06 EGALITARIANISM AND DIVERSITY

The distinction of ranks and persons is the firmest basis of a mixed and limited government. . . . The perfect equality of men is the point in which the extremes of democracy and despotism are confounded. . ..

—Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

One of the difficulties in writing such a book as this lies in the problem of classification. Because the effort is addressed to very broad concepts, vague at the edges and often intertwining and interlocking, it is hard to find clear divisions between one concept and another. One can only plunge headlong into this subject matter, hoping that the reader will himself perceive the interrelationships among the various headings and topics and will discern something of the broad unity of philosophical concept that presumably unites them all.

In this spirit, and not knowing any better place to begin in this exposé of some of my views about my country, I shall select one issue which, I should suppose, is about as controversial as any that I could find, and move into it as a starter. For want of a better name, let it be presented as the issue of egalitarianism versus variety.

Tocqueville and Egalité

One cannot speak of egalitarianism without recalling, first, some of the conclusions of the man who gave greater attention to precisely this subject than any other thinker of the modern era: Alexis de Tocqueville. Born in 1805 into an aristocratic French family, Tocqueville, upon visiting the United States in 1831, became fascinated with the contrast between the hierarchically structured society in which he had been born and raised and the highly egalitarian society he found before him in America. This subject dominated his impressions of the United States; and while his great work, Democracy in America, the two parts of which appeared with a five-year interval later in the 1830s, referred to democracy in its title, the real subject of the book was equality—equality as observable in America: in the first volume, equality in general, in the second one, in America but elsewhere as well. Actually, he used the two terms “equality” and “democracy” almost interchangeably, because he regarded the equality of status of the members of the citizenry, socially and politically, as the outstanding feature of American democracy, overriding all others in importance.

The reason for this absorbing interest in the egalitarian aspects of American society was that Tocqueville was persuaded that this—the triumph of the principle of equality over that of hierarchy and differentiation—was the wave of the future for all of the western European world that he cared about. He saw all of European civilization as tending inexorably in that direction; and while this prospect saddened him, for it implied the demise of all that he had come to love and to respect in the position and the traditions of his own family, he felt very strongly the necessity of studying it, of coming to understand it, and, finally, of coming to some sort of terms with it. He perceived positive as well as negative features in American democracy, and did not fail to recognize the positive ones in his book, as short-term advantages of this form of government; but for the long term he had very serious reservations about it. People, he thought, were more greatly attracted by the principle of equality than by the principle of liberty; and confronted with a choice between the two, as he thought they eventually would be (for he regarded the two as ultimately incompatible), they would choose equality. He described the taste for equality, at one point, as a depraved one, which would impel the weak to try to drag the strong down to their level and would induce them to prefer equality in servitude to liberty in inequality.1 He thought, too, that equality would lead to an unfortunate centralization of power in the state and that this centralized power would take the form not of any sort of personal tyranny or dictatorship but rather of what he called “an anonymous despotism for which no one person would stand as responsible.” “What is to be feared,” he wrote, “is not a perverse individual, and not a maddened mob—it is a bureaucratic tyranny that would make possible the weakness of the individual.” This tyranny, he envisaged, would not oppress the people in the classical manner but would encourage passivity in them and hold them in submission by pandering to their thirst for the material comforts and for a total social equality.2

Looked at from the perspective of more than one hundred and fifty years, these fears of Tocqueville appear somewhat overdrawn, to be sure, but not wholly without validity, at least so far as the United States is concerned. In these intervening years the power of the federal government has indeed gained at the expense of that of the states. The growth of bureaucracy and its role in the governmental process will be noted in the following chapter. And the large proportion of Americans who, while continuing to demand of their government that it assure their material prosperity, fail to exercise their right to vote in the presidential and other elections would stand as a good measure of confirmation for what Tocqueville perceived as their indifference to the nature of governmental authority so long as it pandered sufficiently to their material interests. It will be well, therefore, to hold these anxieties of Tocqueville’s in mind as we turn to the egalitarian tendencies in the American society of this day and elsewhere.

Egalitarianism and Socialism

These words are being written at a time when the columns of the papers and the television screens are full of what is called the collapse and demise of communism—not only in the USSR and Eastern Europe but in large measure on a world scale. If communism be seen as a governmental system, there is good reason for this. But if it be seen as an ideology—as a form of Marxism—it is only partly true. Radical Marxism of the Leninist variety (which remained, however abused, the theoretical foundation of Soviet society down through the Stalinist period and until the final breakdown in 1991) may have failed as the foundation for a governmental system; but as a theoretical approach to social problems, Marxism in general—or at least a part of it—has deeply influenced the thinking of millions of people worldwide, and this in many instances where these people were not even aware of the source of the influence. And the particular feature of Marxism that has had the widest and deepest effect has been the implicit egalitarianism that has lain, together with the theories of surplus value and exploitation, at the heart of the doctrine.

