June 15, 2016

By:  Ted Bauman of the Sovereign Group

Subject: The End of American Democracy

I’m traveling in Geneva for research this week, and the city’s historic ties to modern American democracy led me to an interesting topic.

Earlier today I made a personal pilgrimage to a statue honoring Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Renaissance thinker who greatly influenced the American founders, especially Thomas Jefferson. It’s located on a little island in the middle of the Rhône, where the river accelerates into a torrent at the southern end of Lake Geneva. Rousseau was a lifelong resident of this Swiss city.

I’m here at the invitation of a group of companies that specialize in helping the ultrarich of this world escape the bonds of unsatisfactory citizenship by obtaining a second one.

That their meeting was held in the city that produced the West’s greatest theorist of meaningful democratic citizenship is bitterly ironic to me.

Rousseau’s family were French Protestants who fled France after the Édit de Nantes, which outlawed any religion other than Catholicism. They were fortunate to find a home in Geneva, which at that time was an independent city-state.

Geneva in Rousseau’s time was a “democracy” not unlike the Ancient Greek city-states, such as Athens. In other words, it was an oligarchy of the oldest and most powerful families who made all the important decisions for everyone. Families like Rousseau’s, who had arrived after the ruling elite, were considered citizens but not voters. They weren’t subject to a royal sovereign like most of the rest of Europe, but they were also not quite sovereign themselves.

That uncertain status created understandable tension, which shaped the young Rousseau’s thinking. Rousseau’s grandfather had been strongly censured by Geneva’s ruling elite for supporting a radical reformer named Pierre Fatio.

Fatio’s yearning for liberty was unsatisfied by the notion that, as a Genevois, he was “free” from arbitrary heredity rule, but still not able to participate in decisions that affected him. Like Socrates of Athens, he was eventually executed by his city’s ruling council for his heresies against the established order.

In a memorable turn of phrase, Fatio wisely noted: “A sovereign that never performs an act of sovereignty is an imaginary being.” In other words, citizenship means nothing if one has no influence over the public decisions that matter. Freedom has no meaning if one cannot exercise it in cooperation with fellow citizens through truly democratic systems.

A few years ago, nonpartisan social scientists at one of America’s greatest centers of learning — MIT — released the results of a detailed study of the relationship between popular opinion and the behavior of America’s lawmakers. They found that the average American voter had no statistical influence over the decisions of their elected officials, just like the majority of Geneva’s residents in Rousseau’s time.

Dear readers, draw your own conclusions.

kommonsentsjane