III. The Political Failures
The Enlightenment promised to place politics on a rational foundation. In place of the divine right of kings, the accidents of inheritance, and the weight of tradition, the people would be ruled more justly by a government grounded in reason and consent. The results of this centuries-long experiment are now in, and they do not vindicate those who advocated for it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, published in 1762, proposed that legitimate political authority rests upon an agreement among free individuals to submit to the general will. The concept was elegant and has proven remarkably durable as a legitimating fiction. But it was never anything more than a fiction. No actual contract was ever signed. No one has ever been consulted about its terms nor has anyone ever been permitted to negotiate them. The consent of the governed is presumed from the mere fact of residence and geographic location, which is to say, it is not consent at all but submission enforced by the impracticality of any alternative. The man who may freely leave a country provided he abandons his home, his family, his language, his livelihood, and everything he knows, is not free in any meaningful sense. He is merely presented with a choice between submission and exile, and given the universal jurisdiction claimed by some countries, he may not even have that.
This abstraction at the heart of social contract theory, the idea that rational individuals in some imaginary past are assumed to have agreed to certain specific terms, does precisely the work that rational argument can never do: it manufactures consent that was never given by anyone. And this manufactured consent has proven useful for its ability to justify anything. Just thirty years after the publication of the Social Contract, Robespierre was sending men to their deaths on the guillotine in the name of the general will. The Jacobins were not betraying Rousseau’s principles, to the contrary; they were applying them. If the general will is supreme, and if some enlightened vanguard is able to discern that will more clearly than the confused masses, then terror in the service of the general will is not tyranny, but liberation. The Revolution did not reject the social contract. It followed exactly where its logical premises led.
Representative democracy was meant to solve the problem of scale: direct democracy being impractical for large nations in the Eighteenth Century. Therefore, the people would elect representatives to deliberate on their behalf. The representatives would be constrained by accountability to their constituents, and the result would approximate the will of the people as closely as circumstances allowed.
Three centuries of practice have demonstrated the gap between theory and reality. The representatives are accountable not to the people but to the interests that fund their campaigns and the parties that control their advancement. The people are consulted every few years, presented with choices they did not make, between candidates selected by processes they do not control, on platforms that will be abandoned the moment they become inconvenient. Between elections, the permanent bureaucracy—elected by no one, accountable to no one—governs according to its own institutional logic. The people’s will, to the extent it can be determined, is an obstacle to be managed through media, education, and when necessary, simple disregard.
And direct democracy, which is now tenable due to technological advancement, is opposed everywhere by the representatives who claim to speak for the people. Referendums that consult the people directly are opposed by politicians and overturned by judges. The genuine will of the people is systematically thwarted by the Enlightenment’s parody of itself.
This anti-popular representative democracy is not a deviation from the democratic ideal; it is its mature expression. The Enlightenment theorists imagined that rational voters would deliberate on the common good and select wise representatives to enact sound policy. They refused to contemplate the way in which the structures of representative democracy would inevitably be captured by those with the strongest motivations to do so and the sufficient resources to control them. The will of the people is not expressed by modern democracy; it is manufactured by the elite, distributed by the media, channeled through one or another of the ruling party’s factions, and then imposed by the government.
The separation of powers was designed to prevent tyranny by dividing authority among competing branches. The executive, legislative, and judicial were supposed to check each other’s oversteps, ensuring that no single faction could dominate. This mechanism has proven altogether inadequate to its stated purpose. The branches have not remained in productive tension; they have merged into a single ruling apparatus with superficial divisions. The legislature delegates its authority to executive agencies and abdicates its responsibility to make difficult decisions. The judiciary legislates from the bench, discovering in ancient documents various rights, requirements, and limitations that none of its authors could ever have imagined. The executive acts unilaterally whenever the legislature proves inconvenient. The separation of powers has not contained government overreach, it has instead provided a complex machinery for diffusing responsibility and eliminating accountability while concentrating effective control.
What the Enlightenment theorists failed to take into consideration is that political structures do not operate upon rational principles, but upon incentives, interests, and the will to power. Parchment barriers, however cleverly designed, constrain only those who choose to be constrained. The Constitution of the United States has not prevented the emergence of a surveillance state, a long series of undeclared wars, the demographic adulteration of the nation, or the periodic disenfranchisement of half the citizenry through the two-party system. It has merely required that all of the developments that materially harm the very Posterity whose rights the Constitution was written to safeguard be dressed in constitutional language.