Democracy in Crisis (Works of Harold J. Laski)

Harold J. Laski

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138822047
• eBook ISBN: 9781317586678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume is an expanded version of the Weil lectures given at the University of North Carolina in 1931 and is one of the two texts of Laski's quasi Marxist period.

II The Decay of Representative Institutions

DOI: 10.4324/9781315742625-2

I

I have so far discussed in general outline the character of the crisis in which capitalist democracy finds itself involved. Though this has, inevitably, affected every aspect of civilisation, it has naturally made a particular impact on the political institutions of the modern state. The character of that impact is not easy to describe in a brief way. Broadly it may be said to consist in the effort to adapt institutions suited to one set of purposes to conditions in which those purposes cannot freely operate. The result is necessarily serious strain, and it is universally admitted that the problem has become an urgent one. Reorganisation is essential; but no one, save those who accept the necessity of dictatorship, is clear about the lines upon which reorganisation should proceed.

The first great element of difficulty is that of the electorate itself. The assumptions of capitalist democracy require universal suffrage; without it, there is illogic at the heart of the liberal state. But universal suffrage confers political power upon masses of citizens the greater part of whom is enfolded in a purely private life, and devoid of interest in, or knowledge of, the political process. What it asks from the government of the day is results; it has neither leisure nor information to inquire whether the results are, in the given conditions, attainable, Generally speaking, it has not been adequately educated for its special political task, and the problem of organising it for that end falls into the hands of the political parties. Ihe ooject for which these strive is the simple one—simple at least in definition—of obtaining a majority in tne legislative assembly, and they have to adapt tneir methods to the kind of electorate with which they have to deal.

If ever a history of parties in the modern state is written adequately, it will be one of the great books of the world. It will show a rapidity of party response to rapidly changing social conditions which is in every way remarkable. Parties have to capture public opinion. But the elements of public opinion do not grow out of knowledge, and they are not the product of reason. Knowledge and reason may count, but they remain, quite definitely, at the service of the interests in conflict. And the decisions of men, when they come to choose their governors, are influenced by considerations which escape all scientific analysis. They vote against a government because, whatever its merits, it has been too long in power. They are sent headlong in one direction by panic. They rush in another over some suaden last moment issue which has no real relation to the policies in dispute, and may, as in 1924, contain at least the probabilities of an impudent forgery. They may be confused and distracted because important leaders change sides. The passions of war, as in 1900 and 1918, may make them wholly oblivious of their true interests, which, in both cases, they begin to realise only when the decision has been made. The problem with a modern electorate is the almost insoluble one of saying, in any but the most general and usually negative terms, what a result does mean; and any particular result, within the whole, is rarely explicable on rational grounds.

It is universally admitted that an American presidential campaign is a four months’ debauchery. When Mr. Alfred E. Smith was beaten in 1928, it was agreed that the main item in his defeat was the fact that he was a Roman Catholic, and a minor item, that he did not possess the social habits usually associated with the Presidency of the Republic. Yet every thinking voter must have known that Mr. Smith’s religion would, in fact, have no influence upon his political policy; and his social habits, whatever they were, were at least as good as those of either Andrew Jackson or President Grant, and had not prevented him from being, as its Governor, one of the most distinguished administrators in the history of New York State. In a British election, it is agreed that most of the electors do not attend meetings at all, and, of those who do, the vast majority attend meetings of the candidates they have already decided to support. Little election literature is valid that is either long or involved; to attain its end, it needs to be suspiciously general, full of wide promises, passionately critical of the other side, built upon some tremendous slogan that will stay in the electoral memory at least until polling-day. The new techniques of wireless and movietone have still further complicated methodology. With both, a beautiful voice counts enormously; with the second, the actor’s technique is fundamental. Yet both are an appeal to complete irrelevancies which, suitably staged, may well be decisive of the whole issue.

Nor is this all. The complexities of modern politics make the electoral task far harder than at any previous time, because the discovery of truth is so much harder. The kind of issue which the nineteenth century discussed existed upon a plane which could be understood without excessive intellectual effort, and naturally lent itself to the great commonplaces which are the pith of rhetorical analysis. Religious toleration, the extension of the suffrage, the desirability of a national system of education, the reorganisation of local government, these are, in their larger perspective, the kind of thing the average man finds interesting and intelligible without the possession of special knowledge. Nor is this all. Because this is their nature, they permit also of distinguished debate in a legislative assembly. The processes by which the latter reaches its decisions can be made illuminating and instructive to the public mind. The debates of the nineteenth century did not, I think, arouse greater interest or secure wiaer publicity because their level was higher; it was rather because their subject-matter was, in itself, calculated to arrest the attention of a non-technical audience.

