When Democratic Virtues Disintegrate

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Not long ago President Roosevelt was reported to have said: “It is not useful to suggest . . . that the American government, its policies, its practices, and its servants are corrupt. To do so is of necessity an attack upon the American system of government itself.” Almost at the same moment, in reply to a Member of the House of Commons who ventured the opinion that at the Munich conference Great Britain and democracy had suffered a great defeat, Mr. Chamberlain said: “If the Right Honorable gentleman really believes that, I am sorry that he should say so publicly. It is not one of the characteristics of the totalitarian states, at least, that they are accustomed to foul their own nests.” It is, however, one of the characteristics of the totalitarian states to identify criticism of the agents of government with an attack on the system of government itself, and to regard objections to the policy adopted by the leader as a fouling of the nest. That Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Chamberlain should so casually commend these characteristics as suitable for democratic states is, to say the least, not altogether reassuring.

Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Chamberlain would no doubt say that in these crucial times freedom to criticise should be exercised with restraint. They would be shocked by the suggestion that their statements, by implication, amounted to a denial of the principle of free speech. Yet it is invariably in this insidious way, and in times of crisis, that allegiance to the principles of democratic government begins to weaken. A few years ago “The Nation” published a symposium by certain liberal writers on freedom of speech, or, more specifically, on freedom of speech for those who would presumably suppress it if they had the power. All of the writers regarded freedom of speech as the foundation of free government, but some of them at least were in favor of denying it to those engaged in communist and fascist agitation. Probably more people than not would agree with them. The position seems to be this: freedom of speech should be maintained as a general principle, but it needs to be curtailed in particular instances in defense of the very institutions of which, in normal times, it is thought to be the essential foundation. To weaken the foundation at particular points in order to save the building—this seems to be the normal procedure of democracies in times of crisis. One wonders why it should be so. Is democracy a way of life for fair weather only? Is it inevitable that the virtues of democratic government should disintegrate at the very moment when they are most needed?

Inevitable is perhaps too strong a word, but it is safe to say that democratic government does not readily flourish in all climates. We know, at all events, that in the long history of civilization it has played a distinctly minor rôle, appearing in relatively few places and for relatively short times; never in any but very small countries until the means of communication and transportation were such that, figuratively speaking, large countries were made small. This significant fact is likely to be forgotten, especially in our country. Any other form of government is so alien to our tradition and experience that we are apt to take democracy for granted, to regard it as a permanent conquest of the human spirit. Its virtues, although rare and for that reason to be rarely prized, are for us commonplaces. In a world grown passably cynical, its symbols are a little shopworn, and so often the last refuge of politicians and profiteers that, even for those who take them most seriously, they begin to have the irritating quality of stale clichés. Nevertheless, there they are, the substantial virtues behind the glittering generalities. If these virtues are an illusion, then democracy is an illusion, or at best scarcely more than a temporary if fortunate accident.

The democratic virtues are in the nature of spiritual luxuries, deriving from the assumptions on which democracy rests, and available only in so far as the assumptions are valid. One of these assumptions is that men, or at least the men of a particular community, are rational creatures; another is that they are for the most part men of good will. Assuming that citizens are men of good will, democratic government disposes them to be so: fosters tolerance, humane dealing, fraternity—encourages men to be, as President Roosevelt has it, “good neighbors.” Assuming that men are rational creatures, democratic government disposes them to cultivate their minds, to clarity their ideas by inquiry and discussion, and by reasonable concessions to accommodate their individual interests to what appears to be the common good. Perhaps the most fundamental assumption of democracy, at least in modern times, is the worth and dignity and creative capacity of the individual, so that the chief aim of government is the maximum of individual self-direction, the chief means to that end the minimum of compulsion by the state. Ideally considered, means and ends are conjoined in the concept of freedom: freedom of thought, so that truth may prevail; freedom of occupation, so that careers may be open to talent; freedom of self-government, so that no one may be compelled against his will.

