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The Role of Force, Patronage,
and Privilege
from the book
Public Opinion
by Walter Lippmann
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"It has happened as was to have been foreseen,"
wrote Hamilton, " the measures of the Union have not been
executed; the delinquencies of the States have, step by step,
matured themselves to an extreme which has at length arrested
all the wheels of the national government and brought them to
an awful stand." . . . For "in our case the concurrence
of thirteen distinct sovereign wills is requisite, under the confederation,
to the complete execution of every important measure that proceeds
from the Union." How could it be otherwise, he asked: "The
rulers of the respective members . . . will undertake to judge
of the propriety of the measures themselves. They will consider
the conformity of the thing proposed or required to their immediate
interests or aims; the momentary conveniences or inconveniences
that would attend its adoption. All this will be done, and in
a spirit of interested and suspicious scrutiny, without that knowledge
of national circumstances and reasons of state which is essential
to right judgment, and with that strong predilection in favor
of local objects which can hardly fail to mislead the decision.
The same process must be repeated in every member of which the
body is constituted; and the execution of the plans framed by
the councils of the whole, will always fluctuate on the discretion
of the ill-informed and prejudiced opinion of every part. Those
who have been conversant in the proceedings of popular assemblies,
who have seen how difficult it often is, when there is no exterior
pressure of circumstances, to bring them to harmonious resolutions
on important points, will readily conceive how impossible it must
be to induce a number of such assemblies, deliberating at a distance
from each other, at different times, and under different impressions,
long to cooperate in the same views and pursuits."
Over ten years of storm and stress with a congress that was,
as John Adams said, "only a diplomatic assembly," had
furnished the leaders of the revolution "with an instructive
but afflicting lesson" in what happens when a number of self-centered
communities are entangled in the same environment. And so, when
they went to Philadelphia in May of 1787, ostensibly to revise
the Articles of Confederation, they were really in full reaction
against the fundamental premise of Eighteenth Century democracy.
Not only were the leaders consciously opposed to the democratic
spirit of the time, feeling, as Madison said, that "democracies
have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention,"
but within the national frontiers they were determined to offset
as far as they could the ideal of self-governing communities in
self-contained environments. The collisions and failures of concave
democracy, where men spontaneously managed all their own affairs,
were before their eyes. The problem as they saw it, was to restore
government as against democracy. They understood government to
be the power to make national decisions and enforce them throughout
the nation; democracy they believed was the insistence of localities
and classes upon self-determination in accordance with their immediate
interests and aims.
They could not consider in their calculations the possibility
of such an organization of knowledge that separate communities
would act simultaneously on the same version of the facts. We
just begin to conceive this possibility for certain parts of the
world where there is free circulation of news and a common language,
and then only for certain aspects of life. The whole idea of a
voluntary federalism in industry and world politics is still so
rudimentary, that, as we see in our own experience, it enters
only a little, and only very modestly, into practical politics.
What we, more than a century later, can only conceive as an incentive
to generations of intellectual effort, the authors of the Constitution
had no reason to conceive at all. In order to set up national
government, Hamilton and his colleagues had to make plans, not
on the theory that men would cooperate because they had a sense
of common interest. but on the theory that men could be governed,
if special interests were kept in equilibrium by a balance of
power. "Ambition," Madison said, "must be made
to counteract ambition."
They did not, as some writers have supposed, intend to balance
every interest so that the government would be in a perpetual
deadlock. They intended to deadlock local and class interest to
prevent these from obstructing government. "In framing a
government which is to be administered by men over men,"
wrote Madison, "the great difficulty lies in this: you must
first enable the government to control the governed, and in the
next place, oblige it to control itself " In one very important
sense, then, the doctrine of checks and balances was the remedy
of the federalist leaders for the problem of Public opinion. They
saw no other way to substitute "the mild influence of the
magistracy" for the "sanguinary agency of the sword"
except by devising an ingenious machine to neutralize local opinion.
They did not understand how to manipulate a large electorate,
any more than they saw the possibility of common consent upon
the basis of common information. It is true that Aaron Burr taught
Hamilton a lesson which impressed him a good deal when he seized
control of New York City in 1800 by the aid of Tammany Hall. But
Hamilton was killed before he was able to take account of this
new discovery, and, as Mr. Ford says, Burr's pistol blew the brains
out of the Federal party.
