ON REMOVING CERTAIN IMPEDIMENTS TO DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES
Dahl, Robert A.
What this nation can become will be influenced, though not fully determined, by the ways in which we think about ourselves as people. With a people as with a person, it is a sign of wisdom and...
...Thus, when the country committed itself to their framework of government, two different arguments became confounded in the national consciousness, and they remain confounded to this day...
...As to those resulting from the unequal distribution of political resources, a country committed to procedural democracy must either place effective limits on the extent to which economic resources can be converted into political resources, or else ensure that economic resources are much more equally distributed than they are in the United States at present...
...If we want to find the recent rather than the Jacksonian origins of the imperial presidency, as good a place as anywhere to begin is the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt...
...What is typically at stake is purely a disagreement about policy...
...The commitment to a welfare state in fact has added even more burdens to democracy...
...However laudable their ends, in their means the framers were guilty of overkill...
...For one thing, the reforms undertaken in behalf of the commitment could not be carried through without the leadership of an energetic president, who could increase, organize, and exploit all the political resources of the office...
...To reject this criterion is to deny the condition of roughly equal qualification, taken all around...
...As to the second of the adverse consequences of corporate capitalism, the enormous expansion of hierarchical systems of control, we need to be open to new ideas about governing economic enterprises and to a rapidly growing body of experience and experiments in this country and abroad...
...What is more, these changes will have the effect of satisfying many of the claims for substantive justice as well...
...Taking all these problems into account, political scientists need to begin a serious and systematic reexamination of the constitutional system much beyond anything done up to now...
...When we turn toward the inner self and ask what we need in order to understand the needs and interests of the self, including those crucial aspects of oneself that are inextricably bound up with and require a sympathetic understanding of other selves, we confront a question to which the answer is inescapably open-ended...
...and within ourselves, too, we are conflicted in ways we do not fully recognize...
...It could be readily shown that this body of primary rights must include most, though not all, of the rights and liberties the Supreme Court has held to be protected by the Constitution...
...But to accept as real the limits that are imposed only by our own minds is not wisdom but self-inflicted blindness...
...This is partly right but mainly wrong...
...Among other things, what his presidency did was to disarm most intellectuals and academics, not least political scientists, who, being mostly in favor of reform, enthusiastically came forward with whatever was needed in the way of a justification for enhanced presidential power...
...inaugurating proportional representation and a multiparty system in congressional elec322 tions...
...The degree of social and economic differentiation that had already been foreshadowed in the cities of the Eastern Seaboard was no longer marginal, as it had been when the socioeconomic order was overwhelmingly agrarian, but central to the new order...
...There is no convincing evidence in American history for the existence of one group of adults qualified to rule over adults who are excluded from full citizenship in the demos...
...Viewed in this light, the commitment to corporate capitalism needs to be reconsidered...
...Suppose further that we were to test our commitments against the requirements of this doctrine...
...The whole burden of American experience demonstrates not only that any group of adults excluded from the demos will be lethally weakened in its own defense, but also that those who govern will fail to protect the rights, needs, and interests of the excluded group...
...Out of our past we have inherited ways of thinking about ourselves that condemn us to try too much and accomplish too little...
...Surely, no narrower definition of inalienable rights ought to be acceptable to us...
...First, in spite of the eloquent universality of the language used in the Declaration of Independence and common at the time, in actuality the framers gave much narrower scope to the principles of consent and political equality...
...At the very least, the question of distribution of wealth and income ought to be high on the agenda of a national politics...
...and many other possibilities...
...Finally, like the governments of corporate enterprise, the bureaucracies in the government of the state are also hierarchical in structure...
...They need to give serious and systematic attention to possibilities that may initially seem unrealistic, such as abolishing the presidential veto...
...It is obvious that all societies, including our own, fall very far short of satisfying the criteria of procedural democracy...
...It seems obvious too that if citizens are to understand the external world, they must have access to experts...
...The basis of the new order was a fundamentally different kind of economic enterprise...
...Moreover, considerations of substantive distributive justice would seem to 321 require a considerable reduction in inequalities in wealth and incomes...
...At the outset these require changes in the way we think about ourselves and our institutions...
...Under the maximal interpretation, the members believe that the demos includes all qualified members of the association and all members of the demos are in all relevant characteristics equally qualified with respect to matters requiring collective decisions...
...Because differences like these are readily convertible into political resources, the wide if by no means perfectly equal dispersion of political resources among the demos in the agrarian order was now considerably more concentrated...
...An association that satisfies all five criteria might thus be called afully democratic association in the procedural sense...
...Hence, the potentiality of widespread governmental coercion of the demos or any substantial part of it was perhaps as minimal as it had ever been anywhere among a numerous body of people...
...The guiding criteria against which to measure political performance implied by this interpretation are, in my view, the criteria of procedural democracy, which, together with their most crucial assumptions, constitute what one might call the doctrine of procedural democracy...
...Consider claims advanced on behalf of adults excluded from the demos that they are qualified to participate in American political life...
...For it still remains true that without a strong concentration of political resources in the presidential office, the policies preferred by a majority of citizens and their elected representatives stand a good chance of defeat by a well-entrenched opposition...
...What had recently been a sharply contested possibility thus came to be accepted as pretty much an undebatable aspect of the status quo by the major parties, political leaders, writers and publicists, and (so far as these things can be discerned) the voters themselves...
...Sometime not long after 1800, conflict over the validity of the existing Constitution pretty much recedes and soon hardly an American voice is heard in opposition to it...
...Government ownership is as consistent as private ownership with despotic control of enterprises...
...The second historical commitment, consolidated somewhere between 1800 and 1836 or thereabouts, was to the belief that the only proper constitutional and political system for Americans is a democracy...