Ideally considered is not to say practically realize. We are told that in Russia the revolution has been “betrayed.” Certainly it has. It is in the nature of revolutions to be betrayed, since life and history have an inveterate habit of betraying the aspirations of men. Democratic government has been so far betrayed, the ideal so imperfectly portrayed in the course of events, that the conditions essential to the practice of its virtues are not easily noted. They may be most easily noted, not in any democratic state as a whole, but in small communities within the state—in clubs and similar associations of intelligent and like-minded people united for a particular purpose. In such associations the membership is limited and select. The members are, or may easily become, personally acquainted with each other. Everyone knows, or may easily find out, what is being done and who is doing it. There will, of course, be differences of opinion, and there may be disintegrating squabbles and intrigues. But, on the whole, ends and means being specific and well understood, the problems of government are few and superficial; there is plenty of time for discussion; and, since good will can be taken for granted, there is a disposition to make reasonable concessions and necessary compromises. In such associations the ideal of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” is near enough to the reality so that democratic government can function with a minimum of stress and a maximum of success.

The analogy must be taken for what it is worth. Any state is far more complex and intangible than a private association. It may not be the God-created mystical blind Moloch of German philosophy, but it is not a gentleman's club to be incorporated and dissolved by mutual consent. There is, nevertheless, a point in the analogy. Democratic government is in some sense a compact for mutual advantage, and if it cannot in any state attain the measure of success attainable in a private association, the conditions essential to whatever measure of success it may attain are at least of the same order. The necessary conditions are that the citizens should be in a position to know and understand in a general way what their fellows are thinking and proposing to do about their common affairs; that they should all be thinking and proposing to do, so far as the fundamentals of politics are concerned, much the same thing; that inequalities in status and possessions should not be too flagrant to be capable of being ignored, too oppressive to be endured, or too deep-seated to admit of amelioration by mutual concessions; that the problems of government should not be too complex to be in essentials intelligible to the many, or too insistent to permit of the necessary delays incident to rational discussion and the slow crystallization of public opinion. In short, it is essential to the effective working of democratic government that the great majority of citizens should be sufficiently easy in their present circumstances and sufficiently secure in their future prospects to afford certain intangible luxuries—the luxury of good will, of tolerance for opinions not shared and of consideration for interests not their own, the luxury of believing in the value of rational discussion and of entertaining the conviction that their common interests can be better served, in the long run, by relying upon the methods of persuasion than by appealing to the methods of force.

The prophets and protagonists of nineteenth-century democracy were convinced that democratic government, once established, would straightway create these happy conditions. Experience has taught us that without a reasonable approximation to these conditions the establishment of democratic government is scarcely more than a salutation to the ideal. Given the best of conditions, the assumptions of democracy do something more than justice to men as they are. Ideally considered, our elected representatives should be primarily interested in the search for truth, and normally engaged in discussing questions of profound social import. In practice it does not work out so. Men are rational creatures no doubt, and no doubt devoted to the welfare of their country; but few men are reasonable all of the time, and devotion to self-interest is apt to cloud their perception of what will advance the common good. In practice, therefore, democratic government turns out to be government by political parties, and in practice it turns out that each party formulates a program of action inspired by something more than love of truth if also by something less than desire to obtain power by winning an election. Under these circumstances government by discussion works best when there is nothing of profound importance to discuss, and when there is plenty of time to discuss it. The party system works best when the rival programs involve the superficial aspects rather than the fundamental structure of the social system, and majority rule works best when the minority can meet defeat at the polls in good temper because they need not regard the decision as either a permanent or a fatal surrender of their vital interests. Generally speaking, all is well in a democratic community so long as the rival party leaders can dine together without distress, and feel under no compulsion, off the hustings or outside legislative halls, to denounce each other as sinister enemies of the commonwealth.

