The New Road to Serfdom (5 page)

In other words, 73 percent of British MPs need not worry about being voted out at election time. The only way they will lose their jobs is if their whips deny them the right to stand under their party colors.

Accordingly, instead of answering downward to their constituents, they answer upward to their party leaders. This skewing of incentives contributes to the creation of a separate political caste: a set of people whose values and preoccupations differ from those of the electors they notionally represent. On a whole series of issues, from tougher sentencing to supra-nationalism, voters are reconciled to being brushed aside by a
bienpensant
elite.

Worse, the ease with which party leaders control their MPs means that Parliament has ceased to be a meaningful check on the executive. As long as one party commands a majority in the House of Commons, and as long as the careers of the MPs in that party depend on the goodwill of the whips, the administration is effectively unconstrained.

Americans might not realize how unusual they are in enjoying a genuine separation of
powers—de facto
as well as
de jure.
When Barack Obama proposed his
stimulus package, every line of the budget was debated and haggled over by elected representatives who knew that, within a couple of years, they would have to explain themselves to their voters, who are also taxpayers. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, Gordon Brown decreed a much larger package in
per capita
terms, without so much as summoning Parliament.

In the seventeenth century, Englishmen fought a civil war to establish the principle that only the House of Commons might raise revenue through taxation for the national government. Yet so overbearing is the modern executive, so feeble its invigilators, that a twenty-first-century prime minister enjoys powers beyond the dreams of the Stuart kings.

In most European countries, where legislators are elected on party lists through proportional representation, politicians are even further removed from their electorates. If you are near the top of your party list, you are effectively irremovable. So, naturally enough, you spend your time sucking up to the person who determines which position on that list you will occupy: your party leader. Once you have secured a high-ranking place, you are invulnerable to public opinion. Even if your party suffers a heavy defeat, you will still be in the national assembly and with a fair chance of being in government as a minor coalition partner.

A rarely remarked but malign consequence of proportional representation is that most of the parties
are in power most of the time. They therefore have no incentive to reduce the powers of the state—or, come to that, the perks of the politicians who are employed by it.

In Britain and the United States, parties alternate in power. The party in opposition generally seeks to constrain the government; and the majority party, knowing that it will one day be in opposition, tends to be circumspect about building a machine that will eventually fall into the hands of its opponents. A two-party pendulum, in other words, tends to keep the state smaller, and the citizen commensurately bigger.

In countries where some parties are more or less permanently in office, these constraints do not apply. One way to measure the impact is to compare the share of GDP taken by the state. In the United States, over the past three decades, the percentage has tended to be in the high thirties; in Britain, in the low forties; in European countries with coalition governments, in the high forties.

Open primaries don’t just serve to strengthen the legislature vis-à-vis the executive. They also ensure that political parties are rooted in public opinion. I visited Georgia in 2009—a state which, astonishingly, had never had a Republican governor before the current incumbent, Sonny Perdue. While I was there, a state legislator kindly invited me to join him for a day’s hunting. As he outlined his philosophy, his gun over his arm, I found
myself marveling at the consequences of open primaries. The congressman described himself as a conservative Democrat. When I had previously encountered that phrase in the U.S. media, it often carried connotations of “southern racist,” but this man was in no way nostalgic for the old South, and was well aware that he owed his majority to African American voters. He was a thoroughly modern American who happened to believe in patriotism, localism, low taxes, and personal freedom. When I asked him what had made him join the same party as Ted Kennedy, he replied simply: “Mine is a Democratic district; my voters are Democrats.” The real election, for him, had been the primary, in which he had defeated nine other candidates.

How extraordinary, I thought, to have a system where politicians see their role as being to represent their constituencies in their parties rather than the other way around; where policy is made bottom-up rather than top-down. My own electoral division, South East England, is, like Georgia, a pretty right-wing place—certainly in the sense of being fiscally conservative. But, whereas both parties in Georgia try to reflect the temper of the local populace, Labour candidates in South East England are, if anything, further to the left than in the rest of the country, reflecting as they do the prejudices of tiny selection committees.

Open primaries, in other words, don’t just guarantee a purer form of democracy; they also ensure greater
diversity within the legislature. They are perhaps the single most effective way to ensure that the government is accountable to the governed. Yet they are almost wholly unknown outside the United States.

Unknown, at least, for the present. Within the past year, the British Conservatives have selected three parliamentary candidates through open primaries—an innovation that is likely to spread for the simple reason that, in a contest between a candidate imposed by a local party committee and one chosen by the wider electorate, the latter will almost always win. When one party adopts open primaries, the others will have to follow if they want to remain in business. Once this happens, all the parties will be held within the gravitational pull of public opinion, varying in their orbits, but unable wholly to cast off the surly bonds of Earth.

__________

If open primaries serve to make political parties accountable, the direct election of officials performs the same function for the administrative machine as a whole. Again, Americans might not be aware of how exceptionally fortunate they are in being able to elect their sheriffs, district attorneys, school boards, and all the rest. It is worth taking a moment to ponder why this matters.

A functioning modern democracy ought to ensure that civil servants work for the rest of the population. In the private sector, firms are accountable through the
market. In the public sector, state officials are meant to be accountable through the ballot box. If they are not so accountable, human nature being what it is, they eventually will start to suit themselves.

I don’t mean that they will be lazy (although, by the law of averages, some of them will be). Rather, I mean that they will discharge their duties according to the criteria favored by their colleagues and the experts within their own fields rather than the broader public. Teachers will start applying fancy educational theories that fly in the face of common sense. Police officers will start pursuing soft targets in preference to dangerous criminals. Judges will be reluctant to incarcerate malefactors.