...It may not be going too far to say that although the framers were unable to prevent the democratization of the constitutional system, they created a potentially lethal instrument for that democratization in the presidency...
...One further point: probably no one who believes that full procedural democracy is a relevant aspiration thinks that it must hold for all matters, including judgments on highly technical, judicial, and administrative matters 318 of every kind...
...creating a unicameral Congress...
...However, as with the preceding commitments, the main elements of this one soon gained such wide acceptability that opposition to the commitment itself, as distinguished from criticism of specific means, came to be an exercise in political futility...
...It may have been realistic for Rousseau or Jefferson or the framers but it would be profoundly unrealistic today to expect citizens, even highly educated ones, to have enough technical knowledge...
...When the democratic commitment referred to earlier was undertaken, the antimajoritarian constitutional design was not merely preserved but identified with democratic government itself, a confusion that remains all but universal among Americans, as visitors from other democratic countries and teachers of political science to American undergraduates repeatedly discover...
...In this perspective, any large economic enterprise is in principle a public enterprise...
...However, if the commitment to a welfare state has altered, it has not profoundly reduced the two adverse consequences of the corporate capitalist order mentioned a moment ago...
...An important part of this distortion comes out of a series of historical commitments this country has made...
...In order for the preferences of each member of the demos to be equally taken into account, every member must have equal opportunities for expressing preferences, and the grounds for them, throughout the process of collective decisionmaking...
...We might disagree both because the location of the limit at which trade-offs become excessive cannot be satisfactorily described in a precise way, and also because different persons will evaluate the trade-offs differently and thus reach different judgments about the location of the limit...
...Probably none can be shown to be superior to all others in all circumstances...
...Moreover, it seems obvious, though often ignored, that forms of control are not fully determined by forms of ownership...
...This brings us to another consequence of the framers' antimajoritarian design that is unsatisfactory both as a protection for morally inalienable rights and as a device for procedural democracy...
...I believe that the requisites of procedural democracy hold for the people who work in economic enterprises, and that the criteria of procedural democracy ought therefore to be applied to the government of firms...
...Only with the utmost reluctance and in the final hour was the Congress compelled to rediscover in the impeachment process a constitutional means for firing a president guilty of criminal acts...
...Certainly the solutions are not easy to come by, either theoretically or practically...
...The product of this coalition was the fourth historic commitment, which was, of course, to the idea and institutions of a welfare state...
...The criterion of enlightened understanding is not only the most difficult to meet but the most resistant to precise statement...
...Yet that agrarian order was not only a historical rarity, but it had no future...
...Thereafter, the national commitment to the socioeconomic order of corporate capitalism swelled into a current so powerful that opponents could make no headway against it and were swept out of the mainstream of American life...
...The claim was now made that the president was the sole authentic spokesman for and representative of national majorities...
...If one part of the Constitution has proved to be workable, the fact that there was a need for impeachment proved how badly the constitutional system had been working...
...If mankind is spared as much time as separates us from Socrates, or even as brief an interval as separates us from the historical situation that necessarily limited the understanding of Mill, Lincoln, Freud, and Marx, we cannot say what vast transformations human consciousness may undergo...
...Indeed, the constitutional framework hardly provided any other possibility...
...may carry misleading connotations...
...First, the new order generated much greater differences than the old in political resources, skills, and incentives within the demos itself...
...With a people as with a person, it is a sign of wisdom and maturity to understand and accept limits that are imposed by nature's laws and the scarcity of resources, whether physical, human, or political...
...92, no...
...William Livingston, ed., by the University of Texas Press in 1968...
...We need quasi-expert intermediaries spread among the whole body of citizens, so that every citizen has ready access to technical understanding...
...Most of the time all of us are ordinary citizens without a great deal of technical knowledge about such matters...
...Claims may be rejected, justly or unjustly...
...Thus ajudgment that these conditions exist implies a rejection of claims that might be advanced on behalf of a government over the demos on these matters by a putative aristocracy, meritocracy, or governing elite...
...By extraordinary luck, such a social order already existed in the United States...
...By action and inaction, the Congress, the courts, and the demos—cheered on, it has to be said, by political scientists, historians, lawyers, and other intellectual spokesmen who should have known better—all gave their blessing to the 316 emerging imperial presidency...
...First, there is a need for collective decisions that are binding on the members of the association...
...It is partly right because procedures should be judged by the ends they serve...
...Great differences in wealth, income, social esteem, education, occupational skills, and ethnic status now differentiated wage-earners and pieceworkers in industry, ship, mine, and forest---a rising proportion of whom were immigrants--from the middling strata of white-collar and professional people, who for some time to come were predominantly Anglo-American in origins, and these in turn from the opulent few...
...Whenever this is so, some members of the association, who are excluded from the demos, will also be excluded from the rights, opportunities, and protections of procedural democracy...
...But the criticism is mainly wrong in implying that other solutions, particularly solutions that accept the claims of a putative governing elite, are more likely to lead to substantive justice...
...Some Americans may be tempted to conclude that in a world so hazardous, our salvation and that of the world require us to bring the rest of humanity rapidly around to our way of thinking...
...establishing an office of advocacy to represent interests not otherwise adequately represented in or before Congress and the administrative agencies, including future generations...
...This ideological triumph successfully warded off attacks not only from nascent socialist movements opposed to private property in the means of production but also from the historical rear guard defending the old agrarian order, which had at hand no convincing way of distinguishing private ownership and control of one kind of enterprise, the farm, from private ownership and control of a radically different kind, the business corporation...
...Even if all our elected officials were to perform this intermediary role well—and many do not—they would not be enough...