Rarely has democratic government worked more smoothly than in England after the Reform Bill of 1832, when rival party leaders were all gentlemen who understood each other and, as Disraeli said, the nearest thing to a Tory in disguise was a Whig in power. The system worked so well that George Grote withdrew from politics in disgust because he found it futile to defend Whig conservativism against Tory conservativism. It worked so well that a major political crisis could be created for dear Lord Melbourne by the insistence of the Queen that her dear ladies in waiting should not be dismissed.

In the United States conditions were equally favorable after 1815 so long as the compromise of interests involved nothing more fundamental than tariff schedules and internal improvements. But the Missouri Compromise sounded in Jefferson's ears like a fire bell in the night, and the Era of Good Feeling definitely ended in 1832 when William Lloyd Garrison, insisting upon telling the truth about slavery, refused to compromise and would be heard. The incident was a startling disclosure of the fact that, although free speech and the habit of compromise are democratic virtues, there are some issues that cannot be raised and some things that cannot be heard in a democratic society without impairing the efficiency of the democratic method. Slavery was such an issue. Valiant efforts to preserve the Union by agreeing upon a proper definition of the Constitution proved unavailing. Presently Seward announced the disintegrating doctrine that there was a “higher law” than the Constitution, and Lincoln declared that a house divided could not stand—it would become all one thing or all the other, all slave or all free. It became all free, but not by the democratic method.

To-day our democratic houses are divided again. The division is not between different geographical sections but between different social classes. For more than half a century the development of technology, in industrial societies organized on the principle of private property in the means of production, has resulted in a flagrant inequality of possessions and opportunity—an ever sharper differentiation between the integrated groups who are the chief beneficiaries of the system of free enterprise, and the masses whose present circumstances and future prospects depend less upon individual character and talent than upon the hazards of the business cycle. Accompanying this differentiation, there has been a confused but persistent realignment of political parties (well under way in European democracies, just beginning perhaps in the United States)—on the Right, conservative parties representing the beneficiaries of the system of free enterprise; on the Left, radical parties representing the poor and the dispossessed. The significance of this development is that rival party programs begin to raise fundamental issues: no longer confined to the superficial aspects of policy within the framework of the traditional system, they are increasingly concerned with the validity of the assumptions on which the system rests.

The all but unquestioned assumption of nineteenth-century democracy was that the social welfare (liberty) could best be achieved by emancipating the individual from governmental restraint. In the economic realm this meant private property in the means of production, free enterprise, competition; in the political realm it meant the minimum of interference with free enterprise. The system worked passably well so long as there was opportunity for expansion—new countries to be settled, old ones to be developed industrially. It worked less well as the opportunities for expansion decreased; and at the present time it works so badly that in a world in which millions are destitute it is thought necessary, and perhaps is so, to decrease the production of the necessities of life in order to make it work at all. Since the system works so badly, the question, long since raised, becomes more insistent: should it not be abandoned? The doctrine that there is a higher law than the institution of private property steadily wins adherents, and the fundamental issue can no longer be ignored: can the social welfare be best achieved by the traditional system of free enterprise (however modified in detail) or by the complete socialization of the means of production and distribution?

Thus our democratic houses are divided on fundamental issues. They cannot forever stand thus divided. Can they be reunited by the democratic method? Can the possessors be sufficiently dispossessed and the dispossessed be sufficiently reinstated without resorting to violence—to revolution and the temporary or the permanent dictatorship? The communists say no—sooner or later the revolution. The fascists say no—the totalitarian state is the only solution. The socialists say yes—the democratic method, but only if employed to abolish private property in the means of production. The great majority say yes—the democratic method; but the great majority, still clinging to the traditional system, are divided and uncertain as to the measures that must be taken to make it work.

Division and uncertainty among the great majority arise less from the inherent difficulties of the problem than from the fact that it arouses traditionally fixed but irrelevant emotions. Liberal democracy rests upon assumptions so long regarded by its supporters as harmoniously correlated that it is all but impossible for them to reject one assumption without rejecting all the others.

