Spectator democracy
“Representative democracy” is a construct created with the intention of keeping the population away from real power. Exclusive excerpt from “Die extreme Mitte” (The Extreme Middle).
We all know the feeling: we have elected our “representatives,” but we have no real influence on what happens. “They” do what they want, whether we applaud from the spectator stands or boo. So why bother with the facade of popular rule? Rainer Mausfeld considers representative democracy to be a means of preventing revolution. It serves to advance the process of disenfranchising us, with our consent, so to speak. According to this view, the cross on election day is not a symbol of the power of the citizen as the sovereign of a democracy; rather, the act of voting transfers power to “representatives,” moving it away from the people. The history of democracy is also the history of increasingly imaginative attempts to keep the elites away from the influence of a supposedly incompetent majority.
[This article posted on 7/20/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/die-zuschauerdemokratie.]
By transferring a pre-capitalist concept of freedom to novel capitalist power relations, for whose limitations this concept of freedom was, as it were, blind, liberalism was able to transform itself into “liberal democracy,” that is, a form of democracy that excludes the economic sphere from democratic control and thus frees capitalist power from any extra-economic control or restriction.
In the process, the traditional guiding principle of democracy as the radical socialization of power is replaced by a new expression of democracy that greatly simplifies the original concept and runs counter to its original intention of providing a civilizational bulwark against the power of the strongest. What is more,
“What characterizes liberal democracy’s approach to this new sphere of power is not to control it, but to liberate it” (1).
“Liberal democracy” means a highly restricted democracy, since the influence of the people is constitutionally limited and central areas of society are removed from any democratic decision-making and shaping.
Liberalism has redefined the meaning of “democracy” as the safeguarding of “state-free zones of private autonomy” for the propertied classes and the provision of free elections of political representatives from a predetermined spectrum of elites. As social historian Ellen Meiksins Wood notes: “Democracy has been taken over by liberalism” (2).
This reduction, emptying, and distortion of the concept of democracy under the influence of liberalism and capitalism has become so deeply entrenched in collective thinking that today the word “democracy” is almost exclusively associated with bourgeois freedoms such as the protection of privacy and private property, freedom of expression, freedom of the press and assembly, protection and recognition of social groups, especially those subject to discrimination, and so on. As a result, the term “liberal democracy” seems to most people today to be almost a pleonasm, when in fact it is a contradiction in terms.
Contempt for the masses — elections in liberalism
The idea of popular sovereignty is deeply alien to liberalism, which has been characterized by a profound contempt for the people since its historical beginnings. Elitism and social Darwinism are inherent features of liberalism.
“The sovereignty of the liberal individual, shaped by the idea of selection and establishing an elite, is in reality the opposite of radical democratic ‘sovereignty of the people’.”
This anti-democratic attitude was already expressed by John Stuart Mill (1806 to 1873), economist, social reformer, proponent of utilitarianism, and one of the most influential liberal thinkers of the 19th century:
“Never has a government, through democracy or a numerous aristocracy, been able to rise above mediocrity in its political actions or in the opinions, characteristics, and spirit that nourish it, except when the ruling many—as they have always done in their best times—have allowed themselves to be guided by the advice and influence of the more gifted and educated few” (4).
In the liberal sense, citizens are property owners; those who do not own property are excluded from civil rights. Only those who are economically independent can afford to make independent judgments. Only property owners have the leisure and education to gain insight into social relationships, and this enables them to exercise political rights. For this reason, early liberal constitutions restricted the right to vote to property owners, or more precisely, to white men who owned property. Consequently, liberalism favored the traditional census suffrage system, in which the right to vote, the weight of votes, and the holding of political office were linked to the possession of property.
Nineteenth-century European liberalism was also characterized by a rejection of universal suffrage.
“European liberals had always rejected democratic suffrage. Only those who met the liberal criteria of citizenship were to be considered full political citizens: a certain level of education and economic independence. Liberal ideals were tailored to the intellectually and materially independent citizen, politically, socially, economically, and culturally” (5).
Liberalism has always been about protecting an educated and wealthy class from the demands of a politics determined by the “mediocrity of the many.”
In traditional liberalism, wealth and education unite against the common enemy of egalitarian democracy.
“In fact, liberalism essentially served the interests of a neo-feudal privileged class” (6).
At the core of liberalism, therefore, there has always been a decidedly anti-democratic sentiment. It adopted from antiquity “misodemia” (7), the hatred of democracy, and the associated contempt for the masses (8), and combined it with an elitism based on education and property, which sought to justify claims to power on the basis of individual achievement. With the transition from feudalism to capitalism, traditional titles of authority such as descent, inherited wealth, or references to actual power structures were increasingly replaced by titles of authority derived from criteria of individual “achievement.” This gave rise to a new ideology, meritocracy, according to which those who have earned merit through achievement are legitimized to exercise power.
