting, making initiative and referendum instruments of “small and organized groups with plenty of funds and skillful publicity.” This brought an “additional de-rationalization of politics that came with the propaganda campaigns demanded by referendums.” [6]

The New Jersey Constitutional Convention
By the time the New Jersey Constitutional Convention convened, experience had tempered ideological enthusiasms. In a monograph prepared for the use of delegates, Rutgers University political scientist L. Ethan Ellis concluded that initiative and referendum are “neither as useful as their original sponsors predicted nor as dangerous as early opponents feared.” [7] Proponents of direct democracy testified before the Committee on Rights, Privileges, Amendments and Miscellaneous provisions and the Committee on the Executive, Militia, and Civil Officers. Mr. James W. Arrowsmith, a private citizen, suggested that a constitutional provision for initiative and referendum “enlarges the power of petition which in the Federal Bill of Rights is guaranteed to the citizens of the United States.” [8]  Arrowsmith did not make the unsupportable claim that the American founders generally endorsed direct democracy on either the national or state level. [9]  Indeed, initiative and referendum would not merely “enlarge” the First Amendment right to petition the government for a redress of grievances; it would fundamentally alter that right by making the people a part of the government itself, that is, a part of the legislative branch.

The most substantial and spirited argument in favor of initiative and referendum came from a spokesman for the State Federation of Labor, Mr. Thomas L. Parsonnet. Without this provision, he contended, “democracy is totally lacking in state government” (III. 424); it is “the basic essential for democracy in our government” (V. 128). “Too long have we in New Jersey favored the Hamiltonian theories of the superiority of the few, as against the Jeffersonian theories of the dignity and intelligence of all men.” [V. 128]  In view of the fact that Jefferson never advanced a theory asserting the dignity or the intelligence of all men—on the contrary, he agreed with John Adams that there exists a “natural aristocracy among men, the grounds of which are virtue and talent” [10]—this alleged failure of New Jerseyans was quite understandable.

Mr. J. Spencer Smith of the Committee on the Executive, Militia, and Civil Officers asked Parsonnet “whether your organization believes in the republic form of government as against a democracy”—that is, whether laws should be made by elected representatives or by the people themselves. Parsonnet replied that the regime itself should be republican, given the size of “the country”; he was silent on state government, that is, on the topic under discussion. Smith observed that he had “never seen a hybrid thing work very satisfactorily,” and asserted that if citizens “accept their responsibilities to the republic… a democracy will function.” Parsonnet denied this, saying that “the statement in the [New Jersey] Constitution that all power is invested in the people is utterly meaningless” unless that power can be exercised by the people themselves; popular “self-expression” is the “only way” to “enhance the power of the people to insist upon how they will be controlled” [V. 128-131]. Evidently, Parsonnet envisioned direct popular self-expression as the best means of self-control, self-government. He did not reflect upon the possible tension between self-expression and self-control. Self-expression by a minority might well rest not on self-control but on a desire to control the minority.

Initiative and referendum was voted on by only one committee, the Committee on Rights, Privileges, Amendments and Miscellaneous Provisions, meeting on July 23, 1947. Mr. Ronald D. Glass said that the provision “takes away the authority from duly elected bodies who should handle such matters” as lawmaking. The provision lost, 9-1 (III. 193).

Arguments for Initiative and Referendum Today

The arguments advanced today for initiative and referendum in New Jersey differ hardly at all from those advanced in 1947. For that matter, they differ hardly at all in principle from those advanced at the turn of the century. They are usually couched in more moderate language, although there are exceptions. Mr. David Schmidt, Director of the Initiative Resource Center in Washington, D. C., an organization that trains activists for initiative and referendum campaigns, has gone so far as to contrast the “participatory and egalitarian” Western states with the “elitist and aristocratic” Eastern states—”the progressive, growing, changing West” with “the stagnating East.” “Just as the East must now modernize its industry or face inevitable economic decline, it must modernize politically, through adoption of mechanisms such as the initiative and referendum, which permit greater political innovation, if the East is to stave off political decline.” [11]  Here in elitist, aristocratic New Jersey, where the unemployment rate recently stagnated at 5.9%, as contrasted with participatory and egalitarian California, where the rate as grown to a progressive 7.2%, we may content ourselves with reflecting upon the fact that populist rhetoric never changes, even when the facts do.

