Fulfilling Tocqueville’s Prophesy by Institutionalizing Popular Consent
“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained form acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America
PBS condemned Watergate as “the worst scandal in American history” for attempting “to subvert the American political process.”
Could a politically motivated raid on the headquarters of a rival party really produce this calamitous consequence? Author James Thompson says no. The way to subvert America’s majoritarian political process, says Thompson, is to eliminate the right of Americans to consent to the laws by which they are governed. If this were done, and if the American people were willing to live under a system of laws dictated by a tyrannical uberclass, they would become, says Thompson, drones similar the ones Alexis de Tocqueville described in Democracy in America. In other words, Tocqueville’s disturbing prophesy from 1840 would be fulfilled by depriving the American people of their fundamental political right, which is the right to consent to the laws by which they are governed.
Thompson explains in his four-book American Revolutions Series, that in the course of America’s two-hundred year political history, this very thing happened. During three American revolutions, the Lockean right to consent was institutionalized. Over two centuries, America’s Nietzschean governing class changed “one man one vote” into a tool it uses to manage the people and preserve itself in power. This transformation, James Thompson contends, has destroyed American majoritarianism. Forget about Watergate!
In his Second Treatise of Government (1689), John Locke argued that majoritarianism is the only legitimate form of government because it alone expresses the “will of the people.” In 1875, English legal scholar Frederic Maitland summarized Locke’s concept of consent in these words:
“When any number of men have by the consent of every individual made a community, they have thereby made the community one body with the power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority. So, when once the state is formed, the whole body is to be concluded by the majority. This assertion of the divine right of majorities is most important, and here is the reasoning on which it is based. That which acts any community, being only the consent of the individuals of it, and it being necessary for that which is one body to move one way, it is necessary for that which is one body to move that way whither the greater force carries it, which is the consent of the majority: or else it is impossible to act or continue as one body, one community, which the consent of every individual united into it agreed that it should, and so everyone is bound by that consent to be concluded by the majority.” Thompson points out that although majoritarianism may be a “divine right,” the society it operates in is not, as Locke described it, “one body.” In fact, it is vulnerable to divisions that make it chronically unstable. Thompson considers three.
The first is the vertical division that creates hierarchy. Thompson notes, for example, that some form of organization is needed to assemble the majorities that express the will of the people. History confirms that this is a top-down process and that the organizations that do this are formed and managed by men who have their own political agendas. This is his focus in the second book of his series, where he recounts how Thomas Jefferson and James Madison created the nation’s first political party.
The two patricians, Thompson notes, formed their famous political partnership shortly after Jefferson returned from France in late-1789. During the 1790s, which Thompson explains was the duration of “the Second American Revolution,” Madison used the party Jefferson encouraged him to organize and grow to take control of the government. As it grew, says Thompson, a leadership network formed around Jefferson and settled at the pinnacle of the organization’s pyramid. At the bottom of this pyramid were the party’s rank and file members, all of whom received their orders from above. The concept of consent therefore blurred as Jefferson’s party grew and became organized.
This vertical division produced a horizontal division. Thompson explains, again in the second book in his series, that America’s adversarial party system came into existence during the “Second American Revolution.” During the ten years this revolution continued, Madison, with Jefferson’s enthusiastic support, organized networks of journalists and wardmen that he used to divide the American people and recruit those who supported Jefferson into his party. He attracted majorities of voters in the agricultural South and the rapidly expanding West with an unending stream of vitriolic attacks on Jefferson’s hated rival, Alexander Hamilton, and Hamilton's plan to revive the American economy from its post-revolution depression. In the fall of 1792, Jefferson’s party became the majority in the Congress. Watching Madison overwhelm them with rhetoric and organization, Hamilton’s supporters began organizing their own party. With periodic upgrades and modifications, Jefferson and Hamilton’s (pro-government – anti-government) parties have dominated American politics since 1796.
The divisions these rival parties created in America’s society grew, says Thompson, until the American people no longer recognized their common good. The union of American states then dissolved and a bloody war between the states ensued.
Third, Thompson points out that Locke’s contractarian society forms when individuals in the State of Nature agree one with another to abide under a common “contract”. For contractarianism to be coherent as a social theory, however, individuals in each succeeding generation must have the same right as the previous generation(s) to create their own social contract. This assures division and conflict because a rising generation might prefer to pursue a different common good. It might specify a different form of government with procedures that approve different laws. It might expand or reduce the body politic, which contains the individuals in the society who have political rights. Which contract should prevail? What duties do individuals have? Should they support the contract they formed, or the contract formed by the rising generation?
