The perils of simple government

In an earlier post discussing the Constitution as the supreme law of the land, and in connection with the concept of the rule of law, we quoted John Adams:

Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to Say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact and no where appears in history. Those Passions are the same in all Men under all forms of Simple Government, and when unchecked, produce the same Effects of Fraud Violence and Cruelty.

The term simple government, as a description of something to be avoided, was also used by James Madison in Federalist 46.

Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.

Advocates of the Second Amendment are understandably fond of this statement, and that is a subject we will revisit in the future. For now, we wish to focus on the warning against simple government, and Madison’s recommendation of federalism as one element of a superior alternative.

Adams defines “simple government” for us in another of his letters:

The generation and corruption of governments, which may, in other words, be called the progress and course of human passions in society, are subjects which have engaged the attention of the greatest writers; and whether the essays they have left us were copied from history, or wrought out of their own conjectures and reasonings, they are very much to our purpose, to show the utility and necessity of different orders of men, and of an equilibrium of powers and privileges. They demonstrate the corruptibility of every species of simple government, by which I mean a power without a check, whether in one, a few, or many.

(Emphasis mine.)

We acknowledge here that Adams and Madison are not using the term in precisely the same sense. Madison uses it to mean a non-federal form of government. Adams uses the term in a more sweeping sense. But these are compatible meanings.

Thus Adams introduces into our discussion the concept of checks and balances.  Adams’ definition of simple government is government by a single body, whether of one, a few, or many persons. There is every reason to believe that Adams included, in the latter, government by the whole body of citizens.

This concept is simple to understand in the case of a monarch, whether he calls himself king, emperor, Fuhrer, or General Secretary. There was no legal check on the power of Hitler whatsoever; his power was checked only by the complete military defeat of his formidable army, at immense cost in blood and treasure. Foreign armies were likewise the only meaningful check on the power of Stalin or Mao, and were utterly inadequate to prevent mass murder within the Soviet Union or China, just as they had been unable to prevent the Holocaust in Germany.

The case of Imperial Japan in the 1930s is an interesting one. The historical evidence is that there was not, in fact, any one person (certainly not the Showa Emperor) who exercised sole rulership over Japan in 1931-1945. But the country was nonetheless ruled by one body, namely, the Imperial Japanese Army, which the Emperor himself feared to oppose, until the threat of American nuclear weapons and a Russian army in Manchuria strengthened his hand. The Imperial Japanese Army was an excellent case study in the power of groupthink, in that it came over time to speak with a single mind and voice. Tojo came near to being a dictator by 1944, but he ultimately fell from power, not because the Army and Navy seriously dissented from his policies, but simply because he proved inept at carrying them out. The Emperor was ultimately able to make peace only because the leaders of the Army and Navy knew in their hearts that Japan was defeated, and if the peculiarities of Japanese culture compelled these leaders to continue making a show of supporting continued belligerence, their sudden insistence that they were honor-bound to bow to the supremacy of the Emperor was very convenient.

There is a tendency for historians to overemphasize the special place of consensus in Japanese political culture. This myth needs to be dispelled. There is little evidence of it in pre-Meiji Japan, where there were multiple factions vying for power, and there is ample evidence that groupthink is a universal human tendency whenever humans gather into a single group.

To the modern American, steeped in Jeffersonian democracy, the case against pure democracy as another form of simple government may not be quite as obvious. But we have already pointed out, as have others before us, that there is no legal obstacle to a government by simple plebiscite voting to order Socrates to drink hemlock. This is an important point. We now have the technology, in the form of the Internet and of public/private key cryptography, to make universal plebiscite as fast and as secure as any voting system ever has been, if we are sufficiently serious about doing so. One of our greatest fears is that we will, in fact, live to see a serious movement in this direction by something like a majority of Americans. This would destroy what is left of classical liberal government in the United States. A plebiscite now would immediately end the dispute over the 2020 Presidential election, which is laudable as far as it goes; but if history is any guide, the majority would then order Trump summarily executed, along with enough of his followers to ensure there would be no present or future dispute over the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency. And that would conveniently have the effect of removing all checks on the Biden administration. That a substantial number of Americans would not have a problem with that does not mean that it is not a problem.

To be clear: If it was Biden who had just lost a close election, and was flirting with insurrection to reverse the outcome, not a jot or tittle of our concerns would be changed. And we have no illusions that the other side are not equally capable of such a thing. Such is our current national crisis, and much of our motivation for this blog.

There are other problems with government by plebiscite than the groupthink problem. We will revisit them in the future. They are not germane to the present discussion.

