The Experiment Continues: How much democracy is enough?

Frederic J. Fransen

Submitted photo/InsideSources

The American objective was never to discover the purest mechanism for translating a bare majority of voters into governmental power. It was to secure individual liberty through a government that derives its authority from the people while remaining limited in what it can do to them.”

OPINION — Two-hundred, fifty years ago, delegates to Pennsylvania’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia were wrestling with a question about which Americans still are arguing: How much democracy is enough?

The constitution they created would make Pennsylvania the most radically democratic state in America. The experiment didn’t end well. The commonwealth’s constitution begins with a Declaration of Rights: “All power,” it states, is “inherent in, and consequently derived from, the people.”

However, Pennsylvania’s revolutionaries went considerably further. They created a powerful single-house legislature, elected annually. There was no independent governor with a veto and no upper legislative chamber to slow popular majorities. Executive authority was entrusted to a president and a council, while a periodically elected “Council of Censors” was supposed to police constitutional violations.

It was government kept very close to the people. Perhaps too close.

Plato, Aristotle and other ancient thinkers familiar to America's Founders had witnessed repeated examples of run-amok democracy overwhelming law, property and institutional restraint. That concern survived the American Revolution.

James Madison warned in “Federalist No. 10” that pure democracies had historically been “spectacles of turbulence and contention.” His solution was to create a republic in which popular consent operated through institutions designed to restrain temporary passions and protect individual rights.

Pennsylvania, through experience, eventually reached much the same conclusion — and abandoned much of its 1776 experiment in 1790, replacing the unicameral legislature with a House and Senate and the Executive Council with a popularly elected governor.

Pennsylvania had learned that republican government requires restraints on both the government and the governed. That insight is central to the American principle of limited government.

The U.S. Constitution begins with “We the People,” but almost everything that follows limits what the temporary majorities claiming to represent them may do. Power is divided among three branches: Congress, Executive and Judiciary. Legislative power is divided again. Authority is divided between Washington and the states. Judges are independent. Individual rights are placed beyond ordinary majority rule.

These are not unfortunate compromises with democracy. They are the architecture of American liberty.

The distinction later appeared vividly in a famous argument between Thomas Paine, among the American revolution’s most radical firebrands, and the Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke over the French Revolution. Paine emphasized the right of each generation to reconstruct government for itself. Burke warned that societies cannot safely discard inherited institutions and traditions merely because there’s a hope for something more democratic.

The French Reign of Terror vindicated Burke’s warnings that popular sovereignty, unconstrained by institutions and law, could become terrifyingly brutal.

That history is worth remembering because “democracy” has become among the most fluid words in American politics. Both parties invoke it when it works to their advantage, but ignore it at other times.

Arguing over which party is the greater hypocrite, however, misses the more important point.

The American objective was never to discover the purest mechanism for translating a bare majority of voters into governmental power. It was to secure individual liberty through a government that derives its authority from the people while remaining limited in what it can do to them.

That is why constitutional procedures matter, especially when they frustrate majorities. It is why property rights matter when redistribution is popularly in vogue. It is why free speech matters most when the speaker (or what he or she says) is despised. And it is why losing an election should not mean losing one’s rights.

Odysseus, the protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s latest film “The Odyssey,” offers the appropriate image. Knowing the irresistible power of the Sirens’ song, Odysseus has himself bound to the mast of his ship to avoid the temptation of steering the ship toward the beautiful voices — and certain shipwreck and death on the rocks.

A constitution performs much the same function.

The genius of American government is not that the people rule. It is that the people also created restraints upon their own power.

Pennsylvania tried something closer to pure democracy in 1776. Fourteen years later, it reconsidered. Two-hundred, fifty years later, we might profit from remembering why.

Frederic J. Fransen is president of Amerion College in Huntington, West Virginia. He wrote this for InsideSources.com as part of a monthly look at 250 years of America’s story. Please submit comments at yourvalley.net/letters or email them to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.