The New Road to Serfdom (4 page)

Believe me when I tell you that such a program is unimaginable—literally unimaginable—on my side of the Atlantic. British political dramas are invariably predicated on the idea that all elected representatives are petty, jobbing cowards. The most enjoyable such program was the late 1970s and early 1980s BBC production
Yes, Minister,
starring Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington, which centered on a battle between a wily civil servant and the vote-grabbing politician who was notionally in charge of his department.

While the minister was shown as shallow and ambitious, there was a dash of warmth in the portrayal. Not so in later series. In
The New Statesman,
Rik Mayall played a selfish, greedy, perverted crook who rose
swiftly through the ranks. In
House of Cards
Ian Richardson was a chief whip prepared to commit murder in order to become prime minister. In the current series
The Thick of It,
power is shown to have shifted definitively to the spin doctors, leaving the ministers as small-minded drones obsessed with their careers.

Things are even worse in Continental Europe. Canvassing in France and Spain, I have been left shaken by the way voters talk of their elected ministers. It is as though they are discussing agents of an occupying power. Latin America has been even more violently convulsed by an anti-politics mood: tinpot
caudillos
have taken power across the region, not because people expect them to do any good, but because they embody and articulate the rage that electorates felt against the old parties.

I’m not saying that U.S. politicians don’t also come in for their share of mockery. But there is a difference between teasing people in authority—cutting them down to size—and fundamentally denying their legitimacy. Satirical shows in the United States strike most European viewers as so mild as to be deferential. The same is true of political interviews. While U.S. presenters can be searching and aggressive, you rarely catch them contorting their features into the knowing sneer that is the default expression of a European journalist interviewing a politician.

One might argue, of course, that this is merely a symptom of a wider cultural difference. The American
media in general, with their editorial high-mindedness and determination to avoid bad language, are primmer than their British or European counterparts. Nonetheless, television can be a telling cultural marker, and fiction has always been a useful way to assess the temper of a civilization, to appraise its values and its preoccupations.

__________

If you want something more empirical, though, look at the raw numbers. For a long time, it was axiomatic in Europe that low turnouts at American elections were a symptom of a corrupt plutocracy that was rigged against ordinary people. This view was based on a misreading of the figures. The U.S. political system is pluralist, in the sense that there are many more opportunities to vote than in most countries. One elector might care passionately about who her state senator is, but not care about the DA; her neighbor might have strong views on the composition of the school board, but be indifferent about the gubernatorial contest. In other words, while the turnout at any given election might be low, the number of people casting ballots at one time or another is significantly higher. The main role of the president is the direction of foreign and defense policy. It might be argued that, for voters who don’t much care about international relations, the presidential election is less important than the more local polls.

More to the point, though, the premise of the Euro-sophists is wrong. Turnout at U.S. elections is rising. It is
turnout at
European
elections that is falling. This is yet another instance of a phenomenon that we have already seen: the tendency of European critics of the United States to level accusations that not only are untrue, but apply more aptly to Europe than to America. It’s an almost psycho-political phenomenon—a form of displacement.

Here are the figures:

I have cited figures for the European Parliament because these constitute the only pan-continental polls, but the phenomenon of falling turnouts can also be observed within most of the EU member states. What is going on?

Anyone who has canvassed on the doorstep in Europe will tell you the answer. “It doesn’t make any difference how I vote,” people complain. “Nothing ever changes.” The worst of it is that they have a point. With the best will in the world, there is less and less that European politicians
can
change. In recent decades, there has been a comprehensive shift in power in the EU: from elected representatives to permanent functionaries, from local councils to central bureaucracies, from legislatures to executives, from national parliaments to Eurocrats, from the citizen to the state.

My own country is now largely administered, not by MPs or local councilors, but by what we call quangos: Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organizations. You haven’t yet needed to come up with a name for them in the United States but, at the rate they are multiplying, you soon will. A quango is a state agency, funded by the taxpayer, but at arm’s length from the government.

Every British politician, if he is being honest, will tell you that these standing
apparats
are the true source of power in modern Britain. When a constituent writes to you with a problem, the best thing you can do for
him, nine times out of ten, is to pass his complaint on to the appropriate bureaucracy: the Child Support Agency, the Highways Authority, the Learning and Skills Council, the Health and Safety Executive, the Food Standards Agency, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.

