Danger, James Madison, Danger!

I asked [Jeffrey] Rosen [president of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia] to imagine what Madison, the main proponent among the Founders of indirect democracy, would have made of Trump, of Trumpism, and of our coarse and frenzied political age. Rosen’s eloquent answer is contained in his essay, “Madison vs. the Mob,” which is an anchor article in this special issue on democracy in peril.
The American Crisis. The Atlantic.

Democracy is in peril, huh? So what?

I understand that this is considered somewhat sacrilegious in modern American society, but honestly, so what? American representative democracy/republicanism was conceived as a means to an end. And that end was, effectively countering some or all of the many problems that the founders of the nation perceived with the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain. And like many means to an end, representative democracy was a tool. now, some 240+ years later, it's possible that the ends have changed, and so the perception of the best tool to meet the new ends may be changing with them. So be it.

For me, the hand-wringing about "democracy in peril" presupposes that democracy has some sort of right to exist, independent of its fitness for purpose. I'm not sure that people actually understand it that way, and so it's possibly more accurate to be concerned with changes in the ends to which government is being put. But... maybe those ends aren't really changing.

There's an assumption, and one that a number of people are very much invested in, that the goal of the United States has always been to live up to the lofty ideals espoused in the Declaration of Independence; the whole "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" deal. But it doesn't take a Ph.D. in political science to understand that what tended to motivate the colonists most was their own material well-being. After all, violations of people's putative rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness were the order of the day right out of the gate. And while most people tend to take that as a reference to slavery, slaveholding was merely one aspect of it; it went far beyond the simple treating of people as property.

Perhaps what's happening, is that there is a class of people (as there has always been) who have understood that the goal of the United States was their personal material well-being. And that lofty goals and high ideals were nice, but good food and fine clothing were better. And the understanding that changes in demographics are going to mean that they cannot count on electoral dominance to privilege their interests forever has lead them to conclude that representative democracy has outlived its usefulness.

As I've noted before, democracy is a poor way of apportioning scarce resources between two mutually antagonistic groups of people. It's even worse for guaranteeing that a minority minority of the population obtains the largest portion, unless they have allies in the scheme. And if democracy is imperiled, it may be due to the fact that it is useful for lending legitimacy to whatever scheme comes after it; one that might do a better job of looking after the interests of those who feel the nation rightfully belongs, and will continue to belong, to them.