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American Democracy: Patterns of Distrust
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Orlando Patterson |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
While democracy is perceived to be about equality, democratic systems in practice have always tended toward hierarchy. The American experience has been no different, resulting in a situation whereby trust in government is almost always low. Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard University, offers a provocative analysis of the origins of these patterns of distrust in the United States. |
 he American colonies were the first part of the modern world to experience anything approaching the constitutive features of democracy that collapsed with Greece in 322 BC. By the late seventeenth century, the majority of free adult males in colonial British America--somewhere between 50 and 80 percent--had the right to vote and, as such, were counted among "the people," the modern name for the demos. In practice, the proportion that could actually vote may have been higher, since the only check on eligibility--beyond gender, age, and slave status--was an oath taken at the voting booth. Unlike ancient Athens, however, political participation rarely engaged more than 50 percent of the electorate. |
 Despite the relatively low level of inequality and high literacy rates of the Massachusetts colony with its highly developed town-meeting culture, only between 20 and 30 percent of the electorate voted, although this escalated to nearly 100 percent on special occasions when the issues at stake were of great urgency to all. This sounds remarkably like the pattern that prevails in Massachusetts and other parts of America today. In fact, we see here in the very beginning, political behavior very similar to the civic disengagement decried by political scientists as a peculiarity of the past quarter of a century. Ironically, participation rates ran much higher in the slave South: between 40 and 50 percent of the electorate. The middle colonies of the Delaware Valley fell somewhere in between, with between 20 and 45 percent of the electorate voting regularly. |
How do we account for America's extraordinary precocity in the emergence of this central element of democracy? It was prompted by aspects of the colonial situation that all the colonies shared: their stubborn belief that they possessed the liberties of "freeborn Englishmen" and their expansive interpretation of these "liberties"; the assembly system of government established with each new colony and the struggles with the governors over sharing power; the English system of representing localities rather than groups taken to its extreme by the exegesis of the colonial situation; the role of charters and fundamental legal codes that soon evolved into proto-constitutions; and the acceptance and institutionalization of religious toleration, largely out of necessity, but long before this was common practice in Europe. |
North and South
The Northern proto-democracies were founded on several systems of trust. One was the affective trust of the small face-to-face community. Another, the intermediary trust of the strong, respected leader. Like all such systems, they were reinforced by strongly sanctioned norms, including excommunication, exile, and burnings at the stake. Related to this, but to be considered separately in view of its enormous independent effects, was a system of humanistic trust based on a strong commitment to shared religious beliefs, to an ideology of duties and obligations to other members of the society based on one's duty to and complete trust in God, and to the notion and practice of a compact of freely consenting citizens. |
It was a form of democracy incorporated in a manner very different from that of ancient Athens or Virginia--not the contradistinctive collective ethnic bond induced by a domestic and barbarian enemy, but the contradistinctive bond of the true believer vs. the misguided. It could be as brutal as Athens in the ferocity of its punishment of those found guilty of sin and selfishness, the Puritan version of hubris. But unlike Greece and the US South, it potentially included all who were willing to choose its ideology and faith. The element of choice and the emphasis on belief and ideology as the basis of citizenship are what mark the Northern colonial democracies as unique for their times. It was their most lasting legacy to the modern system of democracy that emerged after the Revolution. |
In the old South, there emerged a fundamentally different kind of democracy, founded on a doulotic social order with radically different conceptions of trust and social obligation. Although he never mentions the ancient parallels to the story he tells, making them all the more telling, Edmund Morgan's seminal study of Virginia (American Slavery, American Freedom, 1975) portrays one of the rare instances of history repeating itself in broad sociological and cultural terms--which is, of course, the only way history repeats itself. Morgan (p. 75) begins with the bold assertion that "the rise of liberty and equality in America had been accompanied by the rise of slavery. That two such seemingly contradictory developments were taking place simultaneously ... is the central paradox of American history." |
To prevent any insurrectionary union of white servants and slaves, racism was deliberately reinforced through legal enactments and strong social sanctions aimed at separating the groups. With the growth of this "screen of racial contempt," there was a general raising of the status of lower-class whites. "Partly because of slavery," Morgan (p. 344) writes, "they were allowed not only to prosper but also to acquire social, psychological and political advantages that turned the thrust of exploitation away from them and aligned them with their exploiters." |
The growth of popular government and of a strong local legislature increasingly opposed to the rule of the colonial governors was all of a piece with this association. The Virginian barons had no fear that the populace would vote in people who would then turn against them. To the contrary, they encouraged populist politics, and it was the "union of freedom and slavery" that made this possible. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the basic pattern of Southern freedom and democracy and its supporting ingredients were well in place: a large slave-labor force isolated by racism and strong solidarity among all classes of whites who felt a commonality of interests with the dominant slaveholding elite. |
Freedom and slavery
What emerged from this system was the strong conviction that there was no inconsistency between liberty and slavery. As William J. Cooper notes (Liberty and Slavery, 1983, p. 39), "The white southern celebration of liberty always included the freedom to preserve black slavery." In the end, even those elite whites who had misgivings about this paired commitment came around to the view that "slaves were property, and the right to hold property was an integral part of liberty" (Cooper, p. 35). Sooner or later these two forms of democracy had to come together. That fateful bonding happened in the great fraternal slaughter of the common father in the American Revolution. |
It was the freest and most powerful of the Southern aristocrats who, in leading the colonies to independence from Britain, became the founding fathers of the new nation. Torn from its Southern context in the common war of independence, the aristocratic ideal of freedom as an inherited quality of the individual person--the honorific version of possessive individualism--fused with the borrowed European notion of natural rights to fashion the distinctly American conception of the individual as a bearer of inalienable rights. Forced to accommodate the Northern notion that all men are equal, covenanted children of God, this honorific ideal of freedom was dramatically transformed and democratized, generating the belief that all men are created equal, legally and politically. Inherited privileges and powers of birth for a few became inalienable rights for many through the simple replacement of the earthly aristocratic father by the law-giving godly creator. |
The struggles leading up to the political miracle of 1787 need not be summarized here. It is important to emphasize, however, the equally extraordinary compromises that made the Constitution possible. One was that, for all the glorious rhetoric of equality and fundamental human rights, one-fifth of the nation would remain in slavery. This meant, further, that the Southern version of primal democracy based on the herrenvolk system of collective trust would continue for another 170 years--78 of them as a slave system--and would powerfully influence the other two forms of democracy with which it formed alignments from one era to the next. |
Majority rule?
