The Paralysis of Governments

Perhaps, before going any further, I should say that I am a liberal democrat and have no wish to disenfranchise my fellow citizens. My hope is that both liberty and democracy can be preserved before the one destroys the other. Whether this can be done is the question of our time, what with more than half the world denying and despairing of it. Of one thing we may be sure. If it is to be done at all, we must be uninhibited in our examination of our condition.
And since our condition is manifestly connected with grave errors in war and peace that have been committed by democratic governments, we must adopt the habit of thinking as plainly about the sovereign people as we do about the politicians they elect. It will not do to think poorly of the politicians and to talk with bated breath about the voters. No more than the kings before them should the people be hedged with divinity.

Like all princes and rulers, like all sovereigns, they are ill-served by flattery and adulation. And they are betrayed by the servile hypocrisy which tells them that what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, can be determined by their votes.

If I am right in what I have been saying, there has developed in this century a functional derangement of the relationship between the mass of the people and the government. The people have acquired power which they are incapable of exercising, and the governments they elect have lost powers which they must recover if they are to govern. What then are the true boundaries of the people's power? The answer cannot be simple. But for a rough beginning let us say that the people are able to give and to withhold their consent to being governed - their consent to what the government asks of them, proposes to them, and has done in the conduct of their affairs. They can elect the government. They can remove it. They can approve or disapprove its performance. But they cannot administer the government. They cannot themselves perform. They cannot normally initiate and propose the necessary legislation. A mass cannot govern. The people, as Jefferson said, are not "qualified to exercise themselves the Executive Department; but they are qualified to name the person who shall exercise it ... They are not qualified to legislate; with us therefore they only choose the legislators."

Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.

The propensity to this derangement and the vulnerability of our society to it have a long and complex history. Yet the more I have brooded upon the events which I have lived through myself, the more astounding and significant does it seem that the decline of the power and influence and self-confidence of the Western democracies has been so steep and so sudden. We have fallen far in a short span of time. However long the underlying erosion had been going on, we were still a great and powerful and flourishing community when the First World War began. What we have seen is not only decay - though much of the old structure was dissolving - but something which can be called an historic catastrophe.

My Reason For Writing This Book

During the fateful summer of I938 I began writing a book in an effort to come to terms in my own mind and heart with the mounting disorder in our Western society. I was living in Paris at the time, and I had learned that the decision had been taken which was soon to lead Mr. Chamberlain and Monsieur Daladier to Munich. Little hope remained that another world war could be averted except by abject surrender, and yet there was no sure pros­pect that France and Great Britain would be able to with­stand the onslaught that was coming.
They were unpre­pared, their people were divided and demoralized. The Americans were far away, were determined to be neutral, and were unarmed. I was filled with foreboding that the nations of the Atlantic Community would not prove equal to the challenge, and that, if they failed, we should lose our great traditions of civility,1 the liberties Western man had won for himself after centuries of struggle and which were now threatened by the rising tide of barbarity..
I began writing, impelled by the need to make more intelligible to myself the alarming failure of the Western liberal democracies to cope with the realities of this cen­tury. I had done a draft of the book when the fall of France naade it evident that we, too, must soon be en­gaged and, moreover, engaged alone if the Battle of Brit­ain was lost..

But at this time the American people were as unpre­pared in their minds as in their military establishment. Could the democracies be rallied, could they be collected and' nerved for the ordeal so that they would be equal to this mortal challenge? They had the superior assets. They had the numbers, the resources, the influence. But did they have the insight, the discipline to persevere, and the resolution to go through with it? Though they had the means, did they also have the will, and did they still know how? A second world war was making up out of the ruins and the failures of the first, and there was nothing to show that the Western democratic governments were in control of their affairs and capable of making the necessary decisions. They were reacting to events and they were not governing them. Could they avoid defeat and conquest without an exhaustion which would rend the fabric of Western society, without enormities of suffering which would alienate the masses of the people, and with­out resorting to measures of violence which might be­come inexpiable? They were so very late, and they were becoming engaged in they knew not what. They had re­fused to take in what they saw, they had refused to be­lieve what they heard, they had wished and they had waited, hoping against hope.

It did not come easily to one who, like myself, had known the soft air of the world before the wars to recognize and acknowledge the sickness of the Western liberal democracies. Yet as we were being drawn unready and unarmed into the second of the great wars, there was no denying, it seemed to me, that there is a deep dis­order in our society which comes not from the machina­tions of our enemies and from the adversities of the human condition but from within ourselves. I was one of a large company who felt that way. Never doubting that the utmost resistance was imperative and that defeat would be irreparable and intolerable, they were a com­pany who knew in their hearts that by total war our world could not be made safe for democracy nor for the four freedoms. We were, I had come to see, not wounded but sick, and because we were failing to bring order and peace to the world, we were beset by those who believed they have been chosen to succeed us.

