Public Opinion, the American Way

`Left’ and `Right,’ Americans today call their political life out of joint, and therefore

painful. A news cycle cannot go by without another show of genteel hand-wringing over Tea-Party activists and radio-show callers–their rage, their seemingly endless array of `phobias,’ the menace they pose to decent people everywhere. Complementarily, Americans on the `Right’ are outraged or, more precisely, morally indignant. This has nothing to do with the thought-crimes and sentiment-felonies of racism, sexism, homophobia; rather, as seen in the recent passage of health-care legislation in the face of public opposition,, conservatives see a representative form of government that no longer, well, represents the majority of Americans.

Both sides feel a dislocation in America, a dislocation of public opinion from government.

In our Constitution “we the people” announce that we rule ourselves, through our elected representatives. But our eyes and ears tell us that our elected representatives listen not to us but to party leaders and other purveyors of elite or `advanced’ opinion, `expert’ opinion, `academic’ opinion. The Right deplores this; the Left says, `Thank God!’–or it would, if the Left did not now insist on a chaste separation of religiosity from state.

If public opinion in some form rules and thus preoccupies republican regimes, how should it rule? What is the proper relationship between citizens, their opinions, and their government?

As the designers of what Madison called the first “purely republican” regime in the modern world the American founders thought carefully about the role of public opinion in popular self-government. None thought more clearly than did Madison himself. And today, no one thinks more clearly about Madison than the Villanova University scholar, Colleen Sheehan. In her recent book, James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government (Cambridge University Press, 2009) Sheehan she explains how Madison understood both the promise and the perils of American political life, particularly as they center on the question of public opinion.

Madison understood politics as the classical political philosophers had done, Aristotle above all. A political regime consists of three fundamentals: those persons who rule (whether they are one, few, or many, good or bad); the institutional structures by which the rulers rule (legislatures, courts, armies, but also tribes, religious cults, and markets); and the way of life of the society, the citizens daily patterns of activity, public and private. Through institutions rulers rule–in republics they rule by the consent of the governed–by commands, particularly laws. Laws shape, and are shaped by the citizens’ way of life.

Between the law and the citizens, so to speak communicating between the two, the “spirit” of the community, its public opinion, circulates. In Sheehan’s words, Madison understands that “the ongoing sovereignty of public opinion” requires “the active participation of the citizenry in the affairs of the political community.” In this respect, the Tea Partiers do exactly what the American founders wanted Americans to do.

In my experience, the Tea Partiers–and not only they–seek not only a voice but a voice guided by a renewed understanding of their own regime. They sense that their regime no longer quite belongs to them, any more, or to the much wider numbers of ordinary citizens who have long since given up attempting to engage in active self-government. They and their fellow citizens have not only lost control of their own government, and therewith their way of life, but have lost a sense of how to exercise the sovereignty they are supposed to possess. Americans hunger for a better understanding of how they can govern themselves, sensing that mere outrage, mere sentiment, however justifiable, can’t and won’t get them very far. Here too, Madison offers a steady hand.

Sheehan identifies six components of Madisonian republicanism, all of them carefully interrelated.

First, American republicanism means representative government. Whereas the democracies of ancient Greece resembled big, tumultuous town-hall meetings, where the loudest lungs too often carried the vote, government by elective representatives slowed down the passions of the moment, gave deliberation and choice some purchase against sentiment and force. Meetings and petitions, yes. Government by such means, no, except in towns where everyone knew everyone else, places where you could tell the local windbag to sit down for a spell.

Second, representative government enables the rule of the people to extend through much larger territories and populations than any of the old Greek democracies could manage. This enables governments of, by, and for the people to defend themselves against the powerful centralized states commanded by monarchs and aristocrats. Just as important, the extensive republic also makes factions–unjust majorities and minorities–less able to dominate; by complicating the task of political organizing, republicanism dilutes the effects of faction, prevents factitious leaders from stealing a march on those who have no axe to grind and then wield against the public treasury.

The familiar system of balanced, separated governmental powers provides much the same protection within the government itself. By necessitating cooperation among the several branches of government, American’s constitutional structure prevents the concentration of undue power in any one set of hands, making persuasion not force the habit of those who govern. It is a good habit for such persons to get into.

Federalism stands as another such structure. While separation and balance of powers divide government `horizontally,’ federalism divides it `vertically.’ Each municipality, each county, each state has responsibility for its level of governance, even as the federal government has responsibility for matters preeminently national. Without federalism, Madison remarks, the executive power must expand, inasmuch as no body of national legislators could know all the details of government down to the individual citizen. Neither can any one executive: hence modern bureaucracy, which the Declaration of Independence had memorably described as “a swarm of Officers” who “harass our People, and eat out their substance.” While Madison worried that Alexander Hamilton and his allies in the 1790s would turn government over to the executive branch, the gentry classes, and especially the bankers, we now see (in addition) a new class of bureaucrats who take over the functions of government from the people and their representatives alike.

Madison’s fifth component of government, public opinion, takes some of its shape because it flows through these institutional structures on its way to becoming the laws of the land. At the same time, public opinion keeps these structures alive; without it, institutions will become only so much dead wood, a tree without its life-giving sap, home to parasites. In the formation of public opinion, some citizens will speak more persuasively than others. No longer entitled to impose their views via a national church establishment, American clergy will persuade their fellow citizens from free pulpits. Equally, what we now call public intellectuals (Madison calls them “literati”) now will use a free press, independent colleges, and public lecture halls as forums of public discussion. Even as Americans enjoy commerce of things in a free market, they will also select from the goods offered in churches, public squares, classrooms, newspapers by “the cultivators of the human mind,” the “manufacturers of useful knowledge,” the “agents of the common ideas,” the critics of manners and morals, and the teachers of “the arts of life and the means of happiness” which it is their natural right to pursue.

Finally, this invigorated public opinion works upon those who govern within the ruling institutions, keeping them dependent upon the sovereign people. The sovereign people, in their turn, will respond to the well-articulated, balanced structures of their public life, habituating themselves to thoughtful in addition to (inevitably) self-interest and impassioned public speech.

The American regime thus deserves the name of commercial republicanism in the broadest sense, featuring above all a commerce of opinions as well as of things. Together, arranged as they are, the several components of the American regime will give Americans, in Sheehan’s words, “free exercise of their diverse faculties.” This is what Publius meant when he predicted that American republicanism would vindicate the honor of mankind from European assumptions of superiority. Madison called this regime–in contrast to European imperialism, then bestride most of the globe, “the Empire of reason,” as Jefferson called it “the Empire of liberty.” In such a regime, citizens understand and defend the rights they have by nature, rights “endowed by their Creator,” as the Declaration of Independence calls them. Madison saw that these rights entail an equal duty, the duty to protect all citizens against violations of natural and constitutional rights–ultimately, to defend human beings against tyranny.

As illuminated by Sheehan’s scholarship, Madison still speaks to Americans `left’ and `right.’ To the left he says: do not hold your fellow citizens in such contempt. To the right he says: indignation is not enough, as it alone only yields frustration and despair. To both he says: government is not sovereign; you are. But only if you really government yourselves, re-learn the way of life of public reasoning, abandoning the self-indulgent arts of vituperation, rhetorical showboating, and ad hominem attack.

Madison left examples of such public reasoning in his contributions to The Federalist and in his other writings. Together, they form nearly a complete curriculum of American civic education. Colleen Sheehan rightly points us back to those essays, and to their author–as timely now as they were some two centuries back.