In our own day the character of the discussions has changed. The details of industrial reorganisation, the principles of currency reform, the method of unemployment insurance, the schedules for grants-in-aid of housing, hardly lend themselves at all to the orator’s devices. Behind each of them, if they are to be understood, lies a body of specialist knowledge which is not available to the ordinary man, who shrinks from the effort involved in acquiring a specialism. Whenever a typical nineteenth-century topic is under discussion in a body like the House of Commons, responsible government in India, the Prayer Book of the Established Church, the limit of police powers over private citizens, the legal recognition of gambling, the public interest is probably greater, and not less, than it was in the Victorian age. But it is surely futile to expect that a body of technical issues can be so debated by a miscellaneous assembly of amateurs as to result in public excitement. Only the clash of great principles produces widespread public attention; that is why a general or a presidential election shakes men out of their normal routine, for he is not to be envied who can view unmoved the spectacle of the transference of public power. That is why, it is worth noting also, observers have always remarked that the atmosphere of revolution is one of intense exhilaration; the stakes at issue are so immense that men cannot but be absorbed in the drama which decides their conquest. But a party which could keep public attention riveted on the details of a housing scheme would have performed nothing short of a miracle. For the inner processes of a technique are always dull to any not charged with their actual operation. It is only the result achieved which can hope to make a universal aopeal.

Two other things in this context are worth remembering. The dullness of the general political process is, in fact, its safety-valve; things get done in the state because most men are not prepared to be excited about them. Every government depends for its normal routine upon the inertia of the multitude. If every question aroused passionate controversy, the politician would have no time to operate the engines of state. That is why no legislature can sit all the year round; without a period in which response to criticism was unnecessary the modern statesman would be dead in a twelvemonth. That is why, also, exciting governments are usually short-lived governments; men cannot be for ever remaking foundations without catastrophe. It is the Lord Liverpools of this life who rule for fifteen years. To carry out any plan of comprehensive reconstruction involves, given the limits of human nature, either the atmosphere of dictatorship, where opposkion is forcioly at a minimum, or a long period of time in which the critics can be satisfied and established expectations trained to the slow acceptance of the disappointments involved. The very nature of a political democracy precludes the possibility of action that is at once swift and comprehensive. The area of interests to be consulted is too great, the risks of technical error too manifold, the possibility of defeat upon the irrelevant issue too large, the dread of novelty too intense for the maintenance of unity to be possible in an area of profound transition.

The second factor is the intellectual condition of the democracy itself. Decision in politics requires the trained mind, and our system of education limits its possession to a small fraction of the citizen body. The reason is a simple one. Education is expensive, and in a capitalist democracy more is unlikely to be spent on it than is necessary for its maintenance as a going concern. To educate the masses so that they can, in any large numbers, enter into possession oi the intellectual heritage of civilisation is, in the traditional phrase, to educate them beyond their station. This is not all. The higher the general level of training in a capitalist democracy the more difficult it is to maintain the classic division between rich and poor. For a highly trained proletariat will never be long content to remain a proletariat. If it has the keys of knowledge in its hands, it will attack the system which maintains inequality without principle. All régimes built upon inequality draw their strength from the ignorance of the multitude, and all such régimes seek to make their methods of education such as are least likely to injure their own foundations. The sense that knowledge is either urgent or possible is rare enough; and so long as ascent to it is possible, the masses will rarely have sufficient scepticism of the order under which they live to inquire into tne steepness of the ascent. An educational system which, in most Western countries, ends at the age of fourteen is an insurance for capitalism against inconvenient attack.

Tnis can, I think, be best seen by considering briefly the habits of the Press in different countries. As everyone knows, it has become, with rare exceptions, a department of big business, and it is deliberately organised, like the other industrial institutions of a capitalist society, upon the basis of the profit-making motive. That means the necessity of fulfilling two conditions. The newspaper to-day must largely live by advertising, and it cannot secure advertisements by undermining the system on whose habits the advertisers depend. Nor can it hope, from a semi-literate population, to secure any great mass of readers, if it devote itself to an impartial presentation of social truth. Its business is such a presentation of news under the conditions most likely to maximise the profit upon the investment it represents. The greatest of modern newspaper proprietors has told us frankly how low is politics in the list of such news.¹And its interpretation is, of course, adapted to the public it believes itself to serve. No one would go to the Beaverbrook Press for a truthful account of the British trade position. The distortion of Russian news by the New YorkTimes has been the subject of a careful analysis.²The Temps and the Journal des Débats have recently been bought by the Comité des Forges, or its subsidiary organisations, and no one supposes that their object in those purchases was, say, an impartial treatment of socialism or disarmament. The power to weight news in a particular direction is the power to prevent that material from reaching the public upon which rational judgments may be based. Anyone who compares the treatment of disarmament in the British Press in the first phase of the Geneva Conference of 1932 with the importance allotted to the sexual behaviour of an Anglican rector in the same period will not find it difficult to discover how public opinion is made in a capitalist democracy.

Lord Northcliffe, Newspapers and the Public (1920). W. Lippmann and Charles Merz in the New Republic, August 4, 1920.

