One
defining characteristic of democracy for many political scientists is a
constitution. Yet constitutions emerge from complex negotiations that give
unequal advantages to social elites. How can democracy produce equality when
those designing the governance structures have unequal advantages in wealth,
education, experience negotiating, networks of allies in powerful places, and in
other ways? For these reasons most
constitutions are written to respond to certain interests: not the interest of
the people, but specific group interests that weaken democracy as equalized political
power.
The historical
processes out of which constitutional agreements emerge often weaken the rule
of ordinary people in order to give advantages to powerful groups. Obvious
examples of these advantages include the modern British House of Lords and
other parliamentary bodies beholden to wealthy social sectors, the success of
wealthy elites in gaining elected office after national liberation across much
of Africa and Asia, the influence of propertied white males in the early U.S.
constitutional system, and the importance of wealthy merchants in nineteenth
century French negotiations of constitutional reforms.
Even seemingly small factors may have
outsized impacts on democratic practice. One such apparently small change was the
adoption of James Madison’s proposal to enlarge U.S. House of Representative
districts when the constitution was drafted in the 1780s. The enlarged
districts made it unaffordable for all but a wealthy minority to afford the
cost of campaigns and time away from work to travel throughout the larger
districts, making it impossible for ordinary citizens to be elected to Congress.
Some of these same factors are at
work in constitutional electoral democracies in our own day. Since the election of two
presidents that lost the vote in the United States over the last twenty
years, there has been increased discussion of reforming the electoral college,
the mechanism that made their election possible. The increasing flood of
corporate monies into campaign coffers in the U.S. after the Citizens United
Supreme Court decision of 2010 continues the outsized influence of the wealthy
that has plagued constitutional democracies since their founding.
One of the risks of democracies is
the willingness to accept anti-democratic practices, political parties, groups
and organizations, and individuals as part of democratic institutions. By
claiming to represent the will of the people across large bodies, such as big
states or nation-states, some are represented who do not share the goals of
serving all members of the body politic. Many examples of political parties and
individuals who have succeeded in electoral systems only to postpone, cancel,
or even ignore elections and electoral mechanisms can be found as evidence.
The right has also begun
implementing a new tactic known as “parliamentary
coups” across Latin America. This practice is identified with impeachments
of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras in 2009, Fernando Lugo in Paraguay three years
later, and more recently Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, These removals of
democratically elected governments, generally of administrations that are
reformist, are often carried out with little evidence of wrongdoing.
The Paraguay removal of President
Lugo was received negatively by other governments in the region, and Paraguay
was removed from the Mercosur pact as a result. In the Brazilian case, the
administration that replaced Rousseff was made up of congressional
representatives that included some with openly anti-democratic positions, including
one recently elected as Brazil’s new President, Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro not
only announced publicly that he would be willing
to shut down Congress, but also that he openly advocates
torture even when it was well-known that President Rousseff had been
tortured as a young person.
The power of elected leaders to
appoint court justices in constitutional systems is sometimes seen as an anti-democratic
mechanism, since it shields the justices from recall by popular vote. Court support
of voter-suppression laws and gerrymandering strengthens partisan groups
that do not have the general interest in mind. Supreme court justices appointed
by minority presidents also present the impression of minority rule
rather than democratic rule by the will of the entire political body.
Those
who believe that constitutional democracies are the pinnacle of democratic
governance may find these recent developments across the Americas to be unsettling
signs of a decline in the democratic spirit. Some may even find them to be morbid signs of
the decline and even death of democracy in some cases. Some may hope
for a resurgence in the democratic impulse of particular groups of citizens at
some undetermined future date. Some may despair that ordinary citizens will
ever claim full power to govern their own affairs in the unending wait for political
elites to give up their stranglehold on the constitutional mechanisms of electoral
power.
Yet
those who design constitutions do not always have democratic rule by the people
as their goal. The opening remarks at the beginning of the U.S. constitutional
convention in 1787 by then governor of Virginia, Edmund Randolph, make this
clear: “Our chief
danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions. It is a maxim
which I hold incontrovertible, that the powers of government exercised by the
people swallows up the other branches.” This statement may help us understand
why the popular electoral character of the presidency and congress was balanced
by a branch of government that is not popularly elected, the judicial branch.
Those
who have less faith in constitutions than most political scientists may then
wish to look elsewhere for stronger guarantees than those found in constitutions.
There are important defense systems in democratic government that come from
outside the constitutional systems. These defenses work against the narrow
interests that so often gain monopoly control on the mechanisms of constitutional
governance, what Derrida
calls its autoimmune character.
Some of these defenses require
constitutional systems but many of which do not. These defenses require an ability of democracies to defer
themselves, to make a path for democracy “as the turn of a detour, as a
path that is turned aside, as adjournment in the economy of the same.” They
also require difference “as reference
or referral to the other…as the undeniable…experience of the alterity of
the other of heterogeneity, of the singular, the not-same, the different, the dissymmetric,
the heteronomous.”
These
developments in democracies are not abstractions, but practices. They are not
theories or applications, but experiences of the other, of that which is not
democracy, not governance by all, but also not oligarchy or autocracy or plutocracy
or other established others of the democratic. What they mean for democracy is
found only in the future, in the time when deferral comes to fruition and experience
of alterity emerges. Whether electoral democracies have the flexibility and the
wherewithal to successfully experience the not-same remains a standing
question. Only time will tell whether those willing to experience the singular
out beyond the end of the economy of the same can overcome constitutional
guarantees of narrow interests and strengthen the rule of the people to carry
the day.
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