A situation like this arose in America in the 1970s as the leaders of Woodstock Nation assumed their places in the governing class. The elder generation aimed to create social justice. The rising generation sought to liberate itself. This division produced conflict. We know that it did not bring American society to an end. It did, however, cause it to fragment. To maintain social order in the face of this fragmentation, the bureaucrats who administered America’s government assumed greater control of its political system, and in this process, Thompson says, they placed additional constraints on the right of every American to consent to the laws by which they are governed.
In the fourth book of his series, Thompson explains that, during the Third American Revolution (1920–1980), four new factors came to bear on the divine right of the people to consent to the laws by which they are governed. The forces these forces exerted, says Thompson, effectively nullified the Lockean concept of consent and changed America’s majoritarian system into a tool to manage the people. The four factors that subverted America’s majoritarian system are propaganda, bureaucratic government, money in politics, and media advocacy.
Thompson does not dispute that propaganda is an inherent part of the political process. He notes, however, that Woodrow Wilson established a commission to flood the nation with "positive publicity" in support of his unexpected declaration of war on Germany in the spring of 1917. George Creel, director of Wilson’s new Committee on Public Information, persuaded the President that propaganda was “the gathering and dissemination of facts for the purpose of propagating truth among the faithful.” Wilson revealed the scope and objective of his propaganda campaign by announcing that “it is not an army that we must shape and train for war; it is a nation.”
When the Great War ended, Congress dismantled Wilson’s propaganda machine. But the proverbial horse was out of the barn. Every department, for example, in Franklin Roosevelt’s benevolent government conducted its own propaganda campaign to “shape and train the nation.” Otherwise stated, the purpose of these ubiquitous campaigns was/is to shape public opinion and boost popular consent.
Bureaucratic government, Thompson observes, was the end game for the Roosevelt Revolution of the 1930s. The American people were willing to try it as the Depression deepened. Roosevelt’s New Dealers took advantage of their opportunity and filled the government with rule-making commissions and panels that sidestepped the right of the people to consent to the laws by which they were governed. Putting the train back on its track proved to be virtually impossible in the flood of propaganda issued by Roosevelt’s Nietzschean helpers. Indeed, the power of the faceless bureaucracy continued to grow—for the next one hundred years! As it did, the significance of popular consent shrank, and the control of the people over their government withered away.
The government grew and spent more money. More money also flowed into American politics. Why? Because, Thompson says, politics became an increasingly profitable business. To get the most productive results, monied interests, including wealthy individuals, for-profit businesses, non–profit institutions, and their agents, steadily increased the cash and services they funneled into the political process. Candidates in Maine could run for office because benefactors in California funded their campaigns. Lawmakers could live comfortably because lobbyists paid their bills. The significance of individual consent diminished in relationship to the quantity of money sloshing through America’ political system.
The advent of television, Thompson observes, further distorted the nation’s political process. Little by little, then in great leaps, Americans turned on their televisions to find out what was happening. Television thus became increasingly influential. Broadcasters designed their programming to attract audiences and employed likeable personalities to present it. By the late-1950s, broadcasters were deciding what was important and what was not, and the people found out what they thought by watching television. Viewers regularly adopted the opinions of their favorite TV personalities. What was their consent worth? Who knows!
These patterns affected the Nietzschean network that controlled the media. Over time, it became pro-active in identifying issues and creating public opinion. Members of this crowd decided that Richard Nixon was unfit to be President. What he did was therefore the greatest threat in history to America’s majoritarian political system. Thompson doubts that the clarions of this calamitous news know that the bedrock on which it rested—the consent of the people—had been co-opted by nation’s imperial hierarchy, of which they are a notable part. The American political process had already been subverted when Woodward and Bernstein revealed the Watergates Scandal.
These events, says Thompson, institutionalized the right of the people to consent to the laws by which they are governed. That is to say, they brought it under the control of the institutions that controlled the American state and its people. In doing so, Thompson concludes, they fulfilled Alexis de Tocqueville’s astonishing prediction.
