And in fact, as a child, I was a part of another great awakening: the second founding of America, as the civil rights movement unfolded in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, and finally expanded the meaning of “We the people” to encompass people like me.
Even leaders who are undeniably authoritarian make some claim to the mantle of democracy, either by holding sham elections or by trying to broaden the definition of “rights” to encompass goods they can deliver, like prosperity. Those who are not subject to popular will still crave legitimacy — or at least the appearance of legitimacy. Few will say they simply rule by fiat, something that would have been wholly acceptable in times past.
If democracy is broadly understood to mean the right to speak your mind, to be free from the arbitrary power of the state, and to insist that those who would govern you must ask for your consent, then democracy — the only form of government that guarantees these freedoms — has never been more widely accepted as right.
Democracy requires balance in many spheres: between executive, legislative, and judicial authority; between centralized government and regional responsibility; between civilian and military leaders; between individual and group rights; and ultimately between state and society. In functioning democracies, institutions are invested with protecting that equilibrium. Citizens must trust them as arbiters in disputes and, when necessary, as vehicles for change.
He called them rules of the game in a society — or, in other words, “humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.”
At the beginning, formal protections — such as constitutionally determined organizations, laws, procedures, or rules — may reflect bargains between various interests in the society. As such, they may be imperfect and sometimes contradictory. This will breed contention for years to come. Every democracy is flawed at its inception. And, indeed, no democracy ever becomes perfect. The question is not one of perfection but how an imperfect system can survive, move forward, and grow stronger.
Moreover, these “humanly devised constraints” are, at the beginning, just words on paper. The puzzle is how they come to actually “shape human interaction.” In other words, how do institutions become legitimate in the eyes of the citizen — legitimate enough to become the vehicle through which people seek protection and change?
Over the years, many people have tried to invoke “cultural explanations” to assert that some societies lack what it takes to establish or sustain democracy. But this is a myth that has fallen to the reality of democracy’s universal appeal.
It was once thought that Latin Americans were more suited for caudillos than presidents; that Africans were just too tribal; that Confucian values conflicted with the tenets of self-rule. Years before that, Germans were thought too martial or subservient, and — of course — the descendants of slaves were to “childlike” to care about the right to vote.
Totalitarians leave no aspect of life untouched — the space from science to sports to the arts is occupied by the regime. Mussolini coined the term totalitario, describing it to mean “All within the state, none outside the state, none against the state.” Existing institutions are little more than tools of the regime. In Nazi Germany, science was placed at the service of the “Aryan ideal,” promoting eugenics and theories of racial superiority. The Soviet Union persecuted some of its finest artists for writing music that was not socialist enough.
Every aspect of life is penetrated in some way. The regimes are often “cults of personality” — then entire society bent to the whims of a single leader.
Like the other republics of the Soviet Union, Russia had long had a ceremonial presidency and a legislative council (called a soviet). But these paper organizations meant little until the reforms of the late 1980s. Up to that point, Russia and the Soviet Union had been virtually synonymous.
That evening on the canal, I tried to soften what I had said, explaining that American democracy had taken a long time to mature. “The American Constitution was born of a compromise between slaveholding and non-slaveholding states that counted my ancestors as three-fifths of a man.”
The US was fortunate to have Founders who both intellectually and emotionally understood the critical importance of institutions. It was, after all, the failure or absence of institutions that led them to rebel in the first place. British subjects had rights on paper and according to tradition, but those rights were being violated by the unchecked powers of other political actors — namely the King. The only way to make those rights meaningful, the Founders believed, was to build an institutional framework to protect them. They knew that if the nation were to be stable, individual rights had to be exercised according to rules that all people could understand and trust.
Through a series of compromises they came to a conclusion: The US would rely on a system of “enumerated powers.” The new authorities that would be given to the central government would be explicitly spelled out in writing (they would be “enumerated”), and all powers not mentioned would be reserved for the states.
Still, federalism was not just a matter of constraining central authority. The Founders and many after them believed that government closer to the people was both more accountable and more effective. Federalism was a practical way to govern over a diverse and massive land.
We have seen that America’s Founding Fathers worried about creating a state that would be too strong and thus a threat to democratic values. But they understood that the state had to be strong enough to carry out certain functions: protecting the country from foreign enemies; the establishment of a national currency; the maintenance of civil order; the ability to tax its citizens fairly; and the confidence that the states would carry out federal laws. Somewhere between chaos and authoritarianism lay democracy.
Russia did not find that sweet spot. Rather, the period was characterized by wild schemes to privatize the economy rapidly, creating massively rich new elites while real income plummeted and poverty levels soared for the general population. Organized crime emerged as a potent force, offering protection to companies and individuals (for a fee) that the state could not provide. Regional and local authorities simply ignored the policies of the central government. The Russian citizens experienced daily life as one of humiliation, deprivation, and chaos.
