Commentary
Flailing Democracy
Left-Right Populism versus American Elitism
The principal conservative argument against democracy is the claim that "the people"—ill-educated, vulnerable to mere emotion, susceptible to demagoguery—cannot be trusted. A well-governed state must depend on some kind of aristocracy to rise above such fatal weaknesses.
The flaw in that classical argument was identified by Winston Churchill in his paradoxical comment that "democracy is the worst of all systems, except for the others." History does not show that monarchies or oligarchies, to say nothing of dictatorships, are more just than democracies. Each has its flaws, which can eventually prove fatal. Sinful man cannot create a sinless society.
Hereditary aristocracy is now an irrelevance, with most modern hereditary aristocrats settled into the lives of mere easeful pleasure that most of them led even when they still had political responsibilities. The Virginia Dynasty was a notable exception that helped make the American experiment a success, although at the founding of the nation it shared leadership with northern commercial interests. It was undermined by the opening of the West, and the power of the landed aristocracy was finally destroyed in the Civil War.
Hereditary aristocracy in Europe was undermined not by democracy but by the Enlightenment idea of an aristocracy of merit, whose original champions, such as Voltaire, frankly distrusted "the people" and planned for the day when those people would be properly enlightened.
Alignment, Then Rupture
As the world's first modern democracy, the United States throughout its brief history has in various ways attempted to balance rule by the people with an aristocracy of merit. From the late nineteenth century until the 1960s the two were essentially aligned, because they had a common enemy in "big business," which could be brought under control both by popular resistance (labor unions, the Grange) and government regulation, an alliance that culminated in the New Deal.
But the leaders of the Progressivist movement of the earlier twentieth century, which also culminated in the New Deal, considered most people unenlightened and, in addressing those whom they deemed as enlightened as themselves, candidly urged a kind of meritocracy that would direct a docile populace in the right directions—the "welfare state" in the broadest sense.
This self-conscious aristocracy of merit dreamed dreams that went far beyond the will of the populace, dreams about the role of race in society being the most obvious. But Franklin D. Roosevelt—a rare hereditary aristocrat who succeeded as an idol of the people—repeatedly tempered the dreams of his "brain trust" (and his wife) for the sake of his practical program.
The popular will and the aristocracy of merit split apart violently in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic convention of 1968, partly over race but more profoundly over the strident claim of the meritocracy that in every respect—religious, moral, familial, educational, political—the populace was backward and stupid. When the dust settled, the Democratic Party had ceased to be populist and—wholly unforeseen—the Republican Party began picking up the populist flags the Democrats had dropped.
That division simmered for sixty years, during which time the country in some ways moved to the right electorally, but the meritocrats got much of what they wanted from courts and other government agencies not subject to the popular will. Religion has been at the center of much of this, as the meritocratic elite has revived the French Enlightenment conviction that religion is the enemy of truth and justice.
James Hitchcock is Professor emeritus of History at St. Louis University in St. Louis. He and his late wife Helen have four daughters. His most recent book is the two-volume work, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life (Princeton University Press, 2004). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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