Can Our Representative Democracy Survive?

Are we "the American people" or "the American peoples"?

The American political system, as you know, is not a direct democracy.  That is a system in which people meet to debate and decide what policies they want government to adopt.  If you have ever belonged to a group like a club or a class and needed to decide how to proceed on a particular matter, you have engaged in direct democracy.

One of the problems—and there are many—with direct democracy is that it is necessarily limited to a relatively small group of people who have the time and the ability to meet to discuss and decide policy matters.  Socialism, rightly or wrongly, originally considered itself to be a more democratic form of government in this direct-democracy sense.  Various sources suggest that Oscar Wilde famously said, “The problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.”

Instead of a system of direct democracy, then, what we have in the United States, all caveats to the side, is an indirect democracy.  Rare instances aside, we the people don’t discuss, debate, and decide upon the range of policy issues that arise.  Rather, we elect people to do those things on our behalf, and we hold them accountable for their performance through elections.

The assumption is that our elected officials want to be reelected, so they will pay attention to and act upon their constituents’ wishes at the risk of being denied reelection if they fail to do so.  (In that sense, it is worth noting, we lose control of any elected official once he or she announces that he has no interest in another term of office; the threat of being denied reelection disappears as soon as there is no longer a desire for reelection.)

What, then, do prospective representatives try to convince us of when they seek our electoral approval on this coming Tuesday?  They make the case, in brief, that they are willing and able to represent us.  What, though, does that mean?  At the very least, it means that they know us well enough that they can cast the vote that we would cast if we were there ourselves.

But what makes it possible for someone to represent us?  One reason that we have geographical representation instead of what’s called virtual representation is the size and diversity of this country.  The British have had a system of virtual representation—it’s the idea that any British subject, just by virtue of being British, has the knowledge and ability to represent any other British subject anywhere in the country. 

We tend to believe, by contrast, that you cannot truly represent, say, Iowa without having lived in Iowa.  Geographically, we could then say that you cannot truly represent IA-3 without having lived there.  But then you could say that you cannot truly represent the people who live on the street on which your friends live without having lived on that street yourself. 

If we push this logic far enough, we run into trouble.  Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that ultimately only I can represent myself—and, if Freud was right, I can’t even claim to be able to represent myself due to my questionable knowledge of all the subconscious factors that determine who I am.  Such is logic!

Representation becomes much more complicated, however, when we begin to question the criteria that someone must meet in order to claim plausibly that she has the knowledge and ability to represent us.  It’s one thing to say that if you’re going to represent a district in Iowa you must live in that district in order to experience and know the issues that matter in that district. 

But what happens if issues become secondary to identity?  It’s entirely another thing to say that Smith cannot truly represent Jones if Smith is male and Jones female, or if Smith is one race and Jones another, or if Smith is one religion and Jones is another.  This is the main impetus behind the growth of so-called identity politics.  Indeed, note the way that “he” and “him” are no longer taken both to refer to males specifically and to represent everyone in general.  We’re now in a “he or she” and “him or her” world, not to mention the grammatically offensive “they” and “them” to refer to an individual.

Politicians try to say they can represent and look out for us because, first, I am you—race, gender, ethnicity, religion, area of country, etc.—or second, while I am not you, I do understand you.  That raises the question of how much I must be like you to be able to say that I am truly able to understand you.

In other words, the concept of representation necessarily involves the idea of commonality—for me to represent you, we must have at least a certain minimum level of backgrounds, experiences, and, above all, understanding in common.  As my post from October 15  worried, however, Americans increasingly live in two different and even antagonistic cultural and political paradigms.  Is our commonality disappearing? 

The current presidential election has become, then, a conflict over what it means to be American.  The Democrats argue for a more inclusive idea of what it means to be an American, whereas the Trump Republicans argue for a more exclusive idea.  Can a president now represent the entire American people?  Is there still such a thing as “the American people”?

If this conflict persists, as seems likely, the possibility of meaningful representation in our representative democracy diminishes substantially.  And that is dangerous to the health of the body politic.