Over the same time frame the number of people living in poverty went from 2 percent of the population to 50 percent. That mean that nearly 74 million people saw their income and earning power plunge in that period as they joined the ranks of the officially poor.
By the 1995, there were still many state-owned enterprises that needed to be privatized. Moreover, the Russian government was running out of money due to capital flight and a rapidly devaluing currency. Moscow needed a way to fund its budget. A number of individuals who had become quite wealthy in the first privatizations of banks provided loans to the government with the proviso that they would receive a stake in various companies if the money was not repaid. It was a good bet. The corrupt and secretive bidding process handed some of the country’s biggest assets to these men.
This is how the oligarchs came to be. Arguably, the state received the loans it needed and many of the companies were reorganized, given new management, and brought to profitability by those who acquired them. But the fire sales of Russian state assets lives on today in the consciousness of ordinary citizens and Russia’s rulers, who use it to intimidate, cow, and extort loyalty from the very rich.
It is said that Putin (a wealthy man in his own right) told the oligarchs that he had a deal for them. He would not challenge their ill-gotten gains if they stayed out of politics. Most followed the script, and when Khodorkovsky did not, the Kremlin made an example of him, breaking up his company and jailing him for ten years. Popular jealousy of the oligarchs has been one of Putin’s most potent weapons against those who are wealthy and influential enough to challenge him. In other words, it was easy to find an answer to the question “Who is to blame?”
The country was in chaos and the Russian people could see and feel it all around them. Pensioners who were forced now to live with their children were humiliated. Soldiers sleeping in Gorky Park, having returned from Easter Europe with nowhere to go, were humiliated. Industrial workers with no job to do were humiliated.
Additionally, Putin’s opposition is largely based in Moscow. In fact, in the election of 2012, the one district that he did not win was the capital. But rural voters love him, and it is in those districts that his image, burnished by favorable stories on state television, is most heroic. Putin maintains contact with these voters through his selection of presidential envoys to each federal region.
With every round of NATO enlargement, Moscow felt the pain of lost influence. NATO tried to extend a hand of friendship to Russia. The creation of a NATO-Russia Council in 2002 was intended to show the Kremlin that the alliance was no longer trapped in Cold War thinking.
Putin has played the politics of Russian identity brilliantly. The problem is that Russia has rarely been a defined geographic entity; it is more like a tide that has gone deep into Europe when it is powerful and receded to the outskirts of Moscow when it is weak. Putin has relied on this sense of vulnerability to build a narrative of a West that takes advantage of Russia, does not accord it respect, and encircles it. He has employed raw nationalism to remind the Russian people that they are great and deserving of the respect that, in his narrative, they have been denied.
Theoretically, the talented and creative Russian people, long known for their prowess in mathematics and science, should be leading the knowledge-based revolution. There is no reason that the economy has to be dependent on commodities — oil, gas, and minerals — for more than 70 percent of its exports. Consider this: When was the last time you bought a consumer product made in Russia?
The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was passed as part of the compromise that withdrew American troops from the South and ended the period of Reconstruction. The meaning of the phrase is essentially “local law enforcement,” and the 1878 act prevents the president from using federal troops “as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws” within the US.
Militaries are necessary for the defense of the republic but are potentially a threat to its democratic governance — this is the paradox. A standing army could be used by the state to undermine the liberty of its citizens. In modern literature on civil-military relations, students of developing countries have frequently asked the question “Why does the military intervene?” The more relevant question is “Why doesn’t the military intervene more often?” Confronted with the failure of political institutions and ensuring circumstances, militaries — which are by definition armed and organized — are certainly in a position to take matters into their own hands.
The president would be commander in chief, but he could not declare war, nor could he fund the effort. The power to declare war would be vested with Congress. Other authorities would be divided between the House (where all funding bills originate) and the Senate (which must ratify treaties and confirm all ambassadors and cabinet officials).
Moreover, the Framers used the federal structure to defend the country through recognizing state militias and constituting them into a National Guard. The states were not allowed to raise troops without explicit congressional authority. But the militias, made up of part-timers who lived at home and worked in civilian jobs until needed, were given the task “to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrection and repel invasion.” The Congress was to assure a certain standardization of procedures and training, but for the first hundred years of the country’s existence, the backbone of America’s military force did not depend on professional soldiers. The Spanish-American War and then the successive world wars would shift us toward a professional military. The National Guard would remain the “citizen-soldiers” that Jefferson so admired.
