The Will of the People

A Modern Myth

Albert Weale

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509533299
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Political Philosophy

Democracies today are in the grip of a myth: the myth of the will of the people. Populist movements use the idea to challenge elected representatives. Politicians, content to invoke the will of the people, fail in their duty to make responsible and accountable decisions. And public contest over political choices is stifled by fears that opposing the will of the people will be perceived as elitist. In this book Albert Weale dissects the idea of the will of the people, showing that it relies on a mythical view of participatory democracy. As soon as a choice between more than two simple alternatives is involved, there is often no clear answer to the question of what a majority favours. Moreover, because governments have to interpret the results of referendums, the will of the people becomes a means for strengthening executive control – the exact opposite of what appealing to the people's will seemed to imply. Weale argues that it's time to dispense with the myth of the will of the people. A flourishing democracy requires an open society in which choices can be challenged, parliaments strengthened and populist leaders called to account.

1
In the Grip of a Myth

All round the world, political parties and movements – both on the left and on the right – invoke the will of the people. In 2013 the Abbott government in Australia said that any attempt by the Australian senate to hold up repeal of the carbon tax was opposed to the will of the people; and the One Nation Party claims to be a political party that represents the people of Australia, who are concerned that their will is being ignored by the two-party system. Marine Le Pen of the French National Front asserts that attempts by the French judiciary to examine the party’s finances would be opposed to the will of the people. Campaigners for same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland say that opposition to their cause runs against the will of the people. The former President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez declared in his 2007 inaugural address that the people’s judgement is pure, its will is strong, and no one can corrupt or even threaten it. In the wake of the failed military coup in Turkey in 2016, President Erdoğan claimed that the people who come out to demonstrate against the coup were manifesting a singular ‘national will’. Speaking of the rise of the US Tea Party, one of its members said that the party had realized that government spending without the will of the people is a form of taxation without representation. Campaigners against the electoral college in the United States say that the college frustrates the will of the people because it can deny victory to the candidate with a majority share of the popular vote, as shown in the election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. The UN ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Hayley, has said that Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel ‘did the will of the people’.

In the United Kingdom Conservative politicians have enthusiastically discovered the will of the people since the Brexit referendum in 2016. David Davis, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, repeatedly appeals to the will of the people as a way of warning MPs not to vote against the government’s policy. On 15 December 2017, at the conclusion of the European Council meeting, Theresa May tweeted: ‘We will deliver on the will of the British people and get the best Brexit deal for our country.’ Speaking as foreign secretary, Boris Johnson said, of the opposition to Brexit, that there were those who were determined to stop Brexit and hence to frustrate the will of the people – a mistake, he judged, that would lead to feelings of betrayal. Even those opposed to Brexit have repeatedly asserted that they did not want to disregard the will of the people.

My purpose in writing this book is to convince you – the reader – that the will of the people is a myth. There is no such thing as the will of the people, just as there are no such things as unicorns, flying horses or lost continents called Atlantis. Those who think that accepting the will of the people is an essential part of democratic public life are in the grip of a myth. Worse still, the phrase ‘the will of the people’ is part of a larger populist myth that assumes that government policy can be decided directly by the people as they exercise their power collectively.

The terms ‘populist’ and ‘populism’ are nowadays widely bandied about. They are used to describe very different political movements. The label ‘populist’ has been applied to UK supporters of Brexit; to European right-wing anti-immigrant parties in countries such as France, Austria and Hungary; to European left-wing anti-austerity parties in Europe, for example Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece, or to movements like Occupy Wall Street; to Eurosceptic parties such as Five Star and the Northern League in Italy; to Trump supporters in the United States; or to the left-wing populism of Evo Morales in Bolivia or of the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Given the variety of political ideas and movements in this mix, it often seems as though ‘populist’ is simply being used as a term of abuse, to describe the politics a speaker disagrees with.

Yet, despite this diversity, the term ‘populist’* does pick out, in these otherwise very different movements, certain common elements, invoking a core set of ideas to which different causes are attached. All populists see the prevailing system of representative government as something that has been taken over by an elite. All look to rectify this state of affairs through the direct involvement of ordinary people, whose will should prevail in the making of policy. All think that the will of the people – at least as they claim to understand it – should be the basis of government policy.

For those who are friends of democracy, the claim that the people should be the basis of all political power at first sight seems self-evident. It is a taken-for-granted assumption. Indeed, it seems to define what we mean by democracy. Among these same friends of democracy, there is often a nostalgia for what they imagine was a purer past. They look back to what they suppose were direct democracies – that is, classical Athens in antiquity or, in (pre)modern times, agricultural societies in which an upright people governed itself, as the farmers of early America or the peasants of Europe were once supposed to do. From this perspective the democratic ideal is to replicate in modern, large-scale democracies the earlier practice of government by the assembly of the people so far as is practicable.

So the idea of the will of the people presents itself both as a part of contemporary populist rhetoric and as a nostalgic longing for a lost form of true democracy. If only the people – and not the elites – could be in control of government, all would be well. This is said in bad faith by manipulative political leaders, who are using the appeal to the will of the people to consolidate their own power. It is said in good faith by those friends of democracy who think that the workings of modern-day democracies would be improved through the direct involvement of the mass of citizens. Cynical manipulation married to idealized nostalgia is a dangerous combination. To avoid the cynical manipulation we need to rid ourselves of the idealized nostalgia.

Elitism?

