Government by Rabble-Rousing

...This article by Will Herberg explores a new threat to our constitutional democracy, n threat which cuts across party and sectional lines to the heart of our representative government...

...And, by and large, their hopes and expectations were not falsified in the century-and-a-half that followed the ratification of the Constitution...

...The same individual, in his trade-union committee or business group, is usually a very different kind of person from what he becomes when he is caught up in the mob...

...But how different is the situation that has emerged in the past quarter of a century...

...McCarthyism" is the logical outcome of the system of government by rabble-rousing initiated in the first years of the New Deal—only, in "McCarthyism," the rabble-rouser is not a cultured and aristocratic gentleman, but a crude and rather primitive plebeian, not a Pericles but a Cleon...

...That possibility came with the radio in the Twenties, just in time for Franklin Delano Roosevelt to make use of it...

...On the other hand, it was now possible for the man on top to bypass constitutional channels and appeal, over the head of the Constitution, so to speak, to the entire people for the authority he needed, or felt he needed, to deal with the emergency in a direct and expeditious manner...

...Roosevelt's "fireside chats...

...in part, however—in major part, perhaps—it was a development of the British constitutional experience, on which Jeffersonians no less than Hamiltonians were eager to build...

...there is nothing to offset or check it...

...Truman inherited and made use of it, though his talents did not run that way, since his approach was rather that of the old-line machine politician...

...And so the "liberal" becomes ever more foolish and irrelevant, and leaves himself open to a suspicion of worse, while the "nationalist" becomes ever more crude and primitive, exhibiting modes of behavior that arouse very disturbing memories of the recent past...

...Roosevelt came to the Presidency under a fateful collocation of circumstances—an acute emergency demanding prompt action and the means at hand (radio) by which the people could be roused to empower such action...

...In a way, Kefauver with his "television show" may be said to have begun it, and it has spread like wildfire...

...it is also destructive of the particularity of interest groups and group interests...

...Rabble-rousing and totalitarianism have an inner bond, a fact to which the history of recent times, as well as of ancient Greece and Rome, testifies...

...Let us recognize that the new situation requires a new semantics...

...Government by Rabble-Rousing Checks and balances of our constitutional system are subverted by 'direct democracy' By Will Herberg The dreary debate over "McCarthyism" goes on, if debate it can be called...

...To revert to our former example, the same character who foamed at the mouth and screamed for blood under Antony's rabble-rousing, was, when associated with his friends and colleagues in a ward or guild meeting, probably a sober and responsible citizen, concerned with promoting his particular group interest but also not oblivious to larger concerns and obligations...

...The "nationalists," on the other side, exalt McCarthy and gloat at his triumphs in rabble-rousing...

...We need a new conservatism dedicated to the conservation of the American constitutional tradition of freedom and order and unalterably opposed to government by rabble-rousing from whatever direction it may come...

...The mob is not only destructive of individuality and individual responsibility...

...The burgeoning forces of mass-democracy were not long in appearing...

...It develops into a vicious circle in which, sooner or later, everyone is caught up who desires to be effective in politics on a large scale...

...McCarthy, like Roosevelt, wants action and goes directly to the people to get it...

...All I am saying is that Mr...

...Between the two, the real problem of "McCarthyism," if this word (incidentally of Communist coinage) has any meaning at all, is completely obscured...

...This fact, incidentally, was one upon which the Founding Fathers counted a great deal for the preservation of the constitutional system they were establishing...

...He rouses the "rabble" for direct action, in contempt of constitutional channels and procedures...

...The intricate constitutional system of checks and balances, of the separation and distribution of power, was exhibiting signs of a certain slowness in adapting itself to the situation, and many people under strain were growing impatient with it...

...indeed, they made themselves felt increasingly through the nineteenth century, coming to expression in a more or less confused way at certain critical points...

...The mob in the Roman forum whom Brutus and Antony alternately swayed to wild and destructive courses was presumably made up of men who, taken individually, were decent, sensible people, no worse and no better than the average, and so was the mob in the Athenian agora...

...he appeals to the people to swamp the White House with letters and telegrams...

...Government by rabble-rousing in the first years of the Roosevelt regime was justified by the urgent necessities of the crisis...

...they were to elect their representatives in Congress and the President in the White House, and in constitutional manner hold them to responsibility...

...And as it goes on, it becomes ever drearier, ever more senseless, ever more discreditable to the parties involved...

...Let it be clear that I am not imputing sinister motives to Mr...

...Liberals" scream their heads off against McCarthy, but they chortle with glee when one of their particular heroes does a "McCarthy" on his own...

...Reinhold Niebuhr and Peter Viereck are not very far apart in their feeling for a responsible neo-Burkean conservatism, and it is not without significance that one of the few recent protests against what I have called government by rabble-rousing comes from a liberal journal ("Government by Bombshell," editorial by Max Ascoli, the Reporter, December 8, 1953...

...The situation is by no means a cheerful one from the point of view of those who prize freedom and order...

...Ascoli says in the editorial to which I refer, "conservatism today—hardhitting conservatism against the radical subversion that is on the rampage...