More sober arguments are advanced in Assembly Bill No. 1028 and Senate Bill No. 1. These bills list seven major arguments for initiative and referendum:

1. “Properly restricted and used, [they] can strengthen democratic government and popular sovereignty.”
2. Initiative and referendum offer “an additional and necessary means of political self-expression.”
3. They have “an educational value for the voter.”
4. They arouse “voter interest in State government by bringing many policies to public attention and debate.”
5. They are “useful in directing public attention to perceived evils in need of correction.”
6. They “may well lead to the enactment of many reforms desired by the people.”
7. They “will go a log way to dispel the current disillusionment with government.”

Evaluating these claims requires the recovery of the arguments for representative government, which initiative and referendum would alter. For this, we have no better guide than the writings of James Madison, rightly called “the father of the American Constitution.”

Why Representative Government?

Madison defines the American regime, the manner in which our public order is constituted, as an unmixed, compound, extensive, commercial republic. He defines each term precisely.

A republic is “government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behavior” [The Federalist #39]. That is, a republic is representative government. It is not what Madison calls a “pure democracy,” as seen in ancient Athens, wherein citizens assembled to pass laws and otherwise to set policy “in person.” Nor is it what we now call “direct democracy,” wherein citizens do not assemble but vote ‘privately,’ casting secret ballots on laws and other policies.

A commercial republic, as distinguished from the military republics of antiquity (most notably, Rome before the Caesars), safeguards liberty by promoting what David Hume calls “parties from interest” and discouraging “parties from principle.” [11]. By the latter, Hume had in mind primarily the violent and uncompromising religious parties that caused civil war in seventeenth-century Britain. while eschewing the rule of those we now call ‘ideologues,’ the Founders also disclaimed mercantilism, that is, a regime in which merchants and manufacturers act through politicians to restrict trade in order to throttle competition and increase profits in the short term. Commercial republics resist such schemes by establishing a government sufficiently powerful to refuse the blandishments of mercantilists. Whereas mercantilism tends toward monopolies that jeopardize liberty, commerce tends toward numerous enterprises, numerous interests, none of which can oppress they others.

Representation and commerce both enable the United States’ extensiveness. Because we do not assemble the mass of citizens in one place, because we do not require the firm unity of universal adult participation in military exercises, and because we do not foster the small-town character agrarianism imposes, the United States government can encompass a large territory and a large, diverse population. At the time of The Federalist, our population was below three million; today, substantially the same form of government accommodates a population nearly eighty times as large, extending over a land area many times as vast. Geographic and demographic size augments political stability and by making factions more numerous; each factions becomes less likely to dominate. Again, liberty is served.

A compound republican form separates the powers of its government. Obviously, a representative government, particularly one composed of a relatively small minority of citizens, could itself turn into an agent of oppression. Madison and the other Founders guarded against this by their celebrated system of separated powers that check and balance one another; they also enumerated and defined the powers of the central government, leaving the powers that remained to the states—a new form of federalism. The governmental principle here resembles the social and economic principles described before: It is difficult for one faction to dominate the others, even if it succeeds in seizing control of one branch.

At the same time, America is an unmixed republic. All of its governmental branches are republican—elected by the citizens, or by electors elected by the citizens, or appointed by such elected representatives. There is no purely democratic branch, no purely oligarchic branch—neither a Greek assembly nor a British House of Lords. The American regime is not a “hybrid” or mixed regime in the classical sense.

Why the Framers Did What They Did

Each of these characteristics—unmixed, compound, extensive, commercial, and republican—serves the purpose of government as defined by the Declaration of Independence: to secure the unalienable rights of human beings, rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. [12]  Such a government protects these rights by the exercise of its powers, “deriving [its] just powers from the consent of the governed.” The asserted necessity of consent for the establishment of those powers that will protect justice instead of interfering with it, was of course the central practical problem the framers confronted. As Madison observes in the tenth Federalist, instability, injustice, and confusion are “the mortal diseases under which popular governments”—governments by consent—”have everywhere perished.” This fact has been cited by “the adversaries of liberty” when arguing against such governments. Liberty yields faction, faction yields injustice, injustice yields turbulence. The reaction to turbulence is that longing for order at the expense of natural, human rights exploited by those who despise such rights.

