‘Of, by, for’ the people
Perhaps the most concise, and certainly most memorable, definition of democracy was given by President Abraham Lincoln in his address at Gettysburg in November 1863, in the middle of the American Civil War, at the memorial service for the many who had fallen in the fierce battle that had taken place nearby, a turning point in that appallingly wasteful war. Lincoln spoke of the Union side’s defence of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’. It is a splendid encapsulation of the democratic ideal. It is simultaneously a remarkably dishonest description of democracy in America not only at the time, but before and ever since; and this applies to democracy almost everywhere likewise. This is because the word ‘people’ has a different sense on each occasion of its use in Lincoln’s definition.
‘People’ in ‘government of the people’ means everyone in the state: men, women, children, old, young, slave, free, disabled or whole.
‘People’ in ‘by the people’ means ‘those who are enfranchised, i.e. have a vote’, which is not everyone but (in Lincoln’s day) only white property-owning males and (in our day) adults aged eighteen and over not otherwise disqualified (e.g. in the UK by being peers or prisoners).
‘People’ in ‘for the people’ in practice and principally means those who vote for or donate money to the political party which, commanding a majority in the legislature, forms the government; for, aiming to retain power by being re-elected, a political party in government will generally ensure that its policies do not alienate its supporters, but rather will offer and implement policies that attract and retain their support. Given that even in the purest form of a democratic electoral system a party only needs 51% to rule, ‘the people’ thus privileged in ‘for the people’ will only at best be half the people denoted in ‘of the people’. But because of the way electoral systems work, most notably in plurality (‘First Past the Post’) systems, which tend always to produce two-party binaries, governments typically get the support of 35%-40% or at most 45% of actual votes cast (thus, perhaps, 25%-30% of the total electorate), the ‘for the people’ people are considerably less than half the ‘of the people’ people.
Reflection on these equivocations over the word ‘people’ is educative. The ‘by the people’ part is key, because it is the answer to the question, ‘On what authority does government of the people rest?’ In democracy the source of power in the state is, technically speaking, the people collectively. In a small community – a village, say – literally everyone could be involved in debates and decisions. Variability in human psychology tends to throw up ‘natural leaders’, or demagogues, or people loved or admired, or who are or seem wise, and as a result even small collectives have a tendency to defer to the direction of one or a few among them. But we can indulge a Rousseau-like fantasy of pure democracy at the small scale, and locate in the collective engagement of all the people, and in particular in consensus among them, the legitimating factor in their self-government.
As a result of populations increasing in size and diversity, it becomes impracticable to gather all the people in a single place to debate and decide. This is one of the reasons for ‘representative’ institutions, delegates (conveying a constituency’s wishes) or plenipotentiaries (acting on behalf of a constituency) substituting for the collective, or at least that part of it enfranchised to appoint them. This is a rational solution to the large-population problem. The source of legitimacy still lies with the ‘by the people’ people – that is, the enfranchised – who send and can recall the representatives. But as the institutions formed to carry out governmental functions come to have powers, and as elected and appointed officials of those institutions come to exercise those powers in ways too complex and numerous for direct intervention by the people (any of the people, of by or for), so the source of legitimacy becomes more remote from the actual performance of government, restricted to election times only, and thereby becomes increasingly notional in practice. Those professionally engaged in manning the institutions of government accordingly come to have a degree of impunity only constrainable at the margins of their terms of office – usually, the periodic election times – and even then either the invisibility or the ‘spinnability’ of most of what they do, down in the details of the daily exercise of power – reduces their actual accountability.
These points are intimately related to the first reason – mentioned in the Introduction – for disaffection with democracy: that it is not delivering enough for people’s aspirations and needs, but has become trapped in political partisanships that reduce its responsiveness to social and economic diversities. The effect of the for the people = for donors and supporters aspect of the matter is very largely to blame. As franchises extended and numbers of voters increased from the mid-19th century onwards, so political parties had to become more organised and disciplined in order to capture the levers of government to get their agenda through. A major result has been the explicit politicisation of government. Debates in legislatures are party political combats, showing how politics has in effect taken the place of government in at least all the headline issues and problems requiring action in any present moment of a state’s life.
To say that politics has replaced government, or has so far infected government as to generate mistrust of government via mistrust of politicians, is to acknowledge that a fear mooted by James Madison in his Federalist Paper No 10, namely that ‘factionalism’ (i.e. party politics) would usurp or poison government, has been realised. When the people see bitter party divisions over issues affecting their society and economy, and public policy privileging one side in the debate without sufficient sensitivity or accommodation towards other sides and interests, disaffection with the whole process grows.
A significant part of the problem here is the fallacy of majoritarianism – the belief that democracy is about what the majority want, and that the majority preference therefore decides the issue. For one thing, there is no such thing as a majority. Society is a congeries of minorities (including individuals: minorities of one), enough of which can be temporarily aggregated together on certain occasions in relation to a particular matter – elections or referendums if the choice is binary – to give the illusion of ‘a majority’. For another, the idea of a democratic order turns on concepts such as the rule of law, individual rights and civil liberties which, far from privileging majority preferences, explicitly exist to protect minorities and individuals from other minorities and individuals, and from any majority that aggregations of the two latter might constitute.
The fiction of ‘a majority’ is used when license is required for a decision to be reached. It is a useful fiction, to an extent, because in practical affairs too much going round the houses of competing opinions is eventually counterproductive. In this respect appeal to the concept is efficacious in default of anything better. But it has come to be inflated into something it is not, viz. the putative source of legitimacy for the polity’s institutions and practices. The majority is not this source; the collective as a whole is. The majority (insofar as any such thing exists more than temporarily and issue-dependently) is only part of the collective – indeed might only be 51% of the collective – which is why questions of rights, liberties and the protection of law is so important, in the interests (in this case) of the 49% – indeed again: in the interests of even one sole member of the collective.