A few hours later, the commander of the Alabama National Guard unit approached Wallace. “Sir,” he said, “it is my sad duty to ask you to step aside under orders of the POTUS. As a member of the Alabama National Guard, I have been ordered into federal service this morning at approximately 10:30, and it is my duty to ask you to step aside in order that the orders of the court may be accomplished.” The 31st Dixie Division had been federalized and now reported to the president, not the governor.
The marriage of religion, politics, and the power of the state has perhaps been the single greatest source of worldwide civil strife throughout history. Individual citizen hold multiple associations and loyalties and with varying intensity. Religion, though, makes a claim on the believer that is superior to any other. If that claim is confined to the individual and his right to practice matters of conscience freely, then there is not a problem. But if a group of citizens of the state itself transfers that superior call to the realm of politics, dissenters will by definition be disadvantaged. It is simply not possible to sustain freedom of religion for the individual if the state is committed to a particular set of religious beliefs.
Madison and others reserved their harshest criticism for state religions obsessed with earthly wealth and power. Their argument was two-pronged: State religion was bad for the individual citizen, interfering with his most basic and personal of choices, and it was bad for religion, condemning the church to worldliness and corruption. Therefore, under the “establishment” and “free exercise” clauses of the First Amendment, the US Congress can make no laws “respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Freedom of religion for the individual thus became closely associated with the separation of church and state.
These high ideals have not prevented religious prejudice in American social life and politics. It was not too long ago that candidate JFK had to assure Americans that he would not answer to the Pope when making decisions as POTUS.
Many have made the point that Christians founded America. These men and women lived in a time when at least some expression of Christian belief was an absolute necessity for moral propriety.
The questions that have arisen are wide-ranging. Some strike us as fundamental: Can the government compel obedience to a law that a citizen deems to be in contradiction to her religious beliefs? Others may seem more trivial: do holiday decorations with a religious theme displayed on government property violate the separation of church and state? What is remarkable is that we have a Constitution that gives us a pathway to confront these questions. We do not, therefore, take up arms against one another to defend the claim that God is on our side.
It makes perfectly good sense that citizens should enjoy freedom of speech and of religion, protection from the arbitrary power of the state, and the right to select those who would govern them. But a right to pursue happiness? How in the world can government guarantee that?
The answer lies in the fact that the government’s role was actually limited. There was no guarantee to happiness — only a promise to provide conditions of freedom and liberty that allowed citizens to pursue their goals. That has meant that happiness is pursued through individual initiative and free association with others.
The US evolved in a way that made unprecedented room for private space and private activity. This is of course true for the economy, where in terms of “value added,” private industries account for more than 87 percent of GDP.
But the relationship of the citizen to the government has become a dialogue about rights and very little about obligations. Yes, one pays taxes, serves on juries, and obeys laws, but everything else is voluntary — even voting and serving in the military. The truth is that the US has a substantial welfare state, and it has grown immensely over the last five decades. Arguably, therefore, citizenship is finding its deepest expression in this private space where individual citizens or groups of citizens take responsibility for one another. This is one of the strongest pillars of a stable democracy.
The Constitution has by any standard enjoyed a remarkable run. The Founders presciently built in mechanisms for revision, litigation, and evolution. In a sense, the struggle to make America’s democracy a bit better and inclusive — little by little — is the history at the core of its stability and success.
In the view of many Founders, this was an improbably outcome. Thomas Jefferson was convinced that black slaves would not live in chains forever. But he was equally certain that whites and freed blacks “cannot live in the same government.” Tocqueville, in viewing the fate of the “three races” that inhabited America, saw no way for them to live together in peace. Madison and other Founders so despaired about the future for freed slaves that they endeavored to return them to Africa, supporting the creation of what would become the country of Liberia.
And it stands as a remarkable example of one approach to the horrible question that so many emerging democracies face even today: How do you deal with rebels, insurrectionists, and those who are on the losing side of civil wars?
The KKK was founded in 1865 by Confederate veterans in Tennessee and soon developed a presence throughout the region. Violence and voter intimidation against blacks become commonplace.
The injustice confronted by black Americans in the pre-civil rights era was in many ways akin to the injustices faced by people living in non-democratic regimes around the world. What we have seen in so many of those cases, time and again, is that people will not accept the conditions of tyranny forever. Eventually, even if it takes generations, there comes a point at which they will revolt.
Institutions are not worth the paper they are written on until people are willing to say that they must be what they claim to be and to sacrifice and even die to make the point.
LBJ argued that the country could not be satisfied with this paradox. “You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
Emotional cases before the courts pitted aggrieved individual white citizens against larger societal concerns. How was it possible that white teachers with many years in service could be laid off simply to assure racial balance in a school district? Was it really right for black firefighters with lower examination scores to be promoted ahead of their white counterparts? These questions frankly had no good answer when seen as a contest between two compelling principles.