It is important to see exactly how faction yields injustice in a popular government. Madison cites the well-known principle, “No man is allowed to be a judge in his own case, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.” Madison then draws the analogy to group behavior: “What are many of the most important acts of legislation,” he asks, “but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens?” In a popular government, “the most numerous party, or in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail”—likely serving its immediate interests, not the public good. Faction being inevitable wherever liberty and government by consent of the governed flourish, Madison intends to control its effects rather than to attempt its extirpation.

Pure democracy “can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction” because it provides “nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.” The majority, judges in their own case, rule unrestrictedly, at times without regard to individual or minority rights. Representative government moderates both the strife and the unjust majoritarianism of popular government Elected representatives “refine and enlarge the public views” by study and debate. Owing their election to broad coalitions, representatives rarely succeed as ‘one-issue’ candidates. They seek the adjustment of diverse interests; they avoid perpetual controversy. Even a majority faction will find it difficult to coalesce effectively, given the size and diversity of the republic’s territory and population. Representative government thus maximizes the role of reason in politics, minimizes passion. “It is the reason, alone, of the public, that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.” [The Federalist #49]  Pure democracy does just the opposite, encouraging passions and giving no voice to reason. Notwithstanding “the virtue and intelligence of the people of America,” without which any popular government would be impracticable, Madison warns against “disturbing the public tranquility by interesting too strongly the public passions.” Give passion the rule and demagogues, manipulators of passions, will become the real rulers. “The countenance of the government may become more democratic, but the soul that animates it will be more oligarchic. The machine will be enlarged, but the fewer, and the more secret, will be the springs by which its motions are directed.” [The Federalist #58]

Whereas the representative principle did exist in ancient governments, “the people in their collective capacity” were not entirely excluded from the government. There was always an element of pure democracy, namely, a popular assembly. The American republic, however, is wholly republican, “a most advantageous superiority in favor of the United States.” “Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power.” [The Federalist #63]

This summary of Madison’s defense of American constitutionalism provides the basis for refuting the claims made for direct democracy, to which we now turn.

Initiative and Referendum: A Third Branch of the Legislature

Initiative and referendum would constitute a third legislative branch. But this would be a more powerful branch than the others because its enactments could not be vetoed by the chief executive. Initiative and referendum would thereby upset the balance of separated powers endorsed by the American Founders and imitated by the framers of the New Jersey Constitution. Eventually, this would lead the people to oppose the courts, a power struggle unlikely to produce a more just and stable public order, whatever its outcome. [13]

The New Jersey legislators sponsoring initiative and referendum argue that “properly restricted and used, the initiative and referendum can strengthen democratic government and popular sovereignty.” But as Madison knew, such “strengthening” actually leads to weakening. For example, the “initiative industry” in California has been called “California’s growth industry.” [14]  In 1982, it was a $25 million industry, but by 1984 the costs had risen to $32.2 million. Obviously, this is a game only the biggest spenders can play effectively, making lobbyists and the more recent “political action committees” look rather modest indeed. Far from reducing the influence of money in politics, initiative and referendum put a premium on money. As one authority suggests, “The application of high-tech political devices to direct democracy seems to me to take the initiative out of the realm of ‘grass roots’ political activity and places it squarely in the field of a business venture.” [15]

This relates closely to another of the sponsors’ arguments, namely, that “initiative and referendum has an educational value to the voter and arouses voter interest in State government by bringing many policies to public attention and debate.” The argument overlooks the nature of “attention and debate” in the age of television. Research shows that television is “the principal source of news for most Americans.” [16]  But according to today’s most prominent television journalist, “One of the great difficulties of television is that it has a great deal of trouble dealing with any subject in depth…. There is no way that I, or any White House correspondent… can come out there in a minute and fifteen seconds and give the viewer even the essence, never mind the details or the substance [of any policy]….” [17]  This fact has nothing to do with either intelligence or conscientiousness; it is simply a reality of everyday life. Representative government allows this citizen to elect someone whose character and opinions he prefers to the alternative nominee. The representative then gets paid to examine staff reports, interest group arguments, academic studies, and to weigh the views both of executive branch spokesmen and fellow legislators. Woodrow Wilson describes this process succinctly and well:

