What of popular sovereignty?

Sam Crane’s The Useless Tree, as usual exemplary of sterling political-philosophical writing, once again has a very interesting and worthwhile post up about the role of popular sovereignty in a hypothetical Confucian government imagined by noted neo-Confucian scholars Daniel Bell (not the recently-deceased sociologist, the other one) and Jiang Qing (not Mao Zedong’s not-so-recently-deceased wife, and indeed a man). And once again, I find myself agreeing with Mr Crane about 70% of the time, and vehemently disagreeing the other 30%.

His clear-minded and charitable critique of Bell and Jiang primarily rests on the idea that taking some of the emphasis off of popular sovereignty is unrealistic in a modern Chinese political context. I think he does an excellent job, per usual, of framing the issue and asking the right sorts of questions. Indeed, both the liberal democratic impulse and the Marxist impulse are very much to champion the idea that ‘the people’ are and should be the undisputed source of governmental legitimacy (and Mr Crane is indeed right that there is an important level-distinction to be made here between ‘popular sovereignty’ and the legitimacy derived from governments holding to that theory). Questioning that, as Bell and Jiang do, is likely to be the most contentious point of their work and theorising - both from a ‘rightist’ (neoconservative or neoliberal) and from a ‘leftist’ (neo-Maoist or postmodernist) perspective. Of course a government should derive its legitimacy from the people! Is that not what has been taught us, drilled into us, from day one of our middle-school social studies curriculum - whether in the tradition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or in the tradition of John Locke?

Mr Crane tracks the argument back to this crux, and places his finger firmly on it. As his political-philosophical sympathies are very much with the Boston school of the New Confucians (Dr Robert Neville, sometime of Marsh Chapel, and Dr Tu Wei-ming of Harvard University), he is inclined to view the more critical project of Bell and Jiang as something of a pipe-dream. He notes that popular sovereignty has been the reigning doctrine within the Chinese nation since the fall of the Qing Dynasty, as it is in much of the rest of the world for this past century at least. Further, he criticises Bell and Jiang for attempting to refashion a set of ‘traditional’ norms and values for a set of political ends which attempt to deconstruct the project of Western-style liberal democracy.

I am sympathetic to the argument of tradition being fuzzy and unbounded as a concept. In fact, one of the most appealing things about any tradition is that ritual manages to renegotiate and reconstitute itself with each repetition, as long as there are people who value it enough to breathe new meaning into it. But once again the main difficulty I have with Mr Crane’s argument is that it lacks a crucial irony: his sole justification for popular sovereignty as a doctrine is that of tradition. Why do we need popular sovereignty? Jiang and Bell ask. Because people have been practicing it in China for over a hundred years, answers Crane. Moreover, it was a tradition invented by a small group of very determined radical intellectuals led by Sun Yat-sen. And reinforced by another small group of very determined radical intellectuals led by Mao Zedong.

So, given that all tradition is creative (re-)imagination by those who follow it, the argument can pull both ways. Mr Crane states that there is no reason outside the political identification with a particular reading of Confucian philosophy to renegotiate political sovereignty; however, there is no reason outside the political identification with the invented tradition of the Three Principles to want to keep it intact, either. And a small group of very determined radical intellectuals may yet again overturn an order which is now seen as a given.

But the deeper question which needs answering is, is popular sovereignty a good thing? Is it an end in itself, to be desired as such? Mr Crane certainly wants to argue that it is, and that questioning it is comparable to advocating the revival of foot-binding. I personally find, from my own experience (particularly after the Iraq War; the frightening angry rise of the Tea Party at the behest of a few powerful businessmen; and the even-more-frightening long-term expansion of executive power in the hands of an imperial Presidency cheered on, ironically, by the same people who want to do away with more egalitarian manifestations of government) that popular sovereignty is a very dangerous thing. Because it leads people to feel themselves entitled to a public voice, it has a levelling effect on values, making it so that ignorance and bigotry are considered on equal terms with more informed and understanding opinions; simultaneously, it leads to a decidedly widening effect on existing social gaps. Think of the wild support President Andrew Jackson enjoyed under an explicit doctrine of popular sovereignty, and then think on the atrocities he committed under the Indian Removal Act against the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles, running roughshod over his constitutional bounds in the process, and then going on to be re-elected in a landslide victory. Popular sovereignty is far from an unqualified good.

The opinions which gain the greatest hearing under popular sovereignty are not the best opinions, or the most humane, but those which can garner the most support from the political and economic elites. Popular sovereignty leads to the rule of those who crave power (力) and profit (利), and those who are eager and unscrupulous enough to stroke the egos of the public enough to get from them what they want. Under these considerations, from a Confucian standpoint, Dr Jiang and Dr Bell may be seen as justified in their critique of popular sovereignty.

This is a High Tory argument, running along similar lines as that of Jiang and Bell (and others of like mind, such as Kang Xiaoguang), but in the long term, popular sovereignty cannot be the only basis for legitimacy in a functional democracy. Mr Crane brings up the United Kingdom as an example of a government which, in spite of some illiberal trappings, still makes concessions to an ideal of popular sovereignty - which indeed it does. But it also has, to its benefit, a fully-unelected House of Lords, which now ought to be considered much more representative, accessible, open and responsive than the fully-elected House of Commons (thank you, David Lindsay, for the link!). If the Chinese people want a government that represents the mass line rather than only its own officials and big-business patrons, they could do far worse than its own House of Exemplary Persons.

After all, there are things that we want our democracy to do other than reflecting the desires of its people, especially since those desires (as Jiang and Bell note) can be very unhealthy and destructive. We want our government to provide for the common good, to provide well the things which abet the physical and spiritual flourishing of its citizens; popular sovereignty can be no guarantee of these provisions, particularly not in a capitalist society where desires can be easily manipulated through advertising of various kinds.