Democracy as Popular Responsibility

For the past couple of weeks I've been watching this show Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It's a curious entity: a Japanese anime from 1988 that, in a whole host of ways, has a shockingly progressive ethos. And it also manages something that I've almost never encountered: meaningful, interesting exploration of political philosophy through fictional narrative. I'm not sure why exactly that's so rare. Perhaps it's because democracies are boring, for narrative fiction purposes anyway. Stories demand characters but democracies are fundamentally not about any one person. Political stories set in democracies, therefore, will often over-emphasize the importance of individual figures, which is fine if they're just stories but problematic if they try to get philosophical. (I believe that's in part the story of The West Wing.) Most fantasy worlds, meanwhile, are pre-democratic, essentially feudal/monarchical societies, which are much better for storytelling but also boring for political theory purposes because, well, non-democratic political theory is wrong per se and therefore not very interesting.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes solves this dilemma I think in part by structuring itself as a conflict between the Empire, a Germanic society ruled by an autocratic Kaiser and an oppressive, entrenched nobility, and the Free Planets Alliance, a democratic society that broke away from the Empire some few hundred years ago. So far this sounds like a pretty standard Cold War-style Good vs. Evil story. The thing is, though, that the Alliance is actually a deeply diseased "democracy," probably as a result of 150 years of perpetual war. The show does a deft job of depicting a society that is simply not free despite its formally democratic institutions. The Empire, meanwhile, is equally decrepit after five hundred years of comfortable privilege for its aristocrats, but has the good fortune to be conquered by Reinhard von Lohengramm, one of the protagonists of the show, who rises up from the minor nobility to become Kaiser and begin his own, new dynasty. Though no democrat, Reinhard is very much a progressive reformer.

And what this dynamic sets up is the very interesting question of which side of this war between a corrupted democracy and an enlightened dictatorship is actually the good side. It's a particularly pressing question for the other chief protagonist, Yang Wenli, an admiral in the Alliance fleet who actually hates war and really just wants to be a history scholar, who feels uncomfortable about fighting on behalf of the in many ways unworthy Alliance government. And for whatever reason (credit presumably goes in large part to the writers of the show), Yang is spectacularly wise, and every single thing he says about political philosophy, every decision that he makes as the war goes along, is fascinating. It really gets at the ideas of, what is democracy, why is it good and important, etc., in a very deep way that you just don't see in a lot of fiction.



I mention this because one theme that comes up in some of Yang's musings is that democracy means popular responsibility as well as popular sovereignty. One comes with the other. If a democracy fails, the failure belongs to the people as a whole. Yang prefers democracy to autocracy not so much because he thinks the people will govern better but because, in an autocracy, the blame for failure can be placed upon one man's shoulders rather than born by the entire populace. This is a fascinating idea, a whole way of looking at things that I had frankly never thought of before.

And I mention all of this because I think the idea of democracy as popular responsibility is essential to thinking about things well in the age of Trump. Trump is awful. He is doing awful things, undemocratic, authoritarian things. But the fault, really, lies with the people, those who support him at least. Our institutions are eminently capable of dealing with Trump. Our Constitution was designed with the danger of a figure like Trump firmly in mind, and the Founders created specific mechanisms by which to handle such figures. Those mechanisms would work just fine and could solve our current crisis in a heartbeat. The problem is that we're in two crises, not one. The first is the acute Trump crisis, the "the President sure seems like a Russian agent and is trying to undermine our democratic institutions" crisis. The second is the long, slow one, the Mitch McConnell-Newt Gringrich crisis. The crisis caused by three decades of Republicans deciding that they care more about promoting their unpopular agenda of upholding the wealth, power, and privilege of their faction than they care about democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law.

And without that long, slow crisis, Trump would be unimportant. He would've been impeached by now; it's been obvious for ages that he should be, if we had a Congress interested in doing its job in defense of the Republic. But we don't, and the reason we don't is that apparently a huge portion of the electorate doesn't really care about democracy either. We see this in their willingness to keep supporting the party that has been gradually undermining our democracy for decades, and we see it especially in their continued support of Trump. That support cannot, at this point, be understood any other way. And this is an extremely unhealthy state for a democracy to be in. These people, these citizens, are failing. They are failing in their responsibility to uphold democracy, to protect their own freedoms and those of their fellow citizens. It is their fault; it is their responsibility. The blame lies with all of them, not just with Donald Trump or Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell.

I'm writing this post specifically because of a couple of things I've seen in the public discourse today that I think are wrong and that are wrong specifically because they don't adequately account for popular responsibility. One is the genre, which Matt Yglesias rightly calls tiresome, of pieces showing that Trump supporters still support Trump, with the implication that the things he's doing can't be that bad. This article, for instance, is titled "Parallel universes: D.C. freaks, Trump Country shrugs," with the obvious implication being that D.C.'s freak-out shows how out-of-touch it is. Because after all, Trump's supporters are The People (well, part of The People anyway), and in a democracy The People are never wrong (even when they disagree with each other). But that's wrong. Democracy means only that the people rule. Monarchy means rule by one, but we would never say that the one ruler of a monarchy can never be wrong. The sovereign people can be wrong as easily as a sovereign monarch can. They are entitled nevertheless to govern themselves, even to govern themselves wrongly, but that doesn't stop them from being wrong. It's up to them to not be wrong. It's their responsibility. The Trump supporters who shrug at the firing of Comey are failing in that responsibility.