The correlated assumptions are that freedom of the individual in the intellectual realm and his freedom in the political and the economic realms will work together to achieve the maximum of equality and social advantage. To the discriminating, the course of events has long since made it clear that these assumptions, so far from being harmoniously correlated, are at war with each other. Freedom of the individual in the economic realm has in fact come to mean economic subjection for the many and freedom only for the few, if, indeed, even for those few; and economic subjection of the many threatens to destroy whatever freedom they may still have in the intellectual and political realms. The essential problem of liberal democracy, therefore, is to preserve that measure of freedom of thought and of political action without which democratic government cannot exist, and at the same time to bring about, by the social regulation of economic enterprise, that measure of equality of possessions and of opportunity without which it is no more than an empty form. The problem is not a new one, suddenly sprung upon us, it is merely more complex and more obvious than it was; and the most obvious thing about it is that the governmental regulation of economic enterprise, which in fact has been steadily increasing in every democratic country for more than half a century, must continue and at the same time become more comprehensive and more intelligently co-ordinated if the essentials of democracy (freedom of thought and of political action as well as economic freedom) are to be preserved.

The problem is difficult enough in any case. What may make it unsolvable is the disposition of the great majority to face it as a menace rather than as a problem: forgetting all past measures for the social regulation of private enterprise, they identify every new measure with communism, instead of considering it on its merits, and emotionally reject it as an attack on democratic government and all its liberties. The situation is one which manifestly calls for a renewal of the democratic faith and an intensive cultivation of the democratic virtues. Yet there is everywhere, among the possessors and the dispossessed alike, the pervasive sense of insecurity, the sense of failing opportunities and of unavailing faiths, that engenders fear; and fear, that corrosive of the human spirit, is the chief enemy of the democratic virtues—of reason and sound judgment, of good will, of tolerance and humane dealing. Thus it is that the very situation which calls for an exercise of the democratic virtues tends to impair them.

In certain respects, the democratic virtues more easily impaired in the United States than we like to believe. We are accounted a tolerant people, but in us this virtue derives less from temperament and conviction born of harsh experience than from easy circumstances. All much alike, and living much to ourselves in a new and isolated country, we have had slight occasion to tolerate alien customs and ideas. When the occasion arises for us to say, “I disagree with you absolutely,” we are little disposed to add, “but I will defend to the death your right to speak.” We are less tolerant of political heresy than either the French or the English, one reason being that we have never had to live with hangovers from an ancient régime: have never, like the English, had to place a king in cold storage in order to keep a Pretender off our back; or, like the French, had to make terms with royalist and clerical parties openly bent on overthrowing the republic. It makes a difference. Now that we have to live with socialists and communists, and to take serious note of their heresies, the quality of our tolerance is revealed. Good will turns to suspicion and resentment, confidence in the democratic method not infrequently gives way to panic, and faith in reason is easily overcome by the native impulse to direct action.

Our impulse to direct action is as ingrained as our habit of self-direction, and derives from the same experience—the experience of people who for three centuries have been engaged in subduing a virgin continent with the minimum of governmental authority either to assist or to restrain them. To get the immediate practical task done in the most direct way with a minimum of palaver seems the obvious because it has so often been the necessary procedure. Whether it be a matter of clearing the forests or exterminating the redskins, organizing a government or exploiting it, building railroads or rigging the market in order to wreck them, establishing free schools or imposing restraints on freedom of teaching, applauding the value of temperance or perceiving the convenience of bootlegging—whatever the immediate task may be, the short cut and the steady made device for dealing with it are thought good enough so long as they work. Throughout our history, ruthlessness and human dealing run side by side: in almost equal degree we have exhibited the temper of conformity and of revolt, the disposition to observe law and custom when they serve our purposes and to ignore them when they cease to do so.