Let us dispense with some other comforting myths. The end of the Senate filibuster shows that we cannot count on a single body to long maintain internal barriers to dominance by a faction. Let us likewise dispense with the myth that, in a liberal democracy, if a single party manages to secure supreme power, it will spontaneously fragment along fault lines that were previously smoothed over for the sake of unity in the face of a serious political opponent. There is not a shred of historical evidence that one-party rule is inherently unstable. Humans are simply too prone to groupthink. Were the Republican Party to suffer genuine disintegration in the next four years, the Democratic Party would maintain one-party rule for as long into the future as we can hope to look, and this would be a constitutional disaster. Again, we may switch the party labels without this conclusion changing in the slightest.

Adams does an admirable job in his letter of explaining why this is the case. He does not use the word groupthink, of course, since this term had not yet been invented. But he notes the natural tendency of men to spontaneously sort themselves into hierarchies under a single leader or body of leaders, who inevitably are the rich and powerful. If modern sociological research is at all accurate, the only difference between men and women in this regard is that women form shallower hierarchies, which helps not at all.

Adam’s proposed solution is an interesting one. He would gather the rich and powerful into a body with real power — but checked by other bodies organized according to different criteria, with real power of their own. This is, ironically, something like the original order of Parliament in England, with Lords and Commons in separate bodies with their own prerogatives.

If modern American schoolchildren are taught anything at all about checks and balances, it is that the Constitution instituted three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial) to check each other. Ironically, this seems not to have figured highly in the thinking of the Framers, whose attention was riveted on the legislature and the relationship between the federal government and the states. This is clear in Adam’s letter, which emphasizes the latter. The Great Compromise of 1787 produced a legislature split into two bodies, each with its own prerogatives, and the Framers counted on the House and the Senate to be the most important checks on each other. Congress was to be a house divided against itself, by design. The President was to be the servant of Congress, which was clearly the supreme branch, though the Framers ultimately and consciously gave the Presidency power to check Congress as a one-man Committee of Revision. The independence of the judiciary was almost an afterthought, with early proposals making the judiciary a creature of either the executive or the legislature. Appointment of judges by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, and with lifetime tenure, was a rather late development in the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention. And even more important than the check exerted by the two bodies of Congress on each other was the check provided by independent state governments with their own prerogatives. The guarantee of equal representation of each State in the Senate, the one aspect of the Constitution that is all but off-limits to amendment (since it would require the unanimous consent of the States, which will never happen), demonstrates how important this was to the Framers.

Thus the Framers envisioned thirteen state governments chosen locally, by thirteen different bodies of voters, with real power and prerogatives of their own. The federal government would be granted only few and enumerated powers, to protect the states’ prerogatives. The federal government would have a supreme legislature, but composed of two bodies, chosen in different manners for different terms and with different prerogatives. The Framers hoped this would provide multiple firewalls to prevent a single faction from uniting all of government into a simple body. The President would be chosen in yet another manner and would have limited power to check the legislature. The courts would be largely independent, chosen by no one body and with guaranteed tenure and salary, with their own prerogatives.

The Framers instituted a Senate chosen by states, which would therefore be dominated by less populous states. There were good reasons in theory and previous practice to do this, but the key feature for the present discussion is simply that the Senate was chosen differently from the House. The Framers might have found a different way to create distinct constituencies for the two bodies; the important thing, for purposes of the present discussion, is simply that they were different. We could as well have a House chosen by women and a Senate by men; or a house chosen by those under 45 years in age and a Senate chosen by those over 45 years in age; or a House chosen by those making less than $70,000 in household income and a Senate chosen by those making over $70,000 in income; or a Senate chosen by those who have served in the military and a House chosen by those who have not. The key thing is that they are chosen by a different cross-section of voters and so are different bodies with some immunity from mutual groupthink. We have been deliberately provocative in some of our proposals, which are not meant to be taken too seriously. What does not work is for the two bodies to be chosen by the same group of voters in the same way. Dividing up voters by lottery for which House they get to vote for would not work. We fear that the current system is dangerously close to homogeneous: Only the unequal representation of the population in the Senate makes the present setup tolerable.

That, and the independence of the judiciary. Our judges are all highly educated and trained in the law, a very unrepresentative group indeed. The President may nominate who he likes, but if she isn’t a lawyer respected by a substantial body of her peers, that nomination is dead in the water. But that’s a very slender thread on which to hang our protection from simple government.

It is possible that the political parties provide some protection against groupthink, by imposing a permanent fault line between factions. However, we suspect that the parties only function in this way because the government is already divided institutionally, and that a simple government spontaneously becomes a one-party government. We may revisit this idea in a future post.