How to Rule?

The Arts of Government from Antiquity to the Present

Grant Duncan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000451528
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Government & Business
• Index: Business

A guide through history for those perplexed about the fate of democracy and the government of diverse societies. In war and in peace, amid disruptive change and during reconstruction, a government of people and events will always be called for. But in this age of anxiety and uncertainty, people on the left and the right are losing confidence in governments, elections and politicians. Many ask whether democracy has failed, and ponder alternatives. Knowing how to govern, and how to be governed, are necessary for solving collectively our pressing social and ecological problems.

This book rediscovers diverse models of government, including the successful statecraft and drastic mistakes of past rulers and their advisers. From ancient to modern times, what methods of government have arisen and succeeded, or what were their fatal flaws? What ethical and political ideas informed the rulers and the ruled? How have states dealt with unexpected calamities or with cultural and religious differences? And what kept things (more or less) running smoothly? Amid rapid change and political dissent, it's timely to re-examine the ideas and practices that governed large populations and guided their rulers. In an age of political distrust, disruptive populism and global crises, we need to rearm ourselves with knowledge of history and diverse political ideas tobetter address contemporary problems.

This book will appeal to students in political theory, political history, or history of government and public policy.

1

The arts of government

DOI: 10.4324/9781003166955-1

It was October 2019, and it looked as if the wheels were falling off that rickety vehicle called Democracy. It was some three years since the dual anti- establishment shocks of the Brexit referendum and the election of President Donald Trump, and there had been dire warnings from respectable political scientists that democracy was broken and in decline – perhaps terminal decline.¹ Boris Johnson was the prime minister of the United Kingdom, but he lacked a working majority in the House of Commons. The Supreme Court overrode his plan to prorogue the parliament. He had promised Brexit by 31 October but couldn’t get a revised deal approved by parliament in time; so, like a disorganised student, he requested another extension. And he called an election for the coming December. The constitution of the United Kingdom looked as if it had broken down, however. Brexit supporters were furious that ‘the will of the people’, as expressed in a referendum result that favoured leaving the European Union, was being subverted by their representatives. Many of those who had voted to remain in the European Union just wanted the drawn-out and acrimonious divorce and the economic uncertainty to be over and done with. Others insisted on a second referendum. British public life descended to levels of incivility not witnessed in recent history. People questioned the system of political representation itself and asked whether Britain’s unwritten constitution needed an overhaul.

Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, the House of Representatives initiated impeachment proceedings against President Trump. It was alleged that the president had violated the law by asking the leader of a foreign state, as a ‘favour’, to order an investigation into the son of Trump’s leading political rival, with the alleged goal of aiding Trump’s campaign for re-election. The delivery of $400 million in military aid, granted by Congress, happened to be stalled by the White House while the foreign leader, President Zelensky of Ukraine, made up his mind. Mr Trump defended himself by saying he had put ‘no pressure’ on the Ukrainian leader. In that same month, Trump upset many Republicans (among others) by unexpectedly ordering the withdrawal of US troops from Kurdish-held territory in Syria, creating a power vacuum into which Turkish forces quickly moved, supported by the Russians.² The office of the president and indeed the Constitution were undergoing a severe stress test. The political disagreement was about more than the conduct of the incumbent president; there was a fundamental disagreement about political legitimacy.³ It became a common tactic to describe political opponents as unpatriotic, treasonous or insane, as if to rule them out of the game altogether. Many of those who watched in dismay were losing their trust in politicians and in the system of government itself.

In Hong Kong, pro-democracy protestors were openly defying Chinese rule; in Chile, rioters burned subway stations and looted supermarkets; in Barcelona, Catalonian separatists protested violently against prison sentences handed down on nine representatives who had backed a pro-independence referendum. And in Poland, the conservative Law and Justice Party – responsible for undermining freedom of the press and the independence of the judiciary – was returned to office with increased support in an election that also saw an increase in voter turnout. Indeed, elections throughout Europe had seen the rise of parties that openly challenged internationally accepted norms of human rights, especially those regarding minority groups and migrants – and they did so in the name of ‘the nation’. In Hungary, this meant a politically dominant hybrid of illiberal democracy that thrived on perceived threats from arrivals of refugees and migrants. In western Europe, party-political fragmentation, the weaknesses of mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties, and the strength of far-right populist parties meant that governments were being cobbled together from unlikely coalitions.⁴ Italy’s short-lived coalition between the 5-Star Movement and the far-right Lega was one particularly dysfunctional example. The future was looking bleak for democracy – particularly for liberal democracy. Liberalism itself had become in many people’s vocabulary a dirty word that evoked either (for the left) the neoliberalism that had caused social dislocation and inequality, or (for the right) the big-city elites who seemed arrogant, condescending and smugly cosmopolitan.

And yet outstanding global issues, including climate change, economic inequalities and poverty, and the online proliferation of extremist ideologies were needing urgently to be addressed. More than ever in history, humanity needed solutions to problems requiring global collective action, but governments weren’t trusted to address them effectively at the national level, let alone the international. Indeed, in the case of online propaganda, some state actors and political parties were taking advantage of the problems. Had something gone terribly wrong with systems of government? Apparently there was a major problem, but what exactly was it? And if we could agree on a diagnosis of the problem, then what could be done about it?

And then in 2020, a novel coronavirus caused a pandemic. Respiratory disease and death ran rampant as health-care systems were overwhelmed with critical cases. The wealthiest and most advanced countries of the world, notably the United States, United Kingdom and countries of the European Union, suffered massive human and economic losses. The everyday norms of government and of private and commercial life had to be suspended. Temporary emergency powers were invoked to protect public health. To control transmission of the virus, whole populations were placed under compulsory lockdown, overriding their civil and economic liberties. Communities became divided (roughly) between those who were willing to sacrifice liberties in order to control disease and prevent death, and those who would risk death rather than sacrifice their liberties – between those who saw government as protective and those who saw it as a threat. Either way, there could be no return to the status quo. For better or worse, government was undergoing another round of transformation.