A striking example of this will be seen, curiously enough, in the Soviet Union itself. Even those of us who saw a good deal of Russian society in the heyday of Soviet power were unaware (at least I was) of the extent to which the regime had instilled, or at least encouraged, among the common people, especially in the countryside, egalitarian tendencies. Where we outsiders saw only a ruthless totalitarian regime oppressing an entire population, the reality was that to a great many in the poorer and more backward ranks of the population the economic misery brought to them by the regime was significantly moderated by its very equality—by the fact that it was shared by the vast majority of the people around them. This equality of misery was in some respects their only solace—the only thing they had to hold on to. And this explains the extreme suspicion and jealousy with which, even in the post-Communist period, they have continued to watch their neighbors to make sure that none of them had contrived to make some money and was living better than they did.3 It has been particularly depressing to learn to what great extent, even after the collapse of communism, any effort on the part of individual persons in the countryside to better their situation by ventures in free enterprise has been actually resented, opposed, and seen as an effort to take improper advantage of others, by fellow citizens whose own poverty was the product of the Communist system.

In the non-Communist parts of the Western world, it seems to have been primarily the Scandinavian welfare states that have reflected most strongly the egalitarian tendencies prominent in Marxist thinking. This is not unnatural given the extent to which they had their ideological origins in the social-democratic movements, which were essentially Marxist in inspiration. In any case, I can think of no part of the world where society and politics are more deeply penetrated by egalitarian principles than they are in certain, if not all, of the Scandinavian countries.

In the European Marxist versions of egalitarianism, a prominent feature seems always to have been the belief that there could be no social justice until everyone lived in the same personal economic situation as everyone else. To this goal all other factors affecting living standards were to be sacrificed. It did not matter what your priorities were. You might have preferred to earn by hard work, and then to save and skimp in order to attain a way of personal living that seemed to you more comfortable, more tasteful, or in some other way preferable to that of your neighbors. But the fellow who chose to work as little as he could get by with, and not to save at all or to spend his savings at the gaming tables, was as much entitled to this uniform, officially approved style of living as were you. The main thing was that no one should live better than anyone else. Uniformity was an end in itself. If your style of living deviated from it downwards—if, that is, you were poorer than the golden mean, even as the result of shiftlessness—this was nothing discreditable; it was merely a sign that you were unjustly deprived, and deserved greater benefits from the state. To deviate from it upwards, however, or at least to show signs of doing so, was reprehensible. It was a sign that you were depriving someone else of something, and ought not to be tolerated.

By my own observation, and much of it from life in socialist countries, I know of no assumption that has been more widely and totally disproved by actual experience than the assumption that if a few people could be prevented from living well everyone else would live better. I have seen village after village in Russia where the wealthy landlord and his family had been driven out, killed or dispossessed, where the ashes of the ruins of his house stood as mute and tragic evidence of his elimination, but where the prevailing misery could not have been greater than it was. I have, to be sure, seen welfare states where a wide improvement in living standards for the mass of the people indeed went hand in hand with the disappearance of most evidences of ostentatious prosperity on the part of the few. But this had been achieved not so much by the impoverishment of the wealthy as by the prevalent egalitarian social spirit that had caused the latter to conceal the evidences of their prosperity rather than to flaunt it. In itself this was, perhaps, not a bad thing. But it did not prove that the impoverishment of the few was essential to the advancement of living standards among the many.

The plain fact, which I believe will be confirmed by many economists, is that the luxuries of the very rich are of relatively little importance as a factor in the general economy of the modern advanced country. Much of what the rich own must, after all, be invested in ways which, while indeed they are normally profitable to one degree or another for the rich themselves, also benefit, by the very fact of the investment, the general economy. Which is better?—that the rich should themselves invest their surplus income or that the government should take it by taxation, and then, after passing it through the sticky substance of its own bureaucracy, spend it in its own favored ways? The government would claim that it spends it (or what is left of it when the bureaucrats have taken their cut) for the public good. The rich would say that they themselves use it, and invest it, more wisely and economically than the government could. There is much to be said, it seems to me, for the latter view.

To say these things is not to deny that there has been, and no doubt still is here and there in all the European welfare states, such a thing as social injustice. There was far more of it in earlier decades, and particularly in the early stages of the industrial revolution. There is so little of it today in the advanced countries of the West that Marx himself, one suspects, had he been able to observe the industrial economies of this day, would have found his goals very largely achieved, and would have been astonished only by the ways in which this had been brought about, which were not the revolutionary ways he had thought essential to this end. Nevertheless, a certain amount of injustice does exist. Where it does, the state has means of moving against it; and by all means let it do so. But I find, in the liberal treatment of these questions, so much oversimplification, social jealousy, and intellectual posturing that I have no choice but to disassociate myself from it.

Egalitarianism in the United States

When we turn to the United States, we see that here, too, egalitarianism has had profound effects. The first great agency of this tendency has been the American governmental system itself, which is unapologetically and proudly egalitarian. All democratic governments have much of this quality, but in the American government it has particular importance. For while most of the European democratic governments have administrative structures through which laws can be interpreted, and their rigidity modified in the application to the individual citizen, we have, as interpreters of the laws, only the courts; and their interpretive judgments, like the law itself, have only a collective applicability, affecting alike all who come within their purview, and allowing no flexibility in relation to the individual citizen. This system, excluding as it does most administrative discretion and flexibility, gives to the law a position of unique and exclusive importance at the center of government—a situation reflected in the numerousness and prominence of lawyers in our public life and in the enormous amount of interpretative litigation with which our courts are burdened.

