The Public Philosophy > Chapter V. The Two Functions > The Elected Executive
Our inquiry has shown, I believe, that we cannot take popular government for granted, as if its principles were settled and beyond discussion. We are compelled to agree with Sir Henry Maine who wrote, some seventy years ago, that 'the actual history of popular government since it was introduced, in its modern shape, into the civilized world,’ does 'little’ to support the assumption that popular government has an indefinitely long future before it. Experience rather tends to show that it is characterized by great fragility, and that since its appearance, all forms of government have become more insecure than they were before.’
We have been dwelling upon the devitalization of the executive power as the cause of the fragility that Maine speaks of. It is, I have been saying, the disorder which results from a functional derangement in the relationship between the executive power on the one hand, the representative assemblies and the mass electorates on the other hand.
Democratic states are susceptible to this derangement because congenitally the executive, when dependent on election, is weaker than the elected representatives. The normal drainage of power in a democratic state is away from the governing center and down into the constituencies. And the normal tendency of elections is to reduce elected officers to the role of agents of organized pluralities. Modern democratic governments are, to be sure, big governments, in their personnel, in the range and variety of their projects, the ubiquitousness of their interventions. ; But to be big is not necessarily to be strong. They are, in fact, swollen rather than strong, being too weak to resist to the pressure of special interests and of the departmental bureaucracies.
As a rule competition in the electoral market works like Gresham's law: the soft money drives the hard money out of circulation. The competitive odds are heavily against the candidate who, like Burke with the electors of Bristol, promises to be true to his own best reason and judgment. The odds are all in favor of the candidate who offers himself as the agent, the delegate, the spokesman, the errand boy, of blocs of voters.
In a modern democratic state, the chief executive office must be elective. But as heredity, prescription, consecration, rank and hierarchy are dissolved by the acids of modernity, the executives become totally dependent on election. They have no status and no tenure which reinforce their consciences, which invest them with power to withstand the tides of popular opinion and to defend the public interest.
They hold their offices for a short time, and to do this they must maneuver and manipulate combinations among the factions and the pressure groups. Their policies must be selected and shaped so as to attract and hold together these combinations. There are moments, the 'finest hours,’ when communities are lifted above their habitual selves in unity and fellowship. But these moments are rare. They are not the stuff of daily life in a democracy, and they are remembered like a miracle in a dream. In the daily routine of democratic politics, elected executives can never for long take their eyes from the mirror of the constituencies. They must not look too much out of the window at the realities beyond.