Where had we gone wrong?

In a contemporary system of representative government, ideally, the competitors for power attain, retain or lose office as an outcome of free and fair elections based on a universal adult franchise. Losers concede defeat peacefully; the armed forces remain in their barracks; career public servants will implement the voter-mandated policy platform of the incoming government. Between elections, the opinions and voices of ‘the public’ will be heeded – if only with an eye to success at the next election. But this is not – and, I will later argue, was never really intended to be – ‘rule by the people’ in the direct and substantial sense. At elections those who turn out to vote wield a momentary power – only to entrust the powers to pass and execute laws to a tiny minority of people (as representatives) who are mostly beholden to the political parties that pre-selected them as candidates. The voters’ trust is only conditional, of course, as elected offices are constitutionally limited in scope and tenure. We’ve learned, after all, to trust no one with ill-defined or unlimited powers. So in a representative system, ‘the people’ retain an electoral veto on any government, and hence they hold them to account. A relatively small swing in voters’ choices away from governing parties and towards opposing parties often suffices to change the government, or at least to change its composition. The true political change agents are thus a relatively small proportion of ‘swing’ voters. Political party membership and loyalty have declined in recent decades; polarisation and electoral volatility have risen.

Moreover, on social media and on university campuses, a strange inversion had occurred. Many on the left were calling for their opponents to be silenced or banned. They demanded restrictions on freedom of speech on the grounds that vulnerable minorities were at risk. Silencing voices is, however, a tactic of authoritarian politics. Meanwhile, those on the right were borrowing the old tactics of the left. Realising the power of victimhood, the right complained about suppression due to left-wing ‘political correctness’, and they adopted unconventional forms of protest and (mis)information campaigns. For instance, the German far-right sought recognition for the victims of the bombing of Dresden in World War II. The right had adopted the previously left-wing tactic of disrupting politics-as-usual through protest.

Many hard-working white folks were feeling under siege and began fighting back. Donald Trump led their fight precisely because he was a rule-breaker, not a rule-follower. His willingness to flout laws and conventions, repeatedly and shamelessly, proclaimed that this was a route to success. Freedom-loving mavericks at last could stand proud; he implicitly handed a get-out-of-jail-free card to other disruptive rule-breakers. His propensity to follow one transgression unapologetically by performing another violated norms of political leadership. Scandals that would normally have terminated a political career didn’t block his pathway to the presidency as his life had always been openly scandalous. His supporters saw him as authentic, even honest, and not hypocritical, unlike ‘normal’ politicians. Trump also showed disdain for experts and administrators. But this particular trend had begun even before the attack on ‘big government’ by Ronald Reagan.⁵ Public-service professionals and bureaucrats were often derided as self-interested empire-builders who resisted innovation and lagged behind private enterprise. Disdain for experts and administrators had long been widely shared as people turned away from public life saying that they didn’t trust politicians or government. This trend against administration and regulation, combined with misinformation and conspiracy theories, left the United States less well prepared than it could have been to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.⁶

Leading western countries were witnessing a decline in public trust in government and a disinclination to engage in public affairs. The Aristotelian principle of citizenship (learn how to rule well, and how to be ruled well) was off the table. Worse still, there was an assault on public confidence in commonly accepted sources of knowledge (especially mainstream media) as the maximisation of scepticism and disbelief became a political strategy. The atmosphere became so polarised that it was politically unwise for members of opposing sides to reach out to, let alone cooperate with, one another. Aiding and abetting ‘the enemy’ would invite severe backlash from one’s own allies. Society was set at odds with itself, and political progress became almost impossible. A fundamental system change had occurred. Something had lifted the lid off the least civil and most hostile collective emotions. Social media enabled this, but they couldn’t have been entirely to blame on their own, as worse forms of disorder – not to mention civil war – had occurred in the past, well before the inception of mass media and the internet. There has never been a golden age of politics, guided entirely by truth and justice; the popular idea of ‘post-truth politics’ ignores history. But the internet and social media accelerated the proliferation of falsehoods⁷ and exacerbated the present discontents.

Looking back to a time just before the internet age, in the early 1990s, one prominent analyst of representative government⁸ observed that, in the era of ‘audience democracy’ (characterised by broadcast media, opinion polling and a wide ‘division of labour’ between leading political actors and voters), public news outlets did convey certain biases or distortions (through agenda-setting, framing and editing), but they were largely politically neutral and non-partisan.⁹ While people disagreed over policies and crises, there was basic agreement about what were the problems and the essential facts. The subject matter in contention, or the field on which a battle was fought, such as in the Watergate crisis, was largely agreed by the major contestants.¹⁰ With the internet and social media, however, there was a proliferation of channels of news and opinion, all of which compete for attention, but not all of which have high standards of reporting. And the perception of the facts and issues themselves became highly contestable, to the extent that one person’s fact was another’s misinformation. Even when a fact was agreed upon, the interpretations thereof differed wildly. Norms about what counts as evidence and rational debate were no longer agreed. This was exacerbated as the global reach and communication speeds of the internet had greatly accelerated the distribution of misinformation and controversy, and so multiplied the available interpretations.

All the same, such a basic dysfunction wasn’t historically unprecedented. Political controversy or confusion over the very disposition of the ground of debate itself, to the extent that people believe untruths or doubt well-founded facts, had occurred before – well before modern media.¹¹ How had people faced such problems in the past? How had societies succeeded – or failed – in regulating them? How, then, could the present discontents be better navigated so that the urgent tasks of governing serious global prob...