A Response to David French: The Importance of Representation and Statesmanship

I agree with so much in David French’s recent blog post entitled “A Christian Defense of American Classical Liberalism.” He is correct that most if not all attempts to undermine commitments to liberty and equality for all people is at odds with the liberal tradition we all share. He is also right to point to the anthropology behind classical liberalism: that human beings’ infinite value justifies a system of legally enforced rights and human beings’ depravity demands a government that’s limited in size and scope. For anyone familiar with the liberal tradition, this should be standard fare and uncontroversial.

However, his understanding of human dignity is incomplete, and his understanding of the American founding and political tradition is too narrow. In particular, he first misses that human dignity is not just the foundation of rights and freedoms; it’s also the foundation for human responsibility. Or, to put it another way and to use an example: human dignity requires that we protect the freedom to speak, but it also demands that citizens use that freedom to speak in a responsible manner. This first blind spot is connected to and rooted in his second problem: namely, his unitary reading of the American founding and American political tradition. In particular, he misses the republican (small r) character of the founding and the American political tradition in general.

Without getting into more extensive discussions of human dignity or the influence of republican thought on the founding (maybe the subjects of other posts), I want to focus on one feature of the founding that French does not mention: the role of political representation and statesmanship in preserving freedom.

In Federalist 10 (probably the most famous of the Federalist Papers), Publius argues that representation is one of the keys to preserving freedom and avoiding the problem of majority faction. In any system that relies on majority rule, a majority can gain power and oppress the minority (the definition of a majority faction). Publius argues that a large, extended republic will mitigate the possibility of this occurring, and later the Framers will give in to demands from the Anti-Federalists to ratify a Bill of Rights to do the same. But what is often missed by observers is the central role of representation in protecting against majority faction as well.

So why does Publius think representation is so key to preserving freedom and protecting against majority faction? His answer to this question gets to the heart of the problem that occurs when reading the American founding strictly through a liberal lens. More specifically, though, the problem is reading the founding as an exclusively egalitarian project. To be sure, equal rights and equality under the law were central to the founding in principle (if not in practice), and that spirit has remained throughout American history. But there are decidedly inegalitarian elements within Publius’ argument and in the founding itself that must be understood if we are to make sense of our history and our political system in an appropriate way.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that philosopher-kings are necessary to save the city of Athens. The regime needs both wisdom and power to survive the onslaught of the cynical, power-hungry sophists. On this view, the basic problems in politics are that wise people don’t rule and those who rule are not wise. Both explicit and implicit in Socrates’ argument is that certain people are more fit to rule than others, and that until we get those kinds of people into office, we will continue to suffer from rule by philodoxers (those who are in love with mere opinion and not wisdom).

It’s this classical emphasis not on the legitimacy of a regime (a liberal, Lockean question) but rather on the kind of rule and the kind of rulers that are necessary for a healthy and just republic that influenced many of the American framers. Indeed, in Federalist 10 itself, Publius argues that while the people are the final authority in the American system, we still require “fit characters” to “refine and enlarge the public views” if we are to avoid majority faction, if we are to avoid the oppression of one group by another, and if we are to preserve and protect freedom. In other words, it is not enough to have separation of powers, a Bill of Rights, Civil War Amendments, and courts to make sure our basic freedoms are protected (all positive developments that French mentions). No, we need political rulers — representatives — who will rise above the pernicious interests of political majorities, whose only goal in life is to oppress the minorities in their communities. In the very act of voting, we are saying that this person we are appointing is qualitatively better, more fit, more ready, more experienced, and even more virtuous to rule than we are. That is, after all, why we are selecting them. And it is these people who will sometimes need to rise above our demands to oppress our neighbors in the minority.

Don’t get me wrong. The ways to preserve freedom according to the framers of the Constitution are many: a large republic, checks and balances, separation of powers, federalism, a Bill of Rights, and courts to protect all of it. But this notion that there are some who are better than others, at least better in terms of ruling but also better in terms of character — this notion was central to preserving freedom and equality for all, the point of the whole thing.

To conclude, one of the weakest elements of the liberal tradition that we inherit from early modern theorists like Hobbes, Locke, and Jefferson is the inattention to statesmanship and the importance of good rule. There is a spirit within the “no men are angels” tradition that French espouses that looks down on people in government. If we’re all rotten and rulers are no exception, then we’ll always hold these folks in suspicion. Why become a statesman or stateswoman or value the training it takes to become one with this kind of expectation? We get the representatives we deserve, but we also get the kind of representation we expect to get. Human dignity is not just about the value of human beings, and depravity is not the whole story of the human condition. Human beings as image bearers of God means that we are “glorious ruins,” as Francis Schaeffer put it. It’s the glory in some who deserve to lead our republic that we need to recover.