Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh puts forward an idea, that a widely lamented lack of leadership in western democracies is actually a “followership” problem. He notes how big democracies have repeatedly rejected strings of political leaders, refusing to accept cuts to government subsidies, taxes to reduce deficits, or raising of the retirement age to ease pension system shortfalls. Free people, this thought says, simply will not accept any policy that they have to pay for, and any politician who moves in that direction will be “flayed alive.” Ganesh doesn’t say, but the observation raises the question – will democratic electorates only indulge themselves?
Journalist David Brooks, addressing a Yale audience on “How America Recovers From All This,” suggests that “all this” reflects populists imposing their resentments born of powerlessness. He sees a denial of higher values that the resentful cannot even see anymore, and a nihilistic embrace of Realpolitik. The recovery he calls for comes not in partisan contest but from a cultural shift back to higher aspirations. He doesn’t focus in this talk on where the shift comes from, citing universities, the arts, and cultural and community organizations in passing reference. But are these entities the carriers of culture? If they have been, are they still? Aren’t they the objects of resentment as inaccessible to the common citizen, imposing esoteric standards in public life, and bending their influence to politicized ends? And, after all, what is culture, what in the profane world does it respond to, and who makes it?
Writer Bob Greene notes in a Wall Street Journal op ed that the most important people in an election aren’t the leafleteers, pollsters, message crafters, and analysts. They are the people hurrying to work past the leafleteers, the background customers in the coffee shop where the candidate is shaking hands in a campaign stop, the TV spectator waiting for the political ads to finish and the football game to come back on. Culture in a society without hierarchical traditions is what grows from the aggregated choices and tastes of a large audience, in their numbers, variegated tastes, and idiosyncrasies.
In society as we currently know it, the large audiences, the people scurrying past, the people outside the universities and community organizations, all are relatively inarticulate, particularly on questions of What We Stand For. Expressions regarding such questions tend to come from interested parties – often partisan politicians – from the edges of most peoples’ life concerns. Much of what is taken for popular opinion is distilled from reactive answers to pollsters’ questions, which are shaped by those active players in public discourse. If those shapers of questions get confounded by political and cultural rejection, is the problem one of democracy and ignorant followers, or of leaders and activists pushing agendas irrelevant to regular folks?
America conceived itself as a People, separated from ethnic heritages, taking its station among the powers of the Earth, characterized by our holding of certain Truths, of personal rights and government by consent of the governed. As such, this “We the People,” are the governed, but also, at the same time, the sovereign power – who in fact ordained our own government in the Constitution. In that instrument of state, we, this sovereign, named governing agents and specified how we would choose them. We should recall that Presidents, legislators, their appointees, and the courts, are just that – agents for the sovereign, not sovereign itself. They also forget this, which may explain partisans’ dire commitment to political trench warfare.
We the People have long held our sovereign power implicitly. But as old norms fade (or get obliterated), one effect is a widening disconnect between, on one hand, the notional sovereign interest of 330 million persons named in a creed of principle and, on the other the personal, parochial, ideological and vested interests in whose terms the politicians conduct their competitions. Perhaps the democratic citizenry is beginning to exercise that sovereign interest, but so far only in reaction to the politicians chasing their own attainment of high office. Perhaps, somehow, in some development, the sovereign people will find more pro-active channels to exercise the authority of our sovereign interest.
Any such evolution will face perplexity, in the paradoxes of our creed. We are all equally endowed with unalienable rights, and government exists to secure those rights, legitimated by consent of the governed. But those two tenets can stand in tension to each other. When must I cede some of my rights, curtail some of my wishes, for the sake of everyone’s ability to pursue their own happiness? What costs should I shoulder for the sake of civic order, and what government measures should I reject in the name of my rights? These are just a few of the tensions between me and us, between creed and prosaic needs, between freedom and community, that any society of free people will wrestle with. America’s creed, in its not-always aligned tenets of rights and self-government, effectively imposes a wrestling exercise, on every citizen in their personal choices, and on the electorate as a body. It isn’t fun. But, we might be starting to realize, in that wrestling, we, each and all together, exercise agency. If we learn to embrace this wrestling, just maybe we find new ways to exercise our agency, and, as a whole People of our creed, new ways to assert our sovereign will.