...But if a people were to meet these criteria perfectly and yet meet the criterion of enlightened understanding badly, the democratic process would be irrelevant to their preferences, needs, and interests...
...This was the privately owned and operated business corporation...
...The white males who comprised the demos enjoyed an astounding degree of autonomy in relation to one another and to all governments...
...Again, it may be hard to recapture how bitterly divided Americans were over this issue in the late 1930s...
...Under the agrarian economic order, the pseudodemocratization of the presidency did not matter very much nor would it have gone very far...
...Consequently, whatever may have been the situation in previous centuries, in our own and surely in the next, it is foolish to think that the demos can achieve its purposes without experts...
...The election of 1896 might be taken as the turning point in the victory of the new order over its rivals...
...The fourth and fifth commitments extended the domain of hierarchy even further...
...Perhaps we should consider ourselves lucky that our first two commitments held as well as they did...
...To arrive at a correct answer depends as much on technical as on philosophical or ideological judgments, and perhaps a good deal more...
...Even as late as the Constitutional Convention, the desirability of a representative democracy was a debatable issue...
...By now this proposition needs no documentation beyond what Watergate has furnished us...
...But the commitments still dominate the way we think about ourselves and our future...
...It took national shame, disaster, scandal, and prolonged investigation to make us realize what sort of institution the presidency had become...
...and even if they did, we might disagree about the answers...
...It seems not wildly unrealistic to hope that in the epoch ahead, human consciousness will change profoundly, and that what we might now consider as enlightened understanding, and the best ways to reach it, will be seen by our successors in a vastly different perspective...
...Inequalities in political resources added further to the handicaps of any majority coalition that sought changes in the allocation of privileges and disadvantages...
...This criticism is only partly right in its premise and thoroughly wrong in its conclusion...
...Insofar as all policies have costs and gains and thus influence the distribution of advantages and disadvantages, the policies of a majority (like those of a minority) are likely to be adverse to the interests of some persons...
...Yet few of us would argue that the interests of children, inadequately as they are often protected, would be served better if they were made full voting members of the demos...
...If privately owned enterprise can be justified at all, it must be on the grounds of comparative social effectiveness: that is, of all the possible alternatives, this form provides the greatest social advantage with least social disadvantage...
...Every key word in the criterion as it was presented earlier is ambiguous, and the concepts the words are intended to signify are difficult and complex...
...As with other rights, there is no automatic, self-enforcing determination of the validity of a claim...
...It is not an excessively harsh judgment to say that over three decades the presidency was transformed into a kind of plebiscitary principate with despotic tendencies toward arbitrary, ruthless, and selfaggrandizing exploitation of power...
...We ought to be able to design a way of preserving fundamental rights that is not so biased in favor of existing privilege and against reform...
...Thus the historic commitments soon came to possess all the extraordinary advantages of things as they are and, after a generation or so, as they seem always to have been...
...In order to express preferences accurately, each member of the demos ought to have adequate and equal opportunities for discovering and validating, in the time available, what his or her preferences are on the matter to be decided...
...It is often said that procedural justice, and thus procedural democracy, will not guarantee substantive justice...
...At the same time, however, any broader definition that includes rights inconsistent with these primary rights ought not to be acceptable to us...
...Consequently, we need to make explicit in the doctrine a proposition that has often been omitted or obscured...
...Rather, it pertains to periods in our history in which some alternative possibilities seemed open to the principal historical actors who, however, were in conflict over the relative desirability of the alternatives they perceived...
...but we can hardly say--nor can the framers have intended to say—that every privilege that happens to exist does so by inalienable right...
...These criteria imply the existence of a body of primary rights, the rights necessary, though not sufficient, if a people is to govern itself...
...While it is surely asking too much to expect that most citizens can be experts on many of the issues of national politics, it is not foolish to hope that one day almost every citizen might be sufficiently informed about some of the issues so that a less informed citizen could readily 323 turn to a more informed fellow citizen, a quasi-expert, for a responsible clarification of the matter at hand...
...Thus, the transfer of the Lockean view to the corporation was a double triumph...
...3. The criterion of enlightened understanding...
...Not only is this arrangement inconsistent with procedural democracy but it is arbitrary and unfair in its substantive results...
...But experience suggests that when Americans, or anyone else for that matter, begin to talk about a national mission to save the world, it is time for everyone to run for cover...
...Procedures that do not tend toward good ends cannot be judged good procedures...
...In any case, the range of alternatives this country ought to consider and experiment with is really quite broad and needs a great deal of systematic study...
...An obsession with national security and loyalty fostered secrecy in government, the enormous expansion of domestic spying, the harassment of radicals, and other excrescences...
...The conflict among them became overt, bitter, sometimes prolonged, and in one way or another finally came to involve a substantial number of citizens...
...Even so, as a world power things were done and widely thought to be justified that surely would have been condemned as unjustifiable in less paranoid circumstances...
...Ignoring for a moment the contradictions described earlier, these may be interpreted as an aspiration toward a society with a political system in which liberty, equality, and justice would jointly prosper, a society therefore requiring also a socioeconomic system that would foster these ends by supporting the kind of polity necessary to them...
...It is said further, however, that as a consequence substantive justice should take priority over procedural justice and therefore over procedural democracy...
...Adequate knowledge of means and ends requires an understanding not only of the external world but also of the inner world of the self...
...During this time a number of alternatives to the new order—agrarianism, anarchism, socialism, individually owned consumers' and producers' cooperatives, selective government ownership and operation, economic regulation, limits on corporate size, monetary schemes, enforced competition, and many others—were thrust forward, debated, and finally pretty much defeated...
