Forum: ‘We the people’

OPINION:

All of the candidates have one claim in common. Each is anxious to celebrate a basic populism. “I want to be the people’s president” is their comfortably shared mantra. For Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John McCain to suggest otherwise would be blasphemy.

Political appeals to The People are not novel in America. But neither have such appeals always been fashionable. The early history of the United States reveals very substantial contempt for mass publics and popular rule.

True, the men who drew up the Constitution in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 had created a document that was stirringly republican, but they surely did not believe in democracy. Imbued with the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvin, they expressed distinctly anti-popular sentiments.

For Edmund Randolph, the evils from which the new country was suffering had originated in the “turbulence and follies of democracy.” Elbridge Gerry actually spoke of democracy as “the worst of all political evils,” and Roger Sherman hoped that “the people … have as little to do as may be about the government.” Alexander Hamilton charged that the “turbulent and changing” masses “seldom judge or determine right,” and sought a permanent authority to “check the imprudence of democracy.”

Even George Washington urged the delegates not to produce a document merely to please the people.” Today, we try to forget that the Founding Fathers had displayed a deep distrust of ordinary folk, and of democratic governance.

With no more than a half-dozen exceptions, the men of the Philadelphia Convention were scions of wealth and privilege. Serious thought by the general population was something to be discouraged. Said the young Governeur Morris: “The mob begin to think and reason, Poor reptiles… They bask in the sun, and ere noon they will bite, depend on it.”

Even Benjamin Franklin remarked that any public capacity for purposeful citizenship was still undemonstrated. President Washington, in his first annual message to the Congress, revealed distinct apprehensions about public participation in government. The American people, he warned, “must learn to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority[.]

The Founding Fathers were largely correct in their expressed reservations about democratic governance, but for all the wrong reasons. We, the people, have displayed a marked capacity for compliance and deference to lawful authority. Yet, we have also shown a persistent unwillingness to care for ourselves as authentic persons. The mob does now reign supreme in America clearly not the mob feared by Hamilton, Sherman and Morris but a dangerous mob nonetheless.

Who are the members of this American mob? They are drawn from every corner. They are rich and poor, black and white, Easterner and Westerner, educated and uneducated, young and old, male and female, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and atheist. It is, as the Founding Fathers had feared, a democratic mob, but its most distinguishing feature is not poverty or lack of schooling or even vulgarity. It is the clear absence of individuality, courage and serious thought.

We Americans inhabit the one society that could have been different. Once, we nurtured a potential to become more than a crowd. Emerson had described the nation as one motivated by industry and self-reliance, not by conformance, mimicry, fear and trembling.

Where now is the individual American citizen, the authentic Single One? For the most part, he or she no longer even exists. For present-day America, it does not matter if the public multitude is obscene or sublime, as long as all are readily able to belong. In these United States, demos is not the plain path to virtue, but the suffocating valley of imitation, mediocrity and despair.

We Americans have come a long way from the ancient Greek belief that each person must be honored for individual worth. In the words of the Athenian statesman Pericles: “Each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person, and do this, moreover, with exceptional grace and exceptional versatility.” In America, the citizen who now acts as the rightful lord and owner of real personhood is quickly judged either a fool or a sociopath.

It is as mass society that we Americans choose to define and defile our lives and our nation. Our product-driven society bristles with demeaning jingles, shameless hucksterism, humiliating allusions and endless equivocations. Somehow, we have managed to deform the republic and ourselves at the same time.

“The People” now so loudly adored by all presidential candidates have little to commend themselves as individual persons or citizens. Before this can change, we must first begin to take our selves seriously. Unless this happens, the coming presidential election will be largely beside the point.

Louis Rene Beres, who served as chairman of Project Daniel, is a professor of international law at Purdue University.