To put it another way, the default setting of the public sector, in any country, tends to be well to the left of the population at large. This is perhaps no surprise: Those whose livelihoods depend on the taxpayer are bound to see things slightly differently from those who operate in the private sector. But in the United States, unlike in most places, the direct election of those in charge of local services drags officials back into the mainstream, forcing them to follow local people’s priorities instead of their own. To see what would happen without this discipline, look at countries where there are no such elections.

Let me give one example. Outside the United States, it is very unusual to have any mechanisms of direct
democratic control over the police. In Britain, the notional regulation of constabularies comes from bodies known as Police Authorities, on which local councilors sit alongside a number of co-opted nominees. These bodies are almost wholly unknown to the wider public and have come, over the years, to see it as their role to champion “their” chief constables.

The result? British police chiefs have drifted further and further away from public opinion. Ask them what their priorities are, and they will talk about cracking down on sexist language in the canteen, recruiting more ethnic minority officers, improving their relations with the gay community. While none of these objectives is intrinsically wrong, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they have displaced, rather than complemented, what ought to be the core task of the police: being beastly to scoundrels.

Consider the case of Sir Ian Blair, until 2008 the head of London’s Metropolitan Police, and thus the United Kingdom’s most senior police officer. Early in his career, it became clear that Sir Ian saw the promotion of multiculturalism as the chief function of a police force. When two young girls were murdered by a sex offender, he chided the press for giving more column inches to their case than to black crime victims (inaccurately as well as insensitively, as a survey of column inches revealed). As street crime rose in London, he managed to find the money to hire fourteen diversity
advisers. He spent millions of pounds redesigning the logo of the Metropolitan Police to make it more “accessible.” At the same time, he was careful to cozy up to the Labour government, lobbying openly in favor of its Draconian proposals to intern suspects for six weeks without charge.

Unsurprisingly, Londoners concluded that their vain, hypersensitive, publicity-obsessed police chief was taking his eye off what ought to have been his main job. Matters came to a head in July 2005 when, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the London Underground, anti-terrorist officers shot dead a Brazilian electrician in the belief that he had been one of the bombers. At first, the police refused to admit their error, and Sir Ian announced that a man had been shot as part of a security operation. When it became clear that an innocent victim had been killed, the police started spreading false rumors in an attempt to exculpate themselves: It was said that the man had been an illegal immigrant, that he had jumped the barrier and attempted to flee.

Eventually, public pressure mounted to the extent that, following a damning inquiry, the London Assembly passed a motion of no confidence in the hapless chief constable in November 2007. Not that he cared. On the contrary, knowing that he was invulnerable to democratic control, Sir Ian taunted the assemblymen with their powerlessness, declaring: “I have
stated my position. If you have the power to remove me, go on.”

Twelve months later, Sir Ian negotiated a generous redundancy package, which left him with virtually the same income as if he had served out his term. Only then did he volunteer to step down.

I don’t want to pick on Sir Ian Blair. He is an inevitable by-product of a system in which there is no mechanism to align the priorities of public servants with those of the public they notionally serve. It is worth noting, though, that unaccountable public sector executives—quangocrats, in the British vernacular—fight very hard to avoid being made answerable. When the Labour Party brought forward modest proposals to strengthen the democratic component of the Police Authorities, a massive lobbying campaign was waged against it by police chiefs. When the Conservatives announced that they would go further and adopt a U.S. system of directly elected sheriffs, mass resignations were threatened.

Democracy is more easily truncated than extended. Attempts to introduce the direct election of public officials on the U.S. model invariably trigger a massive resistance campaign from the unelected beneficiaries of the current system. But the reverse is not true. Governments can set up new agencies and committees—or new federal czars—with little protest. Which is why Americans shouldn’t be complacent. Once power shifts from
elected representatives to appointed officials, it is no simple matter to shift it back.

__________

Open primaries and direct elections are the chief guarantors of modern Jeffersonian democracy. But other defensive ramparts have been thrown up alongside them. These vary from place to place: Some states favor term limits, others recall procedures; some limit how many days their legislatures can meet, others allow for ballots by popular initiative. Indeed, there is something intrinsically Jeffersonian in the fact that each state is free to design its own political institutions. As we shall see in the next chapter, the advantage of pluralism—the freedom to trial new ideas, and to copy what works elsewhere—is itself a bulwark against overweening government.

Taken collectively, these procedures not only tilt the balance from the state to the citizen; they also give purpose and meaning to the act of voting. They encourage the phenomenon of the citizen legislator. They explain the culture of optimism that produced
The West Wing
rather than
Yes, Minister.
They contextualize something that strikes almost every foreign observer about U.S. politics: the absence of cynicism. (Euro-sophists call it “naïveté” which, when you think about it, means the same thing.)

Americans sometimes put the difference down to culture. The United States, they say, is naturally more
optimistic than the Old World, with its deference, its class systems, its monarchies, and so on. But this explanation won’t do. Culture is not a numinous entity that exists alongside institutions; it is a product of those institutions. The reason Americans are relatively optimistic about their democracy is that they have been habituated from an early age to the idea that their ballots can effect meaningful change.

Forty million people worldwide watched Barack Obama’s inauguration: an extraordinary affirmation of faith in the U.S. system. Can you imagine a similar number of people tuning in to watch the results of elections to the Russian Duma, or the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress in Beijing, or the nomination hearings for European Commissioners? To gauge the success of the American dispensation, contrast it to the alternatives.