In our current era of democratic backsliding, it's easy to give way to the despairing conclusion that despite superficial changes of official names and ruling parties, every major civilization in the world just ends up re-creating some version of the same government it has always had. Has this not been the story, in recent decades, with every major authoritarian power that we once thought was launched on a path to greater democracy and liberalization? Look at the People's Republic of China; look at Russia. Even India, celebrated for half a century as the world's largest democracy, now seems to be turning into something quite different.
One is tempted mightily, therefore, to embrace some version of the "futility" hypothesis—which, Albert O. Hirschman warned, is one of the three legs of the stool of reactionary ideology. If we forget this for a moment, though, and allow ourselves to wallow in the pessimism and depression of the situation without hindrance, it may appear that countries really are doomed over and over again to replicate the same system of government. Putin is just a post-Soviet version of Stalin, after all, who himself was a Bolshevik version of the czars. Such men even acknowledge as much themselves: they have all lionized the previous links in the chain. Was not Stalin a great admirer of Ivan the Terrible?
As for the PRC, is its governing regime—for all its Marxist trappings—not simply the latest dynasty to rule the Chinese Empire? Have they not ended up replicating the same system of highly-centralized authoritarian bureaucracy that has characterized the Chinese state for millennia?
One could go around the world and find examples of the same thing. Despite the new names—despite the purported ideologies of the new governments—the underlying structures of the polity, and all its problems, will be found to correspond perfectly to whatever predecessor government was there before. Putin instead of Stalin; Lenin instead of Czar Alexander; Mao instead of the Qing Dynasty. Old wine in new bottles. As Milton would put it: "New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ Large."
This is of course not a new observation on my part. Skeptics of democracy and liberal revolutions have been saying as much for as long as such things have existed.
I've been talking in recent posts about Gustave Le Bon's underrated and surprisingly sympathetic study The Crowd, for instance, and he addresses this point in words that still ring true today, no matter how much we might prefer to evade the conclusion. He says that many popular changes of government are more a matter of exchanging names for things, rather than of altering the substance. Thus, though the French Revolution toppled the monarchy in the name of the republic, it ended up installing a new centralized absolutist regime that proceeded along the same lines of political development (Tocqueville famously made this point as well).
Le Bon frames it starkly, but not inaccurately, given what we know about the Terror and the September Massacres. He cites a passage from the earlier conservative historian Taine to make his point: under the slogans of liberty and republicanism, "the Jacobins were able 'to install a despotism worthy of Dahomey, a tribunal similar to that of the Inquisition, and to accomplish human hecatombs akin to those of ancient Mexico.'" (Unwin trans.) Thus, the words changed, but the substance of the oppressive French absolutist state and clerical rule remained unchanged. The same goes—Le Bon observes—for Latin American republics that proclaimed constitutions of liberty and justice, yet quickly dissolved into dictatorships.
One can also find the same point in Joseph de Maistre's Considerations on France. And since we are talking here about reactionary ideology, we might as well turn to the source. De Maistre's ur-text of reaction furnishes as comprehensive a brief as we are likely to find anywhere for the doctrine of "Futility," as Hirschman called it. Nor could one ask for a more eloquent and entertaining statement of it.
To be sure, de Maistre has his deeply unsympathetic moments. Far more than Le Bon—whose thesis is often unfairly caricatured—de Maistre deserves the label sometimes attached to him of being proto-fascist. I don't know how else to read his valorization of war as a great "pruning" mechanism that will hive off the excess population of humankind, for instance. His defense of extreme orthodoxy in religious belief, while appearing in certain passages not actually to believe in it himself, meanwhile ("If they are not true, they are good," he says of his claims about Divine Providence (Lebrun trans. throughout)), presages Maurras, Sorel, and the concept of the "myth" that would loom so large with the fascists.
But also, just as with Le Bon, what de Maistre has to say about the failures of the French Revolution and the Jacobins is not wrong. In the name of liberty, they really did erect a raging despotism that made the former French absolutist feudal state look mild and humane by comparison. And when we survey the democratic backsliding happening around the world today—as I say—de Maistre's skepticism about the possibility of grafting new democratic forms of government onto preexisting societies where they have no indigenous roots seems fairly prescient.
De Maistre claims, throughout the book, that every promulgation of a new constitution or system of government is empty. Indeed, constitutions are not written—they are arrived at organically through the unique development of each society (here, de Maistre has more in common with Burke, whom he read and admired, than he does with the twentieth century fascists who would appropriate him). The most that any written constitution can do, says de Maistre, is to codify rights that had long preexisted and been recognized in that society. This would provide some explanation, if true, for Le Bon's observation that the names of governments change, but the names make no difference to the substance—the underlying political structures always remain the same.
One is tempted at this point to adduce modern counterexamples. It is not in fact the case, after all, that every country ends up following the path of Russia and the PRC. Some nations really have managed to form new liberal democracies that last. If "Chinese culture" or the "character" of the Chinese nationality invariably ended up replicating the structure of authoritarian centralization, as de Maistre would have us believe, then Taiwan or the pre-2020 condition of Hong Kong would be very hard to explain. Chinese liberal democracy is plainly not a pipe dream or a contradiction in terms—we know that because it already exists, in the Taiwanese Republic of China.
De Maistre could wave this away, however, by clarifying that he meant that no "large" new republic could be brought into existence by constitutional fiat. Even in his own era, after all, he was well aware that republics existed. Moreover, they had to originate from someplace. But, he observes, they can only operate on a small scale (Walter Lippmann's analysis in Public Opinion is relevant here too—he likewise suggests that true democracy is only realizable at a scale where people's direct personal interests and circumscribed range of views cover the entire range of decision-making in which the polity must engage; and that—in turn—can only be true in relatively small political communities.)