Now, because the law consists of great sweeping dicta prescribing the behavior of large numbers of people, and because we are, quite properly, all equal in the eyes of the law, the law constitutes the greatest and most authoritative of all the equalizing influences bearing on our society. And the scope of this equalizing effect is naturally enhanced by the growing centralization of government—by the growth of federal power, that is, in proportion to that of the states. Numbers of issues—such things as abortion, integration, and treatment of social or ethnic minorities—which at the outset of our independent national history would surely have been regarded (if they were seen as concerns for public authority at all) as proper concerns for the state governments, are now the objects of strident demands for treatment at the federal level, whether by legislation or by interpretation by the courts, or even sometimes by constitutional amendment. And every step in that direction, tending as it does to centralize in Washington the control over some of the most intimate details of personal or local life, is a step on the path to that total egalitarianism that loomed so unsettlingly on Tocqueville’s intellectual horizon.

But it is not only in the governmental system that such tendencies are present. They are strongly represented in popular attitudes and expectations as well; and here they assume what, in the view of outsiders, must be seen as curious forms. First, there is the attitude toward wealth. Here, in contrast to the situation that seems to prevail in Russia, it has never been regarded as reprehensible to make money. To have it in large amounts is perhaps more questionable. It means, at least, that you should be more heavily taxed than others are. To have inherited it is, however, another matter. Thus George Bush can be seriously charged, by his political opponents, with having been born “with a silver spoon in his mouth,” as though it were well established that to have been born to wealthy parents was, at least from the political standpoint, a serious deficiency of character. The politically ambitious person, it may be inferred, should be more careful in the selection of his parents.4

It is apparent, from these oddities in American attitudes, that where wealth is resented, the resentment centers not so much on the material comforts and luxuries it affords as on the incidental perquisites—the prestige, the privilege, the enhanced influence—that are seen as accompanying it. It is, in other words, the inequality of status that wealth is supposed to assure, rather than the inequality in wealth or income for its own sake, that arouses the resentment. And this is no doubt a reason why the egalitarian tendencies of the country have centered so sharply on the educational process. The more expensive the educational facilities, from the grade school up, the more they are seen as unjust channels of advancement to privileged status, and are resented accordingly. It matters not greatly whether, in any given instance, the parents skimped and saved and sacrificed in order to make possible the resort to these facilities or even whether the student himself took outside employment to make possible his access to them. Nor was the fact that in most instances they gave superior instruction allowed to stand as a redeeming feature. If such instruction could not be given to everyone, it should, in this view, not be given to anyone.

But it is important to note that the charges and complaints along this line find their expression primarily in liberal intellectual circles and in the press and media rather than among the people who, one might think, were the principal victims of these supposed injustices. It is not so much from the sufferers of poverty as from their intellectual protagonists that these complaints come. Much of this may be explained perhaps by the fact that the sufferers have, comparatively speaking, few possibilities for making their voices heard. But it is among the liberal intellectual circles that questions of status seem to be of greatest importance; and one cannot evade the occasional suspicion that it is not so much sympathy for the underdog that inspires much of this critical enthusiasm as a desire to tear down those who preempt the pinnacles of status to which they themselves aspire.

Domestic Service

I cannot leave this discussion of the social aspects of American egalitarianism without mentioning the question of domestic service.

Of particular importance here, it seems to me, is the preservation in some degree of domestic service, as an institution. In the Scandinavian countries, it has virtually disappeared; and the same situation is being approached in this country. Here again, it is a question of the golden mean. Certainly, domestic service was overdone, and the servant class was often exploited and treated in unworthy ways, in the affluent Victorian household of a century ago. And then, too, it has not been a bad thing, in our own age, that many persons of reasonable affluence have found themselves obliged to perform daily certain of the chores once consigned to the domestic servant. Some of this has proved to be usefully distracting and not unbeneficial to health, to humility, and, ultimately, to the soul.

But this, too, can be carried too far. A society wholly devoid of the very institution of domestic service is surely in some ways a deprived society, if only because this situation represents a very poor division of labor. There are people for whom service in or around the home pretty well exhausts their capabilities for contributing to the successful functioning of a society. There are others who have different and rarer capabilities; and it is simply not a rational use of their abilities that they should spend an inordinate amount of time and energy doing things that certain others could no doubt do better, and particularly where these are just about the only things the latter are capable of doing.

There is, in my opinion, no function in human society, which, if truly necessary and useful, is demeaning for anyone. There is none that does not have its dignity, particularly if performed as well as the respective worker can perform it. There is none, for this reason, the performance of which should be looked down on. This goes for domestic service as well as for anything else.

There are those, of course, who do not need domestic service, and there are others who, if they had it, would not know how to use it well. But the only person who should be deprived on principle of the very use of it is the one who would not know how to respect the dignity of the person who performs it, and who would see in the performance of it by someone else a proof of his own superiority. I repeat: the true glory of any useful occupation lies not in the seeming elevation or glamorousness of the position in question but in the integrity and conscientiousness of the effort made to meet the demands of the job. No honest and useful work, however humble, should ever be looked down upon.