In capitalism, individual achievement includes, in particular, the merit of having acquired the means to accumulate capital. The capitalist ideology of a “performance society” suggests that one’s social position is determined by talent and performance and that, in this sense, society is just. In a liberal democracy, according to meritocratic ideology, each member of society occupies the social position they deserve; the rich have earned their wealth and social position through their own efforts, and the poor are rightly poor for the same reason. Meritocratic ideology helps to obscure the fact that there is a social relationship between the two.
Universal and equal suffrage was only widely established in the 20th century through the labor movement. It stands in fundamental tension with meritocratic ideology. Liberalism was only able to accept the universalization of its particularistic concept of freedom tailored to the needs of the bourgeoisie, and thus also universal suffrage, to the extent that it was able to ensure through other mechanisms that the political influence of the people was kept within very narrow limits.
Power elites have always tended to compensate for and neutralize any loss of power resulting from socially won emancipatory achievements by creating appropriate legal and institutional mechanisms.
From ancient times (9) to the emergence of the American Constitution and up to the present day, such a historical regularity in the dynamics of power stabilization can be observed. For liberalism, it is virtually constitutive. In order to stabilize and expand the political influence of the propertied class, it has developed a broad spectrum of abstract mechanisms that are largely invisible to the public, ranging from tax law to the privatization of the media to constitutional mechanisms.
Representative democracy as a prophylactic against revolution
The most important constitutional mechanism for effectively limiting the political influence of the people is the concept of “representative democracy.” This term was first introduced in 1777 by Alexander Hamilton, one of the fathers of the American Constitution. The principle of parliamentary representation was intended to create a mechanism for exercising social power that would unite two goals.
On the one hand, it was intended to satisfy the people’s need for self-rule. At the same time, such a mechanism of representation was, in the words of US social historian Ellen Meiksins Wood, “understood as a means of keeping the people away from politics” and “keeping a property-owning oligarchy in power with the support of the masses through elections” (10). This required a “redefinition of democracy” that would conceal the actual form of an elite electoral oligarchy (11).
The power-strategic purpose of such a redefinition was actually obvious from the outset. For example, the Halle-based legal scholar Christian Daniel Voß (1761 to 1820) argued as early as 1786 that the neologism “representative democracy” contained a contradiction in itself and that this expression must therefore be considered meaningless (12). Nothing, Voß stated, was “stranger than the belief that a people who elect the physical persons of their government, either in their entirety or for one or more branches of government, govern themselves” (13). Rather, by electing representatives, voters “enter into a contract of complete submission.”
“Once the voters have elected their representatives, that is, once they have submitted themselves, they have no further part in the government; only deception and delusion can maintain the idea that the citizen who casts his vote for the election of a representative in the legislative body also casts his vote through him for the election of laws, gives himself his own laws, imposes his own obligations, and the like. For that vote was, strictly speaking, nothing more than his consent to the contract of submission which the voters concluded with the person elected.“ (14).
In addition, ”the representative usually allows himself to be elected, that is, by his intellectual superiority he determines the will of the voters so that they submit to his will among several competitors” (15).
Since the invention of “representative democracy,” it has been clear that this idea is nothing more than a rhetorical surrogate for democracy, intended to neutralize emancipatory demands for self-determination. Nevertheless, this term also developed a great suggestive power among those subject to power, enabling this idea to triumph throughout the world.
“We have become so accustomed to the formula of ‘representative democracy’ that we mostly forget that this US idea was a novelty. In its federalist form, it meant that what had previously been understood as the antithesis of democratic self-determination was now not only compatible with democracy, but constitutive of it: not the exercise of political power, but the renunciation of it, its transfer to others, that is, the alienation from it” (16).
The idea of representative democracy thus served from the outset to defend against democracy (17). This is why the American Founding Fathers’ conception of democracy was also characterized by census suffrage. Even in the 19th century, it was still taken for granted that representative democracies would favor property-owning citizens.
Liberal democracy, which had emerged as the form of government of the educated and propertied bourgeoisie and initially kept the majority of the population from political influence through census suffrage, was able to integrate universal suffrage without risk on the basis of “representative democracy.” As Wood points out, this is largely due to the fact that “the social structure of capitalism changes the meaning of citizenship because the universality of political rights—especially universal adult suffrage—leaves property relations and the power of appropriation intact in a previously unknown form.
Capitalism enables a form of democracy in which the formal equality of political rights has only a minimal impact on inequalities or relations of domination and exploitation in other areas” (18). In oligarchic structures, such as those embodied in elite democracy, elections are not an expression of the socialization of power, but rather an instrument for securing power that is particularly well suited to neutralizing the need for change and steering it in a desired direction.