The other is this post on LawFare, a wonderful place whose leaders, particularly Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey, understand the true contours of our current crisis better than almost anyone. But this piece, by one Paul Rosenzweig, is just wrongheaded. It responds to the possibility that Trump will nominate a partisan Republican to replace James Comey as Director of the FBI, and that the Republican Senate will confirm him in a party-line vote, by placing the blame on Harry Reid. Why? Because in 2013 Harry Reid abolished the Senate filibuster rules for executive nominations. Previously, 41 Senators had been able to block any nomination. And so you see it's all Harry Reid's fault, because if the filibuster were still in place for executive nominations then the minority Democrats could block the appointment of, say, John Cornyn to be FBI Director. Now they can't. Boo hoo. The piece ends by invoking what appears to be the thesis of an earlier LawFare post, "We don't defend norms by destroying them."

This is a deeply stupid argument. The main reason why it's deeply stupid is that Mitch McConnell would not hesitate to do exactly what Harry Reid did if the circumstances called for it. Jonathan Chait has been making this argument for years: that the filibuster is already effectively dead because it has long since been true that either party would get rid of it any time it presented a serious impediment to their agenda. The only question is who gets rid of it first. Republicans have been threatening to get rid of the filibuster since at least 2005; the only real reason why it's been Democrats who've actually done it is that when Republicans are the ones making the threats, the Democrats usually back down, on account of how they are usually wimps. The 2013 Republicans were just the first to actually make the majority carry out their threat. So arguments like Rosenzweig's entirely misunderstand the practical dynamics and game theory of the filibuster. Harry Reid has basically nothing to do with the fact that the filibuster doesn't exist anymore for executive nominations.

But there's also a deeper problem with the argument. The idea is that if the President of the United States nominates, and the Senate majority unanimously approves, an extremely improper FBI Director and thereby undermines an important pillar of our democracy (viz., the non-politicization of law enforcement), it's the minority party's fault, for failing to reserve to itself the power to block that nomination. No! It's the majority's fault, for doing those things! It would be really, really easy for, say, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, Ben Sasse, the other Republicans who talk like they actually care about the Republic, to vote against such a nominee. If they instead vote for him, that's their fault! It's their responsibility. It's not the fault, it's not the responsibility of the 48 Democrats who would all vote against the nomination. It's not our job to save the Republicans from their own fecklessness. If the American people wanted that to be our job, they would have given us the majority in the Senate.*

And more importantly, it shouldn't be the minority's job to save the country from the majority's errors. This is the thing about the filibuster: it undermines the People's ability to govern themselves, because essentially no matter how the elections for President, House, and Senate turn out, unless there's a Senate supermajority the only legislation that can pass is that which is broadly agreeable to the Senate leadership of both parties. Which turns America into basically an oligarchy, where the Senate Majority and Minority Leader decide what will or will not happen and there's nothing the People can realistically do to change that. And because the People are, to some extent, stripped of their sovereignty, of their power to govern themselves, to that extent they are stripped also of their responsibility. Quite possibly we would get a better outcome in the forthcoming FBI Director nomination if the Senate Democrats had the power to filibuster the nomination.

 If you think Harry Reid has a meaningful causal relationship to the fact that they don't have that power, then in some sense that's his "fault." But it's too easy to put the fault on him, or even on Mitch McConnell (although I do think McConnell bears significant blame for a lot of what's wrong with our country; he had innovative ideas about how to break our institutions that no one else had, even if other people went along with them). The fault lies with the portion of the American people who voted Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell into power. They, apparently, want this. They want a President who will appoint a crony to run the FBI. That's on them. Arcane procedural rules that prevent them from getting what they want are not the solution.

Saying "we don't defend norms by destroying them" presumes that all our norms are good ones. But the filibuster, the norm that nothing happens in Congress that is not "bipartisan," is a bad one, an undemocratic one. Trying to defend democracy through antidemocratic means doesn't work. It's an inherent contradiction. Democracy means popular responsibility and if the People aren't willing to shoulder that responsibility, there's nothing you can really do to make them, except possibly to make them face up to the consequences of their own actions. Doing the opposite, telling them that they don't have to worry because no matter what they do their leaders will steer the ship of state just fine, only encourages the decay of the necessary civic engagement and diligence. The filibuster prevented the People from choosing how they wanted to govern themselves, and therefore it deserved to die. If the People choose to govern themselves badly, that is no one's fault but their own.


*Note: I'm setting aside the whole "Democrats got more votes for President, Senate, and the House, and yet control none of the three" thing. That's just a problem with our democracy that impedes popular sovereignty and therefore also popular responsibility.