Two Forms of Democratic Government, Essay Example

In September of 1787, at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin “Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?” Franklin replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it” (Franklin, 1787). In the months following, James Madison, later the fourth President of the United States, argued successfully for Franklin’s republic in a series of newspaper articles later called The Federalist Papers. In Federalist No. 10 he wrote  “. . . it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.” (Madison, 1787).  By “pure democracy” Madison clearly meant what we call “direct democracy.”

Much of Federalist  No. 10 is focused on the dangers of popular (or unpopular) factions, starting with the first sentence of the introduction: “Among the numerous advantages promised by a wellconstructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.” He defines faction as follows: “By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Madison goes on to state that the only way to remove the dangers of faction is to either remove their causes or control their effects. Madison shows that the former choice is impossible. One can only try to control the effects of factions by having a form of government best suited to do so. In Madison’s view, that form was a republic. In his article he was clearly against direct democracy for the young nation he represented in Philadelphia, even though the Constitutional Convention was itself an expression of direct democracy for the participants, as is the U.S. Congress today. Such participants represent the people who voted them there, but vote directly when they assemble themselves together as either Representatives or Senators. So true legislatures are themselves pure, or direct, democracies when they vote, although they may have plenty of the factions that Madison warned about in his Federalist #10 — recently elected legislators may even be ordered by senior members on whether  to vote yea or nay on bills (Weatherford, 1985).[1]

As a practical matter, factions or no factions, direct democracies are unsuited for large organizations, whether public or private. But from time to time one reads about some small town that still votes directly on matters of local interest, as do the Swiss, so direct democracy is not itself necessarily illegal in republics. This leads to a next question: what is a republic?

A republic is what the United States is: a system of indirect democracy, where power resides in the people, who then elect their representatives who will go to Washington, D.C. — or a state capital, because Section 4 of Article IV of the U.S. Constitution states “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” This means that the U.S. is not a single sovereign state, but is composed of fifty of them. Until 1914, U.S. senators were essentially ambassadors from their states to the federal government, being appointed by their state legislatures. After 1914 senators were elected directly by each state’s voters — this being seen at the time as a reform. Factions, it seems, had infested various state legislatures and corrupted them, in effect buying and selling U.S. Senate positions.

The U.S. still uses an indirect Electoral College system to elect the president, and again and again people have brought up the idea of voting for the president directly, like they do for their senators and governors. Again and again the idea has gone nowhere. Why? Surely not because, being more “pure”, it would lend itself to the factions that Madison warned us of.

Direct election of our republic’s president sounds good, and on the face of it, it is the system that I would like best. Probably most young people would favor direct election if it were put to us. It would seem to be an obvious improvement: everyone just votes directly for the president, as if they were in the town square voting on whether to ban vaping on Sundays. But there is a problem: the U.S. is a federal republic, which is to say it is composed of  a strong central government and  its states. Some states have a lot of people and some have hardly any people. Direct election would overwhelmingly make the president a choice of city voters. They would swamp rural districts in each state and under-populated states altogether. Presidential candidates would tailor their campaigns only to voters in the biggest cities. Really, rural voters would basically be disenfranchised, at least in presidential elections and probably elections for governor too. If that were to happen, short-sighted city voters might allow all kinds of bad legislation that continually favored them over their country cousins.

On the other hand, who is to say that rural voters from Alaska to Florida could not form alliances and make their political needs felt?  Filmmaker Ken Burns’ 2011 documentary Prohibition tells how rural-based single-issue “drys” worked their will against all comers, taking control of state legislatures and the U.S. Congress to ensure passage of the disastrous Eighteenth Amendment, and then making sure that it was enforced by the Volstead Act, which turned out to be far more severe than many drys expected or wanted. And by then U.S. senators were elected directly by the voters of their states, not by faction-corrupted legislatures. If it could be done then, think what could happen today, when people can form virtual communities on the Web that mean more to some of them than the real communities right outside their own front doors.

The U.S. is too large for direct democracy, but not necessarily too large for direct election of a president. The question is whether the result would be the democracy of a federal republic.

References

Franklin, B. (1787, September ). Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. Retrieved from Bartleby.com: http://www.bartleby.com/73/1593.html

Madison, J. (1787, November 23). Federalist #10. Retrieved from FoundingFathers.info: http://www.foundingfathers.info/federalistpapers/fed10.htm

Weatherford, J. M. (1985). Tribes on the Hill. Westport: Praeger.

[1] Such orders couldn’t have the force of law, but any new legislators who refused to play along would not get their own legislation passed and so would likely be defeated in the next election or even recalled.