Our faith in reason is conditioned by this practical outlook. It is no accident that pragmatism was invented by American philosophers. With us reason is essentially common sense in action. “It seems reasonable” commonly means that a concrete situation (something done or to be done) is clear, something the plain man can understand without elaborate argument. We distrust the subtle manipulation of ideas, either for the sake of the ideas or for the sake of the manipulation. We have faith in education, but not too much in the educated; book learning is good, but chiefly as a means of getting on in the world. We gladly listen to the “slick talker,” the fellow who can “talk the hind leg off a mule,” but we do not trust him—“he ought to of been a lawyer.” Our faith in reason is such that we will swallow any rigmarole that promises us quick returns in health or wealth or the soul's salvation, but it leaves us indifferent to abstract systems of thought, incurious about truth apart from its application to concrete situations.

It is chiefly for this reason that devotion to political principles rarely stands in the way of those practical compromises that give such impregnable coherence and tenacity to our political parties. With us it is peculiarly true that political parties exist less to promote political doctrines than to win elections—to win elections in order to put through measures that will benefit the country and the party by winning more elections. To be a useful party member one must therefore subordinate loyalty to doctrines to loyalty to the party program, whatever it may turn out to be. A party leader finds that it is not, as a general practice, better to be right than to be president: his ideas, if any, may be quite sound, but he “can't get anywhere” with them by bolting the party ticket. It is notoriously difficult in this country to win support for a third party, partly because the voter so well understands the argument that, however desirable the party program may be intrinsically, he will “only throw away his vote” by supporting a candidate who is certain to be defeated.

All this is no great matter so long as politics is a game played for low stakes. We take it with accustomed cynical good humor as “just politics”; and, in any case, there is nothing to prevent even a politician from resisting pressure, since even a politician may express an independent opinion without damaging anything more precious than a reputation for party loyalty. But as issues become more serious, and fear exacerbates passion, the facility for compromise may easily pass into its opposite—the disposition to enforce a rigid conformity in opinion and conduct in order to achieve the immediate end of defeating the “enemy.”

This pragmatic temper is both an asset and a liability. It assures us that much will be attempted, and with any luck something accomplished, to mitigate an intolerable economic situation. It assures us that whatever is undertaken will not be inspired by the desire to exhibit a favorite philosophy of history in action. If we exchange blows and spill blood, it will be in defense of tangible interests, and not in fanatical devotion to the principle of dialectic materialism or the concept of a totalitarian will embodied in an intangible entity called the state. Whatever we do will be done for the realization of concrete practical purposes. If we achieve a planned economy, no one will have planned it. If we achieve socialism, it will be without having intended it, and therefore without any need to feel distressed because it turns out not to be an assignment in Utopia. Whatever it turns out to be, it will have been created by the traditional American procedure—by fighting for good bargains by means of ballots and economic pressure, by unlimited indulgence in the blare and blarney and pandemonium of free propaganda all compact of truth and falsehood, by imputing bad faith to opponents and invoking the American way of life on behalf of every special interest, and by frantically proclaiming that freedom of the press is in danger whenever anyone employs that freedom to promote ideals of which we disapprove. This is the normal American way of life, and whatever comes of it, supposing it to be something less than disaster, we will still call it democracy. It is our best chance to get by in passable fashion, to get by without realizing that there has been a class conflict or losing our faith in the pliability and resilience of American institutions.

The pragmatic American temper may, nevertheless, become a liability if the economic crisis deepens and is prolonged. Preoccupation with immediate concrete issues blinds us to the larger implications of these issues. The danger is that, still looking for “normalcy” around the next corner, we may suddenly find ourselves confronted with a situation too desperate to be mitigated by boondoggling, a situation which requires, for its solution, a capacity to take the long-time view, to grasp the underlying conditions of social change, and to compromise on matters more fundamental than the incidence of a tariff schedule. We are, indeed, practised in the art of compromise, but the art has been learned, for the most part, in devising ways and means of implementing principles that no one has disputed, or in realizing short-time purposes that seemed too obviously good to require any examination of their long-time effects. Confronted with a crisis that does not readily yield to the improvised short cut, the easy optimism with which we commonly ignore unpleasant truths and dismiss theories as of “no use in practice” may very well prove a serious handicap. Our disposition then would be to regard unpleasant truths as heresies, even though enshrined in the Constitution and the great Declaration. The danger is that, always trusting to luck and hoping for the best, the physical barricades may be up before we realize what it is all about—before we are prepared even to understand the fundamental issues which history has so long been preparing for us.