I find it hard to picture a great deal of Western culture without the institutions of domestic service that supported it. I can think of none of the great writers of the past, including those who were often strapped for money, who did not have some forms of such assistance. Even the great painters of the Paris bohème of the late nineteenth century seem always to have had some sort of a helper who looked after what one French poet called “less details bas et repugnants de l’existence” for them. I cannot, somehow, picture Tocqueville combining his serene meditations with the washing of the pots and pans and the removal of trash from the kitchen premises. That this form of service sometimes involved injustice and exploitation, I admit and regret. That it needed to involve this, I deny. So I regret the passage of the institution.

Segregation

Another of the points at which the spirit of egalitarianism finds its most significant application is the question of segregation versus desegregation. Well aware of the racial overtones that inevitably present themselves in any discussion of this subject—aware, again, that the idea of desegregation has become one of those shibboleths to which American opinion is so prone that anyone who questions one of them finds himself looked at with gasping horror—I still have to express a view of this subject that may not accord with the mainstream of American political and social discourse.

Segregation or its opposite can take many forms and affect many aspects of life. Residential and educational arrangements are only the ones that come most readily to mind when the term is used. There are no doubt others as well. Far be it from me to claim that there are no aspects of American life in which desegregation would have a proper place. But when it comes to these major controversial areas, I would say this:

Forced segregation? Of course not. But neither should there be forced desegregation. People should be allowed to do what comes naturally. There are a great many instances in which people prefer the proximity, the neighborhood, and the social intimacy of people who share their customs, their way of talking, their way of looking at things. This does not mean, and certainly should not mean, that they should not be expected to respect similar feelings on the part of the others. Americans seem to have difficulty recognizing that there can be, and are, differences that have nothing to do with “better” or “worse”—differences that might be called (in the terminology of this day) morally neutral—and are yet greatly worth preserving.

Demands for desegregation are often cast in terms that would allow you to think that this was a matter of principle, the positive value of which we had all accepted, which could tolerate no questioning, and need not even be discussed. We have agreed, one is allowed to conclude, that wherever there is a question of uniformity or of variety, uniformity is always preferable.

But question it I must. Recognizing that a great deal of America is the product of the melting pot, and that most of this has been and remains unavoidable, I see no intrinsic virtue in the melting pot as such. Where differences in customs and life-styles exist, and where there is a possibility of preserving them, I would think it better that they should not be obliterated. The preservation and cultivation of them adds, it seems to me, to the color of life. The aesthetic and spiritual tensions they engender can and should be productive and creative ones. The social tensions that occasionally accompany them are unnecessary and, indeed, regrettable; but they are greatest where the effort is made to obliterate the differences artificially and to force people to ignore them and to try to cultivate an intimacy they do not truly feel.

I have lived in and read about cities in other countries where several cultural and ethnic communities lived peacefully side by side, each in its own part of town, its members mingling, to be sure, with others in the premises and functions of employment, but looking to their own particular communities for the meeting of their social, religious, and educational needs. The Riga of the 1920s, for example, was such a place. Each of these communities had, in this instance, its own schools, newspapers, clubs, theaters, and diversions. So long as they viewed each other with tolerance, and so long as any one of them did not attempt to lord it over the others (as one, regrettably, eventually did) all went well; and there was no reason why it should not have gone on through generations. No melting pot was thought necessary; and indeed, none was ever achieved. Elements of this arrangement of life, though less strictly formalized, can be seen today in New York and in other great American cities.

Obviously, this area of problems is one of great complexity. That there are places and situations where desegregation would be the best answer, I do not doubt. But precisely because of this I am suspicious of all efforts to solve the resultant problems by inflexible national norms. Let the solutions be, by all means, in the first instance responsive to local feelings, local customs, and local needs.

Particularly, in my view, should this apply to primary education. The more this can be democratized at the local level, and the more it can be liberated from the educational bureaucracies of the federal and state governments and even the teachers’ unions, the better. That there are professional standards teachers should be expected to meet, and that some minimum standards of professional training might be necessary to assure the meeting of them, I can understand. But the great and essential qualities for teaching at the primary level are surely love of teaching, love of children, and love of subject. No teacher should be without them. No professional training alone can assure them. Let the local community, as embodied in the school district, take into account its own peculiar needs. Let it try to assure that the teachers meet these requirements and that they are adequately paid. Let this apply to the ghetto school as well as to any other. But with this in hand, then, let the school go its way as a neighborhood one. Let the children, if in any way possible, walk to it from their homes, as children always have. And if the school premises are simple and inexpensive, so much the better.

Least of all is there any advantage, visible to me, to be gained from busing children over great distances for the purpose of changing the racial mixture in other schools. Aside from the fact that in most of the larger cities the results of this practice have been exactly the opposite of what they were intended to be (in the sense that the schools ended up no more racially mixed than they were before and, in many instances, far less so), this betrays a serious confusion of priorities. The purpose, function, and dedication of the school is education. And there can be no justification for sacrificing any of this dedication in order to exploit the school (and its children) for what are in reality social, as distinct from educational, needs. Beyond which, we need the preservation and the encouragement of good schools as much as we need the improvement of bad ones. Actually these two needs are not mutually exclusive. But neither of them will be met by attempts to use the schools as instruments for social integration. If the neighborhood school, reflecting, as it should, residential patterns, finds itself accommodating children of racial diversity, fine; and let every child be treated like any other, which is the only way any real teacher would ever treat any of them. But please, no forcing of the mixture for reasons other than educational.