...I do not pretend to know the precise meaning of this celebrated formula, but I do know that suspicion of "direct democracy" implies no distrust of the individual American citizen...

...The pro-McCarthy "nationalists," on the other hand, have an easy time exposing and ridiculing the "liberal" hysteria about hysteria, but in their excitement they are rapidly losing all sense of proportion and are rendering themselves incapable of making the most elementary distinctions—such as the distinction between the Communist entrapper and the dupes he entraps, between the Communist and the ex-Communist, between conspiracy and heresy...

...A mob is unlimited and total...

...It becomes even more depressing when we realize that government by rabble-rousing, once initiated, feeds on itself, since it is to no one's interest—even if it were in his power—to curb it...

...the story of American politics refutes any such notion...

...The one thing the Founding Fathers were intent upon avoiding, as much as the absolutism of a monarch, was irresponsible mass-democracy, direct rule by the masses...

...but that is really incidental —their primary political function is to rouse the masses and to keep them in a state of permanent turmoil...

...The "radical subversion" here indicated is not the subversive activities of the Communists (the Communists are, after all, a Soviet "fifth column," forming no part of American public life, and should be dealt with as such)—the "radical subversion" here indicated is the radical subversion of our American constitutional democracy through government by rabble-rousing...

...Roosevelt was a cultured and public-spirited man, very different from a crude rabble-rouser such as Huey Long...

...Indeed, the Eisenhower Administration has carried the political "television show" to a new degree of technical perfection under the guidance of the public-relations experts who play such an important part in its councils...

...There are signs of a genuine realignment in American political thinking that cuts across and renders obsolete the old distinctions...

...What the Founding Fathers strove to set up (and here Hamilton and Jefferson, Adams and Madison were at one) was a system of government that would avoid arbitrary despotism on the one side and unrestrained "direct democracy" on the other...

...For, in the last analysis, our repugnance to "direct democracy" is due not merely to the fact that it is so utterly opposed to the American constitutional tradition...

...Do you remember Mr...

...This, in part at least, was the operational secret of the Roosevelt regime, particularly in the earlier years...

...Today, government by rabble-rousing is the accepted thing, superimposed upon, but never really able to coexist with, our traditional structure of constitutional democracy...

...When McCarthy wants a change in the Administration's foreign policy, he does not, as Senator, raise it for deliberation in the Senate...

...But how far different is that from the mode of operation of the Roosevelt regime in the 1930s...

...In its "pure" form, "direct democracy" knows nothing and will tolerate nothing but the demagogue on top and the atomized, anonymous mob at the bottom...

...That is in good part the meaning of the American Constitution...

...At the same time, through radio and later television, it became possible for one man in authority to address virtually the entire people, almost face to face, as the Greek demagogue had done in the agora and the Roman demagogue in the forum...

...At no point was the people, in the sense of the mass of Americans, to enter directly into the governmental process...

...This wisdom is voided by the regime of government by rabble-rousing...

...McCarthy, like Roosevelt, is impatient with the restraints and limitations of what are called proper constitutional channels...

...For the real problem goes beyond both "liberal" and "nationalist," beyond both McCarthy and Truman, beyond both the New York Post and the American Mercury...

...A mob is something very different from the individuals who compose it, as everyone at all acquainted with politics or psychology should know...

...When Roosevelt wanted to get some legislation put through, he virtually bypassed Congress and appealed directly to the people...

...but so were Pericles and Julius Caesar cultured and public-spirited men, and yet they operated a system of "direct democracy" through rabble-rousing with results to which history is witness...

...These investigatory committees have done much useful, indeed indispensable, work...

...they remembered Caesar and Antony haranguing the mob in the Roman forum...

...The temper and integrity with which the political fight is waged," Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in The New Leader of January 4, "is more important for the health of a society than any particular policy...

...What did that mean if not that Congress had ceased to be a deliberative assembly and that the legislative process had virtually been taken over by "direct democracy...

...Here is where "McCarthyism" comes in...

...In part, this constitutional structure was the "invention" of the Founding Fathers...

...What is needed today is a good, sound, responsible conservatism...

...Our economic, political and social system suddenly found itself, in the years following World War I and particularly after 1929, under pressures and demands without precedent in our history...

...Even Congress is turning itself into a kind of rabble-rouser...

...we are beginning to discover many hitherto unsuspected virtues in the old-line machine politician as our experience with the new-line rabble-rouser grows...

...They did not intend to permit a repetition of that kind of thing in the republic they were founding...

...They therefore fixed on an intricate structure of representative government, in which the affairs of the nation would be administered responsibly by various agencies, each with its appropriate powers and limitations, and each required at some point to give an accounting of itself to the citizenry...

...The public, even the once sympathetic pro-liberal public, has just about come to the conclusion that the professional "liberals" simply don't know the kind of world they're living in and merely continue to repeat automatically obsolete formulas and phrases that perhaps had meaning at one time but no longer make sense...

...On the contrary, pressure groups, representing the various "interests" of American society, have an important part to play in the democratic process...

...It is against this that the American constitutional tradition serves to protect us, and that is why we must cherish it as we do our freedom, of which it is both the foundation and the safeguard...