The second major compromise had to do with the expansion of the franchise and the degree to which the egalitarian impulse of democracy would be controlled. The elites of both the South and the North dreaded the specter of uncontrolled democracy, of majority rule in which the masses participated fully. From a concern during the revolutionary era of how to protect the ruled from their rulers, the elites of postrevolutionary America became obsessed with the problem of how to protect the ruling class and other powerful minority interests from the ruled. It is now generally agreed that the revolutionary leaders were on the whole wary, even hostile, to the idea of universal suffrage. |
Counteracting this was the stormy emergence during the Jacksonian era of forces in favor of a more inclusive democracy and greater participation by nonelite persons in the electoral and governmental process. This would eventually culminate in the form of pluralist democracy. The process, however, was not a simple linear development; it was extremely messy, contradictory, and, in its use of racism and nativism, quite sordid. It involved the collapse of one party system, the Whigs, and the emergence of another. But the development of America's party system is itself a complex and ideologically convoluted process. In no sense can we identify these parties with permanent commitments to one or another of the evolving forms of democracy, given the frequency of their shifting ideological alignments. |
In broad terms, the three competing versions of democracy that began to take shape by the mid-nineteenth century differed in the following ways. The libertarian democracy of the north was hostile to majority rule and fearful of the power of the masses. It was extensively inclusive, by which I mean that it was willing to embrace all groups of persons, including Afro-Americans and immigrants, partly due to its commitment to market forces and to its hostility to all forms of constraints on individuals, partly to its more legalistic and universalist conception of citizenship--to some extent a secularized heritage of the Puritan past--but mainly because such broad-based citizenship minimized the possibility of solidarity among the masses. At the same time, it resisted any deepening of citizenship, either by expanding opportunities for participation beyond the vote or by extending the notion of political citizenship and equality to the domain of social security. Indeed, it seized every opportunity to demobilize the citizenry and to emasculate the power of the vote. Two powerful weapons were employed toward this end: the ideology of minimal government accompanied by a demonization of state power and the uniquely American legal doctrine of judicial review. |
Minimal government
The ideology of minimal government entailed a historic change in the Western conception of freedom. Until the end of the revolutionary era, the chordal nature of freedom prevailed in America and Europe. It was in the early nineteenth century that the chord of freedom was fragmented and the idea emerged that liberty was potentially in conflict with democracy. In America, there was a swift descent from the revolutionary ideal of freedom being, in good part, active citizenship in a virtuous republican state to the mid-century liberal view of the state as a sinister power, the greatest threat to one's liberty. In short, liberty against the state emerged as one of the central themes in the conservative Northern democratic tradition of America. The state, quite simply, could not be trusted, nor could the institutions it required. It was at best a watchman, a policing guardian of national security and personal liberty, at worst a potential monster under the command of corrupt politicians after "your money, your money, your money." |
This was reinforced by--indeed joined to--the principle of judicial review. Through the "due process" and "equal protection" doctrines of the Supreme Court, liberty came to be interpreted as a constitutional limitation on the legislative branch of government. This became so entrenched a principle in American law and commercial life that by the early twentieth century it was hard for Americans to grasp the newness and peculiarly American nature of this legalistic twist on the notion of personal freedom. But as Edward Corwin notes (Liberty against Government, 1948, p. 182), |
In the Ciceronian-Lockian conception of natural law, liberty and equality are not hostile, but friendly conceptions; and in the Declaration of Independence the same amicable relationship holds ... In the legalistic tradition, on which judicial review has operated in the past for the most part, "liberty" and "equality" are, on the other hand, apt to appear as opposite values, the former as the peculiar care of the courts, the latter the peculiar care of the legislature. |
Finally, the system of intermediary trust was decisive in the libertarian, democratic strategy. The leader is projected as a man of honor who plays the advisory intermediary role, reluctantly taking on the reins of power as a national self-sacrifice and duty. His personal integrity guarantees he will keep his word to keep the state at bay. This is reinforced by the active promotion of distrust of the political system. |
Parties and participation
Sooner or later this sustained propaganda against the state was bound to taint democracy itself, for, after all, is not democracy quintessentially an act of political life and an involvement with the state? The success of this propaganda also denigrated political parties, which are essential for any well-working modern democracy. As Kleppner points out (Who Voted, 1982, p. 150), "A deep-seated ambivalence toward political parties has always been a characteristic of American political culture. In the best of times parties have been viewed simply as necessary evils, and at other times as more evil than necessary." |