It is the lesson of history, after all, that every attempt at social leveling ends with leveling to the bottom, never to the top. Yet in this case the preservation of the top, I repeat, is as important as the improvement of the bottom. Where we have a good school, let us prize it, value it, encourage it. If it compares well to others, let us be happy that it does. Let others take it as an example and emulate it where they can. The ultimate results will be more beneficial to the educational process than any number of attempts to misuse the school for purposes of social change.

Elitism

The converse of egalitarianism, at least in many minds, would be “elitism.” I must confess my amazement at the constant use of this term in a pejorative sense in so much of the public discourse of this country, as though “elitism” were something we had all agreed was reprehensible and abhorrent, so abhorrent, in fact, that anyone who could be plausibly charged with a partiality toward it was thereby stamped as irredeemably wrongheaded and deserving of consignment to outer darkness.

I am unable to understand such a view of the term. The word “elite” is simply a derivative of the word “elect” (élire, in French). Its meaning is little different from that of the noun “the elect,” signifying those who are chosen or elected. In the United States, to be sure, it is often thought of, and the word used, with relation to some sort of a social elite, with all the negative connotations—undeserved privilege, conceit, snobbishness, disdain for others, and so on—that this term evokes. This, indeed, is what is suggested by the only definition of it given by Webster’s: “a group or body considered or treated as socially superior.” But it is not the original definition. The Oxford English Dictionary comes closer to the real meaning of the word when it defines an elite as “the choice part or flower (of society, or of any body or class of persons).” It is in this sense, as I see it, that the term should be used.

And what, pray, is wrong with this? What is implied is not a priggish sort of self-selection, or an assignment of undeserved privilege, but merely the recruitment, out of a general mass of people, of those best qualified to perform certain useful functions of society and the charging of them with attendant responsibility. Whoever rejects the possibility of that sort of choice flies in the face of the very principle of election on which our nation is founded. Surely, these self-righteous spurners of “elitism” are not recommending that we abandon the very idea of election—that we choose our public servants by some sort of lottery, and that the country be governed exclusively by gray mediocrity.

The simple fact is that in any great organization—government or what you will—responsibility has to be borne and the day-to-day decisions taken not by the mass of those involved but by tiny minorities of them, and sometimes even individuals, chosen from their midst. This is not primarily because the judgments of the mass would be necessarily inferior to those of the “elect” (although one of the reasons for choosing this “elect” ought normally to be the reasoned supposition that they would have superior qualifications and facilities for making the decisions in question). The primary reason for this sort of selection is the reality that a large mass of persons cannot, if only for purely physical and mechanical reasons,, be organized in such a way that it could carry out a regular and systematic program of decision taking. For this, a smaller body is necessary. And since such a smaller body has to exist, what is wrong with trying to see to it that it is composed of those to whom might reasonably be attributed the highest qualifications for the exercise of this function?

Human beings, after all, may be born equal; and equal they should unquestionably be in the face of the law. But this is just about the end of their equality. Beyond this, they vary greatly in the capacity for being useful to society, or to any group to which they belong. And when it comes to the selection of small minorities of them to whom legislative or administrative or judicial responsibility is to be assigned, there the effort has to be made, at the very least, to find those best qualified to meet the responsibilities in question. The process of selection may be faulty; it may be dreadfully abused, as indeed it sometimes is. Human judgment is never perfect; and human institutions are at best never more than approximations of the ideal. But the effort to select has to be made. It cannot be avoided. And even those who are most vehement in their abhorrence of what they call an elite will have to accommodate themselves to this necessity.

The crucial question is not whether such things as elites must exist. The question concerns only the quality of the elite in question and, particularly, the standards and institutions by which it is selected. It does not have to be an elite of privilege, least of all of undeserved privilege. But we must remember that special responsibility, however imperfectly it is exercised, often requires special facilities—sometimes even special conveniences and prerequisites of authority. And superior position has the right to demand at least outward respect. Respect is due to the office whether or not the occupant seems fully worthy of it. All the world, as Shakespeare observed, is a stage; and those who hold high office (or lower office, too, for that matter) are merely playing their respective parts in a certain drama, usually as best they can. Outside the office or the public platform or the other outward manifestations of their responsibility—in the intimacies, that is, of home and family—the selected officials or legislators are, if you will, only human beings much like the rest of us: beholden to all the silly requirements of a physical existence, caught in the same turmoil of irrational emotions and compulsions that assails the rest of us, seldom much more successful than many others in coping with those imperfections of human nature to which I invited attention in the first of these chapters. But in the execution of their office, they represent something greater than themselves; and that something deserves respect.

For these reasons, I can find no patience for those who try to build themselves up in their self-esteem by denying respect for established authority and by trying to tear it down: for the students who fancy they have proved something when they appear in weird and silly costumes at their own commencement; for the journalists who think they have shown great cleverness and superiority by ridiculing highly placed persons for their personal foibles; for the persons who throw eggs at the limousines of visiting statesmen. Whoever is incapable of respect for others is usually incapable, whether he recognizes it or not, of respect for himself. By denying that anyone else could be worthy of respect, he confesses, unwittingly, his own unworthiness of it.5

Such, then, are the thoughts provoked in my own mind by the accusations (some of which I myself have not been spared) of “elitism.” Let us by all means have an elite. Let it be an elite of service to others, of conscience, of responsibility, of restraint of all that is unworthy in the self, and of resolve to be to others more than one could ever hope to be to one’s self. But in once having this elite, however far it falls short of the ideal, let us respect it and not pretend that we could live without it. Here, I stand unrepentant, in the unabashed pursuit of what others call my elitist tendencies.