...He did not possess the technical means by which to reach the great mass of the people simultaneously in a face-to-face encounter...

...And of course no "liberal" in good standing could for a moment entertain the suggestion that what is really vicious in the system began with the Great White Father, Franklin Delano Roosevelt...

...isn't democracy "government of the people, by the people, and for the people...

...The wisdom of the Founding Fathers was directed primarily toward preventing the people, in whose hands ultimate power in some sense had to be lodged, from becoming a mob or a rabble...

...The malady goes deeper...

...His articles on political and historical subjects have appeared in Commentary and Partitan Review...

...Herberg is the author of Judaism and Modern Man...

...Something happens when the individual citizen is taken out of his individuality and particularity, out of his "seat in life," so to speak, and mobilized into an anonymous, atomized mob under the sway of a demagogue: Then the people become a rabble, passionate, reckless, irresponsible...

...It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt through whom government by rabble-rousing first made its appearance on a large scale in American life...

...I am, of course, aware that many of my readers will be quite outraged by what they may take to be my contemptuous disparagement of the people in a democracy...

...Both, though of course they would not admit it, are actually radicals whose whole approach is subversive of American constitutional democracy...

...What were they but the re-establishment of the relation between demagogue and mob on a national scale through the miracle of modern mass communication...

...Everybody is in the game nowadays, and it's a devil's game from the point of view of our American system...

...Nor should my remarks be interpreted as a stricture on pressure groups...

...Nor do I mean to suggest that Mr...

...No doubt Teddy Roosevelt, who had as much of the demagogue in him as anyone in high place, possessed all the desires and imagination of the rabble-rouser, but what could he do...

...The real problem touches a condition of American public life that has been developing steadily in the past quarter of a century and that threatens to subvert the very foundations of our American system of constitutional democracy...

...but only on the extraordinary occasion of a constitutional convention was the people to function as supreme power, and even then through representatives...

...That is why it is so destructive of freedom and public order, of organized society and the rule of law...

...There was simply no way in which the people of the entire nation could be brought together to be stirred up by the rabble-rouser, as the entire body of politically enfranchised Athenians were at one time brought together in the agora or the "Roman people" in the forum...

...Roosevelt was the first American statesman or politician who went in for this kind of rabble-rousing...

...Even men by nature and training not predisposed to such a role (as I think Truman and Eisenhower, each in a different way, are not) have to play the game or leave the field...

...The acute crisis of history and the phenomenal development of the media of mass communication have conspired to work a change of which we are only beginning to be dimly aware...

...later on, it became virtually regularized as part of the system of streamlined mobilization for the war effort...

...Congress has many and complicated functions to perform, but who knows or cares anything about them...

...and Congress proceeded to pass FDR's "must" legislation literally almost as fast as the bills could be read...

...As far as the public is concerned, Congress is incarnated in its investigatory committees, which operate as corporate rabble-rousers exploiting all the devices of modern mass communications...

...our repugnance to "direct democracy" is rooted in the conviction that "direct democracy" inevitably ends up in "tyranny," that is, in the authoritarian regime of a mass-supported despot who rules through a plebiscitary dictatorship...

...Congress was to be a deliberative assembly, foreign affairs were to be conducted by the President "with the advice and consent" of the Senate, full executive responsibility was vested in the Presidency, and so on...

...They knew their history, and they remembered the Athenian democracy with its demagogues and tyrants...

...A pressure group has special interests and limited pretensions, which are usually balanced and offset by those of other groups...

...Their understanding of the history of the Greek city-states and of the Roman Republic filled them with a horror of "direct democracy," for it showed them that "direct democracy" on any considerable scale was not only in itself equivalent to political chaos, but was also the inevitable harbinger of "tyranny," that is, of a mass-supported one-man despotism...

...We need," Mr...

...Rabble-rousers there were aplenty, but their field of operation was necessarily limited by the limited scope of die means of communication at their command...

...What's wrong with the people exercising direct power, they will object...

...the people, roused, responded immediately and deluged Congress with hundreds of thousands of letters and telegrams demanding action...

...The whole point of the system was that the people functioned politically only on specified occasions in constitutional ways (constitutional convention, elections, etc...

...But the constitutional system held up, and held up very well, even under the strains of Civil War and Reconstruction...

...The American concept of constitutional democracy is based on the premise that freedom and order in society-can be achieved only if the affairs of government are administered in established Ways through established channels by established agencies operating under constitutional safeguards and restrictions...

...The real problem, of which "McCarthyism," however understood, is but one aspect, lies in the portentous growth of government by rabble-rousing...

...In certain localities and in some states, under appropriate conditions, the people could be roused into a political mob overriding and replacing constitutional government, but only on a limited scale and for short periods of time...

...I do not use this term invidiously...

...Roosevelt or even questioning the wisdom of much of the legislation he thus jammed through a "rubberstamp" Congress...

...The anti-McCarthy "liberals," who despite everything still pursue the Truman "red herring" line (see their first comments on the White case), find their constant yammering falling on contemptuous ears...

...the work of government was to be carried on regularly and normally by constitutionally designated agencies aware of their responsibilities and limitations...