The Party System

INTRODUCTION

A Timely Warning from the Past:

Make Democracy Democratic

DEMOCRACY, RECALLING AN APPOSITE if provocative phrase of the French Catholic philosopher Georges Bernanos (replying to a question posed by transalpine anti-fascist students who, in 1946, had invited him to the University of the Sorbonne in Paris), is the most screwed up word in the world. It is used to say nothing both by professional proponents of values and by those pushing anti-values; by idealists and by pragmatists; by conservatives and by revolutionaries; by politicians and by intellectuals; by journalists and by businessmen. In short, it is used to say everything and to say nothing. And frequently–too frequently–it is used to contradict democracy itself. It is a fraud, a clever deception to conceal and to mask the true nature of even authoritarian systems, veiled despots, and the unrestricted power of a handful of parties or lobbies.

If we confine ourselves merely to events of recent years, we will discover democracy according to many different models. There is the example of that Europe resulting from the encounter between religious tradition and that of secular illuminism, stemming from the conflict between State and Empire. The fruit of the ideological struggles of the nineteenth century and the syntheses of the twentieth century, it has brought forth, on the one hand, and in the name of the New Man, utopias, dreams, illusions, and messianic fervor; and on the other, concentration camps, gulags, and world wars.

Then there is the third world model which has brought to power–democratically, be it noted–fundamentalist forces andleaders, or followers of Fidel Castro, and these because of several grave errors in the foreign policy of the United States.

And then there is the American model, which aims at universalizing and exporting its own conception of democracy, which necessarily reflects biologically its own origins and traditions: that is to say the Constitution, which before the French Revolution, had built a State according to God and according to Reason. This metaphysical conception has encouraged the Americans, independently of their legitimate role in international geo-politics (we are speaking of the Cold War with its opposing blocs of America and the Soviet Union), to believe that the mere spread and functioning of democratic structures–such as elections and parliamentary representation–will bring about naturally the very same democracy by magic (the mysticism of the democratic form). This viewpoint forgets, however, that each people must travel its own road, whether gradually or rapidly, according to its own peculiarities and its own traditions and identity; and that democracy is an historical process, not an ideological one. One cannot invent it (like Jacobinism), nor export it ready-made.

Not only the Ancient Greeks reflected upon and outlined all the possible developments in the sphere of natural politics: democracy which degenerates into dictatorship, aristocracy which degenerates into oligarchy, monarchy into tyranny. Alexis de Tocqueville was not alone in foreseeing the anomalies which might arise in the American democratic system, but was joined by two European intellectuals, the Anglo-Frenchman, Hilaire Belloc, and the Englishman Cecil Chesterton who, in 1911, had taken apart the English and Western model. Bringing together profound analysis and cogent summaries, demonstrating an extraordinary clarity of purpose, and pinpointing the bonds to be broken down so as to make democracy ever more democratic, they destroyed the ideological lies and exposed the reality of political manipulation as well as the many other related issues which from time to time imprison democracy. Such are the chosen ruses of a governing class that seeks to deceive peoples and manufacture consent. This new edition of The Party System is therefore a significant event.

Their work is of remarkable relevance today, for it deals with themes almost prophetically, all the more so given that it was written at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the evil fruits of certain kinds of democracy were not known.

Votes, elections, and representative assemblies–stress Belloc and Chesterton in black and white–are not democracy; they are at best machinery for carrying out democracy. These are words dealt with at length and which stress the correct relationship that should link the form and content of consent, the form and content of representation, as well as between the criteria for organizing society and the democratic values upon which politics is built. Comments and criticisms are made which recall the perennial question: doubts concerning mechanical or quantitative democracy, versus qualitative democracy based on authentic values; about the restricted rights conceded by the System, versus the real needs and interests of the people.

It is no accident that the two intellectuals seek to answer the pivotal question of democracy in their own way: If Laws are not always consistent with the wishes of the people, is it enough for a simple majority to decide what is just on the moral plane?

These are historically important questions, to which an exhaustive and definitive answer has still not been given. And so, direct democracy–the direct election of the executive leadership of the State–which was introduced into several parliamentary systems (France and America, for example), has still not gained recognition by everyone so as to be a generally accepted alternative.