When the constitution was written, "politics could still
be managed by conference and agreement among gentlemen" and
it was to the gentry that Hamilton turned for a government. It
was intended that they should manage national affairs when local
prejudice had been brought into equilibrium by the constitutional
checks and balances. No doubt Hamilton, who belonged to this class
by adoption, had a human prejudice in their favor. But that by
itself is a thin explanation of his statecraft. Certainly there
can be no question of his consuming passion for union, and it
is, I think, an inversion of the truth to argue that he made the
Union to protect class privileges, instead of saying that he used
class privileges to make the Union. "We must take man as
we find him," Hamilton said, "and if we expect him to
serve the public we must interest his passions in doing so."
He needed men to govern, whose passions could be most quickly
attached to a national interest. these were the gentry, the public
creditors, manufacturers shippers, and traders, and there is probably
no better instance in history of the adaptation of shrewd means
to clear ends, than in the series of fiscal measures, by which
Hamilton attached the provincial notables to the new government.
Although the constitutional convention worked behind closed
doors, and although ratification was engineered by "a vote
of probably not more than one-sixth of the adult males,'' there
was little or no presence. The Federalists argued for union, not
for democracy, and even the word republic had an unpleasant sound
to George Washington when he had been for more than two years
a republican president. The constitution was a candid attempt
to limit the sphere of popular rule; the only democratic organ
it was intended the government should possess was the House, based
on a suffrage highly limited by property qualifications. And even
at that, the House, it was believed, would be so licentious a
part of the government, that it was carefully checked and balanced
by the Senate, the electoral college, the Presidential veto, and
by judicial interpretation.
Thus at the moment when the French Revolution was kindling
popular feeling the world over, the American revolutionists of
1776 came under a constitution which went back, as far as it was
expedient to the British Monarchy for a model. This conservative
reaction could not endure. The men who had made it were a minority.
their motives were under suspicion, and when Washington went into
retirement, the position of the gentry was not strong enough to
survive the inevitable struggle for the succession. The anomaly
between the original plan of the Fathers and the moral feeling
of the age was too wide not to be capitalized by a good politician.
Jefferson referred to his election as "the great revolution
of 1800," but more than anything else it was a revolution
in the mind. No great policy was altered, but a new tradition
was established. For it was Jefferson who first taught the American
people to regard the Constitution as an instrument of democracy,
and he stereotyped the images, the ideas, and even many of the
phrases, in which Americans ever since have described politics
to each other. So complete was the mental victory, that twenty-five
years later de Tocqueville, who was received in Federalist homes,
noted that even those who were "galled by its continuance"-were
not uncommonly heard to "laud the delights of a republican
government, and the advantages of democratic institutions when
they are in public."
The Constitutional Fathers with all their sagacity had failed
to see that a frankly undemocratic constitution would not long
be tolerated. The bold denial of popular rule was bound to offer
an easy point of attack to a man, like Jefferson, who so far as
his constitutional opinions ran, was not a bit more ready than
Hamilton to turn over government to the "unrefined"
will of the people. The Federalist leaders had been men of definite
convictions who stated them bluntly. There was little real discrepancy
between their public and their private views. But Jefferson's
mind was a mass of ambiguities, not solely because of its defects,
as Hamilton and his biographers have thought, but because he believed
in a union and he believed in spontaneous democracies, and in
the political science of his age there was no satisfactory way
to reconcile the two. Jefferson was confused in thought and action
because he had a vision of a new and tremendous idea that no one
had thought out in all its bearings. But though popular sovereignty
was not clearly understood by anybody, it seemed to imply so great
an enhancement of human life, that no constitution could stand
which frankly denied it. The frank denials were therefore expunged
from consciousness, and the document, which is on its face an
honest example of limited constitutional democracy, was talked
and thought about as an instrument for direct popular rule. Jefferson
actually reached the point of believing that the Federalists had
perverted the Constitution, of which in his fancy they were no
longer the authors. And so the Constitution was, in spirit, rewritten.