Plebiscite versus Representative Government

And if there are forms of elitism the fear of which is overdrawn, there are forms of what might be called its opposite that are not sufficiently feared. And these are the plebiscitary tendencies now making themselves felt in American society.

Our political system was, as the founding fathers conceived it, intended to be outstandingly that of a representative government. The term was often used in contradistinction to the concept of a pure democracy. In a pure democracy laws were to be adopted by decision of the entire community of the citizenry, gathered in public assembly. This, plainly, was something that was feasible only in a very small and intimate community. This explains its usefulness in the institution of the New England town meeting and in the innumerable forms of neighborhood cooperation that exist in small American communities.

Under a representative government, on the other hand—something necessary wherever the size of the self-governing entity surpassed that of the small neighborhood community—laws were to be drawn up and adopted not directly by the public but by a representative legislative body, or bodies, elected by the citizenry for this purpose. With this act of election, the public’s active involvement in the legislative process was, for the moment, substantially completed. If citizens did not like what their representative was doing, they had the privilege of publicly criticizing it and, if their criticisms were ineffective, of voting at the next election to put someone else in his place.

While I am not sure that this was ever explicitly stated, it seems to me to have been implicit in this concept that the elected representative was expected, in the exercise of this legislative responsibility, to use his own personal judgment and to arrive at his own decisions. In doing so, he would, of course, also be expected to have in mind what he knew about the sentiments of those who had elected him, but he was not bound to be guided by these alone. He might, after all, have come to question their judgment. He might, in the very exercise of his legislative duties, have learned more about certain of the issues at stake in a bit of proposed legislation than was known to the general body of his constituency. In any case, he would have had the possibility of seeing his views refined by participation in the ordered and structured debate of the legislative chamber. His views must then have enjoyed the presumption of certain qualities above and apart from those of the constituents who had elected him. There was good reason, therefore, why he, once elected, should be guided primarily, in the exercise of his office, by his own knowledge and judgment of the question at hand. This was, of course, the ideal. The classic example for it was given by Burke, as illustrated in his well-known Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol. As a member of the House of Commons, and aware that a position he felt bound in good conscience to take ran counter to the strong feelings of at least a part of his constituency, Burke wrote this letter of some fifty pages to explain to the constituents why he felt as he did about the issue in question and why he proposed to vote accordingly. But then, in order to make it clear that he intended to stand his ground, even if it cost him reelection (which it did), he added the following classic sentence:

If I were ready, on any call of my own vanity or interest, or to answer any election purpose, to forsake principles. . . which I had formed at a mature age, on full reflection, and which had been confirmed by long experience, I should forfeit the only thing which makes you pardon so many errors and imperfections in me.

This, I repeat, was the ideal. Normally, and particularly in this country, things have not worked quite that way. Seldom, one must assume, have representatives been prepared to fly as heroically as did Burke in the face of the opinions or prejudices of those who elected them, thus jeopardizing their own chances for reelection. But the ideal remains intact. And it still plays some part in the behavior of the American legislator, if only because he is frequently confronted with the need for decisions on questions with regard to which he has never had the opportunity or even the time to consult the feelings of a majority of his constituents, and is therefore obliged to use his own judgment, or because the issues involved, particularly when it comes to hectic last-moment adjustments of language in specific bills, are too intricate, and too urgent, to be taken in any way before his constituents.

And it is something else again when the electors are asked to express their opinions directly by means of some sort of an officially arranged plebiscite or referendum, or when private polls are taken of their opinions.

The idea of the passage or the repeal of legislation by direct popular vote rather than by regular parliamentary procedures marches under a number of names—plebiscites, public questions on ballots, direct democracy, and citizen legislation among them—but the idea is generally known in this country as “initiative and referendum.”6 In detail, it can take various forms; but provisions allowing for procedures of this general nature already exist, as I understand it, in the constitutions of some twenty-three states, most of them west of the Mississippi. And I have the impression that there is much lively, if not growing, sentiment in favor of setting up new such arrangements where they do not already exist, and of exploiting further those that do.7

In any case, I mention these tendencies here in order to express my strong aversion to them on principle. I see the idea of initiative and referendum as being in flat contradiction to the principles of representative government that have lain at the heart of our constitutional system from its very foundation.

The idea that legislation should be made or repealed by popular majorities involves, in the first place, the forfeiture of all those advantages of the system of representative government that were mentioned above, especially the presumptive superior knowledge on the part of the legislator of the issue at stake and its background, and the possibility of refinement of decision by means of ordered debate on the legislative floor or in the appropriate committee.

Second, the device of initiative and referendum invites all the evils of single-issue thinking and voting. There are literally no public issues involved in legislation that do not have implications for other issues as well. There are none that have qualities on the merits of which, alone, they can safely be treated. The elected legislator knows this. He cannot deal with any one question entirely in isolation. He is constantly being confronted not just with a single legislative question but with numbers of them. He is obliged to reconcile the position he takes on one question with those he takes on others. He has to balance the pros and cons, and he may never forget that what gratifies one constituent may offend another.