As these functionariats have grown, representative government has shriveled. To quote the book for which this one is named, F. A. Hayek’s
The Road to Serfdom:

Of course, MPs don’t like to advertise their powerlessness. They maintain the fiction that they are still in charge. As a result, voters tend to blame their politicians for the failings of a government machine that no longer answers to anyone. In the 1920s, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin accused the press of exercising “Power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” Today’s MPs have the opposite: responsibility without power. Ceasing to be authoritative, they have become contemptible.

The extent to which voters despise their politicians was brutally exposed in 2009 by the Westminster expenses crisis. I won’t bore you with full details of the scandal: This is, after all, a book about American, not
British, politics. To cut a long story short, a journalistic enquiry under a newly passed Freedom of Information Act required the House of Commons to publish details of every expense claim submitted by MPs. Some of the claims were outrageous. Most were not. The so-called Additional Costs Allowance had been set up to allow MPs from constituencies outside London to maintain a second home in the capital, and most of the receipts were for everyday household items: food, furniture, and so on.

Such was the mood of the country, though, that no one was especially minded to distinguish between the legitimate and the illegitimate claims. The MPs who had behaved scandalously—stretching the definition of their “main” residence, for example—were treated in exactly the same way as those who had behaved within the spirit and letter of the rules. The revelation that someone had claimed for a sofa or a frying pan was treated as an abominable scandal. Why? Because the affair wasn’t really about expenses. It was about a much deeper-rooted sense that politicians had become parasitical. As long as MPs were unable to deliver meaningful improvements in their constituents’ lives,
any
claim they submitted was resented, be it large or small, extravagant or modest.

Of course, the fact that there was such a fuss—the story dominated the front pages for six months—suggested that, in Britain at least, people felt that they
ought to look up to the House of Commons. They were angry because they felt let down by an institution that, deep down, they wanted to respect. In most of Europe, voters are beyond that stage. My Continental colleagues in the European Parliament simply couldn’t grasp what the fuss was about. A French friend made me explain it to him three times, and then remarked. “So: the money was for furniture, and the MPs spent it on furniture.
Et alors?”
An Italian MEP told me that, in his country, something didn’t become a scandal unless it involved mafia links, briefcases full of banknotes, and, ideally, an assassination or two.

__________

Are American politicians more virtuous than their European counterparts? No. Is corruption unknown in Washington? No. The difference between the two systems has to do, not with the integrity of the practitioners, but with location of sovereignty.

America’s Founding Fathers were determined, above all, to prevent the concentration of power. They knew firsthand where such concentration led, and had spent years fighting the consequences. As Thomas Jefferson put it:

The framers of the Constitution in general, and Jefferson’s followers in particular, were determined to diffuse power, to constrain those in authority, to ensure that decision-makers could never stop looking over their shoulders at those they purported to represent. And, by and large, they succeeded.

American political institutions have developed according to what we might loosely call Jeffersonian principles: the belief that the concentration of power leads to malfeasance; that decisions should be taken as closely as possible to the people they affect; and that decision-makers, wherever practicable, should be answerable through the ballot box.

In consequence, contemporary Americans enjoy a series of unusual, sometimes unique, Jeffersonian institutions: states’ rights, recall mechanisms, open primaries, referendum and initiative procedures, term limits, balanced budget rules, the direct election of public officials from the sheriff to the school board. If the U.S. Constitution was the genotype, these features of modern American democracy are the phenotype—the practices that have grown up according to the DNA encoded at Philadelphia.

It is, as I say, human nature to take for granted the
institutions that you have known throughout your life. Pause, then, to consider the difference between the United States and those nations that lack these political practices.

__________

Take open primaries. Eleven years in public life have convinced me that open primaries are the strongest possible guarantee of a free and independent parliament. As long as they exist, no politician can afford to forget his electorate. Take them away, and you allow a government with a majority in the legislature to rule almost without constraint.

Again, let me compare the British and American dispensations (and again, as we shall see presently, things are worse in Continental Europe than in the United Kingdom). British election rules, unlike those prevalent across most of Europe, are similar to those in the United States. Both countries elect their legislators by first-past-the-post. Majoritarian voting is naturally conducive to a two-party system. In most of Europe, by contrast, there is proportional representation, which means that many more parties sit in the assembly, and that coalition government is the norm.

Although the rules are similar, the practice is very different. In Britain, as in the United States, most constituencies are “owned” by one of the two main parties. In four out of the past five British general elections,
fewer than 9 percent of seats went from one party to the other. The exception was the Labour landslide of 1997, which brought Tony Blair to power. Even here, though, 73 percent of constituencies were retained by the parties that already held them.