lots to constitute
How can the USA or any country fairly call itself a "republic" unless its public, its living citizens, have chosen their form of government?
Earning the “republic” label
Discussions about the design of the US federal government often refer reverently to wishes of the founding fathers. So Thomas Jefferson provides a bit of a puzzle when he writes to James Madison:
…by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation to another… On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation… Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.
Oh, what to do when a founding father asks us to think for ourselves. Jefferson proposes that constitutions should expire after 19 years so that we have to decide our own way forward. If longer, he suggests, the older generations are imposing their wills upon the younger by force. So we're living under a constitution over two centuries past its expiration date.
In fairness, those older generations gave us the mechanism to do as Jefferson suggests and choose our form of government from time to time. That is, not just to choose the people filling roles as we do through elections but to choose the structure of the roles themselves. Article V of the Constitution gives us the power to change it via either legislatures or conventions. We previously argued Article V conventions provide the most promising route for introducing new (or old but unfamiliar) forms of democracy into the structure of the federal government. Congress has never called such a convention, but the constitution says they must do so if two-thirds of the states submit applications.
Unless you're new here, you know the new/old form of democracy I'd like to see more of: mini-publics, deliberative assemblies of citizens chosen by lot. We don’t need constitutional amendments to start convening national mini-publics; the president or Congress could and should assemble mini-publics and give them some degree of authority. But to see our government deeply organized around mini-publics will require constitutional reform, and there’s little hope of such reform via the traditional route of amending the constitution through legislative supermajorities. Elected folk like elections; they won’t be the ones leading the charge against electoral politics. So that leaves Article V constitutional conventions as our best shot at introducing more open democracy into our federal government. And if we want conventions with healthy deliberation and genuine representation, we should organize the conventions as mini-publics.
There is, of course, no guarantee a mini-public convention would design a mini-public government. What if it didn’t? What if we held such a convention and the attendees went an entirely different route or proposed no changes at all?
Still a massive win. Having the people, the public, the demos choose our form of government – whatever the choice –would be a triumph. If a well-facilitated randomly-selected national mini-public deliberates healthily and then decides against open democracy reforms, then we can say that in a very significant sense the country’s people would have written (or at least agreed to) its own rules, not just inherited them. The constitution would, in Jefferson’s words, belong to the living generation.
And if we went further and embraced Jefferson’s vision by establishing a recurring constitutional convention every… say 10 years? (Sorry, Thomas, 19 is too weird. What are we, cicadas?1 Let’s keep it clean and hold our imagined citizen assemblies every year ending in a “5”.) Not only would we keep the constitution in the living generation’s possession, we would stake a much stronger claim to the title of “republic”.
America has a deep-seated and emotional connection to the word “republic”. Kids pledge allegiance to it. Choirs sing the Battle Hymn of it. Many have noted that founders explicitly rejected democracy, calling for a republic instead. “Remember,” John Adams exhorted, “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
We should note that the democracy those founders were rejecting was not the system of elections we know today. ”Democracy” at the time primarily suggested classical Athens, which did not rely on elections but rather a mixture of random selection and open participation. ”Republic” suggested primarily Rome (before the emperors) and Venice (before Napoleon, who wasn’t on the scene yet). Both of those republics featured elections heavily. The founders would have received the phrase electoral democracy as oxymoronic. Democracies didn’t have elections; republics did.
We should also note that today’s historians (or anthropologists or archaeologists) would not endorse Adams’ rendering of democracy’s history as one of short-lived and suicidal societies. Long-lasting cultures successfully experimented with various democratic practices for millennia. They did so well before Athens, the only well known example of democracy at Adams’ time. Athenian democracy itself had a very good run: over two hundred years. And Athens didn’t end in suicide, it ended the same way countless other social orders did: somebody (in this case the Macedonians) beat them up and started bossing them around.
In fairness the founders had a lot less scholarship to work with, so we might forgive their dubious ideas about democracy, but it’s not hard to conjure a reason why Adams and other aristocratic founders might prefer a narrative of history that would justify empowering aristocrats, as elections tend to do.
At any rate, there was clearly a correlation in the founders’ minds between republics and elections. But let's harken back to an even older conception of a republic that doesn’t hinge on elections at all. In this framing, a republic is more of an abstract concept than a formal system; it can describe any framework whose legitimacy ultimately comes from the people. Res meaning concern. Publicus meaning of the people. Res publicus. Republic. Concern of the people.
