Franke: Civic Bargain Book Review
by Mark Franke
One hears the word democracy so often these days — and in so many contexts — that it has lost its meaning. There is the tiresome charge that anything Donald Trump does is a threat to democracy on one hand and on the other hand a rather pedantic academic argument that we are not and never were a democracy, being a republic instead. One is tempted to just tune it all out if it weren’t for the fact that we are facing an existential threat to our American polity, whatever you choose to call it.
Call the United States a democracy or a republic or a representative democracy, whatever you will, but in the final analysis the terminology is not what matters. What does matter is how our form of participatory governance plays out in the public sphere, a deteriorating space subject to increasing levels of incendiary speech and actual violence.
Brook Manville and Josiah Ober have a solution to offer us in their book “The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives” (Princeton University Press 2023, 269 pages plus notes, $16 hardcover at Amazon). They ground their solution in a foundational definition of how democracy works. Just understand that they use the term democracy in its broadest and commonly understood sense, not necessarily restricted by a technical political science definition. The United States is a democracy for their purposes.
A working democracy exhibits seven characteristics, all of which are fundamental to its ability to survive. A functioning democracy has citizens with no boss except for each other, provides security and welfare, defines citizenship, has citizen-led public institutions, functions through good faith compromise, and promotes civic friendship and civic education.
The authors begin by looking at three previous democratic-like polities before addressing the American one. They begin with classical Athens, the birthplace of democracy. It was probably history’s closest example of pure democracy but it still had its problems. My criticism of their rehearsal of Athenian democracy is that they tend to gloss over its uncontrolled excesses, such as the legislated execution of ten victorious generals due to their casualty totals during a battle in Sicily. They mention the incident and then move on. To me the incident represented a lapse into mobocracy, which a pure democracy has no power to prevent. The execution of Socrates is another example of the mob’s unchecked power if an instigator can get enough votes.
We rightly recognize Athens for its contribution to our understanding of democracy but it was Rome that most influenced our Founding Fathers when they were creating an American government from whole cloth. Rome’s overthrow of its Etruscan kings in favor of annually elected magistrates also can be applauded. Yet that republic fell due to mobocracy played out as street theater, giving way to the side that could shout the loudest and eventually kill more of its opponents.
The authors deserve credit for their explanation of the gradual development and eventual collapse of the Roman republic, explaining its rather complicated structure for conducting elections and passing legislation. They are correct that it worked for centuries due to a shared willingness to find compromise between the elites and the hoi polloi. But then one day, it didn’t anymore. The republican façade was maintained for a century or two afterward to hide what effectively was a military dictatorship.
The longest chapter of the book is focused on the evolving constitutional history of Great Britain. The authors specify seven key points in time when democracy advanced against monarchy. The first era was pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon England as a proto experiment in democracy within a limited context. Each successive era was triggered by some kind of agreement between king and citizens, first advancing the nobility and subsequently giving near total power to a universal electorate through the House of Commons.
Give the authors credit for chunking out British political history as they did, focusing on key events that moved the governing power dial toward democracy. My criticism is that they miss a key fault line in the current British constitution—the lack of an effective balance of power. Neither King Charles nor the House of Lords can effectively check any anti-liberty actions coming out of the House of Commons. I stand in good company in this criticism; I’m sure John Adams would agree with me.
The chapter on the United States is a shorter one, with the focus directed at the gradual but unrelenting progress of the American polity’s expanding participation to previously disenfranchised groups. One gets the sense that each significant political compromise in our history produced a “two steps forward, one step backward” outcome. The authors are clearly unhappy with our modern-day political discourse’s stridency and belligerency, a threat to their bargain model.
Essentially, their point is that our Anglo-Saxon heritage brought over with the early colonists established participatory democracy from day one but with limited voting rights. The fundamental “bargain” for America was set with the adoption of the Constitution. The book’s discussion of its ratification, while brief, is a good overview of the democratic principles outlined in The Federalist Papers. The section on the role and potential dangers of political factions is worth the read.
The two common themes of the book are the essential democratic condition of having no boss, meaning no single authoritative head of state, and of a goodwill effort to strike bargains among competing interests. The problem for us today is that we have failed absolutely in meeting the condition of civic friendship, essential for good faith bargaining in maintenance of democracy.
Democracy advances, the authors maintain, through this bargaining process. It is one of compromise, with imperfection tolerated to achieve desirable results. The perfect must not be allowed to become the enemy of the good. Political opposites, the term opponents is not appropriate here, are to be viewed as friends in a common cause and not enemies to be trodden down. Human nature tends toward tribal solidarity instead of this civic friendship. Watch cable news to see what the authors fear.
There is a solution to American democracy’s decline: civic education. This involves more than restoring civics to our public school curriculum; it is something that continues into adult life through our public interactions with each other. Democratic principles should be backyard and cocktail party topics for discussion, my analogy not theirs. The authors bemoan the decline in public service engagement, including military service. They have no use for today’s strident demand for the dominance of diversity rather than a democratic celebration of what unites us. Progress will come from a recognition of what we hold in common instead of the false god of identity politics.
Manville and Ober are probably right but perhaps a tad optimistic about changing our non-civil civic discourse. They close their book with a call to action, one based on the courage of ordinary citizens to act. That’s how our forebears built our democracy, through collective action often sparked by individual initiative. If it worked before, it ought to work again. Shouldn’t it?
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
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