Consequently, Belloc and Chesterton go into more depth about the concept of delegation, which goes back to the ideological and political pillars of the liberal, parliamentary, and representative State. Delegation asserts itself–says The Party System–because pure democracy is possible only in a small community. Delegation, therefore, becomes necessary to govern large and complex societies, but it risks losing its usefulness and effectiveness precisely at that moment when the System–the oligarchical, economic, profiteering, financial, and banking party–begins to construct itself. Clearly, Belloc and Chesterton already had theparty-ocracy and the lobby in mind. In a word, they foresaw the great evil of our democratic modernity, the evil that caused the degeneration of Western society in the twentieth century.

They seek to resolve this problem with proposals which have the outstanding merit of having anticipated the times: There must be complete freedom in the selection of representatives; the representatives must be strictly responsible to their constituents and to no one else; the representatives must be absolutely independent of the Executive. Conditions, as they observed, that do not prevail in England today [1911]. These proposals and background facts, through dissecting the English model, possess their own instructive objectivity. These proposals and background outline the shape of a bottom-up democracy of medieval lineage: a genuine liberty, real power for the people, self-governing communities, effective accountability of the elected by the electors. They would also dismantle, culturally, the Party bureaucracies, and defend the elected representatives’ right to freedom of expression and conscience (as prescribed in the Italian Constitution, where representatives are empowered to represent the nation as a whole without particular obligation to those who elected them). And they would provide for a clear separation of powers, creating the conditions for placing effective limits upon government institutions (a step towards Presidentialism, meaning a special concentration of wide-ranging powers in the person of the President).

In effect, the Middle Ages, which were not a dark age, would be rediscovered. This Age gave people political structures and extremely valuable models and conditions for the organization of society and of the economy, which, if acted upon, might once again today be of immense assistance to contemporary lawmakers. It is surely enough to recall the real freedom enjoyed under the Guild System, and the idea of the authentic, communitarian village, where inequality and natural hierarchies–in the world of arts and crafts–were harmonized perfectly by religious, political, and military unity. The very same traditional England built up an authentic example of democracy worth exporting (this, yes!), founded upon a just balance between the power of the King, an unwritten constitution developed by tradition and custom, and the House of Lords (composed of the aristocracy, guaranteeing the stability of the State) acting as a check upon the House of Commons, which was the expression of a civil reality, but was sometimes a hostage to, or source of, division and ideological collapse.

In Italy, Fr. Luigi Sturzo, the leader of the Popular Party, centered his political struggle upon the need for a grassroots democracy, a genuine democracy. His was an historical battle for proportional representation against the tyranny of parties graced with a majority, and against influential figures and lobbies that were poisoning and polluting democracy. His was an historical struggle–launched at the Congress of Venice in 1921–in favor of Regions, of local autonomy, of the love of natural community.

Finally, we should not forget the proposal of the minister for telecommunications in the first Berlusconi government (1994) to ensure that lobbies are visible to the public, given that in Italy they are hidden and their interests frequently conflict with the common good. Exactly as has happened in the past, and continues even today in the United States: where parties and politicians choose to defend values and interests of the lobbies, made to appear both legal and transparent in law, while they themselves do not even believe in the politics of finance that are based on paper money, globalization, and the excessive power of multi-national corporations and the arms industries.

A Vocational Chamber for the worlds of Work and of Culture, as an independent House, might in the future be a solution to the problem of excessive party influence and the degeneration of democracy, and it might furthermore contribute to forming and choosing a new ruling class that does not have its origins solely in the world of parties.

To make democracy democratic is the challenge of our complex modernity. It is a wager that has to be won. Only the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, with its spiritual message and its social doctrine, is capable of assisting the citizen-patriot in creating a human-scale economy, and of building a qualitatively superior democracy based on the highest of values.

But the Church must not be left alone in this work. It must be sustained and supported by a widespread civic initiative involving men from the world of ideas, politics, business, and civil society. All of us together must do our duty.