...1-20...
...No matter what it does, this country alone cannot ensure a successful outcome to that race, though we can by our own unaided mistakes cause a fatal outcome...
...Any government that satisfies all four criteria might be called a full procedural democracy...
...Yet the Lockean justification of property makes no sense, it was suggested earlier, when it is applied to the large modern business corporation...
...To protect the rights, needs, and interests of children, we must rely not on procedural democracy but on the strength of adult feelings toward children of love, nurturance, pity, joy, compassion, and hope, and on laws and practices that these feelings may foster...
...Yet some of the most acute hardships and injustices generated in the socioeconomic order were to be removed or alleviated by government actions—mainly by the federal government...
...It goes without saying, of course, that the world is full of the most acute dangers to human progress and even to human survival...
...To become fully operative with respect to any association, the doctrine of procedural democracy presupposes a judgment that at least two conditions exist among some set of persons who constitute or intend to constitute an association...
...Suppose, finally, that we resolved to move toward procedural democracy by reducing obstacles to it, at any rate up to some limit at which the trade-offs in other values became excessive...
...If we in this country are to reduce the gap between criteria and performance in a large way, we shall have to make changes of great moment...
...Consequently what has already become standard practice in advanced countries in this century will, one hopes, be taken for granted by citizens in advanced societies in the 21st century: a complex society cannot protect the rights, needs, and interests of its people with one single, prevailing form of economic organization but requires instead a network of enterprises organized in many different combinations of internal government, external controls, and ownership...
...Although democracy mainly meant adhering to democratic procedures in the operation of the government, it also carried with it notions of a larger society within which social and economic conditions would favor the high degree of political, social, and economic equality necessary to democracy...
...Endowed with legitimacy deriving both from constitutional interpretation and democratic ideology, the presidency became the institutional center from which a majority coalition, if there was to be one at all, would be mobilized, organized, and given voice...
...What is more, the other major political actors, including the Congress, the Supreme Court, the parties, the electorate, and the most active and attentive political strata all collaborated in that transformation...
...This is true...
...The difficulty of arriving at knowledge of this kind points directly to the most challenging of the criteria of procedural democracy, the criterion of enlightened understanding...
...The decision rule for determining outcomes must equally take into account the preferences of each member of the demos as to the outcome...
...In this sense, the framers were liberals and 312 republicans though they were not democrats...
...As the doctrine is interpreted here, the demos defines itself...
...The criteria of political equality and effective participation are intended to ensure that citizens have a final say as to the goals that effectively determine the ends of public policy, and whenever they wish, a final say as to the means as well...
...It is a very different matter with adults, among whom these feelings are ordinarily much too weak to ensure adequate protection for those who may be excluded from the demos...
...Without seriously qualifying, much less abandoning their universal norms, they nonetheless created a government that would demand obedience to its laws from a majority of adults—women, nonwhites, and some white males---who were excluded from active participation in making those laws, whether directly or through their elected representatives...
...What is a desirable form of ownership ought to be viewed, at least in part, as subordinate to and dependent on a judgment as to what is a desirable form of control...
...Their reasoned justification of a right to property, if they held one, would no doubt have been Lockean...
...Thus interpreted, these two commitments would give priority to political ends over economic ends, to liberty, equality, and justice over efficiency, prosperity, and growth, a priority that the commitment to corporate capitalism reversed both in ideology and in practice, and that has remained reversed down to our own day...
...In a further irony, constitutional language and interpretation had left a substantial gap in the framers' imposing array of checks and balances...
...This criterion thus implies that any putatively democratic government ought to be evaluated according to the opportunities it furnishes for the acquisition of knowledge of ends and means, of oneself and other selves, by the demos...
...Given these suppositions, what changes would we make...
...Within limits, the strength of each of the five commitments seems to wax and wane...
...Their political resources, and the opportunities and incentives for using them should the need arise, were vast in comparison with the weak coercive means available to any of the American governments...
...And even if some important reforms were carried out, mainly with respect to civil rights, these decades were on the whole unfavorable to reform, and certainly to any changes that might seem to question the validity of our historic commitments...
...Few of these can be dismissed a priori as unsuitable...
...The prior commitment to private ownership and control of economic enterprises, and thus to corporate capitalism, was mainly upheld...
...Even after the shame and disaster of Vietnam, there is not really much likelihood of our renouncing our position as a world power, though the way we use our position and power cannot possibly be to everyone's liking or, alas, to everyone's benefit, and could easily be as harmful to ourselves and others once again as it has been in the recent past...
...So far we have tried only the first...
...There is the liberal argument that certain rights are so fundamental to the attainment of human goals, needs, interests, and fulfillment that governments must never be allowed to derogate from them...
...It exists not by private right but only to meet social goals...
...In this sense we Americans may at last be entering into our maturity...
...However, even if it might well be impossible to define the criterion so rigorously as to specify quite precisely what we would regard as a condition of satisfactory fulfillment, it is a much less difficult task to judge when the criterion is not satisfactorily met and what some of the obstacles are...
...The upshot was that the quite exceptional degree of autonomy the farmer members of the demos had enjoyed under the old order, an autonomy vis-A-vis both government and one another, was now granted to the corporation...
...The doctrine of procedural democracy holds that for any putatively democratic government, collective decision-making by the demos should satisfy at least three criteria: 1. The criterion of political equality...
...ANY government that satisfies these criteria, and only such a government, is procedurally democratic in relation to its demos...
...Under the minimal interpretation, no members of the association are in any relevant characteristic so clearly more qualified as to justify their making the decision for all the others on the matter at hand...
...Moreover, in order to achieve its gains, the welfare state needed extensive governmental bureaucracies...
