The Suffrage of the Insufferable
16th November 2014
One of the arguments of my friend’s book is that idolatry of elective democracy as the political and ethical summum bonum inevitably leads to an absence of any sense of limitation in the political class. As he points out, the founding fathers of the American republic were decidedly not democrats, and indeed feared democracy as an inevitable gravedigger of freedom; but We the people (meaning the few of us here assembled) did not find a formula for limiting the power of We the people, because no such formula exists. As the doctor in Macbeth says, “Therein the patient/ Must minister to himself”: in other words, if a man has no inner sense of limitation, no mere constitution is going to restrain him.
Modern politicians, having been given the mandate of heaven (vox populi vox Dei), do not accept limitations of their authority or their moral competence, even if, in practice, only a third or even a quarter of the eligible voters have voted for them. Procedural correctness is all that is necessary for such a man to feel justified in pursuing his own moral enthusiasms at other people’s expense.