This is a companion post to my earlier Not A Democracy.
Imperial China was ruled for millennia by a top-down hereditary monarchical government. In official ruling ideology, the Emperor and his descendants were appointed by divine will without the input of their subjects. Also in the official ruling ideology, the Emperor had to be just, had to rule well, had to care for his subjects, and if he didn’t his subjects would be fulfilling divine will by overthrowing him.
孟子曰、民爲貴、社稷次之、君爲輕。是故、得乎丘民而爲天子
Mengzi said, the people are valuable, the earth and grain altars next, the ruler unimportant. Therefore, the one who gains the hearts of the people becomes the son of heaven.
Mencius 7B:14
This popular feedback mechanism worked, sometimes. Dynasties changed at least every few centuries. Generations of civil servants, including brutal officiants extracting exorbitant taxes and the feared secret police, had memorized Mengzi’s words and knew there were risks to their evil.
In the era of the Tang dynasty, the nomadic Khitan people were a confederation of tribes who elected their leaders at gatherings of the people every four years. Abaoji of the Yila clan was able to maneuver himself to the top position. He proclaimed the beginning of the Liao Dynasty, declared himself a Chinese-style emperor, abolished elections, and transformed the Khitan to become a major East-Asian power before their eventual usurpation by the Jurchens several centuries later. The Khitan lost their ancestral rights to vote and flourished.
—
Modern representative democracy has largely evolved from the practical institutions of English and then British parliamentary rule - a system where the hereditary nobility shared significant power with the hereditary king - and the ideological influence of the Roman Republic - a system where a hereditary nobility ruled with electoral input from a more numerous population of hereditary citizens. Democracies have gradually become more democratic, but they have never fundamentally changed their nature.
In democracies, decisions on how to govern are made via a system gradually built up over centuries with institutions gradually acquired and shed. Power, formal and informal, is wielded by a combination of elected officials and bureaucrats who work through this system to govern. The officials who wield most of the power are popularly elected. Legal requirements for who can be an elected official have significantly lowered over time, part of the greater march of democratization, so that now only a few age and citizenship requirements restrict who can run for office.
Practically speaking, not everyone can be an elected official, and certainly not everyone can be president. According to the electoral will of ordinary people, these positions are too important and too powerful to be left to ordinary people. Elected officials in democracies almost always come from the same class, the class that is educated and empowered to make decisions. In some the top positions are practically reserved for those with a very specific schooling which weak hereditary connections help with (the path to being PM of the UK often runs through Eton, almost always through Oxford), in others the ruling class is far more permeable and only requires the right educational moves and the right connections even if birth always helps (the United States).
If we compare a well functioning parliamentary democracy to the monarchal states of the past, where is the difference? In Ming China, the country was ruled at the top by a hereditary monarch, the first of which was born a peasant and got his position by leading a popular revolt in accordance with the Mandate of Heaven. Most of the business of state was carried on by a class of bureaucrats and functionaries, and this class was, in the Ming’s case, determined not by birth, but by a meritocratic examination system which legally allowed many to rise to the positions of real consequence. Practically it was much easier for the children of officials to become officials themselves, the examinations were not fully relevant to the work they’d be doing and relied on abstract scholarship and memorization.
The differences are more of degree than kind. The Ming were in some ways more democratic than the Medieval despots of Europe, and the United States now is more democratic than the Ming.
The true difference in degree which makes it a difference in kind is the amount and frequency of popular feedback. While many royalist governments agreed that one must absolutely do right by the people and respond to their will (and many did), direct feedback was rare and could be more easily ignored. When popular will demanded a change, the monarch would replace one faction of the official ruling class with another faction of the official ruling class. In democracies, the same popular will has the same effect, but through elections and automatic legal process and does not get filtered through a monarch. This difference is large enough to make a society into a democracy.
—
Legally, democracies are defined by elections, the right of any citizen to vote for their representatives and to run for office themselves. Practically these rights matter very little without semi-objective information, an educated population, and a real chance at prosperity.