...Consider the liberal thrust of the first historic commitment, to the preservation of morally inalienable rights...
...What follows is a very brief and incomplete account of that doctrine...
...As only one example, the presidential veto has generally been used for purposes no loftier than simply to prevent the adoption of policies disliked by the president and the political coalition whose interests he seeks to advance...
...For example, any judgment that the conditions for a putatively democratic government exist among some set of persons asserts a right to a government that satisfies the criteria of procedural democracy...
...Thus by an extraordinary ideological sleight of hand, the corporation took on the legitimacy of the farmer's home, tools, and land, and what he produced out of his land, labor, ingenuity, anguish, planning, forbearance, sacrifice, risk, and hope...
...A historical commitment in the context of this article is nothing neat, tidy, wholly selfconscious, broadly understood, much less agreed to by all, nor a well-shaped historical drama with a clear beginning, a middle, and an end...
...If by 1900 or so this country was committed to corporate capitalism, aspects of the new order nonetheless remained at issue...
...Of course, not everyone accepts these suppositions...
...If ownership and control of corporate enterprise are matters of secondary not primary right, then the mere assertion of a right to private property does not provide a rational justification for private ownership of a large economic enterprise...
...Two consequences of this new order were particularly adverse to democracy...
...If we abandon the absurdities in extending Locke on private property to ownership or control of the modern business corporation, then the rights of owners must be seen as secondary in relation to the primary rights that are necessary to self-government...
...To be sure, from the New Deal onward the commitment to a welfare state helped to reduce the autonomy of economic enterprises...
...324...
...This criterion implies, then, that any putatively democratic government ought to be evaluated according to the opportunities it provides for, or the costs it imposes on, expression and participation by the demos...
...If we want to move a bit closer toward the best standards to which we are already committed by our national experience, a good way to start is not so much by trying to change others as by changing ourselves...
...Earlier, when the framers had discussed their fears about majorities that might invade the rights of minorities, more often than not they mentioned rights to property...
...Instead, one might propose a very different approach...
...The expression "historical commitment" This article is reprinted, with permission, from the Political Science Quarter/v (Spring 1977, vol...
...However, democratizing the Constitution required a transformation that some of the framers had feared and had sought to prevent...
...In the long run, as we know, Congress failed to uphold its claim, and the claims made on behalf of the presidency pretty much won out...
...Unfortunately, designing a constitution is very far from an exact science...
...Finally, it is said that procedural democracy is in any case too anemic in its standards to compel us toward the robust aspirations of our nobler selves, for it speaks only to process and thus says nothing about the content of a good society...
...Probably no association that has ever attempted to constitute a government for a state has admitted children into the demos...
...To reject these claims, as American policy and practice did, was in effect to deny that full procedural democracy ought to exist in the United States...
...This article will focus on five historical commitments this country has made to goals that are in some respects incompatible and will condemn us to a confused sense of national purpose unless and until we recognize these conflicts and decide on our priorities...
...To be sure, none of this implies a direct answer to the question of how a large enterprise should be organized, controlled, or owned...
...Questions about these social goals, and the comparative advantages and disadvantages of different forms, are properly in the public domain, matters for public discussion, choice, and decision, to be determined collectively by processes that satisfy the criteria of procedural democracy...
...I suggested earlier that this country's commitment to corporate capitalism resulted in at least two such adverse consequences...
...During the harsh struggles over the new socioeconomic order that was to replace it, Americans who wished to retain the old order were the most numerous, persistent, and politically successful opponents of the new...
...Perhaps it may prove possible by regulation to reduce the direct and indirect impact on political equality, effective participation, and political understanding of vast differences in income and wealth, but the record so far is dispiriting...
...In time, however, one set of advocates won out...
...The contest that eventuated in the triumph of the new order over the old dominated American political life through the last three decades of the 19th century...
...Far from diminishing hierarchy, therefore, even in the course of regulating economic enterprise the welfare state has multiplied the number, domain, and scope of hierarchies in American life...
...Even if these are never fully controlled by official hierarchies or, for that matter, by anyone else, they do provide an ambitious president with very considerable political resources—far beyond anything the framers ever dreamed of--for persuasion, inducement, manipulation, and coercion...
...This criterion implies that the procedures and performance of any putatively democratic government ought to be evaluated according to the extent to which the preferences of every member of the demos are given weight in collective decisions, particularly on matters members think are important to them...
...Moreover, we might agree on the need to preserve fundamental rights against government without necessarily agreeing on what these rights should be...
...As an active world power, the country had need—at first quite suddenly—of a large military establishment, thus still another hierarchy, even more rigidly hierarchical than the rest, one perhaps even more difficult to control, yet available to the president for executing foreign and military policies that could be, as events were to show, the arbitrary and personal expressions of a chief executive whose decisions on these matters were for all practical purposes beyond the control of Congress, the courts, or the demos...
...Surely, it is far from being satisfactorily attained in this country and elsewhere...
...The Doctrine of Procedural Democracy IF WE WERE now to search for a perspective on our potentialities as a people that would not be distorted either by self-glorification or self-hatred, that recognized our capacities for great evil, great good, and plain mediocrity, and discerned in the conflicting commitments of our past that weigh heavily on our present some criteria of excellence against which to measure our achievements in the future, where would we begin...
...310 Five American Commitments THE FIRST commitment was the one this country made to a liberal political and constitutional order that gave primacy to the protection of certain political and civil rights among its citizens...
...Now that impeachment has been used successfully and shown to be effective and salubrious, it is not too much to hope that the machinery will be kept oiled and ready for use...
