A few excerpts from Roger Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism on republican versus democratic governance:

De Tocqueville wrote of democracy that it “not only makes each man forget his forefathers, but it conceals from him his descendants and separates him from his contemporaries; it ceaselessly throws him back on himself alone and threatens finally to confine him entirely in the solitude of his own heart”. That is a strong way of putting it, and one that reflects the bitterness spread by the French Revolution in the feelings of all its descendants. But it contains a truth. The great difficulty lies in finding the language with which to persuade people to acknowledge de Tocqueville’s meaning.

The social fragmentation presaged by de Tocqueville is as elusive as it is virulent, while the supposed legitimacy of the democratic process is a conception of permanent and vivid appeal. Should politicians wish to criticize the democratic process they must represent themselves as opposed, not to democracy, but to some local or specialized form of it—proportional representation, say, or the single-chamber parliament, or the plebiscite. But these specialized forms exemplify the same principle that they must also claim to be defending, the principle that, in matters of government, it is the opinion of the governed that confers legitimacy upon what is done. It might be possible to argue against the use of a referendum, on the grounds that twenty million people ought not to be asked to make a momentous decision concerning a matter about which almost all of them know nothing (for example, whether to join or not to join the European Monetary Union). It might be possible to argue against proportional representation, on the grounds that it will generate a parliament that is weak, irresolute and peppered with crackpots.

But all such arguments rely on a principle that denies the basis of democracy. For they assert that popular opinion is a legitimate guide only in so far as it is authorized by a constitution that limits its excesses. Hence the legitimacy of government cannot be conferred merely by democratic choice. …

The underlying idea is … that legitimacy can reside only in contractual or quasi-contractual agreement, and not in established usage. Hence, it is thought, the only legitimate government, or procedure, is one that has been “chosen” or consented to by its subjects. Yet as soon as one considers the highly artificial circumstances of democratic choice, one must see that this “choice” presupposes in its turn that the citizens should recognize some prior legitimacy in that which they do not and cannot choose—namely the procedures which make choice available, and the people and offices which guard them.

“A Republic, if you can keep it,” reported Ben Franklin after the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The demos, or the people themselves, have always been meant to be heard most forcefully through their elected representatives in our republican model. You might say that we’re a democracy in the sense that we determine in every generation to what extent we’re going to keep the republic. If you don’t like the “republic” language for whatever reason, try “constitutional democracy.”

Scruton continues:

… however fair and free, [the democratic process] will always give precedence to the needs and desires of those who are choosing now, regardless of the needs and desires of those who are not yet with us or those who are already dead. The very same theoretical weakness which afflicts the social contract, afflicts democratic choice—namely, that it privileges the living and their immediate interests over past and future generations.

Burke made the point in something like those terms in his great polemic against the French Revolution. But it is worth setting it in a more modern context, since it bears upon the most important questions that now confront us. Burke argued that we can view society as a contract (as the French Revolutionaries, following Rousseau, proposed) only if we recognize that the contract includes not the living only but also the unborn and the dead. Mention of the dead seems quaint to modern ears: after all, they are no longer with us, and therefore, you might suppose, have no interests which are affected by what we do. That is not how Burke saw the matter, however. The dead, he believed, have an enduring interest in our respect for them. Moreover, this is recognized by the law, which obliges us to carry out the will of a testator, whether or not it is in anyone else’s interest.

But there is a much deeper reason to include the dead and their wishes in our calculations. From the beginning of time, it is respect for the dead that has formed the basis of institution-building. Schools, universities, hospitals, orphanages, clubs, libraries, churches and institutions began life as private foundations, dependent on property given or bequeathed by people no longer alive. The present holders of that property were morally speaking, the temporary trustees. Respect for the dead forbade the arbitrary use of their bequests, and compelled the trustees to further the purposes which the founders and donors would approve. By honoring the dead, the living trustees were safeguarding the interests of their successors. Respect for the dead is the foundation of the attitude of trusteeship upon which future generations depend for their inheritance. Remove the dead from the equation, and you remove the unborn. And that, not to put too fine a point on it, is the real danger of unmoderated democracy.

Procedural limitations on democracy must therefore be designed to ensure that the voices of the dead and the unborn are heard in the political process. But not any dead and unborn: only those who belong to the first person plural over which the sovereign power presides — the community-through-time which in modern terms is usually seen as a nation, the term “nation” being etymologically connected with the idea of birth and descent without which the long-term perspective is seemingly impossible to grasp as a part of politics.

It’s an under-appreciated point that Scruton highlights there, that democracy naturally focuses on what we want now, at the expense of the future or the recent past. But context matters; even if you reject arguments about respecting the will, intent, or memory of the dead, it’s a fact that almost nothing in life can be understood out of its context. How can it be that whatever our immediate and present wants might be, that these are the only good worth pursuing?

They’re clearly not, as our entire society is built on the practice of deferring immediate gratification—from investing years of our lives in educating ourselves for future success, to planning in old age for the success of children and grandchildren, to saving as much as possible for retirement in youth and middle age, when immediate spending would be more rewarding in the present moment.