Not so the common citizen, asked to vote on a single public question. This question comes before him in starkest isolation, demanding an answer: yes or no. He is not asked or encouraged to take into account the wider implications. Nothing stops him, of course, from taking the trouble to inform himself on these broader implications; and some no doubt do; but there is nothing that constrains them to do it. The more common individual reaction is to give to the questions a relatively casual answer—an answer usually inspired primarily by whatever emotional nerves the question most intimately touches.

The voter-citizen has no choice, furthermore, but to accept the wording of the question as it is flung at him by whoever instituted the poll. He cannot modify it, amend it, or attempt to clarify it. He cannot respond by saying, “Yes, but. . .” or “Provided that. . . .” He is in fact at the mercy of whoever phrased the question. Yet anyone who has any knowledge of the role played by question and answer in public debate knows that the terms of the question often dictate a large part of the answer.

We have, finally, the fact that a decision once taken in this way, if it turns out to have unfortunate consequences, is relatively hard to change. A legislative body, faced with a similar situation affecting any of the laws it has passed, has much greater flexibility in this respect. It may rescind the law, or amend it, or pass another one in its place. For all this, nothing more is required than a simple vote of the body in question. To do any of these things with the decision of a popular referendum is far more difficult. Any change of this nature involves preparatory steps and procedures as cumbersome and protracted as those of the original measure itself. It allows very little flexibility, if any at all, in the recognition and correction of mistakes.

It will be argued that in our federal Congress as it exists today, some of the greatest advantages of the classical concept of formal legislative deliberation have already been forfeited in a number of ways: by the virtual abandonment of ordered and structured debate on the floor of the legislative chamber in favor of intricate political maneuvering in committee meetings; by the abject dependence of many legislators on the sources of their campaign expenditures; and by the penetration of lobbyists into the most intimate recesses of the parliamentary body.

True enough. All these evils exist, and cry out for correction. In certain instances they are even worse than the language used above would suggest. The admission of television cameras into the legislative chamber, in particular, is even worse than the mere abandonment of the use of that chamber for normal deliberation and debate. In the depressing spectacle of the individual legislator haranguing an empty house before the cameras in order to suggest to the folks back home that he is addressing a great legislative body hanging on his every word—in this you have one of the most pathetic examples of the triumph of the contrived image over the reality, a triumph inherent in the very nature of the television medium, and one about which more will be said in another chapter. By this shabby sellout to the television industry, Congress has forfeited a large part of its own dignity and, with it, of the very function with which the founding fathers were concerned to endow it.

It will obviously be very difficult to achieve the correction of these distortions at the federal level. Some may even be already beyond the possibility of correction. To what extent it would be easier to avoid these same evils in smaller parliamentary bodies is impossible to predict. In any case, the proper answer is not, should never be, and in fact cannot be, plebiscitary democracy. The phrase is in itself a contradiction in terms. In the tendencies now running in that direction one has nothing less than the abandonment of faith in the democratically elected individual and the expression of a vain hope that a greater wisdom will be found to lie in the consultation of the faceless collectivity. This implies the loss of the very principle of personal responsibility of the elected representative, on which our governmental system was founded, in favor of an irresponsible and unreal anonymity of power. It leaves an open field to the backstage manipulator and the shameless demagogue. Neither will fail to take advantage of it.

No less symptomatic in this respect is the flood of unofficial public opinion polls recently undertaken (for their own commercial purposes) by the press and the media. No objection can be taken, of course, to this device, except where their results might influence an election already in progress. Such polls can be usefully informative for individual legislators as evidence of public reactions in matters with which they have to deal, so long as it is borne in mind that the polls are, after all, only one of the factors to be considered in the exercise of their legislative offices, and should never be viewed as substitutes for their own independent judgment on matters at stake. The public may, after all, be wrong, in the sense that the polls may reflect serious misapprehensions on the public’s part which it is the duty of the legislative representative to expose and to set to rights rather than to accept passively. That is what leadership really ought to mean.

With these exceptions, there is, I repeat, nothing wrong about the sampling of public opinion in this way. But I cannot avoid the impression that the results of such samplings are often served up to the public by the pollster with the innuendo that there is, or ought to be, a certain unchallengeability and finality about them. “You see,” the pollsters seem to be saying, “the public has given its verdict. That settles it.” Particularly pervasive is this inference when polls are taken of the president’s “popularity” at any given moment—of how many approve or do not approve of the way he is momentarily conducting his office—and all of this with the clear suggestion that here, in these undifferentiated and spontaneous reactions of the public, is the supreme and authoritative test of his performance of his presidential office, and the one to which his primary response is due.

It was pointed out above that the ultimate responsibility of government had normally to be borne by minorities, and sometimes even (as in the case of the American president) by individuals. The advantage of the American system has lain in the fact that the method of selection of such minorities or individuals, in the persons of legislative bodies or individual legislators, was regularized and their powers and responsibilities made clear.

