For many voters, the recent presidential election was devastating. For others, it was exhilarating. For both, a reminder that the president is America’s chief executive and military commander in chief, not our ruler.
I point this out not because Donald Trump will be sworn in as America’s 47th president but because that’s how America’s government was designed.
The primary concern of the framers of the U.S. political system was not how to protect and extend democracy but how to prevent democratic tyranny. Their solution was a limited national government, defined by separation of powers and checks and balances among the legislative, executive and judicial branches — operating within a federal system. We already see this system at work as President-elect Trump faces resistance to some of his government-position nominees.
Limiting government, particularly at the federal level, is a core American principle.
When asked whether the Constitutional Convention would produce a monarchy or a republic, Benjamin Franklin famously responded, “A republic, if you can keep it!â€
In a republic, government is“by the people†and “for the people.†But this still begs the question of how government officials are selected and the scope of their power.
Many leading political thinkers, from Plato to the present, have agreed on one thing: “democracy†is not the answer.
By “democracy,†they meant rule by simple majorities. Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French author of “Democracy in America,†wrote that the most significant danger to America was the power of the majority, which, if given broad authority, would lead to the trampling of individual rights, what he called the “tyranny of the majority.â€
As James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, put it, “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.â€
Instead of (and in contrast to) a strictly democratic system of government, ours’ is defined by the protection of individual rights. People have not flocked to this country for hundreds of years to participate in democratic elections. There are many places where they can do that, often in a purer democratic form. Instead, they are attracted to America because our individual rights are protected by our political, legal and social institutions.
The brilliance of the U.S. Constitution is that while allowing for rule by and for the people, it also incorporates a multitude of protections designed to prevent, or slow down, “the people†from turning into a mob, undermining justice and trampling on individual rights.
During the recent presidential campaign, strong voices on the right and left called for the abandonment of critical aspects of the Constitution (through various means), freeing their side to exercise near-unlimited power if elected.
John Rawls, one of the 20th century’s most significant political theorists, developed a concept called the “veil of ignorance.†The rules of society, Rawls declared, should be designed without knowing how or where you will fit in. You might want to be king, but if you create a kingdom, you don’t know in advance if you will be king or a peasant in that imaginary realm. Applying this framework prompts most people to favor systems that treat the least advantaged, the peasants, justly because they’re likely to be among them.
Applying this to the government, imagine what type of system you would design if you knew that “your side†would be out of power for the foreseeable future.
Be thankful that we have such a system. It’s why the Constitution doesn’t give the president unlimited power; there are all sorts of institutional hurdles to slow down ill-considered law-making, and it’s why the Senate historically has shied away from confirming federal judges on a purely partisan basis.
The Founders understood, as Henry David Thoreau would write in his famous 1849 essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedienceâ€: “That government is best which governs least.â€