The physical barricades are not yet up, are not, I should guess, likely to be in any near future; but the barricades of opinion are being raised. Evidence of it is to be seen in the disposition to call each other opprobrious but meaningless names, to label opinions rather than to discriminate them, to denounce criticism as disloyal rather than to estimate the amount of truth it may contain: the disposition, in short, to accept the communist and fascist doctrine that truth, since it cannot be divorced from action, is identical with success, and to regard the democratic virtues as un American when they stand in the way of the immediate practical ends which seem to us desirable. “It is not useful,” as Mr. Roosevelt says, “to suggest . . . that the American government, its policies, its practices, and its servants are corrupt. To do so is of necessity an attack upon the American system of government itself.” This is one way of preserving democracy: enforcing the habit of compromise even against the principle of tolerance, defending democratic institutions even against the democratic virtues. It also, in certain circumstances, is the American way of life.

Fifty years ago, or thereabouts, Andrew Carnegie published a book entitled “Triumphant Democracy.” Written without fear and without research, the book was not an achievement of the highest intellectual distinction, but the title expressed well enough the prevailing view of that time. This optimistic view cannot now be held. The cardinal fact of our time is that democracy, so far from being triumphant, is on the defensive; and even in our own country, where it is more strongly intrenched than elsewhere, it is obvious that, under the stress of discontent prolonged, of fear and suspicion, and of hopes deferred, the democratic virtues are beginning to disintegrate. In the circumstances it is inevitable that they should do so, but a certain disintegration is not necessarily fatal. It is not fatal so long as the essential American tradition remains reasonably intact.

Bertrand Russell assures us that there is good reason for thinking that the American tradition will resist skepticism, whereas other traditions have commonly succumbed to it. According to him, no orderly society is possible unless it be held together either by naked force or by an accepted tradition; and “a form of power [government] which has been traditional becomes naked [revolutionary] so soon as the tradition ceases to be accepted.” Hitherto, he thinks, “periods of free thought and vigorous criticism” have developed into periods of naked power, the reason being that, hitherto, the tradition has rested upon some form of superstition which free criticism inevitably destroys. But he thinks the United States may be an exception to this rule, and his reason for thinking so is that the American tradition does not rest upon superstition.

Elements of superstition could, I dare say, be found in the American tradition, but there is something to be said for Mr. Russell's contention. The American republic, fortunately, was not born in defeat, and it is at least true that the tradition which sustains it does not derive from any of the more obvious political myths. The essential core of the American tradition is neither an habitual practice of wide tolerance nor a profound faith in reason, but rather the settled habit of managing political affairs by means of representative government, a habit which has amply justified itself by more than three centuries of virtually uninterrupted success. We can be pretty sure, therefore, that no amount of free criticism will convince us that the theory of representative government is a superstition so long as the institution itself continues to function reasonably well.

This settled habit of managing our affairs by representative government is the strongest guarantee we have for the persistence of democratic institutions in the crisis which confronts us. The mere inertia of habit is a powerful influence. It alone will carry us along beyond the point where conviction falters; it alone will enable democratic institutions to outlast for a time, even for a long time, the disintegration of the democratic virtues. It has done so before, and may do so again. But for all that, it is well to remember that even the most confirmed and the most excellent habit cannot forever survive the loss of those qualities which alone in the long run can give it any value.