Jefferson Was Right
Government is a strange beast.
Thomas Jefferson told us, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”, and Abraham Lincoln that he hoped “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” would not perish from the earth.
Yet, “consent of the governed” is itself a strange concept, seeming to require that proverbial suspension of disbelief so essential to good fiction. The governed are never unanimous. They are often fractious, and sometimes fratricidal, yet it seems they may be governed democratically, with greater or lesser justice.
In the earliest times, what passed for government almost certainly came about with or without the consent of anyone governed. They probably never asked for it, or found a particular government to be the lesser of the evils they confronted. One thing is certain, though. Those early rulers grasped the benefit of ruling.
Government came about for its own reasons, mainly taxes and tribute, not to mention disposable arrow-fodder. It remained because it “worked”, meaning it self-perpetuated. At least its form self-perpetuated. The rulers themselves were often dislodged and replaced. William the Conqueror, for instance, summarily dislodged the King of England by killing him at the Battle of Hastings. The people of England remained monarchical subjects, of course. Simply under a different king.
William imposed Norman rule on a vanquished English countryside, and maintained it through, among other things, a network of castles and garrisons to tamp down local rebellions. The sword is the most direct way to maintain power, if you can afford it, but sending soldiers to stand guard over a surly people, to keep them at work in shops and fields, is obviously costly and inefficient. Much better if the people can be kept in awe of the power placed over them without the necessity of posting large bodies of troops everywhere. The castle itself and its elaborate royal rituals – and occasional public torture and execution – was handy for this. But the stick is most effective when paired with a carrot, and one of the most effective ways of holding a village of illiterate peasants in awe was religion.
Religion supplied both carrot and stick in the form of Heaven and Hell, but it did even more. It provided identity. This was probably serendipitous, an unexpected quirk in human psychology, but from the beginning was exploited by sectarian leaders as well as their temporal counterparts. The early apostles and saints were perhaps followers of Christ, but to be a Christian was not the same thing. That was to be a particular kind of man or woman. To be a Christian was to be set apart from the rest of humanity, who were barely more than naked apes. You might suffer as they suffered, but your suffering had meaning. It was a test. God was watching. The heathen suffered, too, but senselessly. They could never receive a Divine reward.
Successful religions and their splinter sects each followed their own evolutions, but each became an identity, and when that happened the disposable arrow-fodder were transformed into willing crusaders, gleefully murdering the infidel and rewarded with a place in Heaven – or at least loot and slaves, if denied martyrdom in victory. Religious identity, combined with language and notions of “soil”, was shockingly effective. Long-running wars between Catholic and Protestant-led regions of 17th century Europe killed off a fifth of the population, much of it through famine that followed plunder and pillage, before the Treaty of Westphalia formally ended the worst of them, but the nation-building role of identity, especially religious identity, continued.
So, when Tom Jefferson declared, “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men”, he was indulging in a bit of creative license, to put it charitably. Not without foundation, though. English history at least had been stumbling in that direction, even as North America was being colonized, and the dawn of the American State was deeply tinged with the idea.
Yet, once the American State was established, national identity again swam into being and overshadowed the original inspiration, much as the teachings of Jesus were overshadowed by Christian identity. Despite the lack of a king, the American State was not shy with wars of aggression and conquest (successful in the south and west, not so much in the north), wars which could not have been launched without an exploitable psychology of identity rooted in soil, language – and religion, the old belief of being special in the eyes of God, of Manifest Destiny.
Nothing new, of course. Nothing alien to anyone hailing from Europe, where most Americans originated, and the march of national identity and quasi-religious exceptionalism grew into a global march of war and conquest.
But then the Industrial Revolution caught up with war.
Technology and the tools of mass production inevitably led to continent-scale destruction. In the course of two world wars, something like 100 million people were shot to death, burnt to death, gassed to death, starved to death, or smashed to jelly – out of a population hardly a quarter of what it is today. In an ominous reprise of the Thirty Years War and the exhausted Peace of Westphalia, thirty years of World War were followed by global exhaustion and that Pax Americana which is today so obviously crumbling.
We are left with two visions of government. On the one hand, the utopian ideal of an institution to secure rights, “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty”, in the words of the Constitution; and on the other, the perversion and exploitation of the psychology of identity by ambitious kings, popes, emperors, chancellors, presidents, and dear leaders, that has always led to ever-greater disaster as sword and arrow gave way to gunpowder, horse and sail to mechanization, then air travel and, today, intercontinental missile and nuclear warhead.
So we have good reason, even a right, to be deeply concerned with this, with government in general and our own in particular, why we have it, its nature and structure, how it comes into being, how it changes, who is in charge, and what they can do. Like the nuclear bomb, government can not be un-invented. Like the bomb, it has the ability to destroy us. And the historical record is plain.
Jefferson famously told us, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” I am not sure we ever really knew what to make of this. Revolution has generally been a bloody business, a close cousin of civil war. To declare independence from a remote England, which was not truly threatened by independence, and which actually harbored more than a little sympathy for its colonies, was really a different thing. But that is not a situation anyone faces today.
What we do face is mounting evidence that democracy no longer works. These are dangerous words, I know, because they can be taken as justification for tyranny and lawlessness, although I would argue this is already happening. But the founders of democracies had good reasons for choosing that philosophy of government, and those reasons are still good. The most important explanation, I think, for the growing irrelevance of this philosophy is that for too long we have made excuses for its failings.
Like a road or bridge, democratic government is a human creation, and if not repaired or rebuilt from time to time, cracks apart and crumbles away. Neglect is the father of ruin.
Jefferson owned that “all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Abolish or change. Peaceable, intelligent men and women are indeed more likely to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to fundamentally change an overbearing or failing state, especially if it involves questioning our most basic assumptions and opening the door to possible chaos, political or civil. Easier and more prudent, it would seem, to await better times.
But the cracks are becoming obvious and the breakdowns impossible to ignore, let alone excuse. Like a rusted, sagging bridge, our institutions of state badly need serious re-engineering. And we should undertake this, not when better times arrive, but before the only course of action left is total replacement.
About The Author