Rather than discussing how the American people have been deprived of their political freedom, commentators who discuss political majoritarianism tend to admire it. Winston Churchill offered this cute assessment: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
Could a politically motivated raid on the headquarters of a rival party really produce this calamitous consequence? Author James Thompson says no. The way to subvert America’s majoritarian political process, says Thompson, is to eliminate the right of Americans to consent to the laws by which they are governed. If this were done, and if the American people were willing to live under a system of laws dictated by a tyrannical uberclass, they would become, says Thompson, drones similar the ones Alexis de Tocqueville described in Democracy in America. In other words, Tocqueville’s disturbing prophesy from 1840 would be fulfilled by depriving the American people of their fundamental political right, which is the right to consent to the laws by which they are governed.
Thompson explains in his four-book American Revolutions Series, that in the course of America’s two-hundred year political history, this very thing happened. During three American revolutions, the Lockean right to consent was institutionalized. Over two centuries, America’s Nietzschean governing class changed “one man one vote” into a tool it uses to manage the people and preserve itself in power. This transformation, James Thompson contends, has destroyed American majoritarianism. Forget about Watergate!
In his Second Treatise of Government (1689), John Locke argued that majoritarianism is the only legitimate form of government because it alone expresses the “will of the people.” In 1875, English legal scholar Frederic Maitland summarized Locke’s concept of consent in these words:
“When any number of men have by the consent of every individual made a community, they have thereby made the community one body with the power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority. So, when once the state is formed, the whole body is to be concluded by the majority. This assertion of the divine right of majorities is most important, and here is the reasoning on which it is based. That which acts any community, being only the consent of the individuals of it, and it being necessary for that which is one body to move one way, it is necessary for that which is one body to move that way whither the greater force carries it, which is the consent of the majority: or else it is impossible to act or continue as one body, one community, which the consent of every individual united into it agreed that it should, and so everyone is bound by that consent to be concluded by the majority.” Thompson points out that although majoritarianism may be a “divine right,” the society it operates in is not, as Locke described it, “one body.” In fact, it is vulnerable to divisions that make it chronically unstable. Thompson considers three.
The first is the vertical division that creates hierarchy. Thompson notes, for example, that some form of organization is needed to assemble the majorities that express the will of the people. History confirms that this is a top-down process and that the organizations that do this are formed and managed by men who have their own political agendas. This is his focus in the second book of his series, where he recounts how Thomas Jefferson and James Madison created the nation’s first political party.
The two patricians, Thompson notes, formed their famous political partnership shortly after Jefferson returned from France in late-1789. During the 1790s, which Thompson explains was the duration of “the Second American Revolution,” Madison used the party Jefferson encouraged him to organize and grow to take control of the government. As it grew, says Thompson, a leadership network formed around Jefferson and settled at the pinnacle of the organization’s pyramid. At the bottom of this pyramid were the party’s rank and file members, all of whom received their orders from above. The concept of consent therefore blurred as Jefferson’s party grew and became organized.
This vertical division produced a horizontal division. Thompson explains, again in the second book in his series, that America’s adversarial party system came into existence during the “Second American Revolution.” During the ten years this revolution continued, Madison, with Jefferson’s enthusiastic support, organized networks of journalists and wardmen that he used to divide the American people and recruit those who supported Jefferson into his party. He attracted majorities of voters in the agricultural South and the rapidly expanding West with an unending stream of vitriolic attacks on Jefferson’s hated rival, Alexander Hamilton, and Hamilton's plan to revive the American economy from its post-revolution depression. In the fall of 1792, Jefferson’s party became the majority in the Congress. Watching Madison overwhelm them with rhetoric and organization, Hamilton’s supporters began organizing their own party. With periodic upgrades and modifications, Jefferson and Hamilton’s (pro-government – anti-government) parties have dominated American politics since 1796.
The divisions these rival parties created in America’s society grew, says Thompson, until the American people no longer recognized their common good. The union of American states then dissolved and a bloody war between the states ensued.
Third, Thompson points out that Locke’s contractarian society forms when individuals in the State of Nature agree one with another to abide under a common “contract”. For contractarianism to be coherent as a social theory, however, individuals in each succeeding generation must have the same right as the previous generation(s) to create their own social contract. This assures division and conflict because a rising generation might prefer to pursue a different common good. It might specify a different form of government with procedures that approve different laws. It might expand or reduce the body politic, which contains the individuals in the society who have political rights. Which contract should prevail? What duties do individuals have? Should they support the contract they formed, or the contract formed by the rising generation?
