Unsettled Questions

As Americans struggle through the psychodrama of yet another apocalyptically framed presidential election, it is striking how, while (as usual) superficialities dominate the campaign, the most fundamental questions of American democracy remain unsettled and so are, in some sense, still at issue. In 2024, just shy of 250 years old as a country, the U.S. still cannot come to consensus regarding the most basic questions of modern democratic life, questions which have been at issue since the founding. Such questions include: Who should rule, the majority or the minority? How democratic or oligarchic should our American form of government be? How centralized or localized? How ethnically defined or civically defined should American society be? How religious or secular should society be?

None of these issues are new. Thanks to their classical education, the framers of the Constitution were wary of democracy, which they associated with "mob rule," a degenerate form of government oriented not to the common good but to the interests of the multitude of poor. There were also authentic democratic and radically egalitarian forces present in the British North American colonies, and they also were at work in the revolutionary era. The framers for the most part were men of property, however, whose class interests coincided with their classical education's concerns about the dangers of the excesses of democracy. Hence, their attraction to a "mixed constitution," as modeled philosophically by Aristotle's and Polybius' reflections on the merits of a "mixed constitution," and by early modern republican theory. Thus, the constitution the framers created reflected their understandable and likely laudable preference for a "mixed constitution," adapted to the novel circumstances of what by 18th-century standards was a very large territory - too large for anything resembling direct democracy.

The very large size of the new republic also contributed to the creation of the electoral college, since direct popular election of the president was also deemed impractical, as well as philosophically undesirable. That said, the intentionally anti-democratic electoral college has never really functioned as the pseudo-aristocratic body founders seem to have hoped for. Once a functioning political party system was in place, the practical problem of the country's size was overcome, and the electoral college became in effect a quasi-democratic institution, in that the electors in each state increasingly came to be popularly elected and the vehicles for mechanically registering the result of the popular vote. However, the almost universal practice of electing presidential electors at-large in each state has resulted over time in an increasing distortion of the popular will. Like the Senate, whose principle of state equality is inherently anti-democratic, the growth of the U.S. population, its concentration in urban areas, and the increasing partisan polarization between the underrepresented urban areas and the overrepresented rural areas has resulted in a distortion in representation far in excess of the inevitable distortion in representation which was the case at the founding and for much of American history. 

Thus, the anti-majoritarian bias of our national institutions as designed by the constitution has been aggravated in the case of the electoral college and the Senate, even as American culture has evolved ideologically in a more democratic and egalitarian direction. Likewise, the inherently anti-democratic and anti-majoritarian character of the federal judiciary has been exacerbated by the increase in the judiciary's power and in particular by the arrogation of supreme power by the Supreme Court and the contemporary failure of Congress to limit the Court's jurisdiction or alter the number of justices as Congress routinely used to do in the 19th-century.

Closely connected with our ongoing irresolution regarding majority vs. minority rule and democratic vs. oligarchic rule has been our ongoing struggle to modernize our archaic federal system. Like slavery, which the founders had little choice but to accept in order for the pro-slavery states to join the union, the continued existence and semi-sovereign power within the federal union was unfortunately accepted as a given for the framers. More than 200 year later, however, we are still saddled with an unsatisfactory division of political power between the federal government and the states and a constant tug-of-war between the inevitably growing, centralizing power of the federal government as a democratic majoritarian response to modern life and contemporary needs and the anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian state institutions which historically have hindered the effectiveness of the federal government, most extremely in the form of secession and "states' rights."

Although less of an institutional constitutional conundrum, the tension between an ethnically or racially based national identity and a non-ethnic, non-racial, pluralistic civic identity has likewise long remained unresolved. The idealized image of a pluralistic "nation of immigrants," whether described as a "melting pot" or as a more pluralistic, multi-cultural "mosaic," has long been predominant in our dominant ideology, and has represented an authentic reality for generations of Americans.  But in practice it has also often been opposed by institutionalized racial hierarchies (first slavery, then Jim Crow) and by nativist opposition to immigrants and attempts (e.g., the 19th-century "Know Nothings") to limit immigration and make America an ethno-nationalist state. While sometimes successful (e.g., the 1924 anti-immigrant legislation), such efforts have usually failed in the long-term. Even so, that thread remains a reality in American history, as we see it again playing out in current conflicts over immigration.

Finally, we have never really resolved the role of religion in our pluralistic, increasingly secular society. In 1922, G.K. Chesterton famously referred to America as " nation with the soul of a church." And, at least until recently, the U.S. had been the great exception in regard to the secularization that elsewhere has seemed so inexorably a part of modernity. As Charles Taylor has more recently observed: "the United States is rather striking in this regard. One of the earliest societies to separate Church and State, it is also the Western society with the highest statistics for religious belief and practice" [A Secular Age (Harvard U. Pr., 2007), p. 5]. Long before Taylor, even Karl Marx addressed this apparent paradox of America's civic emancipation from religion coexisting with an obviously very religious society [cf On the Jewish Question, 1843]..

Depending on who is doing the telling, accounts of American origins emphasize either the 17th-century New England Puritans and their commitment to establishing a godly "city on a hill," or the 18th-century revolutionaries and their dabbling in Deism. Of course, both are part of the story. Some of the founders - among them Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine - were Deists or at least flirted with unorthodox religious ideas. On the other hand, at least 60% of the adult white population attended church regularly in colonial America, and John Adams famously said, "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In any case, from the Second Great Awakening on, there could be no doubt that America was a religious and Christian nation, indeed for much of that time a Protestant one. This, despite the formal separation of Church and State, which, of course was constitutionally mandated only for the federal government and did not initially apply to the States.

So those who believe that the country has fundamentally changed in its very recent secularizing turn are not wrong. Nor are they wrong necessarily in lamenting that change, which correlates not just with religious loss but with secular woes as well, notably the increasingly isolation of individuals who no longer experience the community which churchgoing provides. The present situation is further complicated by the fact that, certain strains of conservative Christianity - evangelical Protestantism and integralist Catholicism - seem to be in the process of transforming themselves from authentic religious movements to primarily political identities. That means that the ostensible conflict between being a more "religious" society and being a more "secular" society may be less about faith and more about political identity and religion - or irreligion - as a tribal political marker.

All these are some of the most serious and challenging unresolved issues of America past and present, which never quite seem to go away, no matter how much they may masquerade as more explicitly political questions. Our problem, I have often observed whenever the subject of contemporary political polarization comes up, is not that we disagree about things, which is natural and inevitable, but that the particular things which we disagree about are among the most fundamental components of our common life together as a society and a nation among nations.