...Second, in order to achieve their goal of preserving a set of inalienable rights superior to the majority principle---a goal many of us would surely share---the framers deliberately created a framework of government that was carefully designed to impede and even prevent the operation of majority rule...
...A number of other countries that place fewer barriers in the way of majority rule than exist under our political system manage to preserve at least as high a standard of political liberty, with less procedural unfairness...
...The evidence seems to show that what appear to be great changes in levels of taxation and transfer payments have not much reduced the inequalities in the distribution of wealth and income and thus the relative political advantage or disadvantage associated, at least loosely, with access to these resources...
...If doctrine and practice were to treat these primary rights as inalienable, then all claims to rights inconsistent with these primary rights would be subject to final determination by the ordinary processes of collective decision-making, and thus by voters, representatives, and legislators...
...Although the whole colonial period was crucial to the development of sentiment favoring that commitment, the most active stage might be conveniently if rather arbitrarily placed somewhere between 1776 and 1800 or thereabouts...
...Because the demos is inclusive, the criteria of procedural democracy apply to all the adults...
...314 As for the members of the excluded majority, their very exclusion from political rights meant that they could not successfully appeal to the government to prevent private or public coercion, unless they happened to have the support of a majority of white males, and not necessarily even then if a substantial minority in the demos opposed the change sought by or in behalf of the disfranchised...
...By making ownership the only, or at 315 least primary, source of legitimate control over corporate decisions, the new order not only excluded democratic controls in the internal government of the enterprise but placed powerful ideological barriers against the imposition of external controls by a government that, for all its deficiencies, was much more democratic than were the governments of business firms...
...To hold otherwise would be to deny that, taken all around, citizens are roughly equally qualified to make judgments on matters involving secondary rights...
...Needs and Prospects SUPPOSE WE WERE to interpret our first two historic commitments, taken together and, after eliminating the inconsistencies as a commitment to procedural democracy...
...Before turning to the implications of this doctrine for the United States, let us consider several objections...
...As we have seen, this country's commitment to democracy came after and not before the formation and adoption of the Constitution...
...Democracy only for general ends and meritocracy for means will soon become meritocracy for both means and ends...
...Rights asserted usually have to be fought for...
...Judgments have to be made, and among a large number of people such judgments will rarely be unanimous...
...To do so requires a fourth criterion, that of inclusiveness: the demos ought to include all adults who are obliged to obey the rules of the association...
...Yet the conditions and criteria contained in the doctrine of procedural democracy are very rich in their implications for rights...
...An agrarian order that historically speaking was extraordinarily congenial to democracy was now displaced by a new socioeconomic order of corporate capitalism that was much less compatible...
...Thus one consequence of the framers' institutional design was to channel the process of democratizing the Constitution into transforming the presidency, a process that was not to end, if it has yet ended, before that office became what lately has been variously called an elective monarchy, an imperial presidency, a plebiscitary chief executive, and other epithets still harsher...
...The point is, however, that the elaborate system of checks and balances, separation of powers, constitutional federalism, and other institutional arrangements influenced by these structures and the constitutional views they reflect are both adverse to the majority principle, and in that sense to democracy, and yet arbitrary and unfair in the protection they give to rights...
...Now the matter of what ought to constitute inalienable rights beyond the reach of any government and the proper relationship between such rights and democratic procedures are questions far too complex to examine here...
...Although this assertion contradicts a nearly universal dogma held on all sides, it is readily demonstrable by even the briefest consideration of the range of alternatives...
...To understand these changes in the presidency it is important to keep in mind that for the better part of two generations this country was involved in war, near-war, war crisis, or cold war...
...Because they succeeded in designing a system that makes it easier for privileged minorities to prevent changes they dislike than for majorities to bring about the changes they want, it is strongly tilted in favor of the status quo and against reform...
...But of course to bring about such changes meets precisely the obstacle to change just mentioned, the antimajoritarian bias of the constitutional and political system...
...We might begin near the beginning, with our first two commitments...
...But since practically any public policy will infringe upon someone's existing privileges and thus give rise to a claim that a right has been diminished, if citizens are held to be incompetent on all matters involving secondary rights, what matters are they qualified to decide...
...The third historic commitment was to change the distribution of resources so favorable to the demos...
...For if people regularly choose means that impede rather than facilitate attaining their goals, or if they invariably choose goals that damage their deeper needs, then of how much value is the process...
...The irony is, then, that the first and second historic commitments taken in their entirety endow us with a political system in which any majority coalition supporting changes adverse to existing privileges is likely to succeed only if the presidency has access to a concentration of political resources great enough to make the office a standing danger to majority rule and procedural democracy itself...
...As long as the primary rights necessary to procedural democracy exist, then all political rights exist that are necessary if a people is to govern itself...
...Three decades of war would be enough, one might think, to undermine a weaker republic...
...We can begin with the Constitution itself, the political system it helped to form, and the political ideas and beliefs embedded in and strengthened by the constitutional and political system...
...The small family-owned and -operated farm that was modal if not universal in the agrarian order was now displaced by one of the most radical innovations that mankind has ever invented for economic organization, control, and growth...
...This set of persons is confronted by a matter that would be disadvantageous to leave entirely to individual action or to choices made exclusively through a market, and comparatively advantageous to make collectively and enforce on the members...
...In practice, then, the excluded groups had little protection against oppression...
...It is not as if a president uses the veto only when a majority coalition threatens the inalienable rights of a minority...
...This is rarely a better short-run solution and practically always worse in the longer run...
...Moreover, taken over any considerable period of time the evidence does not show that these minority vetoes constitute a defense of primary rights...
