There was a remarkable article in The New Republic two weeks ago by William Galston with the revealing title, “The Public Isn’t Enthused About Health Care Reform. So What?” Galston opens with this:
“With the passage of time,” former Bush administration official Pete Wehner writes today, “President Bush’s decision to champion a new counterinsurgency strategy, including sending 30,000 additional troops to Iraq when most Americans were bone-weary of the war, will be seen as one of the most impressive and important acts of political courage in our lifetime.” Wehner may turn out to be right. And his argument has broader implications that deserve our attention.
Wehner tacitly defines political courage as the willingness to go against public opinion in pursuit of what a leader believes to be the public interest. Fair enough. And unless one believes—against all evidence—that democracies can do without courage, so defined, it follows that there’s nothing necessarily undemocratic about defying public opinion when the stakes are high. After all, the people will soon have the opportunity to pass judgment on the leader’s decision. And they will be able to judge that decision, not by the claims of its supporters or detractors, but by its results.
Now, it might surprise some folks that in large part, I agree with Galston here. He cites Alexander Hamilton in support of his position, but I would go back further, to one of the inspirations of the modern conservative tradition, Edmund Burke (emphasis mine):
Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Properly understood, we elect officials to represent us, not to be our puppets. What they owe us is, first, an honest description of their character and beliefs, so that we can vote for them with an accurate understanding of how they would represent us; and second, to represent us with integrity in a manner consistent with that description. As such, there is no question that Barack Obama, for instance, ought to seek the passage of what he honestly believes to be the best laws possible, whether they are popular or not. Public unpopularity is not in and of itself an argument against any law, initiative, or executive action.
That said, I think Galston goes too far when he writes,
Note that to accept this argument, as I do, is to deny that President Obama and the Democrats are acting high-handedly—let alone anti-democratically—in moving forward with comprehensive health insurance reform. They genuinely believe that the public interest demands it—and that the people themselves will eventually agree. And they know that the people will have the last word.
This paragraph fails for two reasons. In the first place, Galston is comparing a legislative effort by President Obama and the Hill Democrats with an executive decision made by George W. Bush—which in this context is comparing apples and dragons. Had President Bush forced a declaration of war against Iraq through Congress in the face of rising majority opposition, that would be a direct parallel—and the Left would without question have called such action “high-handed,” “anti-democratic,” and a whole host of other things that would have been far less complementary. And they would have been right. What President Bush actually did was to make a decision which was unilaterally his sole responsibility to make as the ultimate commander of our nation’s military forces; which is a very different thing.
In the second place, the high-handed and anti-democratic nature of the actions of the Democratic Party leadership does not rest in the fact that they are proposing policies which are currently unpopular. If they believe those policies to be best, they are honor-bound to do so. Where it rests is in their unwillingness to allow the democratic process to work to their detriment. Were they to follow the rules, it seems clear that at this point, they would lose—but rather than accept that fact, and either compromise with more moderate folks in Congress (to produce a bill that could draw sufficient support) or lose honorably and move on, they have resorted to arm-twisting and attempts to subvert the process. True, they are far from the first to do either; but the fact that wrong has been done before doesn’t make it right.
To understand the key point here, we must I think return to Burke:
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
If this is true (and I believe it clearly is), then it is at least as true that our representatives betray us if they sacrifice their judgment to anyone else’s opinion either, and especially if they do so for personal or political gain; and this is exactly what President Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi are trying to push a number of House Democrats to do. Do they have the right to push an unpopular agenda? Yes, and the responsibility to do so, if they believe it best—but only within limits. They are exceeding those limits in a manner which is, yes, high-handed and anti-democratic, even if it is also courageous, and there’s nothing wrong with calling them on it.