In making this claim, however, de Maistre already had to contend—even writing in 1797—with the counterexample of the United States. Here, on these sunlit shores, we had at that point just recently managed to establish a republic on a large scale. But, in fairness to de Maistre, it was not at all clear at that point that the experiment was going well—or that it would last for any length of time. "America is often cited," de Maistre writes, but "I know of nothing so provoking as the praises bestowed on this babe-at-arms. Let it grow."
I have to admit, I felt a certain thrill of patriotic pride when I read this. No matter how plausible de Maistre manages to make his thesis of "futility" sound, I happen to be a citizen of the one greatest counterexample that serves to refute him. And while de Maistre could airily dismiss this argument in 1797, implying that the American experiment was untested as of yet and might not last to maturity, I can say from the perspective of over two centuries later that de Maistre was wrong. The country still stands, as an example to the world of a written constitution that survived, and a large-scale representative republic that lasts to this day (if we can keep it!)
De Maistre would have a counterargument to this as well, however, could he have foreseen what was coming. After all, there is a Burkean conservative explanation for why the American republic lasted and so many others—originally modeled or proclaimed along the same lines—have not.
De Maistre explains that the United States had a starting advantage in producing a representative government and in preserving liberty, because they were essentially just carrying over the preexisting legal rights and constitutional norms they had inherited from the British system. "The Americans built with these elements [...] they had received from their ancestors, and not at all tabula rasa, as the French did," de Maistre writes. Thus, he argues, the United States is no exception to his ironclad rule that "No constitution is the result of deliberation," and that "constitutive acts or fundamental written laws are never more than declaratory statements of anterior rights."
He has a fair point. The common law, habeas corpus, due process—these were all things we carried over from the unwritten British constitution and legal system, where it had taken centuries of organic development for these concepts to arise at all. And indeed, the celebrated personal rights that appear in our Bill of Rights were not actually originally intended as individual rights at all, and did not become such until well into the twentieth century. Instead, they were understood at first merely as constraints upon the exercise of federal power vis-a-vis the states, which did not limit the actions of state governments in any way. They were, to de Maistre's point, merely a guarantee from the new federal government that it would not trample upon preexisting common law rights inherited from English law that the states were understood to possess.
As strong as de Maistre's arguments on this score may be, however—and as much as the experience of current events seems to confirm them (viz. China and Russia defaulting back to authoritarian structures)—it is worth noting that he was not an infallible prophet when it comes to the subject of the United States.
At the conclusion of his chapter on the futility of constitution-making, after all, he renders a prediction on the future of the country that has demonstrably not come to pass. He mocks the new country's plans, specifically, to found a new capital city on the Potomac. He says that here, if ever there was one, was a utopian scheme—to found a new city where it had not existed before, and to christen it after a revolutionary leader—Bosh! "[O]ne could bet a thousand to one," he writes, "that the city will not be built, that it will not be called Washington, and that the Congress will not meet there."
Well, he wasn't right there! Our country beat the thousand-to-one odds. That's one point the futility hypothesis did not score.
Perhaps, then, as many examples as there are in favor of "futility," there may be some in favor of the opposite hypothesis as well. "If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars," as Arthur Hugh Clough once wrote. In other words, even if many of the liberal and democratic dreams of the world's peoples have been betrayed over the centuries, and their hopes shown up as mere credulity—so too, not every pessimistic hypothesis about the future of representative government has been vindicated either. The United States had a civil war, but it actually emerged for it much closer to being a real democracy, with slavery abolished, with more genuine protections for individual rights, and with more meaningful representation of all its members.
And this is not even to mention the many new liberal democracies that have sprouted up since de Maistre wrote, many of which have proved far more durable than he could have anticipated. Who, in 1797—or even in 1945—could have predicted that Germany would emerge as perhaps the world's foremost defender of liberal democracy, in the first decades of the twenty-first century? Who could have predicted, in the midst of the Second World War, that Japan would become a stable, prosperous democracy by the end of the next decade? Look, too, at South Korea, in its post-dictatorship period.
Look, even, at France, of which de Maistre wrote with such justified skepticism. Fifth time's the charm, I guess—France finally did obtain the lasting republican form of government they sought, after exhausting all the alternatives.
The Burkean analysis of the U.S. constitution, meanwhile, may refute de Maistre's hypothesis as much as it confirms it. Suppose it is true, I mean, that the original U.S. constitution added nothing to the liberties already recognized at English common law, and that it provided the individual with no protection against the state governments. Suppose it is true that the Bill of Rights didn't start to guarantee the personal liberties we hear so much about today (freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, etc.), until after the doctrine of incorporation was invented in the twentieth century. These very facts refute de Maistre. For they mean that apparently countries can invent new rights, that had previously not existed. Apparently, new liberties can arise, through people deliberating and deciding to recognize them.
And so, as worrying as the global democratic backsliding of today's world may be—as much cause as we may have to fear for the future of democracy even in our own, relatively fortunate country, under the shadow of Trump's potential reelection in November—despite all of this, I say, the "futility" hypothesis about representative government is no more proven than its antithesis.
"If hopes were dupes," I quote again, "fears may be liars." Clough was writing, at the time, about the liberal revolutions of 1848, which had largely been crushed. Clough argued, in his poem, that we should not take from this the lesson that such aspirations never succeed. We should not say, he wrote, that "the struggle nought availeth." With the benefit of hindsight, judging from the future destiny of Europe, we can say that he was more right than wrong. And so, I leave you with the final words of his poem:
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.
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