The End of (yet another) Illusion

David Brooks had a piece in the New York Times during the week analysing the structural problems in western democracies. The argument derives from Tocqueville's aristocratic liberalism; democracy only works when a well-designed constitution gives directing power to a wise elite who can balance the passions of the multitude, but are themselves constrained by divided government. The passions have been left unconstrained and the elites no longer committed to civic governance so the system is falling apart as elites try to buy power by pandering to the passions rather than controlling them. This position is shared in whole or part by a lot of clever people who developed their thinking in response to the crisis of liberal democracy in the seventies and the closure of one way thinking marked by the "halt of the forward march of labour". In certain corners of the academy and government this kind of thinking is taken very seriously. Tocquevillian liberalism  is coherent and one can reconstruct rationally how it became attractive to liberal intellectuals, but it is one more false god that leads us astray. It is of no use at all when trying to imagine a way through the present crisis in a way that could sustain and enhance the fabric of a free society.

A blog post is to short to develop a full critique of aristocratic liberalism and all I want to do is point out that is a bad guide to history and so likely to be a bad guide in politics. In really major structural crises free societies have not relied on the conservatism of Toqueville but the moral force of Jacobinism. Lincoln and Roosevelt both faced existential threats to the survival of the republic and appealed to justice and the people to mobilise its defense. Both faced real opposition from the bastion of restraint, the supreme court. It was their capacity to define a compelling account of justice and freedom, not their capacity to manipulate the elements of the system that made them successful. It might be worth looking at Roosevelt's four freedoms again too.