1917: The Revolutionary Year

In December, 1941 I put the manuscript away, knowing that so much was going to happen to the world and to me that if ever I went back to the book, it would be to start all over again. When I did come back to it after the war, the foreboding which had inspired it was in a terrible measure realized.

Something had gone very wrong in the liberal democracies. They had, to be sure, defeated their enemies. They had avoided defeat and subjection. But they were unable to make peace and to restore order. For the second time in a generation they had failed to prevent a ruinous war, they had been unwilling to prepare themselves to wage the war, and when at long last and at exorbitant cost they had managed to defeat their enemies, they had been unable to make peace out of their victories. They were entangled in a vicious circle of wars that led to ever bigger and wider wars. Could it be denied that they were sick with some kind of in­capacity to cope with reality, to govern their affairs, to defend their vital interests and, it might be, to insure their survival as free and democratic states?

There was no mistaking the decline of the West. Thirty years after Wilson had proclaimed a world at peace under democratic governments, the North Atlantic democracies were preoccupied with the defense of western Europe and the fringes of the Eurasian continent. In less than half a century it had come to that. In 1900 men everywhere on earth had acknowledged, even when they resented, the primacy of the Western nations. They were the recognized leaders in the progress of mankind, and it was taken as axiomatic that the question was when, and not whether, the less advanced people would have learned how to use the Western technology, to hold free elections, to respect the Bill of Rights and to live by its political philosophy. Until 1917 the model for a new government anywhere in the world, even in Russia, was liberal democracy in the British, the French, or the Amer­ican style.

But by the end of 1920 things had taken a sharp turn. Lord Bryce was then finishing his Modern Democ­racies, and though he still wrote in the prewar manner that democracy was spreading and that the number of democracies in the world had doubled within fifteen years, he had seen the warning signs and he was troubled. It might not be 'really helpful to the younger generation,' he wrote in the preface, but he could not 'repress the pes­simism of experience.' He had to say that 'although de­mocracy has spread, and although no country that has tried it shows any signs of forsaking it, we are not yet en­titled to hold with the men of 1789 that it is the natural and, therefore, in the long run, the inevitable form of government. Much has happened since the rising sun of liberty dazzled the eyes of the States-General at Versailles. Popular government has not yet been proved to guarantee, always and everywhere, good government. If it be im­probable, yet it is not unthinkable that, as in many coun­tries impatience with tangible evils substituted democracy for monarchy or oligarchy, a like impatience might some­day reverse the process.'

Three years later Mussolini marched on Rome, and Italy became the first of the bigger democracies 'to re­verse the process.' In retrospect we can now see that what Lord Bryce, writing at the end of the First World War, thought was the pessimism of experience was in fact the intuition of a sensitive and knowing observer. He had felt in his bones, being too close to the event to perceive it, that a fundamental change in the prospects of democracy was in the making.

There had occurred, I now believe, an unrecognized revolution within the democratic states. By the third year of the First World War the cumulative losses had be­come so exorbitant that the institutional order of all the belligerents gave way under the stress and strain. The war had become, in Ferrero's telling phrase, hyperbolic, and the prewar governments were incapable of imposing such unlimited drafts upon the endurance and the loyal­ties of the people. In the defeated countries the price of this was revolution against the established order. The Romanoff, the Hohenzollern, the Hapsburg and the Otto­man Empires collapsed. In the victorious countries insti­tutions were not overthrown, rulers were not exiled, im­prisoned or executed. But the constitutional order was altered subtly and yet radically, within itself.

Internal Revolution in the Democracies

A vigourous critic of democracy, Sir Henry Maine, writ­ing in 1884 just as England was about to adopt general manhood suffrage, observed that 'there could be no grosser mistake' than the impression that 'Democracy differs from Monarchy in essence.'

For the tests of suc­cess in the performance of the necessary and natural duties of a government are precisely the same in both cases. These natural and necessary duties have to do with the defense and advancement abroad of the vital interests of the state and with its order, security, and solvency at home. Invariably these duties call for hard decisions. They are hard because the governors of the state must tax, conscript, command, prohibit; they must assert a public interest against private inclination and against what is easy and popular. If they are to do their duty, they must often swim against the tides of private feeling.

The hardness of governing was little realized in the early 1900's. For more than half a century, while democ­racy was making its historic advance, there had been a remarkable interlude during which the governments rarely had to make hard decisions. Since Waterloo there had been no world war, and after the American Civil War only a few short and localized wars. It was a time of expansion, development, liberation; there were new con­tinents to be colonized and there was a new industrial system to be developed. It seemed as though mankind had outlived the tempests of history. The governments --which were increasingly democratic, liberal and hu­mane -- were spared the necessity of dealing with the hard issues of war and peace, of security and solvency, of constitutional order and revolution. They could be con­cerned with improvements, with the more and more and the better and better. Life was secure, liberty was assured, and the way was open to the pursuit of private happiness.

