The Plebiscitary Regime

Friend and foil Roger wrote to encourage me to comment on the recent elections. I'll call to my assistance two trenchant thinkers to commemorate our acquisition of new Masters.

'As it is a feature of democracies that to all appearance the people does almost exactly what it wishes, men have supposed that democratic governments where the abiding-place of liberty: they confused the power of the people with the liberty of the people.'

- Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, Book XI, chap ii.

'When, as happens in democracies, the representative assembly becomes the repository of Power, the appetite for command impels members to group themselves in permanent factions, thereby sacrificing something of their own personalities to the effective cohesion of the group in its quest for victory.

'The forthcoming elections are no longer regarded as held with the object of bringing to the assembly an accession of fresh talent but rather of strengthening or weakening the various groups to which all belong. Anxious to strengthen itself, the group makes its presence felt in the electoral body, from which it asks that it choose a man who stands in the name of the group in preference to a man with distinguished personal qualifications. "In voting for a man as such, you are abandoning your sovereignty to him," is the way in which it is put to the electors - and it is true. "Vote rather for an opinion; that is to say in practice for a man of whose merits, like himself, you are necessarily ignorant, but who is the standard bearer of an opinion. In this way you will be exercising your sovereignty, and will be impressing on the government the way in which it is to go."  Through the prestige of its leaders and the popularity of its principles the group brings victory to its candidates, whom it has chosen less for their personal worth than for their pledge of their obedience to itself; moreover, they will be the more faithful to their party from the inability to make their way without it.

'The first result of this is a degradation of the assembly, which no longer draws its recruits from the best men. A man must now be ready to rely on the support of the controller of his group's votes and to let his name be boosted for election by his whip. He must be ready to become a mere numerical, and not a qualitative, addition to the assembly.

'Another result is the debasement of the elector's position. He is now regarded only for the weight which he can throw into one or the other of the scales.  By hook or by crook the vote of which he disposes must be got from him. When the Reform Act of 1832 had widened the franchise, the chief preoccupation of the two English parties was to get put on the register the electors whose support each believed itself to have won, and to fetch them in carriages on polling day, for fear that otherwise they would omit to record their vote. The spectacle was not so much that of people proudly exercising their rights as citizens, as of two factions touting in every way open to them for the votes which could confer Power.'

De Jouvenel, On Power, XIV: Totalitarian Democracy