June 14, 2006
American Democracy Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:50 PM EST In his response to Ellen Feldman, John Steele Gordon writes: “I don’t know what the ‘American brand of democracy’ is, as opposed to other brands. There is nothing inherently American about democracy. Democracy is democracy, any system of government where the locus of power resides with the people, not the elite.”
I see his basic point, but the question is probably a little more complicated than that.
In Israel, as well as in much of Europe, elections are held on a proportional-representation (PR) basis, with voters casting ballots for parties, and parties dividing a fixed number of parliamentary seats according to the percentage of votes they received. This method allows smaller parties to elect members to the national legislature. In England, by contrast, elections are held on a “first-past-the-post” basis, in which different constituencies elect their own MPs to the House of Commons. This system favors the two large parties (Labour, Conservatives) at the expense of the Liberal Democrats, who tend to hold a smaller portion of seats in the Commons than the percentage of their national vote tally.
The difference between these systems isn’t merely tactical. It’s theoretical. The PR system implicitly assumes the existence of a national commonweal; the first-past-the-post system—which Americans use in elections for the U.S. House of Representatives—assumes that local communities have distinct interests that need representation in Congress. Both ideas borrow remnants of the classical republican discourse of the eighteenth century, but they take from this discourse different strands.
In most of Western Europe, “democracy” is generally understood to include social-democratic rights like health care, old-age pensions, and a free college education. Many of my European friends are stunned that Americans regard themselves as the world’s leading democracy, yet some 50 million or so Americans are without health care. To be clear, I’m not inviting a discussion of whether France and Germany should provide these benefits, or whether they do so well or efficiently, or whether health care should be factored into any measure of a country’s democratic standing. I’m merely pointing out that “democracy,” in the Western European understanding of the word, is quite different from “democracy” in the American context, where the state provision of most services is not understood as a right, or as in any way part of the American democratic tradition.
Then, there are variations even within the American democratic tradition. As Edward Larson points out in his book on the 1925 Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods, the debate between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow wasn’t just about religion and science. It was about whose rights—the majority’s or the minority’s—a democracy should first protect. Bryan’s majoritarianism led him to believe that the citizens of Tennessee had a right to ban the teaching of evolution in the classroom, and that elite experts and judges shouldn’t interfere with that right. Darrow, on the other hand, believed that John Scopes had a right to teach evolution, and that a tyrannical majority shouldn’t be permitted to stop him from doing so. Two very different ideas about democracy. I empathize with both, but I also see where they are sometimes incompatible.
All of which is to say, democracy isn’t that simple a term. It comes in many shapes and forms. Some are peculiar to America; some are in competition with one another in America.
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