Prince Sforza Ruspoli

Rome, Italy

September 14, 2007

Exaltation of the Holy Cross

PREFACE

A Word on the Late Election

THE COUNTRY HAS JUST EMERGED from the heat and dust of a General Election. We have heard it proclaimed on all sides that the Will of the People must prevail! with slight variations as to the direction in which the Will of the People is to be found. We have seen Mr Lloyd George and Mr Winston Churchill represented on the one hand as patriots confronting a haughty aristocracy (as represented to Mr Churchill by his cousin the Duke of Marlborough), and braving its wrath and hatred, and on the other as a pair of low-born demagogues hallooing on their ragged and illiterate associates to the plunder of the wealthy! While the Conservatives have professed to be convulsed with fear lest Mr Redmond should buy up the whole Liberal Front Bench with the sum of £40,000 (or $200,000, which sounds at once larger and more insidiously wicked), the Liberals have been singing a moving war-song of which two lines run:

                   One with us is He who leads us,

                   Asquith, God and right!—

Lines which, however open to objection from theologians, must needs be spirit-stirring to those who presumably conceive Mr Asquith as leaving his plough or his smithy to lead the stormy democracy whose character and aspirations he in his own person sums up and represents to a great attack upon privilege.

Well, it is over for the present, and a good many of the voters are beginning to look at each other and to wonder what it is all about. The question is not an easy one to answer in regard to any election of the present day; but to those who are not in possession of the key, which it is the aim of this book to give, there is about the election which is just over something particularly mysterious.

In the year 1909 the House of Lords, which had previously mutilated and rejected several bills passed by the Liberal Government, threw out Mr Lloyd George’s Budget, thereby forcing an immediate General Election. The Liberal leaders declared that the issue at that election was not only the passage of the Budget, but also the limitation of the Lords’ Veto; and Mr Asquith, speaking at the Albert Hall, declared that he would neither assume nor retain office unless he were in possession of guarantees that the Lords’ Veto should be limited.

Well, what, happened?

On that pledge Mr Asquith won the election. His team was once more returned to power. He did assume office; he did retail office. But no guarantees were forthcoming, and no attack on the Lords was seriously attempted. Instead, Mr Asquith entered into a conference with his alleged political opponents, and six months were supposed to have been spent in the attempt to accommodate the divergent views of the two Front Benches, and to bridge the unbridgeable gulf which one of his humbler salaried followers discovered, in a notable speech, to exist between the views of his uncle on the one hand, and of his first cousin on the other. Then both sides came out explaining with bland smiles that the Conference had failed. Immediately afterwards another election was declared to be necessary, though, as a matter of fact, there was absolutely nothing to vote about, the Bill concerning which the two Houses were supposed to be disagreeing never having been really considered by either of them.

The key to this stage-play is not hard to find. The Conference did not fail. It did exactly what it was intended to do. It saved for a moment the life of the moribund Party System. The failure of the Liberal Government to fulfil the popular mandate in 1906, the Chinese Labour betrayal, the monstrous and unpopular interference with public habit and personal liberty included in the Licensing Bill, the collapse and absorption of the Labour Party, had disgusted most people with party politics, so that, in order to rally their supporters, the old cry of Down with the Lords! had to be raised. The cry succeeded in its immediate object, but it placed the Government in an awkward position when a handful of Radicals began to demand the fulfilment of the pledges upon which the election had been won. Hence the Conference; hence the alleged failure of the Conference; and, finally, hence the election devised in order to give the Party System second wind.

But the game is growing a little too transparent, and it has never been quite so transparent as at this election. The resolute refusal of the so-called Opposition to attack the really vulnerable points in the record of the Government–especially the breach of Mr Asquith’s Albert Hall pledge,–and the determination of both sides to direct the attention of the public to unreal issues, all this must begin to suggest the idea of collusion to the ordinary elector. He does not know all; he does not know that practically every move in the silly and dangerous game is arranged beforehand by the confederates on the two Front Benches. But he is beginning to feel that the fight is unreal.

The object of this book is to support the tendency now everywhere apparent and finding expression, a tendency to expose and ridicule as it deserves, to destroy and to supplant the system under which Parliament, the governing institution of this country, has been rendered null.

We write to show why governments suddenly abandon causes which they have enthusiastically espoused, and why Oppositions tolerate such abandonment and lend themselves to such manoeuvres. The former are less obliged to consider the will of the people than to consult the sense of the Governing Group of which they are for the time the representatives, while the latter are less anxious to overthrow their rivals than to preserve the system which in due course, and by the connivance of those rivals, will bring to them also the opportunities and emoluments of