What I particularly miss in all these plebiscitary approaches and devices is precisely the element of personal responsibility. This seems, in fact, to be a characteristic feature of all the egalitarian tendencies of the age. One notices that in the Scandinavian countries, where such tendencies find their most striking expression, it is hard to find any instance in which a single person can ever be clearly identified with any significant decision of public policy. Only collectivities appear in the capacity of decision takers; and these, very often, are bureaucracies. Because there is no clear allotment of personal authority, there is no allotment of personal responsibility. And the same anonymity of responsibility marks all the efforts in the United States to solve legislative problems, or to dictate the actions of executive branch officials, by the consultation of popular moods and responses in officially sanctioned initiatives and referenda or by means of the privately conducted opinion poll. Where personal decision lies buried, there, alongside it, lies personal responsibility. Where the role of the individual in public affairs is effaced, there, with it, disappears a good deal of the concept of public affairs that inspired the founding fathers of our republic.

Species and the Individual

I have reserved for mention at the end of this chapter, in view of the profundity of its implications, what I regard as the most significant of Tocqueville’s doubts about democratic equality. In the body of the second part of his work, he had already complained of the tendency of the rulers of his age to concentrate on the great masses of their subjects and to neglect the individuals of whom those masses were composed.

In order to concentrate only upon the people as a whole, one is no longer accustomed to envisaging the individual citizen; in thinking only of the species, one forgets the individual.8

And then, again, in the fourth part of his work, in summarizing his final conclusions, he returned, in a different way, to this subject:

One might say that the rulers of our time seek only to do great things with men. I could wish that they would think a bit more about how to make men great; that they would give less importance to the work and more to the worker; and that they would never forget that a nation cannot long remain strong when each man is personally weak, and that one has not yet found either the social forms or the political combinations to make a nation strong when the citizens who compose it are pusillanimous and soft.9

It is true that Tocqueville, in this passage, did not refer specifically to equality or democracy. But he felt that many of the features of the egalitarian-democratic state to which his book was addressed were beginning to pervade European governments across the board, even in the constitutional monarchies. It was this he had in mind when he used, in the second of the above passages, the term “rulers.” And the question he was raising was whether the pandering to the material comforts of great masses of people, which he saw as implicit in the egalitarian-democratic society, would not have the effect of depriving the members of the natural elite of that society of the discipline and challenge necessary for the emergence of true greatness among them.

This is not the place to pursue this feature of Tocqueville’s thought; but I signal it at this point, because it is, in my own view, one of great profundity. I did not like to leave it unmentioned in a chapter the contents of which took their departure from Tocqueville’s views on democracy.

1. De la démocratie en Amérique, pt. 2, in the Robert LafFont edition of Tocqueville’s major works (Paris, 1986), p. 81.

2. Ibid., p. 418. In the French original: “Ce qu’il faut craindre ce n’est pas un individu pervers ou une foule en folie, c’est la tyrannie bureaucratique qui rend désormais possible la faiblesse des individus.”

3. Tocqueville, perceptive man that he was, did not fail to notice this phenomenon: “When inequality is the common law of a society, the most extreme inequalities do not strike the eye at all; but when everything is nearly on one level, the slightest inequalities become offensive. It is for that reason that the thirst for equality always becomes the more insatiable in the degree that the equality is more pronounced.” Ibid., p. 522 (the translation is my own).

4. But even here, the matter is complicated. It is not a question of just being born anywhere to such parents. To constitute a serious mark against you, it must have been birth into something called the eastern establishment, where everyone is assumed to be wealthy. Birth to wealthy parents elsewhere in the country is less serious, if indeed serious at all. This curious distinction parallels an oddity of primitive Russian egalitarianism, which accepted the privileges of the party elite, regarded as the normal perquisites of authority, far more easily than it did the minuscule material advantages that might be detectible in the next-door neighbor.

5. I think, here of Burke’s stinging reproach to the radicals of the years of the French Revolution: “Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves.”

6. There are many variations in the meaning given to these terms in the different states; but, in general, “initiative” is taken to mean the initiation and passage of legislation by direct popular vote, whereas “referendum” means the review or removal by such a vote of statutes already passed by a legislative body.

7. In the state of New Jersey, where these lines are being written, the question of an amendment to the state constitution, allowing for the possibility of legislation by initiative and referendum, has been before the legislature for some fifteen years; and the result of the most recent election would seem to presage an early favorable decision. I note, furthermore, that in this most recent election, in California, there were some twenty-eight questions of this nature on the ballot, which I take to be evidence of extensive enthusiasm for this method of legislating.

8. De la démocratie en Amérique, in the LafFont edition of Tocqueville’s major works (Paris, 1986), p. 448 (my translation). In the French original: “. . . on s’habitue à ne plus envisager les citoyens pour ne considérer que le peuple; on oublie les individus pour ne songer qu’à l’espèce.”

9. “On dirait que les souverains de notre temps ne cherchent qu’à faire avec les hommes des choses grandes. Je voudrais qu’ils songeassent un peu plus à faire de grands hommes; qu’ils attachassent moins de prix à l’oeuvre et plus à l’ouvrier, et qu’ils se souvinssent sans cesse qu’une nation ne peut rester long temps forte quand chaque homme y est individuellement faible, et qu’on n’a point encore trouvé de formes sociales ni de combinaisons politiques qui puissent faire un peuple énergique en le composant de citoyens pusillanimes et mous.”