We are hearing a great deal about a budding “Democracy movement” spreading throughout the Middle East. Many are calling it an “Arab Spring.” The belief is that after centuries of totalitarian oppression, the Arab street is suddenly pining for more freedom; rebelling against the elitist ruling class of kings, emirs, despots and tyrants. This is most likely true for a great number of those filling the streets of Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Bahrain and myriad other Middle Eastern, predominantly Muslim nations. But there is a less than honorable component amongst the rebellion that simply waits for the “right” to a democratic vote. Contrary to how the idea of a move to Democracy presents, in the volatile Middle East there are elements in play that could make it a move in the wrong direction.

Each and every day we hear the misnomer that the United States of America is a Democracy. We hear it from the average man on the street, the mainstream media and even from those we have elected to office. But the fact of the matter is this: we are not a Democracy. We are a Constitutional Republic. A thorough and convincing exhibit of the facts surrounding this reality is presented in Notes on Democracy: And the Republic for Which It Stands. The fact that this issue is even in need of address is a scathing commentary on the constitutional illiteracy of the American electorate and serves as a sobering reminder that, often times, what sounds good – what “feels good” – isn’t always as it presents.

The distinction – between the benefits of a Democracy and a Constitutional Republic – is incredibly important, and while some describe our nation as a Democracy in an error of ignorance, others – some with schemes of political opportunism – do so with a nefarious purpose and bad intentions.

James Madison, recognized as the Father of the US Constitution, said this about factions and Democracy in Federalist No. 10:

“Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people…From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.”

Why is this important in the context of what is happening in the Middle East at this very moment?

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Today marks Constitution Day. On 17 September 1787, in Philadelphia, the Framers of the American Constitution added their signatures to the document they had produced, and soon thereafter it was dispatched to the Continental Congress for consideration by the states. On this day, it is appropriate that we, their heirs, reconsider their handiwork and ask whether ours is still a constitutional government.

In their deliberations, the Framers confronted one great question, and it was largely on this question that the debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists during the ratification period turned. Can one establish an enduring republic on an extended territory? This is the question that Americans in this crucial period wrestled with.

As I have argued in earlier posts here and here and, in much greater detail, in my recent books Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty and Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, the Americans had reason to worry. In the late eighteenth century, it was almost universally agreed that what they were attempting could not succeed. Such was the argument that Montesquieu advanced in the first part of his authoritative book The Spirit of Laws, and he had grounds for advancing such a claim. Athens and Sparta were situated on territories of no great size, and the same could be said for early Rome and for Lucca, Florence, and Venice in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Of course, late republican Rome was an exception to the rule. Under the late republic, nearly everyone in Italy was a citizen, and that polity ruled the Mediterranean and beyond. But – as both Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy and Montesquieu in his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline and Spirit of Laws had pointed out — Rome was also the exception that proved the rule. It was a small republic that, by dint of conquest, came to be situated on an extended territory; and soon after it had expanded, it collapsed. The Framers of the American constitution faced a great challenge, and this they and their opponents among the Anti-Federalists knew all too well.

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In earlier posts – here, here, and here – I drew attention to the pre-eminence of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu in and for a time after the eighteenth century, and I suggested that at least two of the reasons for his pre-eminence are still pertinent today. There is at least one other such reason, and it, too, deserves careful consideration.

In The Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu pays exceedingly close attention to the political psychology regnant within the various forms of government that he examines. Republics have as their psychological principle, he tells us, virtue or love of the fatherland and its laws; and, when this fails, they collapse. As we have just seen, monarchies have as their principle the love of honor; and, when monarchs make holding public office degrading and demeaning, they subvert their own authority. And by the same token, despotisms have as their principle fear, and they are corrupt through and through. In The Spirit of Laws, all of this is made crystal clear.

But when it comes time for Montesquieu to specify the principle or passion that sets in motion “the republic concealed as a monarchy” that he discovered when he visited England, he is ostentatiously silent. Eventually, however, in oblique fashion, he will tiptoe around the question.

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In earlier posts – here and here – I drew attention to the pre-eminence of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu in and for a time after the eighteenth century, and I suggested that at least one of the reasons for his pre-eminence is still pertinent today. There are other such reasons, which I addressed at length in Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty and in Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, and they, too, deserve consideration. I will discuss one such here.

Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws is a large book, and it is difficult to know which elements within it are the most salient. There is, however, one passage in which Montesquieu tells us outright that what he is about to say is fundamental to everything else that he says. “I,” he writes near the end of the first of the work’s six parts, “shall be able to be understood only when the next four chapters have been read.” Then, in those four chapters, he argues that forms of government are closely related to the size of the territory that must be governed. Republics are well-suited to polities small in extent; monarchies, to polities of intermediate size; and despotisms to polities great in size.

The pertinence of this claim to the situation of the American Founding Fathers should be obvious. Especially in modern times, this would appear to mean that republicanism can only be viable in mountainous places such as Switzerland, where the geography virtually rules out the establishment of anything but tiny states. It is, then, in no way surprising that the debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists turned to a considerable extent upon the question whether it is somehow possible to establish a viable republic on an extended territory.

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