Democracy ends in tyranny. ~ Aristotle
Legend has it that after the Constitutional Convention finished its work in September 1787, Elizabeth Willing Powel, one of the most powerful and highly educated women in Philadelphia, asked Benjamin Franklin whether we now had a monarchy or a republic. Great question, Elizabeth! We're still trying to figure out the answer.
But first, some ancient history. In his Politics, Aristotle distinguished among rule by one person (monarchy), rule by a few people (oligarchy), and rule by many or, in fact, all the people (which should be polyarchy or pantarchy, but even back then they called it democracy - "people power"). Because Aristotle loved to draw distinctions, within monarchical governments he also distinguished between kingship on the one hand and tyranny of various kinds on the other. The difference was that a king deserved to rule alone because of his pre-eminent excellence of character and dedication to the common good, whereas a tyrant was an unethical demagogue who cared only about himself and his cronies.
Because nowadays we conflate kingship and monarchy, it strikes us as odd that Elizabeth Powel asked if the result of the Convention was monarchy, because the whole point of the revolution was to separate from King George, right? Well, not quite, because the colonists objected to various forms of Parliamentary oversight and before the war went over the heads of Parliament by appealing directly to the king. She was probably worried not about setting up a new king George (last name Washington) but establishing one-man rule, however legally sanctioned.
We might also be surprised that she didn't ask about democracy. My knowledge of early American history is not deep enough to say why precisely, but my sense is that perhaps the primary if unstated goal of the Convention was to put a lid on what the "better sort" perceived as the excessive people power of the individual states under the Articles of Confederation (for more on this, see Gordon S. Wood's book The Creation of the American Republic). Pure democracy of the kind experienced in ancient Athens was never on offer, because having read Thucydides the Founders were well aware of how that experiment ended.
Following the lead of ancient and early modern republics like Rome and Venice, the Founders wished to balance Aristotle's forms of government: roughly speaking, the intent was that the President (not an executive council as in many republics) would be the monarchic element, the Senate would be the oligarchic element, and the House would be the democratic element. Plus, by setting up a federal structure, the Founders planned for most power to reside at the local level (townships, counties, militias, schools, etc.), for some power to be exercised at the state level, and for very few powers to be delegated to the national government.
Well, it hasn't worked out that way, has it? Most power is now centralized, the House is just as oligarchic as the Senate (and not exactly filled with the sorts of individuals we'd call natural aristocrats), Congresspeople don't want to stick their necks out by crafting legislation, most of the regulations we live under are generated by special-interest lobbyists and unelected experts, and increasingly our Presidents use their pens to issue executive orders instead of working with Congress to make laws that serve the common good. It's this last phenomenon that makes me wonder if we're slouching towards monarchy - more specifically, the tyranny of an elected ruler whose whims (or those who have his ear) are the only law. It's an ugly fate to contemplate for a country that started out with George Washington as its model of a President...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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