If a medieval German kingdom kept everything the same but instituted popular election of the king from among any candidate, what would change? The peasants would likely respond by voting for the incumbent king when their personal economic conditions were good and voting for an alternate candidate (probably a nobleman, how could a peasant possibly be qualified?) when their personal economic conditions were bad. There is reason to believe that even very bad kings could survive downturns, as it is a common pattern throughout history to believe that it is not the king, but his ministers who are doing evil. This would be a better life for all, but it wouldn’t be that different. The conditions which produced peasant rebellions would be more quickly addressed with a lower threshold for complaint, higher chance of success, and lower chance of violence. If people were given the power to elect their local lords, this would be a far more important change as the worst abuses of the feudal system would be curbed. But the system would still be cruel. People would still be poor. Taxes would be lower, but they still would be collected. There was no imagination for a system beyond feudalism.1
The true transformation of the world from the dark centuries of cruelty was economic. Legal equality followed from a greater economic equality and economic mobility. The burghers knew the state could be run better because they had improved their own fortunes. Feudalism was replaced once it was clear that political power was being used to guard a lazy collection of rents which was causing immense deadweight loss. Changing political institutions freed economic growth, which further grew the imagination and demand for yet better political institutions.
If the United States of 2023 abolished elections and transitioned to a hereditary monarchy where Senators and Representatives served at pleasure of the king who was in charge of general wellbeing, what would we expect to see? The American people can be demanding, there are traditions of protest and rebellion. Likely when things went wrong, to manage popular sentiment the king would have to replace his Republican ministers with Democratic ministers and vice versa. The economy would be run through the Federal Reserve, which would remain largely the same in its method of appointment. Policy would be written and determined mostly in backrooms. There would be significantly more corruption, governments would be much more resistant to change, incompetent kings would regularly create crises of states, and there would be a high risk of responding to popular will with a police state. This United States is far worse than the one we have. But it is very likely better than the democratic kingdom imagined above.
—
The decisions of government are not in the hands of the people. Policies are written by the governing class and passed through governing institutions. The people provide the feedback on whether they worked or not. This feedback compromised by an incredible number of fallacies and lossy processes - governments are given credit for things they don’t do, blamed for things they don’t do, media can turn victories into perceived defeat, the raw power of incumbency bias, the tendency for tragedy on the government’s watch to increase support for the government, and the immense popular lust for war are all serious limits to the key mechanism that makes democracy the best form of government humans have yet seen.
More direct democracy would be both difficult and advisable. Our political culture is such that if we decided high offices by a lottery of all citizens, most people would react with horror. The democratic consensus is that random citizens cannot be trusted with the actual government, it is citizens who must choose the rulers among the established choices. In the United States, the direct democracy of popular ballot measures is effective at pushing through issues which the entrenched political parties brigade: marijuana legalization and several recent abortion measures are good examples. But ballot measures can also just as easily fall prey to the greedy and poorly targeted populism opponents of democracy fear (California’s 2008 Proposition 8 cruelly banning gay marriage, California’s 1978 Proposition 13 greedily limiting property taxes). Plebiscites throughout history and the contemporary world show no signs of producing consistently better results, and suffer from all the same problems as the election of representatives around information and misattribution (Brexit).
Good government of the kind we have now was impossible in the feudal era, better government may be impossible now. But we may soon reach a new moment; we have already passed it, and it is now a matter of realizing it.
Further economic transformation of the citizenry could well create more changes in degree that become changes in kind. There are also exciting possibilities for radical shifts in education or in information technology could eliminate some of the bias problems currently plaguing popular elections. It is possible that Fukuyama’s “End of History” is a result of the stagnation of growth in these areas, and a new revolution will start history back up again.
There are many other possibilities too. With better methods of inter-state security, more localist and anarchist systems might have a chance of developing. An AI king contract bound to good rule with each individual citizen might be able to win every election and gradually unite the world. More modest tools for computational democracy could cause a slow transition into an era of peace and prosperity.
What is needed now is to dream and to try. Heaven’s will points towards the future.
I have not extensively studied European peasant rebellions, but the research I’ve done on the Ikko Ikki leaves me fairly convinced that direct peasant rule had little possibility of fundamental listening transformation.