A tactic frequently adopted against anyone who dares question the idea of the will of the people is to accuse the critic of being elitist. To doubt that the will of the people ought to be the basis of government policy is to put yourself above the ordinary person, the man or woman in the street who is entitled to a say in politics.

Since it began to emerge in the first part of the twentieth century, mass democracy has had its elitist critics. Those critics often drew on ideas of the herd psychology of crowds, to which democratic publics were compared. For example, in one of the most widely read books on democracy, a leading writer asserted that, upon entering politics, the typical citizen dropped down to a lower level of mental performance, arguing in a way that he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests.* Even parties on the left, who were supposed to favour the interests of the working class, held that a disciplined vanguard party was needed to prevent false consciousness from slowing down the impending revolution.

Elitist criticisms of democracy have been revived in recent years by political theorists, particularly in the United States, who accuse ordinary citizens in democracies of systematic ignorance.* Basing their findings on public opinion polling, these theorists say that individual voters have no consistent views, are biased and prejudiced, know little about politics and fail to engage with the details of policy. They even try to clinch their case by saying that the trouble with these voters is that they do not understand the principles of orthodox economics! (Presumably, the thought is that such knowledge would reconcile the poor to their economic lot.) The same critics go on to argue that voters should be required to take an examination to acquire the right to vote, or that the more qualified should be given more votes than the less qualified. In all this, they seem happy to ignore the well-known abuse of voter registration requirements – which were used over decades to deprive African American voters of their right to vote – as well as the increasingly malign influence of money in US politics, both on the left and on the right – an influence through which the effectiveness of the political liberties of the citizen is undermined.

So, to be absolutely clear, nothing in this book requires you to believe in such jaundiced views of the people. Of course, in every society you can find those who are ignorant and loudmouth. Saloon bar cynicism too often passes for political intelligence. But such people are found on all sides of political debate. To admit this is nowhere near saying that voters in general are ignorant or short-sighted. In my experience, the vast majority of people are prudent, responsible and self-sufficient. They do their jobs diligently, often with good humour, even when those jobs are boring or underpaid. They spend within their means. They bring up their children with love and concern, if (naturally) with some overindulgence. When the need arises, they willingly help relatives and neighbours. They care for their pets and rescue wounded wild animals. They keep their property in good order. They want the best for their country, their fellow citizens and the next generation. They also pay taxes. No taxation without representation is a good principle. The will of the people is a myth not because the general run of people in a democracy are ignorant and short-sighted, but because people are diverse and there are different and often incompatible ways of combining their opinions. ‘The people’ is made up of a plurality of people, and there is no simple way of getting from the plural to the singular.

Citizens Voice Their Discontent

Populists are right to worry about elites and their control of the economy and politics. Between 1980 and 2016*, in the United States, Canada and Western Europe, the top 1 per cent of income earners captured 28 per cent of the increase in overall income in that period, whereas the bottom 50 per cent captured only 9 per cent of the increase. In the United States the figures are more striking. There the top 1 per cent captured as much as the bottom 88 per cent. In short, over the last thirty-five years, an economic elite has found ways of capturing a larger share of the growth of national incomes.

But statistics tell only part of the story. As important as the increase in economic inequality is the social dislocation that comes with the decline of manufacturing in societies such as France, Italy, the United States and the United Kingdom. During the French presidential election campaign of 2017, Emmanuel Macron went to meet union representatives from the Whirlpool factory in Amiens, which employed nearly three hundred people but was threatened with closure. At the same time Marine Le Pen, his National Front rival for the presidency, appeared on a picket line outside the factory itself, urging that Macron had shown contempt to the pickets by not visiting them himself. Macron did later visit the factory, but the incident with Le Pen was one small example of the ability of populists to tap into the discontent created by economic change and the decline of manufacturing. In towns and cities where people make things, there is more to life than the income the job brings in. There is the pride that goes with knowing that you are working in order to provide for your family. There is the friendship and comradeliness that come from working with others. The place where you work gives you a sense of local identity. You are the town where porcelain is made, where steel is fired or where fabrics are spun. When the local factory goes, there is a large hole left that is seldom filled quickly. The jobs lost may not be recovered for a generation or more.

Immigration, too, can threaten one’s sense of place. There is too easy an assumption, on the liberal left of politics, that to be concerned about immigration is to be racist. This is to deny what, for some citizens, is the lived perplexity of their experience. If you live in the town where you grew up and you start to see shops opening in streets that you have known since childhood, conducting their business in a foreign language and trading in goods that are strange to you, you literally – literally – do not understand what is happening around you. If your perplexity is compounded by pressure on schools and hospitals and other public services, then you may well think that, in order to solve your problems, all the government needs to do is to control immigration. A fast pace of change associated with a decline in public services turns incomprehension into resentment.

For many people in such communities, political representation over many years was secured by parties of the centre-left. However, the reputation of those parties with their traditional supporters was damaged during their terms of office in the United Kingdom, the United States and France in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and 2010 Euro crisis. Balancing the government books inhibited the public spending that might have boosted the economy, were it not for the fear that too much borrowing should damage the credit ratings of governments. Policy responsibility then fell on the central banks. They used the only tools they had available: cheap money through the purchase of bonds. The effect was to send the investment houses looking for higher returns in equities and property, boosting the holdings of those who already held these assets. Workers in many places found themselves squeezed, often with their jobs moving to countries where labour was cheap. Austerity in government spending worsened the public services on which they relied. In some countries rising house prices driven by low interest rates and speculative investment made it hard for many to buy a house. New political movements on the left sought to persuade people that austerit...