Perils of “the vote”: Must all government be bad government?

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 15, 2023

The problem with “democracy” today is that we too seldom recognize that it is not intrinsically connected to the common good. Moreover, except in very small groups, the idea of equal voting rights has very little to do with governmental outcomes. The sad truth is that democracy’s most important governmental characteristic is the complacency it produces in the governed. One can claim a moral authority to challenge monarchic or oligarchic governments from below; but the mythology of democracy makes it very difficult to challenge its outcomes at all. “Democratic” government can almost always claim a kind of righteousness born of the myth that it is the political system most compatible with either God’s will or human dignity.

But this is utterly ludicrous. It makes no more sense than a prior era’s trust in the Divine Right of kings on the assumption that monarchy mirrors most closely God’s own method of governance. Moreover, while all governments claim some mandate to rule from God, Tradition, or Political Philosophy, few can hide their venality as easily today as those which claim a mandate to rule from “the people”—which has become the ultimate thoughtless answer to criticism. In reality, a government is made moral by its purposes, methods, and competence, and not by the basis of its particular claim to authority (which will inescapably be in each particular case a dubious claim that merely reflects common cultural ideas).

I believe that one of the greatest socio-political errors of Church leaders today, from the pope on down, is their constant stress on an unthinking respect and veneration for democracy—as if democracy has ever, in and of itself, solved a single political problem. This stress on democracy blurs the reality that it is not a particular “constitution” or “governance arrangement” but a true moral compass which determines both the proper ends of government and the means by which these ends may be pursued.

Ancient history

Interestingly, the country which has made the largest impact on the expansion of “democracy” is probably the United States. Anyone who knows any history at all knows that the Church was, for a very long time, justly suspicious of democratic movements, which seemed always to emphasize personal political power over the moral dimensions of political action, as if the key political question is “who holds power” rather than the ends for and the means by which power is exercised. The Church, in terms of her own Divine constitution, has always had little faith in temporal rulers, and there is no more reason to expect “democracy” to be an intrinsically moral basis for government than there is to expect the same of monarchy or aristocracy.

Indeed, it was already realized by the ancient Greeks that a good monarchy could degenerate into a frightful tyranny, an excellent aristocracy (rule by the best) could degenerate into a horrible oligarchy (rule by the few for their own benefit), and a superb polity (that is, a political order in which all parts and levels function harmoniously for the common good) could degenerate into a wayward and selfish democracy (rule by the “demos”, that is, the mass of the people with all the willful selfishness of the mob). Even if we grant that the modern use of the term “democracy” is no longer quite the same, since it refers now primarily to a political order which acknowledges the universal right of adults to vote, we can see the intrinsic problem with the unrelenting emphasis on its supposed virtues today. That problem is simple: Democracy is no more intrinsically virtuous than any other governmental model. It simply confuses popular participation in politics with moral participation in politics.

The worst political trap a people can fall into is not one form of government or another but the loss of a morally formative tradition which prescribes the legitimate purposes or ends of government and the legitimate means by which alone government may pursue even its own proper purposes. This sort of genuine consideration of the problem of politics is completely lost in the emphasis on the superiority or necessary goodness of a particular political form, or even of a political “constitution”. It is no more or less moral to be ruled by a monarch than to be ruled by a committee than to be ruled by an assembly of all citizens—which is something more populous nations seek to emulate through the idea of universal suffrage to control the elections of public officials.

Moral competence to vote wisely never enters into the modern political equation. We are so blinded by our cultural ideologies that our society as a whole has become largely incapable of recognizing what has gone wrong. The result is that government is no longer tied to any cohesive system of morality, and so all it can do is claim that it is good because people have “the vote”.

The modern political dilemma

The constant emphasis of Church leaders on the priority of democracy further conceals what has gone wrong, which is the substitution of willfulness for morality. This is evident in the common Western assumption that voting in accordance with self-interest will always bring about the best possible result, and that every adult necessarily has the political understanding, intellectual capacity and moral commitment to vote wisely. We should not be surprised that this never works in a culture that has not been generally prepared over a long period of time through the cultivation of both virtue and practical intelligence. It is, in fact, always the prudential and moral “culture” of those who govern—no matter how they have obtained their governing influence—which determines whether any given government is good or bad.

But please note that this has little or nothing to do with “the vote”. It is true that the ancient Greek polis (city state) at least had a small enough number of adult males so that all the voters could assemble to debate issues, reach decisions and pass laws. Their “vote” was therefore a far more significant reality, though even then selfishness, fuzzy thinking and rhetorical skill presented obvious dangers. But the nature of the vote in modern democracies is far, far different. This modern “vote” is essentially a sop to personal self-esteem which most often actually undermines the common good. Why? Because anyone who “wins” the majority vote is assumed to be justified, and any measure that wins the requisite vote is assumed to have passed the ultimate test of political legitimacy.

Unfortunately, the modern situation is far worse than this in other ways as well. The entire drive for “one man one vote” (or now “one adult one vote”) was a drive coinciding with, and helping to cause, the erosion of intermediary institutions which exercised considerable authority and influence in their own spheres. The myth that a particular individual political right called “voting” was the key to the creation of a just commonwealth was actually a spur to the erosion of all the institutions (churches, agricultural and business associations, guilds and later associations of business and labor, local entities such as universities, local civic groupings such as villages and towns, and a host of other locally manageable associations) which formerly exercised significant socio-political influence in their respective spheres.

The result was the gradual hollowing out of the social order until the so-called “democratic State” exercised a comprehensive legal and bureaucratic power over what gradually became an unorganized collection of pathetically atomized individuals. And each of these individuals, satisfied that he or she had been proudly anointed the equal of each other individual through the power of “the vote”, ultimately became isolated and insignificant in the face of the enormously consolidated power of what we now recognize as the modern bureaucratic State.

The need for political realism

Unfortunately, not only do modern bureaucratic states exercise a degree of personal control over their citizens unprecedented in history but they do so amorally in the name of “democracy”. And the relentless emphasis of modern Churchmen on “democracy” does nothing to retard this trend. The reality is that a society can be neither moral nor cohesive politically (or any other way) without strong intermediary institutions between the individual and the state.

It is one of the great tragedies of the modern period that the idea of universal suffrage has risen to paramount status along with the hollowing out of the natural intermediary institutions which constitute a healthy society. What we have in the modern world is a pattern of massively powerful bureaucratic states on the one hand and isolated individuals with the vote on the other. This is a situation which invites rule by a combination of tyrants and oligarchs—that is, powerful heads of states controlled by dominant financial interests which govern at a very detailed level through massive bureaucracies.

There has been a progressive hollowing out of political entities—nations—over the past two hundred years or more. A large part of this hollowing has been accomplished in the name of the almighty democratic process narrowed down to “the vote”. But real life does not work well that way, and politics can only rarely be effectively restrained and guided by millions upon millions of individual voters. The first step toward a better solution might be an honest recognition by the leaders of the Catholic Church and other Christian bodies that democracy in and of itself is not, and never has been, a solution to anything. With that admission, we might be more successful in focusing on the true roots of the problem of moral governance today.