Democracy's Fatal Virus: Faction

Faction: Democracy’s Fatal Virus?

When I hear people say we need to reach across the aisle and work with the Democrats, you know what I say? The only reason I’ll be reaching across the aisle is to grab one of them by the throat.

(elected State official in the US)

Politics in the US has become a “vetocracy”, where it is far easier to prevent things getting done than to build something new….Part of it comes from the spread of partisanship at all levels..

(David Runciman, London Review of Books, 29^th June 2017)

Perhaps there comes a state of chronic dysfunction for democratic systems of government, no matter how well designed or embedded.

It happens when faction is in ascendant and becomes, for the foreseeable future, ineradicable.

“Faction”, in the discourse about political democracy, indicates the situation where a political party or coalition uses its democratic majority to govern in its own interests, and more or less adversely to the interests of the minority or minorities.

For factional government to arrive, two main conditions are necessary. The first is shrinkage, perhaps to vanishing point, of a common cultural/political ground between political adversaries. People cease to share the same values in very material ways (if not to the point of ceasing to endorse some very basic core moral values, but almost).

The second is a lack of the tolerance of the other side’s achievements that is normally part of the to-and-fro dialectic of democratic politics. Parties, howsoever notionally opposed, have tended not to dismantle all the structures erected by their opponents, even when they have bitterly opposed their erection. There is a recognition that an opponent’s policy has brought about some permanent social or economic change that must be accepted. The NHS is the foremost example in the UK.

In a well functioning democracy, there tends to be a common political area, always shifting – indeed, sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left. When a party misjudges the potential for shifting in their direction, former supporters detach, and “vote the rascals out”.

In a functioning democracy, voters’ allegiances are changeable because, in the main, society’s shared values enable them to change allegiance without an existential wrench.

When faction prevails, instead of common ground there is a battlefield. Those in the minority, or minorities, are threatened by domination and contempt and, in extreme cases, physical force. The roll call of such “democracies” is depressing: Pakistan, Bangladesh, perhaps India, Erdogan’s Turkey, Russia, some countries in Eastern Europe.

Now faction is spreading its tentacles into more mature Western democracies. Trump is a paradigm of a factionalist. In France a very large minority support the factionalist Le Pen, even though she has been decisively defeated – for the time being.

In the UK, faction was seeded (or brought to flower) by the referendum vote on Brexit. Whichever side won, the losers would be existentially downcast – because no obvious possibility was offered to them of retrieving their position, as would be the case in normal political interplay (“throw the rascals out”). Or so the referendum was interpreted, even though it was formally labelled as “advisory”.

Where is the possibility of continuing the debate, and winning a different outcome, as with all other policies? (If one looks for other very important decisions where this is true, consider climate change and nuclear policy.)

The recent General Election may have dealt a mortal blow to the incipient Brexit factionalism. There are signs of good old fashioned democratic muddle, or give and take, beginning to reassert itself. But let us not breathe too soon. For surely Brexit represents deeper divides than can be resolved by fudges about customs and the Single Market.

Theoretical discussions of democracy have always identified faction as a potential flaw – especially in guise of Mob Rule (one notices that a lot of these critics have favoured instead autocratic or oligarchic rule).

However, when the American colonies won their independence from Britain in the C18, Enlightenment thinking, with its emphasis on human autonomy or freedom and equality (albeit in practice limited) had tilted political thought in favour of democracy. But the problem of factions had not gone away.

In what became a famous document in political theory, James Madison, one of the authors of the US Constitution and later a president, expressly addressed the problem, and claimed to have found an answer to it.

Madison first identifies a paradox: liberty, the freedom to form opinions, even wrong and overbearing opinions, is necessary for factions to form – but is also necessary for political life.

If the cause of faction cannot be eliminated, can its effects be prevented or mitigated? Madison thought so.

He proposes two strategies in his essay. The first is representative democracy, under which citizens do not directly have power, but elect those who wield it.

Madison immediately recognises that this step by itself is not enough. Factionalist demagogues get themselves elected. Representative government, far from being judicious and even-handed, merely reflects majoritan prejudices.

Madison then makes a further claim, which to modern ears sounds odd. Madison argues that the larger the territorial area of a democratic state, the more distinct are the various political and economic interests of its constituent citizens. A coherent majority faction is unlikely to form from such variety – or so Madison hopes.

(Madison considered this to be a persuasive argument for the federal United States as they were eventually constituted; such federalism was opposed by some states, which in effect wanted the equivalent of small early modern European principalities.)

The Framers of the Constitution, heeding Aristotle’s strictures on democratic government that is not subject to the rule of law, also provided for the Supreme court to be the independent arbiters of the Constitution, and the constitutional acceptability of executive actions and congressional legislation. This was to be another barrier against the danger of faction. What could go wrong?

History has not been on Madison’s side. As Alexis de Tocqueville, pointed out as early as 1835, Madison’s hopes of wise representatives who rise above faction and keep it at bay were long ago proved illusory. Even the Supreme court suffers the indignity of being a factional tool, as a result of a partisan executive appointing justices expected to deliver partisan rulings.

Indeed the only Madisonian feature of the current political landscape in the US is the incoherence of the Republican majority, containing elements with diametrically opposed views on international, domestic and economic policies. The unifying factor appears to hatred of those “across the aisle”. As David Runciman says in the quote at the head of this piece, what there is, is a factional vetocracy.

June 2017