The Inference

Parliament is in session, he is lucky if he has a couple of hours in the morning left for thinking things over and for real work. Individual miscarriages and defeats of a government as a whole are not infrequently due to physical exhaustion of the leading man or men. 4 How could he, so it might well be asked, undertake to lead and supervise an administrative organism that is to embrace all the problems of economic life?

But this wastage of governmental energy is not all. The incessant competitive struggle to get into office or to stay in it imparts to every consideration of policies and measures the bias so admirably expressed by the phrase about “dealing in votes.” The fact that in a democracy government must attend primarily to the political values of a policy or a bill or an administrative act—that is to say, the very fact that enforces the democratic principle of the government’s dependence upon the voting of parliament and of the electorate—is likely to distort all the pro’s and con’s. In particular, it forces upon the men at or near the helm a short-run view and makes it extremely difficult for them to serve such long-run interests of the nation as may require consistent work for far-off ends; foreign policy, for instance, is in danger of degenerating into domestic politics. And it makes it no less difficult to dose measures rationally. The dosing that a government decides on with an eye to its political chances is not necessarily the one that will produce the results most satisfactory to the nation.

Thus the prime minister in a democracy might be likened to a horseman who is so fully engrossed in trying to keep in the saddle that he cannot plan his ride, or to a general so fully occupied with making sure that his army will accept his orders that he must leave strategy to take care of itself. And this remains true (and must, in the case of some countries such as France and Italy, be frankly recognized as one of the sources from which anti-democratic feeling has spread) in spite of the facts that may be invoked in extenuation. There is, to begin with, the fact that the instances in which those consequences show to an extent that may be felt to be unbearable can often be explained on the ground that the social pattern is not up to the task of working democratic institutions. As the examples of France and Italy show, this may happen in countries that are much more civilized than some which do succeed in that task. But nevertheless the weight of the criticism is thereby reduced to the statement that the satisfactory working of the democratic method is contingent upon fulfillment of certain conditions—a subject that will be taken up presently.

Then there is the question of the alternative. These weaknesses are obviously not absent in non-democratic patterns. Paving one’s way to a leading position, say, at a court, may absorb quite as much energy and distort one’s views about issues quite as much as does the democratic struggle though that waste or distortion does not stand out so publicly. This amounts to saying that attempts at comparative appraisal of engines of government will have to take account of many other factors besides the institutional principles involved.

Moreover, some of us will reply to the critic that a lower level of governmental efficiency may be exactly what we want. We certainly do not want to be the objects of dictatorial efficiency, mere material for deep games. Such a thing as the Gosplan may at present be impossible in the United States. But does not this prove precisely that, just like the Russian Gosplan, its hypothetical analogue in this country would violate the spirit as well as the organic structure of the commonwealth?

Finally, something can be done to reduce the pressure on the leading men by appropriate institutional devices. The American arrangement for instance shows up to advantage on this point. The American “prime minister” must no doubt keep his eye on his political chessboard. But he need not feel responsible for every individual measure. And, not sitting in Congress, he is at least exempt from the physical strain this would involve. He has all the opportunity he wants to nurse his strength.

Third, our analysis in the preceding chapter brings into bold relief the problem of the quality of the men the democratic method selects for positions of leadership. The well-known argument about this hardly needs recalling: the democratic method creates professional politicians whom it then turns into amateur administrators and “statesmen.” Themselves lacking all the acquirements necessary for dealing with the tasks that confront them, they appoint Lord Macaulay’s “judges without law and diplomatists without French,” ruining the civil service and discouraging all the best elements in it. Worse still, there is another point, distinct from any question of specialized competence and experience: the qualities of intellect and character that make a good candidate are not necessarily those that make a good administrator, and selection by means of success at the polls may work against the people who would be successes at the head of affairs. And even if the products of this selection prove successes in office these successes may well be failures for the nation. The politician who is a good tactician can successfully survive any number of administrative miscarriages.

Recognition of the elements of truth in all this should again be tempered by the recognition of the extenuating facts. In particular, the case for democracy stands to gain from a consideration of the alternatives: no system of selection whatever the social sphere—with the possible exception of competitive capitalism—tests exclusively the ability to perform and selects in the way a stable selects its Derby crack. Though to varying degrees, all systems put premiums on other qualities as well, qualities that are often inimical to performance. But we may perhaps go further than this. It is not quite true that in the average case political success proves nothing for a man or that the politician is nothing but an amateur. There is one very important thing that he knows professionally, viz., the handling of men. And, as a broad rule at least, the ability to win a position of political leadership will be associated with a certain amount of personal force and also of other aptitudes that will come in usefully in a prime minister’s workshop. There are after all many rocks in the stream that carries politicians to national office which are not entirely ineffective in barring the progress of the moron or the windbag.

That in such matters general argument one way or another does not lead to a definite result is only what we should expect. It is much more curious and significant that factual evidence is not, at first sight at least, any more conclusive. Nothing is easier than to compile an impressive list of failures of the democratic method, especially if we include not only cases in which there was actual breakdown or national discomfiture but also those in which, though the nation led a healthy and prosperous life, the performance in the political sector was clearly substandard relative to the performance in others. But it is just as easy to marshal hardly less impressive evidence in favor of the politician. To cite one outstanding illustration: It is true that in antiquity war was not so technical an affair as it has become of late. Yet one would think that the ability to make a success at it had even then very little to do with the ability to get oneself elected to political office. All the Roman generals of the republican era however were politicians and all of them got their commands directly through the elective offices they held or had previously held. Some of the worst disasters were due to this. But on the whole, these politician-soldiers did remarkably well. Why is that so? There can be only one answer to this question.