Partly by actual amendment, partly by practice, as in the case
of the electoral college, but chiefly by looking at it through
another set of stereotypes, the facade was no longer permitted
to look oligarchic.
The American people came to believe that their Constitution
was a democratic instrument, and treated it as such. They owe
that fiction to the victory of Thomas Jefferson, and a great conservative
fiction it has been. It is a fair guess that if everyone had always
regarded the Constitution as did the authors of it, the Constitution
would have been violently overthrown, because loyalty to the Constitution
and loyalty to democracy would have seemed incompatible. Jefferson
resolved that paradox by teaching the American people to read
the Constitution as an expression of democracy. He himself stopped
there. But in the course of twenty-five years or so social conditions
had changed so radically, that Andrew Jackson carried out the
political revolution for which Jefferson had prepared the tradition.
The political center of that revolution was the question of
patronage. By the men who founded the government public office
was regarded as a species of property, not lightly to be disturbed,
and it was undoubtedly their hope that offices would remain in
the hands of their social class. But the democratic theory had
as one of its main principles the doctrine of the omnicompetent
citizen. Therefore, when people began to look at the Constitution
as a democratic instrument, it was certain that permanence in
office would seem undemocratic. The natural ambitions of men coincided
here with the great moral impulse of their age. Jefferson had
popularized the idea without carrying it ruthlessly into practice,
and removals on party grounds were comparatively few under the
Virginian Presidents. It was Jackson who founded the practice
of turning public office into patronage.
Curious as it sounds to us, the principle of rotation in office
with short terms was regarded as a great reform. Not only did
it acknowledge the new dignity of the average man by treating
him as fit for any office, not only did it destroy the monopoly
of a small social class and appear to open careers to talent,
but "it had been advocated for centuries as a sovereign remedy
for political corruption," and as the one way to prevent
the creation of a bureaucracy.] The practice of rapid change in
public office was the application to a great territory of the
image of democracy derived from the self-contained village.
Naturally it did not have the same results in the nation that
it had in the ideal community on which the democratic theory was
based. It produced quite unexpected results, for it founded a
new governing class to take the place of the submerged federalists.
Unintentionally, patronage did for a large electorate what Hamilton's
fiscal measures had done for the upper classes. We often fail
to realize how much of the stability of our government we owe
to patronage. For it was patronage that weaned natural leaders
from too much attachment to the self-centered community, it was
patronage that weakened the local spirit and brought together
in some kind of peaceful cooperation, the very men who, as provincial
celebrities, would, in the absence of a sense of common interest,
have torn the union apart.
But of course, the democratic theory was not supposed to produce
a new governing class, and it has never accommodated itself to
the fact. When the democrat wanted to abolish monopoly of offices,
to have rotation and short terms, he was thinking of the township
where anyone could do a public service, and return humbly to his
own farm. The idea of a special class of politicians was just
what the democrat did not like. But he could not have what he
did like, because his theory was derived from an ideal environment,
and he was living in a real one. The more deeply he felt the moral
impulse of democracy, the less ready he was to see the profound
truth of Hamilton's statement that communities deliberating at
a distance and under different impressions could not long cooperate
in the same views and pursuits. For that truth postpones anything
like the full realization of democracy in public affairs until
the art of obtaining common consent has been radically improved.
And so while the revolution under Jefferson and Jackson produced
the patronage which made the two party system, which created a
substitute for the rule of the gentry, and a discipline for governing
the deadlock of the checks and balances, all that happened, as
it were, invisibly.
Thus, rotation in office might be the ostensible theory, in
practice the offices oscillated between the henchmen. Tenure might
not be a permanent monopoly, but the professional politician was
permanent. Government might be, as President Harding once said,
a simple thing, but winning elections was a sophisticated performance.
The salaries in office might be as ostentatiously frugal as Jefferson's
home-spun, but the expenses of party organization and the fruits
of victory were in the grand manner. The stereotype of democracy
controlled the visible government; the corrections, the exceptions
and adaptations of the American people to the real facts of their
environment have had to be invisible, even when everybody knew
all about them. It was only the words of the law, the speeches
of politicians, the platforms, and the formal machinery of administration
that have had to conform to the pristine image of democracy.
*****
Democracy
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