No doubt there are compensations. No Press can ever get itself accepted at its face value. Its misinterpretations tend always to have a short-term incidence. Experience itself is a safeguard against their tenour. The trade unionist who reads that the miners are misled by Russian-paid agitators is inoculated against that virus in innumerable ways. The voter may accept the the Zinoviev letter in 1924; he does not believe it in 1929. He may be led to believe that a National Government will bind up his wounds in 1931; but his neighbour, who has suffered the Means Test, disillusions mm six months later. There is an astringent power in the facts of experience which propaganda is powerless to destroy.

Yet, when all is said and done, the position of the electorate remains highly unsatisfactory. There is a vital truth in Rousseau’s taunt that it is free only at election-time, and that freedom is but the prelude to a new domination. It cannot choose the representatives it wants; it can only strike blindly against those at wnom it feels a passing indignation. Its will is largely meaningless—even where it has a will—save as it can find expression through the programme of parties. That is always a very gradual process in matters of important concern; for so clumsy an instrument as a party is not going to pin its iaith to serious experiment until it is certain that it will be well received. That has been remarkably displayed in recent years in the struggle for disarmament. No party in the state would dare to refuse it lip-service; but at Geneva, in 1932, the electorate was helpless before a government decision which denied even the prospect of its successful accomplishment. As the history of new parties has pretty clearly shown, one cannot improvise a campaign against the defects of the old. The organisation, the funds, the education, the energy required have to be built up by long and arduous effort. And even when that result has been attained, there is always the danger that a shift in the horizon may deprive the new instrument of its effective striking power. Time and again the farmers of the United States have had to begin afresh the task of giving their interests a special and resolute expression.

A democracy, in a word, must be led, and in a capitalist democracy the main weapons of leadership are in the hands of capkalists. Its opponents are always on the defensive unless they confine their antagonism to the minutiae of the regime. If they seek to assault its foundations, they confront the difficulties, first, of the terrible price that has always to be paid for fundamental change—a price which invariably includes the defection of some part of their trusted leaders—and second that, so long as the outward fabric appears unchallenged, the inertia of the multitude is on its side. The case for capitalism is not its result in either efficiency or justice; the case for caoitalism lies in the fact that, save for the as yet unproven experiment of Russia, the socialist case has not yet been translated into any large-scale action. Men fear the unknown where they are not intensely organised to try it; or driven thereto by the breakdown of the system to which they are accustomed, they cling as long as they can to their wonted routines. A capitalist democracy will not allow its electorate to stumble into socialism by the accident of a verdict at the polls. It is only when that will for basic change is made inescapably known that assault upon the foundations will become possible; and the possessors of economic authority will not deem the revelation to have occurred until every prospect has vanished of their retaining power. For a new order only becomes acceptable to the multitude when it is apparent that the will of the old has been definitively broken. It took ten years to persuade the world that the Soviet system had the ordinary marks of political stability, and even yet, on the international side, the persuasion is by no means complete.

II

The thesis is universally admitted that the legislatures of the modern state are in an unsatisfactory condition; it is, indeed, some of the stoutest defenders of the parliamentary system who demand their reconstruction. They are so overwhelmed with work that they have no time for the adequate discussion of any single legislative project. They are so driven by the pressure of party control that the private member has, for the most part, been reduced to the status of a voting machine. They have lost all direct initiative, especially in the realms of finance and foreign affairs; the United States apart, where the fixed legislative period makes for anarchy in the effort to attain a unified political direction, they must either act as the organ of formal registration for the executive, or submit to the hazards of a new general election. They work with irritating slowness; there has rarely been a government in office which has been able to complete its proposed programme before either the session or its term of office expired. Their submission every four years or so to the renewal of their mandate means either a preoccupation with the need for re-election—which usually means an excessive devotion to measures of merely immediate interest—or that the whims of the electorate prevent any government staying in office long enough to carry out the measures of a really ample reconstruction.

But this is not, by any means, the whole indictment. If the government in office has a Dig majority, the opposition is thereby condemned to several years of futile sterility. If the government is in a minority, it is unable to act with either decision or clarity; it is always tempted, ana usually succumbs to the temptation, to introduce not the measures in which it believes, but those which maximise its chance of staying in office. If the government is a coalition of parties, the necessity oi sinking differences in order to attain the appearance of unity breeds a dishonesty of temper, an accommodation in principle, which saps the moral character of the parliamentary system. There can have been few governments more void of any real moral foundation than the coalitions of 1918 and 1931 in England; and successive French governments since the war have shown how the absence of any clear majority for some definite political purpose stultifies the prospect of a clear direction in affairs.

The opponents of the parliamentary regime often exhaust themselves in ironic attack on the personnel of legislative assemblies. They are, it is said, mostly little men, with no special ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• I The Illusion of Security
• II The Decay of Representative Institutions
• III Authority and Discipline in Capitalist Democracy
• IV The Revolutionary Claim
• Conclusion