In this long peace, the liberals became habituated to the notion that in a free and progressive society it is a good thing that the government should be weak. For several gen­erations the West had flourished under governments that did not have to prove their strength by making the hard decisions. It had been possible to dream, without being rudely awakened, that in the rivalry of the diverse in­terests all would somehow come out for the best. The government could normally be neutral and for the most part it could avoid making positive judgments of good and bad and of right and wrong. The public interest could be equated with that which was revealed in election returns, in sales reports, balance sheets, circulation figures, and statistics of expansion. As long as peace could be taken for granted, the punic good could be thought of as being immanent in the aggregate of private trans­actions. There was no need for a governing power which transcended the particular interests and kept them in order by ruling over them.

All this was only, as we now know, a daydream during a brief spell of exceptionally fine weather. The dream ended with the outbreak of the First World War. Then we knew that the Age of Progress had not reformed the human condition of diversity and conflict; it had not miti­gated the violence of the struggle for survival and domination.

In fact, the violence was intensified and extended as never before. The expansion and development during the peaceful decades had wrought, as Graham Wallas pointed out on the eve of the war, 'a general change of social scale,' and that change of scale had revolutionary con­sequences. The forty years which separated the Franco-Prussian War from the First World War were, says John U. Nef, 'in terms of material welfare ...the most successful years in history ...In little more than one generation the world's population grew by almost as much as it had grown during the untold generations which separate Adam, the first man, from Newton, the first man of science of the seventeenth century. According to the enterprising calculations of Colin Clark, the real income per person gainfully employed improved 75 percent or more from 1870 to 1914 while the hours of work were substantially reduced in the wealthier coun­tries of Western Europe ...and in North America.'

Because of the increase in the population, in the vol­ume of production, and in the destructiveness of weapons, the war which brought to an end the Age of Progress had, says Nef, 'none of the limiting features of the warfare which had been characteristic of Newton's age. Europe could now afford enormous armies, could replenish and supply them again while the fighting proceeded. More money was needed to kill than ever before, but the money required turned out to be small in comparison with the money that could be raised (with the help of refined ad­vances in the use and manipulation of credit), and in relation to the quantity of munitions which money and credit could buy.' All this meant that when war broke out again, the advanced nations had become, as Nickerson says, 'capable of sacrifices so irrationally great that the bleeding victor would faint upon the corpse of his vic­tim.'

The strain of the war worked up a menacing popular pressure upon the weak governments. We can, I think, point to 1917 as the year when the pressure became so strong that the institutional framework of the established governments broke under it. The strain became unbearable. 1917 was the year of the two Russian revolutions. It was the year of the American involvement which brought with it the declaration of the Wilsonlan principles. For Italy it was the year of Caporetto. For Austria-Hungary it was the beginning of the end under the successor of Francis Joseph. For Germany it was the year of the July crisis and of the need of the Prussian mon­archy to listen to the Reichstag and its demand for a negotiated peace. For France it was the year of the mu­tinies, and for Britain the year of mortal peril from the submarine. In eastern and central Europe tortured and in­furiated masses brought down the historic states and the institutions of the old regime. In western Europe and in North America the breakthrough took the form - if I may use the term - of a deep and pervasive infiltration. Behind the facade, which was little changed, the old structure of executive government with the consent of a representative assembly was dismantled--not every­where and not in all fields, but where it mattered the most--in the making of high policy for war and peace.

The existing governments had exhausted their imperium- their authority to bind and their power to com­mand. With their traditional means they were no longer able to carry on the hyperbolic war; yet they were unable to negotiate peace. They had, therefore, to turn to the people. They had to ask still greater exertions and sacri­fices. They obtained them by 'democratizing' the conduct and the aims of the war: by pursuing total victory and by promising total peace.

In substance they ceded the executive power of decision over the strategical and the political conditions for concluding the war. In effect they lost control of the war. This revolution appeared to be a cession of power to the representative assemblies, and when it happened it was acclaimed as promising the end of the evils of secret diplomacy and the undemocratic conduct of unpopular wars. In fact, the powers which were ceded by the execu­tive passed through the assemblies, which could not ex­ercise them, to the mass of voters who, though unable also to exercise them, passed them on to the party bosses, the agents of pressure groups, and the magnates of the new media of mass communications.

The consequences were disastrous and revolutionary. The democracies became incapacitated to wage war for rational ends and to make a peace which would be ob­served or could be enforced.