Yet when it comes to governance, we probably tip too much toward democratic interest in present-oriented concerns at the expense of long-term governance and planning for the future. It would explain why we can’t find consensus on energy and environmental policy that plans for the future and why we can’t solve the insolvency problems of our pension and social welfare commitments, for instance.

Bruno Maçães writes on world order and feelings of chaos:

What was remarkable about the Brexit referendum was that the country that had invented free trade and taken it to the four corners of the world was now refusing to be part of the largest and freest economic bloc ever created. As for Donald Trump, he has come to symbolize a precipitous retreat from the previous American foreign-policy consensus. … According to Trump, “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.”

The global order created after the Second World War had been endangered before, but in the past the threat had come from the out­side. Now it seems to be in danger of being abandoned by those who had been responsible for building it and who had always benefited from it. For some, Brexit and Trump have simply been an error of perception: It is true that the countries at the core of the system have to restrain their power and cannot come out on top every time, but over the long term they reap the largest benefits and have the most interest in preserving the system. …

The truth is that for many in the United Kingdom and the U.S., there is no longer a functioning liberal order. …

Surprising? Perhaps, but we have seen it all before — in those societies first suffering the impact of European or Western expansion. One historical analogy is with the arrival of European civilization in the Muslim world. Until the 18th century the course of history still seemed to be favoring the great Muslim empires, and the ruling Ottoman, Safavid, or Mughal elites certainly never entertained any other possibility. When the shock arrived, in the form of a string of military defeats and growing trade dependence, no one was prepared. The initial reaction was to wait for the storm to pass while remaining faithful to traditional habits and principles. Two main strands of reaction were eventually considered. First, there was a call to purify Muslim society from later influences and deviations. The origin of the Wahhabi radical reinterpretation of Islam dates from this moment. The second response, moving in the opposite direction, was to try to reform Muslim society, to address its perceived weak­nesses and to appropriate some European ideas, at least in the area of military technology.

A similar process took place in China roughly a century later. Determined to open Chinese markets to foreign goods, Britain intro­duced the habit of opium smoking into the country and later defended its trade through military means, quickly dispatching the poorly equipped Chinese navy. The emperor sued for peace, opened five trade ports to foreigners, and ceded Hong Kong to the British in per­petuity. It was impossible to pretend that the world order as it had been conceived in Beijing since time immemorial could survive the onslaught, but the mandarins spent most of the next few decades doing just that, for their most treasured values prohibited the recog­nition of any alternative to Chinese civilization. …

One could speculate endlessly about the root causes of the new situation, but the truth is notably straightforward. Technology — once the preserve of the West — is now universal. In both cases discussed above, the Muslim and Chinese worlds were faced with a new kind of civilization, carrying all the secrets of modern science, which at first must have looked like supernatural powers. The encounter between European and Asian empires in the mod­ern age had a very specific meaning to those involved: the superiority of European technology. Some Asian thinkers or polemicists went so far as to make the intriguing claim that the encounter was not between Asians and Europeans, but rather between Asians and European machines.

We have now entered a new age, one perfectly summarized by saying that Western machines are every day meeting Asian machines. After all, the same tools we have used — and continue to use — to manage and influence the rest of the world are now fully available outside the West. When power and influence flow in all directions at once, the result is, from one point of view, a democratic order where everyone will rule and be ruled at once. From a different point of view, it could be described as a field of forces where every action is a reaction in an endless chain. Countries, peoples, voters, and presidents are ultimately disturbances in a chaotic field.

Maçães has a new book out called The Rise of Eurasia, which I assume delves into this further. As technology has flattened the world, I think Maçães is right in suggesting that “power and influence [now] flow in all directions.” Neither rising powers like China nor powers like America and Europe are able to exert unilateral power and influence, and that’s making everything politically and socially frothy.

Arnold Kling’s The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides is a short introduction to the reality of “three axes” in American political life and the problem with trying to heal the culture before confronting the moral concerns of each axis. Tristan Flock writes:

Liberals, conservatives, and libertarians each have their own tribal language, which often baffles and infuriates outsiders. Until we grasp the nuances and assumptions of each language, mutual understanding is impossible. Fortunately, Kling provides a simple framework for making sense of these semantic differences. …

Kling’s framework eschews the simplistic left–right spectrum in favor of a ‘three-axes’ model of political communication, whereby people tend to communicate in either a progressive, conservative, or libertarian manner. It is simple enough to be grasped at a glance, yet complex enough to aid in understanding. The three ways of communicating can be summarized as follows:

• Progressives communicate along an oppressor–oppressed axis, where those who stand up for the underprivileged are good, while those indifferent to the plights of the disadvantaged are bad.
• Conservatives communicate along a civilization–barbarism axis, where those who stand up for time-tested traditions and virtues are good, while those indifferent to assaults on Western values are bad.
• Libertarians communicate along a liberty–coercion axis, where those who stand up for individual rights are good, while those indifferent to government intrusion are bad.

I think Kling presents a good tactical basis for healing some of the political and social wounds in our culture, simply from a standpoint of learning how to better and more meaningfully communicate across different lines and ways of thinking. This doesn’t strike me as a good strategic basis for political engagement, because it doesn’t directly address questions of telos and virtue and meaning in everyday life, and I suspect those implicit questions are what drive people into different axes in the first place.