In a sense, the designation of republic is about story. You could make a sociological argument that power always comes from the consent of the governed, but that’s certainly not always the story told. A republic distinguishes itself from places where power is said to come from a monarch, say, or a god or a book. The United Kingdom, for example, is not formally a republic, because it hasn’t explicitly rejected the story that its parliament owes its existence not to the insistence of its people but to the generosity of its king. The UK has all the trappings of electoral democracy, but it doesn’t tell the story of a republic, it tells the story of a monarchy. A republic, by contrast, tells the story of people in power over themselves. China tells this story. Russia, North Korea, Hungary, Venezuela, and scores of other nations tell this story. We tell this story.
Most US citizens would likely embrace this small-r republican narrative about ourselves (but not China, Russia, etc). We believe that our government ultimately derives its legitimacy from its people. If there is a large countervailing force, it is most likely the habitual thinking that our government’s legitimacy derives in whole or in part from the endorsements of its founders. Let Thomas Jefferson’s refusal to endorse a stale constitution sink in.
And yet we who live in the US today have not chosen our government; we have inherited it. Many of us accept it – some wholeheartedly embrace it – but beyond opting to leave or stay, none can credibly claim to have chosen it. There was never a moment of choice.
We could create that moment. Periodic, representative, randomly-selected, national constitutional conventions would provide the public the chance to choose their fate deliberately. Perhaps we’d choose more open democracy, perhaps we’d dig in our heels with more elections, perhaps we wouldn’t change a thing, but in any case, we could credibly claim to have chosen our form of government. And therefore we could credibly claim to be a republic.
Further, it’s fair to ask whether any nation deserves to be considered a republic if its government could not stand the test of an open democratic convention. Presumably such conventions would come to dramatically different conclusions in different parts of the world. People of different nations would choose different structures, different emphases, different processes… A mini-public of citizens who seem to love their Dear Leader or their Communist Party might certainly choose to keep them. Or they might not. We don't know. Therefore we don't know whether we can really consider them republics.
We can even imagine that if a sufficiently robust international norm of mini-public reviews were established, no system of government that failed to submit to and survive such a review would be afforded the term republic. You cannot credibly claim the blessings of the people if the people can’t bless.
That’s the low bar: that populations may actually choose their government. That those who claim the title “republic” be made to earn it.
The greater hope is that widespread mini-public conventions will lead to a new era of democratic innovation and reform. That they will convene and deliberate and decide to have more representative populations convene and deliberate. That citizens will democratically choose citizen democracy. And that we in the US entrust our Constitution once again to the living generation.
Let’s mark 2035 on our calendars.
1 Yes, you're correct: there are no cicadas with 19-year cycles.
References
"it’s fair to ask whether any nation deserves to be considered a republic if its government could not stand the test of an open democratic convention"
Nice.
Housekeeping: Since you have a post introducing mini-publics, you could link the first mention to that post...
Cicadas — perhaps a pattern worth considering. Holding state, federal, (global?) mini-publics at different prime intervals will mostly keep them scheduled to happen in different years.
And then once in a great while, they are all happening at the same time.
R: Do you mean I should bring some financial perspective into this? Costs, resistance, who benefits, who loses, etc?
J: re housekeeping, I've been going with a plaintext approach and not including inline links, because some folks (ok, one guy) mentioned that it made things harder to read. But man, I don't like forgoing the beauty of the mighty hyperlink.
And re prime intervals, I didn't give much rationale for the "years ending in 5" thing. I don't have a ton. I wanted a memorable pattern, was trying to avoid congressional election years (any odd number will do there), and figured, since we're in such a year now, it might be a nice target. But it's fun to think of the value in a little biomimicry there :)
Perhaps mutatis mutandis — “A Republic, if you can earn it (back)” ?
I do love the Jefferson quote and the origin of Res Publica, both known to me, but deserving to be underscored, repeated, repeatedly.
And I'm very much in alignment on the Q of “inherited v remaking” with Open & Shared Stewardship and what I awkwardly phrase “temporal inclusion” ..
First, I'm encouraged by the quote. Second, money money money money money money money... those who have it, those who don't, those who believe that the "wrong" people have it... etc.