“It is not that [newly-elected] legislators lose heart or prove unfaithful to the promises made on the stump. They have really for the first time laid their minds alongside other minds of different views, of different experience, of different prepossessions. They have seen the men with whom they differ, face to face, and have come to understand how honestly and with what force of genuine character and disinterested conviction, or with what convincing array of practical arguments opposite views may be held. They have learned more than any one man could beforehand have known. Common counsel is not aggregate counsel. It is not a sum in addition, counting heads. It is compounded out of many views in actual contact; is a living thing made out of the vital substance of many minds, many personalities, many experiences; and it can be made up only by the vital contacts of actual conference, only in face to face debate, only by word of mouth and the direct clash of mind with mind.” [18]

This passage describes a genuinely educational process. It contrasts with being subjected to snippets of television news and an array of thirty-second propaganda ‘spots’ designed to sell policies as if they were products. If education requires the cultivation of reason, not the excitation of passions, then in practice today’s initiative and referendum campaign does not, and cannot, educate.

There is no evidence whatever that the “initiative and referendum process… has been shown to be of great benefit to the citizens of the states where constitutionally permitted,” as the legislative sponsors assert. There is no evidence to suggest that initiative and referendum “will go a long way to dispel the current disillusionment with government.” In fact, statistics provided by one of the most impassioned “I & R” proponents prove this contention false. In his June 1985 testimony before the New Jersey Assembly State Government Committee, Mr. David Schmidt produced numbers showing that states with initiative-based referenda on the ballot had only slightly higher voter turnouts than states without them: 1980, 3.1%; 1981, 5.3%; 1982, 4.8%; 1983, 7.0%; 1984, 2.9%. This is hardly the stuff of faith rekindled. And if one assumes, reasonably, that many of these voters came out only to prevent the enactment of certain proposals—that “voter interest” often means voter displeasure—the statistics become even less impressive.

Conclusion

The exaggerated claims made for initiative and referendum provide New Jerseyans with a foretaste of the rhetorical inflation initiative and referendum campaigns necessitate. Political campaigns by candidates impose a sobering limitation: one is, after all, voting primarily for an all-too-human being. But political campaigns for ideas impose no such limitations. Such campaigns fortify extremism. The American Founders opposed this, framing our institutions to guard against it. These institutions channel American away from the extremism of ideology. So, for example, what the French call “bon sens” or “good sense” we Americans call “common sense.” In America, good sense is common; in many other countries, it is not. We cannot owe this fortune to biology or climate, and it would be rash to ascribe it to Providence. Modesty suggests it can originate only in shared principles, customs, laws, and institutions. That is, the strengths of Americans require the American institutions that mold them. Alter the institutions significantly and you change Americans. You encourage different habits, a different type of American citizen.

Initiative and referendum weaken each of the five Madisonian criteria of American constitutionalism. Initiative and referendum are direct-democratic, not republican. They encourage “parties from principle,” not the more moderate “parties from interest” that commerce needs and fosters. The are insensitive to the diversity of our extensive territory and large population because they require a mass, yes-or-no vote that allows no adjustment of conflicting interests, no accommodation of conflicting rights. They take us one step in the direction of a unitary government, one step away from our compound government of balanced, separated powers. And they would give us, for the first time in New Jersey, a mixed or “hybrid” regime instead of an unmixed republic. Proponents of initiative and referendum who point to the relative moderation of may if not all decisions made by the voters under this system fail to recognize that this moderation exists despite initiative and referendum, that American moderation owes its cultivation to republican institutions established in opposition to earlier, simpler, more direct forms of popular government.

In an extraordinary, if inadvertently, revealing statement, a proponent of initiative and referendum shows that this remaking of American citizenship entails the displacement of traditional American statesmanship, as well. Ms. Marion Kaufman criticizes certain New Jersey Republicans for failing to maintain sufficient enthusiasm for the amendment, now that they enjoy majority status in the General Assembly. “How unfortunate,” she writes, “that the Republican Party can’t see beyond its present popularity to the future when it will once more be the ‘out’ party. The Republicans could then use I & R to galvanize the voters…. Many future leaders could evolve from working with the citizenry. If the citizens are passionate about a stand on an issue, they will certainly remember who worked with them and helped it to become law. Then the ‘out’ party will become the ‘in’ party of the people.” [19]

In this scheme, symptomatic of direct-democratic ideology, leadership replaces statesmanship. Impassioned issues-politic replace moderate interest-politics. The education of young politicians would be fundamentally altered. In a representative government, a young man or woman newly elected to the state legislature learns from more experienced colleagues. He or she encounters the various interest groups and learns, among other things, that almost every group argues cogently for its interests because almost every group is partially right. Statesmanship requires seeing both the rightness and the partiality of each one. Leadership, in contrast, marches toward the ever-receding horizon of ‘absolute truth.’ It listens to those who disagree, but only as a debater listens to an opponent. It compromises, but only for tactical purposes. The leader, bringing to life a party of the people by galvanizing voters, tolerates no genuine moderation. A leadership of passion and a politics of absolute demands replaces the statesmanship of reason and the politics of common sense.

