by Thomas Fleming
Real Democracy: America
Small wonder that Washington and Adams had such a horror of democracy. But what about Jefferson? Here we have to be very careful. Jefferson, in the first place, thought the Constitution went much too far in investing power in the national government. Virginia was his country, his “state”—in both sense of the word—while the United States was a confederation, much like the Delian League in the years after the Persian Wars. He thought the federal court system was bound to produce an irresponsible tyranny of judges, which is why he hated his fellow-Virginian, Chief Justice John Marshall, and wanted to impeach him. When Jefferson spoke glowingly of democracy, he did not mean the right of a 51 percent majority of voters in a national election to ride roughshod over the other 49 percent of the voters and, in fact, the majority of the people. Here in America, voter turnout is 50-60 percent, thus a victory really represents something like 25-30 percent of eligible voters. What he envisioned was a society in which every level of social organization, from the family to the state, would take care of its own interests. In the same way that he believed that Virginia’s problems should not be solved by the voters of Massachusetts—or of all the states represented in Congress—he also believed that local communities should not be dictated to by the government of Virginia.
Jefferson believed that the separate states should be sovereign in all that concerned them, and he agreed with John Adams that the federal government should be limited to affairs of state, making war, coining money, managing the postal system, and adjudicating disputes between states. But Jefferson did not stop there: He believed that a state itself was too large to be run on democratic lines and wanted to see power devolved first to the level of the county and then all the way to the neighborhood or village—the “wards” as he called them—which he would have made republics in miniature, responsible for their own police, roads, charitable assistance, and education.
Where would Jefferson have got such an idea—which ran contrary to the enlightened theories in England and France, where the emphasis was all on centralization of power, whether under a monarchy or under a parliament? One source, naturally, was in the American experience, which his theory merely codified. Americans, while their European cousins were leaping forward toward the modern centralized state, had gone back in time to the patriarchal Middle Ages, when distant kings had little power over life either in peasant villages or in the commercial towns. As Toqueville noted in his famous trip to America, we Americans did for ourselves and our neighbors the duties and services that in Europe everyone expected the state to perform.
But Jefferson might have had another source, and that is his knowledge of how an ancient Greek polis—or for that matter the Roman Empire—actually functioned. He knew, what few political theorists know today, that free peoples in the ancient world lived in self-governing cities with minimal governments and paid no direct taxes. Conquered subjects paid such taxes; free men did not.
The Real Athens
Then let us return briefly to Athens and see how it actually functioned. The first thing to note is that for the two basic institutions of democracy, there were no elections. The nine chief magistracies were selected by lot. Greeks believed, with considerable justification, that elections would always be controlled by the wealthy, which makes them inherently undemocratic—as they are in America, where heavily-funded coalitions of lobbyists select the candidates and to a large extent determine the outcome of most elections.
Sovereign authority did not lie in an elected parliament but in the popular assembly, which sounds very democratic until we recall that the only people eligible were adult male citizens, most of whom had to be able to prove descent from Athenian parents on both sides. Slaves, foreigners, and women could not vote. It was more difficult for a foreigner to become a naturalized citizen than in Switzerland—and that is saying a great deal. I should have added “straight,” because whatever bisexual proclivities the Athenians had, they disenfranchised men whose primary sexual orientation was toward other men by giving official notice not to attend the Ecclesia. If they disobeyed, they were, at least in principle, subject to the death penalty.
Important officials who handled money or were in charge of defense—two matters too important be left to chance—were elected, and the members of the Boule or council that prepared bills for the Ecclesia and tried to safeguard constitutional custom were elected from the roughly 150 Attic demes, a unit of neighborhood government corresponding to Jefferson’s wards. These demes were in charge of registering and maintaining rolls of citizens, and functioned as local governments. Another important local structure was the phratry, a kind of clan, that played a large part both in religious life and in inheritance law.
In theory, the ultimate authority lay with the Assembly, which felt free to disregard both the Council and the law, to say nothing of common sense and basic morality. Get on the wrong side of the Demos, the people, as Socrates found out, and you wind up dead.
This same Assembly constituted the basis of the jury system, which, it was noted, was the true power base of the democracy because they could always give unfair verdicts to aristocrats. The Athenians preferred juries of hundreds of jurors on the sensible grounds that it was more difficult to pay off 500 than, say, 10. Speaking of the Athenian legal system, I should remind you that there were neither professional judges nor lawyers nor police. A man was supposed to defend himself in court, though he could hire someone to write his speech for him. If someone had stolen or illegally detained his property, it was up to the injured party to round up his friends and take the stuff back before hauling the perpetrator up before a magistrate. In a case of murder, the victim’s nearest male relatives had to prosecute or their was no case. On the other hand, if they failed to prosecute, one of the man’s friends might enter in a suit against them for impiety—but this again was more like a private or civil action in Anglo-American law.
This very brief description of Athenian law allows us to draw an important conclusion: While it is certainly fair to describe to describe Athens as a democratic city, so long as we agree that slaves and women should not vote and that immigrants should not be made citizens, but it was not a democratic state, because a city without bureaucrats or police can hardly be called a state in the modern sense. No matter how tyrannically the Athenian assembly might behave toward subject cities or towards political leaders it took a dislike to, its ability to intervene in the private life of most citizens was neglible in comparison with the social authority exercised by modern states.
Most of the state functions we take for granted were completely absent. Athens as a city-state had no public schools or universities, no social workers, no social security, no agency to regulate marriage and divorce. All of these functions of welfare and moral regulation were under the control of the families themselves or, where families had problems, of the phratries and demes. Athenian citizens paid market duties and import tolls, but no taxes on their income or wealth—an income tax was the badge of servitude for Greeks and Romans alike. Think of this as you file your tax returns. The real Athens offers a truly Jeffersonian vision that is very compatible with the American constitutional system in theory though not in practice.
To conclude: Democracy has two faces—one is the face of Aristotle and Jefferson, a completely decentralized system in which power is exercised at the lowest possible level and is subject to law and tradition. As Aristotle noted, any democracy in which the will of the people takes precedence over law and tradition is only another kind of tyranny.
The other face, the false face, is that of the demagogues of the Athenian Assembly, and also of Robespierre and Abraham Lincoln and both political parties today. This is a system based on the principle of untrammeled majority rule, subject to neither law nor tradition. If the people want to overturn any clause in the Constitution, they are free to do so. This explains why the Bill of Rights, which were designed to protect the states and the people from the federal government are now used to reinforce the power of the federal government against the people and the states.
In reality, of course, the the people has no power, since we are all under the control of tiny oligarchic cliques and pressure groups that monopolize wealth, power, and prestige. How false democracy devoured Jefferson’s true democracy is a long sad story, punctuated by wars and revolutionary legislation. But if Americans ever wish to be free, they shall not only have to go back to the thinking of Adams and Jefferson but also to the ancient writers and ancient languages that formed their minds and inspired their imaginations. And even we if cannot recover our political freedom as a nation, we can liberate our minds from the propaganda of civics books and discpline our free minds on the classical curriculum.
No comments:
Post a Comment