A situation like this arose in America in the 1970s as the leaders of Woodstock Nation assumed their places in the governing class. The elder generation aimed to create social justice. The rising generation sought to liberate itself. This division produced conflict. We know that it did not bring American society to an end. It did, however, cause it to fragment. To maintain social order in the face of this fragmentation, the bureaucrats who administered America’s government assumed greater control of its political system, and in this process, Thompson says, they placed additional constraints on the right of every American to consent to the laws by which they are governed.
In the fourth book of his series, Thompson explains that, during the Third American Revolution (1920–1980), four new factors came to bear on the divine right of the people to consent to the laws by which they are governed. The forces these forces exerted, says Thompson, effectively nullified the Lockean concept of consent and changed America’s majoritarian system into a tool to manage the people. The four factors that subverted America’s majoritarian system are propaganda, bureaucratic government, money in politics, and media advocacy.
Thompson does not dispute that propaganda is an inherent part of the political process. He notes, however, that Woodrow Wilson established a commission to flood the nation with "positive publicity" in support of his unexpected declaration of war on Germany in the spring of 1917. George Creel, director of Wilson’s new Committee on Public Information, persuaded the President that propaganda was “the gathering and dissemination of facts for the purpose of propagating truth among the faithful.” Wilson revealed the scope and objective of his propaganda campaign by announcing that “it is not an army that we must shape and train for war; it is a nation.”
When the Great War ended, Congress dismantled Wilson’s propaganda machine. But the proverbial horse was out of the barn. Every department, for example, in Franklin Roosevelt’s benevolent government conducted its own propaganda campaign to “shape and train the nation.” Otherwise stated, the purpose of these ubiquitous campaigns was/is to shape public opinion and boost popular consent.
Bureaucratic government, Thompson observes, was the end game for the Roosevelt Revolution of the 1930s. The American people were willing to try it as the Depression deepened. Roosevelt’s New Dealers took advantage of their opportunity and filled the government with rule-making commissions and panels that sidestepped the right of the people to consent to the laws by which they were governed. Putting the train back on its track proved to be virtually impossible in the flood of propaganda issued by Roosevelt’s Nietzschean helpers. Indeed, the power of the faceless bureaucracy continued to grow—for the next one hundred years! As it did, the significance of popular consent shrank, and the control of the people over their government withered away.
The government grew and spent more money. More money also flowed into American politics. Why? Because, Thompson says, politics became an increasingly profitable business. To get the most productive results, monied interests, including wealthy individuals, for-profit businesses, non–profit institutions, and their agents, steadily increased the cash and services they funneled into the political process. Candidates in Maine could run for office because benefactors in California funded their campaigns. Lawmakers could live comfortably because lobbyists paid their bills. The significance of individual consent diminished in relationship to the quantity of money sloshing through America’ political system.
The advent of television, Thompson observes, further distorted the nation’s political process. Little by little, then in great leaps, Americans turned on their televisions to find out what was happening. Television thus became increasingly influential. Broadcasters designed their programming to attract audiences and employed likeable personalities to present it. By the late-1950s, broadcasters were deciding what was important and what was not, and the people found out what they thought by watching television. Viewers regularly adopted the opinions of their favorite TV personalities. What was their consent worth? Who knows!
These patterns affected the Nietzschean network that controlled the media. Over time, it became pro-active in identifying issues and creating public opinion. Members of this crowd decided that Richard Nixon was unfit to be President. What he did was therefore the greatest threat in history to America’s majoritarian political system. Thompson doubts that the clarions of this calamitous news know that the bedrock on which it rested—the consent of the people—had been co-opted by nation’s imperial hierarchy, of which they are a notable part. The American political process had already been subverted when Woodward and Bernstein revealed the Watergates Scandal.
These events, says Thompson, institutionalized the right of the people to consent to the laws by which they are governed. That is to say, they brought it under the control of the institutions that controlled the American state and its people. In doing so, Thompson concludes, they fulfilled Alexis de Tocqueville’s astonishing prediction.
Rather than discussing how the American people have been deprived of their political freedom, commentators who discuss political majoritarianism tend to admire it. Winston Churchill offered this cute assessment: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”