Despite their fundamental distrust of the people, power elites therefore like to make use of elections in order to exploit their associated function of pacifying society.
The strategy of making ostensibly democratic concessions to emancipatory movements while at the same time “defusing” them by other means has proven highly successful to this day. Since the concept of democracy is charged with radical socialization of power and great emancipatory promises, it can be used very effectively as an instrument of power through a suitable redefinition.
This redefinition must be such that it retains the conceptual impression of political self-determination, while at the same time shifting the original meaning of the term “democracy” in a way that is hardly noticeable to the public, so that “democracy” no longer means political self-determination of the people, but rather external determination by political and economic elites.
This is precisely what the idea of “representative democracy” achieves. For it suggests that the need for freedom of those subject to power has been taken into account and that the existing social conditions are precisely an expression of the will of the people. It is difficult to imagine a more effective form of revolution prevention than the illusion of political self-determination.
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Sources and notes:
(1) Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Contributions to the Renewal of Historical Materialism (Cologne/Karlsruhe: ISP, 2010), page 236.
(2) ibid., page 231.
(3) Kurt Klotzbach, The Elite Problem in Political Liberalism: Ein Beitrag zum Staats- und Gesellschaftsbild des 19. Jahrhunderts (Cologne/Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1966), p. 39.
(4) John Stuart Mill, On Liberty: An Essay (Wiesbaden: Marixverlag, 2014).
(5) Dieter Langewiesche (editor), Liberalismus im 19. Jahrhundert: Germany in European Comparison (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), page 14 ff.
(6) Klotzbach, at the location indicated, page 12.
(7) Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), page 285.
(8) See: Alex Carey, Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), and Joseph V. Femia, Against the Masses: Varieties of Anti-Democratic Thought since the French Revolution (Oxford: University Press, 2001), as well as Walter Christopher Struve, Elites against Democracy. Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890−1933 (Princeton: University Press, 1973).
(9) See, for example, Matthew Simonton, Classical Greek Oligarchy: A Political History (Princeton University Press, 2017).
(10) Wood, op. cit., p. 220.
(11) This was actually easy to see in the relevant historical documents and was already criticized by contemporary authors. More recent historical research has examined this issue from a number of other perspectives and confirmed it. Klarman, for example, states: “The convention’s predominant bent was not only nationalist but also strikingly antidemocratic—even by the standards of the time.” (Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016)). Bouton writes: “Make no mistake: the founding elite constricted the meaning and practice of democracy in fundamental ways that continue to shape our government and society today. (…) By transforming democracy into a concept that encouraged uninhibited wealth accumulation rather than wealth equality, the founding elite (and subsequent generations of elites) tamed what they could not defeat.“ (Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: ”The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution/Terry Bouton. (Oxford: University Press, 2007), pages 261/263.) Jeremy Engels sees in the concepts of the Federalists, especially in the form of “representative democracy” they developed, a new variant of the ancient “misodemie,” the hatred of democracy: “The Federalist updated and fundamentally altered these ancient misodemic discourses, casting aside the more traditional vocabulary of the few and the many and, instead, medicalizing misodemia, marking democracy as an incubator of the ‘diseases’ typical of ‘public bodies’. (Jeremy D. Engels, ”The Trouble with ‘Public Bodies’: On the Anti-Democratic Rhetoric of The Federalist,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs (2015), 18, 505 to 538.
(12) Christian Daniel Voß, Handbook of General Political Science According to Schlözers Grundriß, Volume 1. (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1786), page 75.
(13) Ibid., p. 64.
(14) This idea of a contract of submission was then openly expressed in modern variants of representative democracy, for example in Max Weber’s conception of a “plebiscitary leadership democracy,” Walter Lippmann’s conception of an elite democracy, or Joseph Schumpeter’s conception of an elite electoral oligarchy.
(15) Ibid., p. 65.
(16) Wood, at the cited location, p. 219.
(17) As the eminent representation theorist Hanna Fenichel Pitkin notes: “Representation, at least as a political idea and practice, emerged only in the early modern period and had nothing at all to do with democracy.” (Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, “Representation and Democracy: Uneasy Alliance.” Scandinavian Political Studies (2004), 27, 335 to 342.) Representative legislative procedures can be justified at most on pragmatic grounds of expediency, provided that the representatives are fully accountable to the social base (see Ingeborg Maus, Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie: rechts- und demokratietheoretische Überlegungen im Anschluss an Kant (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), pages 197 ff.).
(18) Wood, at the location indicated, page 226.
Rainer Mausfeld, born in 1949, studied psychology, mathematics, and philosophy in Bonn. He is a professor at Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel and held the chair of perception and cognition research until his retirement. His most recent publications are “Why Are the Lambs Silent?” and “Fear and Power.”