The fact that one of the contending parties chose the name "Democratic" as its title only intensified the tendency to smear democracy by association. Democracy itself was caught up in partisan politics. To be sure, there were limits to which the opposition could go in this tarring of democracy: The American voter never became so befuddled by antidemocratic propaganda that he or she could not tell the difference between the Democratic Party and democracy. For this reason, Republicans have adopted the alternate strategy of insisting on calling the Democratic Party the "Democrat Party," denying it whatever political benefits might accrue from association with the name--a strategy that goes back to Thomas Dewey in the 1940s and that was used extensively by Newt Gingrich and others in Republican radio advertisements in 1996. |
Jacksonian democracy championed the common man and actively encouraged the view that ordinary people could participate in government, politics being "a simple thing." Trust in the nation's political institutions was promoted and the electorate mobilized. While there was a strong attack on monopoly power and privilege, laissez-faire was strongly supported. Indeed, the advocates of inclusive, pluralist democracy have always emphasized trust in government and in other public and private institutions as a fundamental prerequisite of a good democracy. |
Though there were many admirable features in the Jacksonian system, it remained racist and divisive in many respects. Jackson's Southern background was the filter for many of the region's primal influences. The rabidly racist subsequent history of populist democracy had its origins here. The white republic with its expanded franchise learned the Southern primal trick of exclusive inclusiveness, of uniting and expanding the club of democracy by the exclusion and demonization of certain groups. |
The Southern herrenvolk democracy thrived on slavery and after the Reconstruction remained "mired in the defense of a totally segregated society" (E. Black and M. Black, Politics and Society in the South, 1987, p. 75). It shared with the Northern elite a suspicion of majority rule and mass participation. It continued to use collective systems of mutual trust both to provide political solidarity and to divide and discourage participation in the political system. But it differed radically from its Northern conservative counterpart in its lack of hostility to the state and governmental authorities. What the South loathed was, and remains, not big government but centralized, federal government. On the state and city levels, elites see politics as a means of exercising power, not something to be shunned. |
This "quintessentially conservative" system, the former Marxist historian Eugene Genovese wrote in his recent encomium (The Southern Tradition, 1994, p. 89), has "carried on a romance with the land and 'the folk' which has nearly done them in" and is best captured by a passage from M. E. Bradford (The Reactionary Imperative, 1990, p. 140): "All our social myths presupposed some version of the corporate life--that man is a social being, fulfilled only in the natural associations built upon common experience, upon the ties of blood and friendship, common enterprise, resistance to common enemies, and a common faith." There may be some truth in these interpretations, but they obscure what has been the central feature of Southern democracy, the fact, as V. O. Key stated forcefully (Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949, p. 665), that the "predominant consideration in the architecture of Southern politics has been to assure locally a subordination of the Negro population and, externally, to block threatened interferences from the outside with these local arrangements." |
Democracy and trust
That it was a system frankly acknowledging hierarchy hardly makes it unique, but that it was one explicitly based on social orders of blood and race certainly places it apart from other forms of modern democracy. For, unlike other corporatist systems such as Franco's Spain or predemocratic South America and Mexico, this was a genuine democracy strongly committed to the view that political legitimacy rests on the consent of the people, although the people is defined in herrenvolk, inclusively exclusive terms. Its "modernity" when compared with the primal democracy of Athens inhered not only in its agrarian capitalism but also in its rejection of participatory democracy in favor of a representative system manipulable by an oligarchic elite periodically upset by charismatic, populist gadflies who shift the focus from the normal pattern of mutual affective trust within leadership groups and asymmetric collective trust between groups to Coleman-type intermediary trust often of a charismatic character with all its attendant instability. |
And precisely because it was based so heavily on these forms of trust, we could expect a great deal of mistrust in them. The opportunities for malfeasance and betrayal were many and rampant--as is true of all honorific cultures--and persons constantly had to be on the alert for those who would dishonor their personal obligations. The South was the land of the feud and gun duel par excellence, and it is no accident that today it is the region of the country in which nearly every household is armed to the teeth and there is extreme hostility to any form of gun control. Add to this the collective distrust of the large black minority and the reactive distrust that must inevitably develop within this alienated group, and one ends up with a system characterized by a chronic propensity to distrust. |
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