Of course, there is a paradox about such ‘leadership.’ It does not exactly lead. The passions it evokes also drive it. A genuine leader—a military officer, for example—requires less passion than discipline. Only statesmanship, cultivated by representative rather than direct-democratic politics, finds itself capable of governing with prudence instead of mere passion. Only citizens of the character cultivated by the institutions of republicanism will likely possess the moderation that makes them responsive to the prudence of statesmen.

The New Jersey Constitution resembles the United States Constitution in its reasoned fidelity to representative government. The framers of both constitutions designed our institutions in order to cultivate virtues we have come to see as distinctively American. Direct democracy strikes these institutions at their root. The New Jersey Legislature has defended them, but will need support from friends of representative government if it is to continue to defend them.

 

Notes

1. Albert J. Beveridge, speech to the National Progressive Convention, July 1912; quoted in Claude G. Bowers: Beveridge and the Progressive Era, New York: The Literary Guild, 1932, p. 427.
2. People’s Party Platform, 1892. In Daniel J. Boorstin, ed.: An American Primer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968, pp. 535-536.
3. See Richard Hofstadter: The Age of Reform. New York: Vintage Books, 1960, pp. 258-264.
4. Arthur S. Link, ed.: The Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977, Vol. 24, p. 234.
5. Ibid. p. 235.
6. Hofstadter, op. cit. 268.
7. L. Ethan Ellis: “The Legislative Initiative and Referendum.” In State of New Jersey Constitutional Convention of 1947: Convention Proceedings. Volume II, p. 1547. Subsequent references to the Convention Proceedings will appear in the body of the text.
8. More recently, initiative and referendum advocates have argued that Jefferson endorsed referenda as a means of ratifying proposed amendments to the Virginia state constitution. But all amendments would have been initiated by elected representatives. Voter approval of state constitutional amendments was adopted by many states by 1830, but in none of these was initiative sanctioned. See Patrick B. McGuigan: The Politics of Direct Democracy in the 1980s (Washington: The Institute of Government and Politics of the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, p. 24).
9. Thomas Jefferson: Letter to John Adams, October 28, 1813, in Adrienne Koch and William Peden, eds.: The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, New York: The Modern Library, pp. 632-633.
10. See McGuigan, op. cit, p. 118. Note that Schmidt makes no claim of moral superiority for the West, as the old Populists did. This is probably just as well.
11. Charles W. Hendel, ed.: David Hume’s Political Essays, New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953, pp. 20-21, 80, 128.
12. To argue, as does McGuigan, that the Declaration is “a clarion call to direct popular involvement in our system of government” (op. cit. p. 23) is a serious distortion of the Signers’ intention.
13. That this concern is not fanciful may be seen in McGuigan’s polemic, “The Courts Begin to Seize the Initiative: A Lament” (Ibid. 135-142). McGuigan describes himself as “perturbed when judges find ways to rob political majorities of their victories” (135). This “robbery” occurs when judges perform their function by overruling, on constitutional grounds, laws enacted by referendum, or remove initiatives from the ballot on such grounds.
14. Sue Thomas, Director, National Center for Initiative, quoted in Ibid. p. 109.
15. Ibid. 110.
16. Doris Graber: Mass Media and American Politics, Washington: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1980, p. 3.
17. Dan Rather, quoted in Hoyt Purvis, ed.: The Presidency and the Press, Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1976.
18. Woodrow Wilson: Constitutional Government in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, pp. 188-189.
19. Hearings, New Jersey Assembly State Government Committee, June 17, 1985, p. 4x ff.
20. Marion Kaufman: “Selling out on voter initiative.” Letter to the editor, “Readers’ Forum,” Newark Star Ledger, March 26, 1986, emphases added.