...Thus if the demos is to retain final control over ends, citizens will also need responsible and responsive intermediariesquasiexperts—to help them hold experts accountable, and to gain an adequate understanding of their own basic rights, needs, and interests, and of the policies best designed to satisfy these needs...
...Orthodox as this commitment now seems, one who did not live through that period may find it difficult to recapture how intense, bitter, and at times violent was the conflict over the inauguration of a welfare state by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal...
...creating randomly selected citizen assemblies parallel with the major standing committees of the Congress to analyze policy and make recommendations...
...Think of the complexities of current policy decisions: breeder reactor, B-I, Trident, Middle East, catalytic converter, inflation/ unemployment trade-offs, rate of increase in the money supply, costs and administrative problems of alternative health care arrangements, SST, Amtrak, limitations on artificial losses, outer continental shelf...
...In this article I have drawn freely from a lecture, "Liberal Democracy in the United States," delivered at the University of Texas, February 25, 1976, to be published in The Prospects for Liberal Democracy...
...The difficulty is that the grounds are not at all clear on which the distinction between primary and secondary, or inalienable and 319 alienable rights, is to be made and justified...
...Impediments to Democracy CERTAIN IMPEDIMENTS to the realization of democracy in the United States have resulted from the other historic commitments...
...Consequently, the framers could not and did not agree to establish a representative democracy...
...Given the nature of the Senate and even of the House, the claim on behalf of the presidency was plausible, and one that the defenders of Congress found hard to rebut...
...It is questionable whether the best political scientists, or for that matter citizens drawn from any source, have the knowledge and skills to excel the performance of the framers...
...So profound is its acceptance, in fact, that the great constitutional quarrels to follow were not so much over the validity of the Constitution as over its meaning, assuming its unquestioned validity...
...They could and did agree to establish a representative republic with a framework of government that would, as they believed, rest on popular consent and yet ensure as best they knew how the preservation of certain basic rights to life, liberty, and property that they held to be morally inalienable...
...But in addition there is the American constitutional argument that the highly specific, indeed unique, set of political arrangements embodied in our constitutional and political practices is necessary to preserve these rights...
...No president should ever again forget that he or she is anything other than the chief executive officer of a democratic republic...
...rather, they tend to ensure the triumph of secondary rights or privileges over primary rights...
...2. The criterion of effective participation...
...institutionalizing adversary processes in policy decisions...
...And that is a source of difficulty, for the commitments are in some ways incompatible...
...Yet nothing has changed in the fundamental institutional structure itself to reduce the pressures toward the pseudodemocratization of the presidency...
...But even with the whole weight of tradition on their side, they and their occasional allies were unable to prevent the displacement of the old agrarian order by a new order based on commercial and industrial capitalism, in which the ideal engine of economic production and growth was no longer to be the privately owned family farm but the privately owned commercial, financial, or industrial corporation...
...But it has never been clear what rights are to be understood as inalienable or primary, and what rights are secondary and alienable, and hence must yield when they conflict with primary rights...
...Thus if socialism was unpopular, reform was not...
...And except for the limited effects of trade unions among a minority segment of the labor force, the American commitment to a welfare state has not done much to alter the hierarchical structures of corporate government under which so many Americans live...
...Now if children are excluded from the demos because they are judged to be unqualified, and yet are subject to the laws, then of course they are governed without their consent...
...Yet even in the best of circumstances experts are hard to control...
...While I accept the liberal argument, the American constitutional argument seems to me seriously defective...
...Because the demos defines itself, it need not include all the members of the association who are obliged to obey its rules...
...As a result, from time to time regulatory laws won out in particular states and occasionally, as with Wilson's New Freedom, even in the federal government...
...Nonetheless, it is possible to specify some directions in which changes are needed...
...Thereafter, the issues so fiercely contested ceased to be salient in American political life...
...Decisions as to means can also determine ends...
...It is absurd to regard as inalienable one's right to buy and thereafter own shares in ITT, and it approaches the ridiculous to argue that because one owns shares in ITT one possesses 320 an inalienable and exclusive, if in practice quite useless, right to choose the directors of the firm, and that the primary legal obligation of the directors and management is, by a legal extension of the original doctrine, to protect the interests of owners above those of any other claimants...
...More perhaps than at any time in some millions of years, the prospects of humankind depend on the outcome of a perilous race in which the growth of an enlightened understanding of ourselves and our universe is pitted against the consequences of actions taken out of ignorance or misunderstanding of our most fundamental needs and interests...
...By regulatory devices of various kinds it also reduced the autonomy and thus the arbitrary and sometimes despotic power of the rulers of economic enterprises...
...From a moral perspective, the consequences seem arbitrary and quite lacking in a principled justification...
...Second, among the persons obligated to abide by collective decisions on this matter, there is a subset, the demos, whose members are roughly equally qualified, taken all around...
...To this extent, democracy was necessarily marginal to the actual political system in which the members of the demos lived their daily lives...
...Yet as with the problem of inclusion, there is an exceptionally tricky problem here, one that can be dealt with only summarily in this article by stipulating a fifth criterion, that of final control by the demos ("popular sovereignty...
...That is, the scope, domain, and procedures for making decisions other than by full procedural democracy are subject to decisions made by full procedural democracy...
...These hardships were real enough to ensure a following for a politician who advocated reform—at any rate so long as he did not 311 attack the basic commitment to private ownership, whereupon his following would shrink into the futilities of minor party politics...
...In a loose and general way, it is obvious that if people are to know their preferences, they need knowledge both of means and ends...
...Successive presidents plunged through and widened this gap...
...Probably we do not even know how best to proceed toward the cultivation of the knowledge and skills of constitution-making that we or our successors may one day be expected to provide...
...that approach has largely failed...
...Obviously, an assertion never establishes the validity of a claim...
