In Making the Social World, John R. Searle writes,
If we assume that democracies are defined in part by majority rule as expressed in elections, then another feature of successful stable democracies is that few, if any, of the important problems of life are determined by elections. Such questions as who will live and who will die, who will be rich and who will be poor, cannot be decided by elections if the country is to be stable. Why not? Elections are too unpredictable for people to be able to plan and live their lives based on the outcome of elections. If you knew that if your opponents won the next election, you were likely to be thrown into a concentration camp, or executed, or have all your property confiscated, you could not make stable and enduring life plans. In successful democracies, it does not matter who gets elected. . .I have noticed that life pretty much goes on after the election as it did before, regardless of who gets elected.
Some thoughts.
1. It is of course in the interest of political activists and journalists to argue otherwise–that “this is the most important election in history,” that the wrong choice will lead to disaster, etc. Their warnings typically do not turn out to be valid, although some day that could change.
2. This is an argument for keeping the stakes in politics low, and thus the argument tends to weigh in on the libertarian side of things. However, I doubt that those who favor activist government will think much of the point that “elections are too unpredictable.”
That somewhat matches up to what the Founders were thinking. The federal government is built with inherent speedbumps (e.g. three branches of government, the veto) to slow down change.
Doug is correct.
How does one determine whether a country is a “successful, stable democracy”? Is being successful and stable a property like having a bicameral legislature? Judging from Searle’s comments, No. Calling a country a successful and stable democracy is is a prediction pretending to be a description, like saying that a book is “sure to win a Pulitzer”. Are we now living in a successful, stable democracy? Time will tell.
Too much leverage in elections makes the stakes too high to resolve them peacefully. People with their backs against the wall will find that all means are justified. In fact, the founders codified that – the people are guaranteed the right to arm themselves, at least against the federal government; the right to disarm them not being found in the Constitution and reiterated in the Bill of Rights. The extension to the states is a bit problematic, as are all such extensions, but that was the decision that was made (later).
In any case, a stable democracy must allocate little enough power to the government that people don’t feel forced to overthrow it regularly.
Most of the Confederacy seceded between Lincoln’s election victory and his inauguration. Some elections are more important than others.
Also in the U.S. some more ordinary elections still matter more than others because of the lumpiness of opportunities to appoint individuals to long-term or lifetime positions, most importantly the Supreme Court.
A shift in the Court’s majority will indeed have major consequences for the country, but while these changes can indeed be quick and radical, they are still not the kind of change that’s going to happen over-night.
We happen to be at such a point right now. For lucky historical reasons, the Court has been mostly balanced for over a generation, which has created a kind of “Great Moderation” in terms of the potential for radical change and political provocation, i.e. the opposite of the Warren Court era.
But whoever wins this election will get to replace Scalia and Ginsberg, and probably Kennedy. Maybe Breyer and Thomas too. Consult your local actuary.
Let’s assume it’s just those first three Justices, and that it’s fair to describe the current Court as being a 4.5 / 4.5 split. Well, the result is going to be a 6/3 split. That’s going to be a big, big deal. If you think our politics is getting crazy now, wait until a 6/3 Court starts feeling its oats. At least a conservative Court will be facing an uphill battle with the prevailing intellectual culture. But a 6/3 progressive court? Warren Court 2.0. On steroids. One can’t take any current jurisprudence that irritates progressives for granted. It will all evaporate.
The only way to prevent this election from being consequential in this way, therefore, is to recognize the reality that both parties feel entitled to at least four spots on the Court as a kind of veto against legal domination by the opposition (e.g. like in the culture war, already won on the cultural front), and their base will go totally nuts when that is pushed to three or below. 5/4 is an advantage, but not that much of one.
That means the positions on the Court should be filled like a political committee with something like four reserved slots for Republicans, four slots for Democrats, and one slot for the President, should an opening become available during his or her term in office. An arrangement of that sort would be the way to make elections much less important, and no Republican would get to argue to other conservatives that unless they support Trump they are objectively supporting Warren Court 2.0.
I think such an arrangement would also be objectively more Libertarian since it would result in a more frequently and inescapably frustrated, gridlocked, and forced-into-compromises Court than otherwise, which, on average, would lead to fewer encroachments on the private sphere and fewer expansions of coercive state power.
If an electorate wants something it tends to get it. Constitutional controls, whether written or merely “understood traditional norms” can always be overcome if the desire is there and sustained.
As a simple example, before the 1930s, if you had told someone that FDR was going to effectively make himself preside for life and pass laws that the supreme court rejected only to threaten to pack the court in order to get them through, they might has said that was crazy talk. It happened though, because the political will was there for it to happen.
If you want elections to be low stakes, you need an electorate that thinks they should be low stakes. Good thing we are busy creating a fractious multi-cultural electorate that hates each other and sees elections as a chance to overcome and punish the other side.