Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) touched off a firestorm in a recent tweet by appearing to question the ideal of democracy. He criticized “rank democracy” and said that what we needed was a system of government that delivers “liberty, peace, and prosperity.” Twitter commentators saw this as an implicit defense of authoritarianism.
As my recent book, “The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today,” discusses, Lee’s ideas might fit better with an earlier idea of how democracy should work that we’ve largely forgotten. Lee is more of a democrat than he realizes, but he is a very old school kind of democrat.
Democracy used to be more decentralized
After the initial controversy, Lee clarified his argument, saying that the United States is a “constitutional republic” rather than a democracy, and emphasizing the safeguards that a republic provides against the vagaries of majority rule. Very often, when the Founders distinguished the U.S. government from a democracy, they were saying that the United States was not a direct democracy, such as Athens in the classical era, where citizens could participate in decision-making en masse. Instead, the United States was and is a representative democracy, where smaller communities elect representatives to defend their interests in a common assembly.
However, there is a big difference between modern democracies and earlier democracies, ranging from pre-conquest North America, to precolonial Africa, and even the Dutch Republic in its golden age. In those earlier democracies, if you didn’t like what the majority wanted to do, you didn’t have to go along with it. You could take your marbles and go home.
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Consider the example of the Haudenosaunee “Iroquois” or the Wendat “Huron” confederacies in the Northeastern Woodlands. Among these peoples, if your tribe or your village didn’t support a decision to go to war, you could simply opt out. The Dutch Republic, which reached its golden age in the 17th century and which some have called the “first modern economy,” was composed of individual provinces, and cities within provinces. When a province or city didn’t agree to go along with a general project, it could opt out. Towns selected representatives, but bound them with strict mandates, which could only be changed if the representative referred back to their constituents for further guidance.
Decentralized democracies protect minority views
In all of these early democracies the “take my marbles and go home” principle provided ironclad protection for minorities, though disenfranchised minorities, like African Americans in the pre-civil rights South, had no such protection. Had he been alive at the time, Senator Lee could have called himself a democrat.
However, decentralized early democracies had a very hard time taking decisive action. The citizens of the Dutch Republic began to realize this when they came into naval conflicts with Great Britain during the 17th century. The refusal by some to pay the costs of shipbuilding led to maritime disaster for all. It took the Estates General, the highest assembly in the republic, until 1654 to agree on financing for a navy that could avoid defeat at the hands of the British in the Summer of 1653. The cumbersome nature of Dutch decision-making eventually undermined prosperity, one of Lee’s objectives.
Modern democracies favor decisiveness over decentralization
Modern democracy provides far fewer safeguards against majority decisions than the Haudenosaunee, the Wendat or the Dutch Republic. It is also arguably much more effective at making things happen when they need to, precisely because there is less blocking power.
Surprisingly, these features of modern democracy are descended from far earlier changes in the monarchy of medieval England. Beginning in the 14th century English kings succeeded in imposing norms that stopped individual constituencies from binding their representatives with strict mandates, a form of blocking power that persisted in the Dutch Republic right up until its fall. Over time this was supplemented by a firm principle of majority rule. The English Parliament would eventually provide the model for a new, more decisive type of modern democracy. Ironically, once Parliament became supreme after 1688 it acquired what the English legal commentator William Blackstone called “absolute despotic power.”
What this suggests is that Lee’s observations about democracy and constitutional republics don’t really ask the right questions. The U.S. Constitution incorporated the English principle of majority rule without mandates for representatives, but it also overlaid this with a system of checks and balances and constitutional rights designed to protect minority views. The real question is whether these restraints of a “constitutional republic” provide us with necessary moderation or whether they embody the critical weakness of the Dutch Republic: failure by indecision.
Whether we call the United States a democracy or a republic, the trade-offs and protections that constitutional checks and balances provide also make it far more difficult to respond to critical challenges that require collective action such as saving our climate, reducing corrosive inequality and investing to sustain innovation.
David Stasavage is the Dean for the Social Sciences and the Julius Silver Professor in New York University’s Department of Politics, and an Affiliated Professor in NYU’s School of Law. He is the author of The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today (Princeton University Press, 2020).