...one is eroded here and another grows firmer there...
...creating a collegial chief executive...
...The only question we need to ask, then, is whether a privately owned corporation is more effective in achieving our social purposes, including procedural democracy, than all the possible alternatives to it...
...This was an agrarian society where, in an economy predominantly of family farms, the adult white male citizens lived with fewer social, economic, and political inequalities than any large number of persons in history that had existed up to this time, and very likely since...
...317 A government of any association in which these conditions are judged to exist is, on these matters, a putatively democratic government in relation to its demos...
...In choosing among the large number of possible combinations available in any particular instance, however, citizens of a country committed to procedural democracy would obviously want to avoid consequences adverse to procedural democracy...
...Let us now turn back to the fourth and fifth historic commitments of the United States mentioned earlier...
...All five of these historic commitments remain strong...
...Yet the advocates of an American role as an active world power were riding an overpowering current of events that swept along most of their opponents and swamped the rest or left the few survivors stranded far behind the main body of American opinion...
...This was the commitment to play an international role as a world power...
...they intended to establish a liberal framework of government, though it could be, and later was, democratized to a degree that, for a time, would astonish the world...
...The criterion of enlightened understanding beckons us forward but it cannot tell us what we shall discover...
...Yet there is this strong bias against majorities in the political system the framers helped to create...
...Even before the main battles of the New Deal were finished, conflict had begun over what was to be the fifth historic commitment...
...If we are now on, or past, the threshold at which claims are finally accepted as valid, then we are also obliged to accept the criteria of procedural democracy as valid measures of our national performance...
...Even socialists, who in Britain and Europe gained greater support as industrial capitalism expanded, remained a small and largely uninfluential minority in the United States...
...Through a highly successful case of ideological transfer, the Lockean defense of private property, which in the agrarian order made good sense morally and politically, was shifted over intact to corporate enterprise...
...In this sense our consciousness, both individual and collective, distorts our understanding of ourselves and our possibilities...
...Such rights are assumed to be beyond the reach of government, and superior to any claims to other rights that conflict with them...
...Rhetorical assertions that seem to make procedural democracy the only proper method of making decisions have again and again been shown to be illusory and self-defeating...
...In their 313 effort to protect basic rights, what the framers did in effect was to hand out extra chips in the game of politics to people who are already advantaged, while they handicapped the disadvantaged who would like to change the status quo...
...The majority of adults were thus provided with as little opportunity to give their active consent to the laws that they were bound to obey as their colonial predecessors had enjoyed under laws enacted by the English Parliament...
...Second, because the internal government of the corporation was not itself democratic but hierarchical and often despotic, the rapid expansion of this revolutionary form of economic enterprise meant that an increasing proportion of the demos would live out their working lives, and most of their daily existence, not within a democratic system but instead within a hierarchical structure of subordination...
...Widespread hardships were engendered by an economy with as little public control as the dominant political coalition demanded...
...If dissenters continued to fight rearguard actions, they were few in number and on the margins of American politics, public attention, and political acceptability...
...Tocqueville was not the first observer nor would he be the last, though he may have been the most gifted, to see how marvelously the agrarian society fostered a condition of equality among the citizens, or rather among the white males...
...Yet for 200 years after the lovely universalistic phrases of the Declaration, the wellsprings of American national life were poisoned by the denial of claims to full citizenship, and by the injustice and oppression this denial entailed...
...The answer must be open-ended because at any given moment human consciousness is necessarily limited by itself, that is, by its own condition...
...For to claim a right inconsistent with the primary rights necessary to procedural democracy is to deny the validity of procedural democracy and thus the capacity and right of a people to govern itself...
...I. pp...
...But the country's commitment to only a modest interference by government in the conduct of corporate capitalism was more accurately reflected by the administrations of McKinley, Taft, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, and by Theodore Roosevelt's bombastic style and ineffectual policies—speak loudly but carry a small stick—than by the brief interlude of reform during Wilson's first term...
...The fifth commitment, of course, compounded these consequences adverse to democracy...
...That is, no member of this qualified subset, or demos, believes that any other member of the association or any subset of persons different from the demos is significantly more qualified than the demos to arrive at a correct choice with respect to matters requiring collective decisions...
...As we all know, it took the trauma of the Great Depression finally to convert a hitherto oppositional minority into a majority coalition...
...The form of control should be treated as a problem that is prior to the question of the form of ownership...
...It might free our consciousness for greater political creativity if we were to see those commitments more clearly, to understand better how they conflict with one another, and to choose self-consciously rather than blindly among our possible futures...
...It is time—long past time—to consider the other approach...
...The political system the framers helped bring into existence was in at least two major respects defective by democratic criteria...
...But a reasonable claim can be made for each of many other possibilities...
...By protecting the rights of workers to join unions and bargain collectively with employers, the New Deal helped to democratize some aspect of some enterprises for some employees...
...If we were to take into account only the most obvious possibilities with respect to the internal government of enterprises, external controls, markets, prices, and the locus of ownership together with the rights and obligations of owners, we would quickly arrive at a very large array of theoretically possible combinations...
...This is one of the most tricky and difficult aspects of democratic theory and practice...
...Thus the justifiable effort to strengthen the majority principle in a constitutional system that was designed to impede it has led not to democratization of the Constitution but rather to the pseudodemocratization of the presidency...
...We fail not so much because our aspirations are too high but because they conflict...
...Such claims as could remain would constitute the very essence of healthy controversy—controversies that are properly adjudicated by means of procedural democracy and not by yielding to the claims of a putative governing elite or allowing a minority to impose its views on a majority...
Vol. 25 • July 1978 • No. 3
