A Sidebar on Government

Over at OTB Steven Taylor has returned to his long-promised musings on political institutional design so I thought that, rather than cluttering up his comments section with it, I’d contribute a little color commentary.

The Founding Fathers, classicists that they were, were clearly familiar with Aristotle’s taxonomy of government (not to mention recent European political experience). In Aristotle’s Ethics he analyzes governmental forms in two axes: the number of people who make the decisions (one, a few, many) and whether the government pursues the public good which he refers to as “correct” (when it does) or “corrupt” (when it pursues personal interests). That results in this matrix:

# of decision makers	Correct	Corrupt
One	Monarchy	Tyranny
Small group	Aristocracy	Oligarchy
Many	Polity	Democracy

He also envisioned these forms as progressing from one to another, from correct to corrupt, cyclically. “Polity” means a sort of constitutional arrangement.

The Founding Fathers clearly attempted to arrive at an arrangement in which the process of transformation from one form to another avoided one-man rule and avoided becoming corrupt. A government of limited powers in which decisions were made by a relatively small group who were selected by the greater body of the people was the form they arrived at. As practical politicians they also made compromises, the greatest and most damaging of which involved slavery and regional differences and the contrasting interests of small states and large ones.

Two questions arise from this. In this conceptual framework where are we now? How can we improve things?

IMO there is practically no question that we are alternating, even vibrating, between oligarchy and democracy (meaning in this case something more like mobocracy). This has come about through the abandoning the constraints of the our constitutional framework (required for a polity) and the pursuit of the personal goals and benefit of elected officials. Evidence for the former is the many federal programs which exceed anything actually in the Constitution and the significant extra-constitutional measures effected by Supreme Court decisions. The most obvious evidence of the latter is the accumulation of vast wealth by politicians during and after their terms of office.

I’m skeptical that anything meaningful can be done about either. We are a very large, incredibly diverse country. Consensus, required for republican government, is declining if anything. You cannot turn around without stumbling over an assertion in one form or another that the end justifies the means. That can only lead to oligarchy or mobocracy.

I’m particularly skeptical that electoral reform can heal what ails us. In the absence of more basic moral or ethical reform I don’t see how that will accomplish anything but I’m willing to learn.