Challenges to Democracy; 6; Elite and Electorate: Is Government By The People Possible?

Challenges to Democracy World and American leaders consider how democratic man can meet problems affecting the survival of freedom with justice in the world. The talks you are about to hear are part of the 10th anniversary convocation of the Center of the Fund for the Republic. An organization dedicated to the examination of democracy in the contemporary world. The studies of the Center have ranged widely over all institutions of modern society, the church, the corporation, the labor union, the military, and the government. Seeking to know the conditions of freedom, the grounds of its growth, the threats to its survival, and the changing forms of freedom itself.

Today, part 6 of Challenges to Democracy in the next decade. Elite and electorate is government by the people possible. Speaking, Senator J. W. Fulbright and Charles Frankel, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Now to introduce Senator Fulbright, the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Harry S. Ashmore. It has been suggested that Senator J. William Fulbright may be a modern incarnation of that man of parts, that universal man, that we like to think, founded this republic. There is some evidence to support that. He has been a Rhodes scholar, a professor of law, a university president. And as a result of some relationships, he could become at any time if you'll pardon the expression a newspaper publisher. But I think he is best known as a politician. And perhaps the highest accolade I've ever heard in that concern came to me in 1956, one day in Chicago, when I was talking to Senator Paul Douglas. Paul Douglas said to me, how has Bill Fulbright doing down in Arkansas?

I said, well, he's running for re-election, and as usual, he has no opposition. And Paul Douglas said, tell him for me that he's not only a scholar, a statesman, and a gentleman, but he's the first politician in the land. This is not prevailed six years later. The Senator has just concluded a successful campaign. He did have opposition, and this time around, he even had republican opposition. So he warned me not to ask him today to say anything very kind about the two-party system, which is dawning in the South. I had the privilege for something more than a decade to actively be a constituent of Senator Fulbright. I consider myself still one, even though I have turned in my poll tax receipt, and do not vote in those precincts anymore. I think as a matter of fact, I'm one of a large number of people in this country and all over the world, who consider themselves constituents of this singular man, who is one of that group of ornaments of the United States Senate, who speak for this country and for the West, and are heard across the globe, Senator Fulbright. Mr. Chairman and ladies and gentlemen, I consider it a real honor to be invited once again to New York City. It's an honor which comes to me very seldom.

When Dr. Hutchins asked me to speak today, I thought at first that it might be appropriate for me to discuss the status of democracy in my constituency. Having just been elected as Mr. Ashmore's told you, I can report that the electorate of Arkansas still exhibits a remarkable degree of sophistication and discrimination. I may add that that discrimination was developed very greatly influenced by Mr. Ashmore's having been editor of the leading paper in that state for a number of years. I have a upon reflection and after a further letter from Dr. Hutchins and Mr. Ashmore, I concluded that they wish me to discuss a question of government by the people from a slightly broader point of view. So I should do the best I can, although I'm bound to say that the prospects for democracy in this context is somewhat less favorable.

The question before us, I think, can be answered very simply. That government by the people is possible, but highly improbable. The difficulties of self-government are manifest throughout the world. The emergent nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America are struggling with varying degrees of success to make democratic government work, and even one of the oldest and most sophisticated free societies of the Western world has felt it necessary to put its destiny in the hands of benevolent but authoritarian leadership. The history of political thought in the last century and a half is largely one of qualification, modification and outright repudiation of the heady democratic optimism of the 18th century. The play is still on, writes Karl Becker, and we are still betting on freedom of the mind, but the outcome seems now somewhat more dubious than it did in Jefferson's time.

Because the century and a half of experience makes it clear that men do not in fact always use their freedom of speech and of the press in quite the rational and disinterested way they are supposed to. The major preoccupation of democratic thought in our time has been its continuing and troubled effort to reconcile the irrefutable evidences of human weakness and irrationality which modern history has so abundantly provided with a political philosophy whose very foundation is the assumption of human goodness and reason. The dilemma has troubled all of the free societies of the West none more so than the United States whose national experience until a generation ago seemed to represent the realization of classical democratic theory. Early American history seemed an almost literal fulfillment of the philosophy of John Locke. The new world represented a state of nature in which free men entered voluntarily into social contracts from the Mayflower Compact to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787.

We were permitted to believe that we had entered into civil society by rational and unanimous agreement and that in Locke in terms we had done so for the sole and expressed purpose of overcoming the inconveniences of the state of nature. Herein lay the basis of limited government, a delegation of authority to government for the purpose of administering justice and protecting the natural rights of the sovereign individual. These rights as the Declaration of Independence so forcefully asserted were conferred on man by law of nature which no government could abridge or alter. The relationship of the individual to government was contractual rather than historical. The core of this philosophy was its assumption of a benevolent law of nature and of a human species endowed with the reason to perceive and to implement it.

Similar to the Locke in philosophy in effect, if not in detail, was the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. In the utilitarian scheme, a limited authority is delegated by people to government for the purpose of fostering conditions of public happiness. The responsibility of the rulers to the rule is guaranteed by frequent and free elections. What is common to both Locke and in Bentham might thought is their deep faith in the rationality of the people and inability to believe that the people might not always perceive their true interests. That even educated men might fall prey to emotionalism and demagoguery.

In addition to defects of concept and content, classical democratic thought is marked by a strikingly unhistoric spirit. It grandly and inexplicably conceived a democratic society as an organ created by a single act of human will and reason, ignoring the empirical lessons of the centuries of English history through which representative government had been tortuously evolving in the face of numberless obstacles and diversions. If Englishmen could fall prey to such delusions, it was far easier for Americans whose revolution lent some credence to the abstractions of rationalist philosophy. The revolutionaries of 1776 in this country inherited a society which was already the freest in the world. Its freedom was built on solid foundations of English traditions and constitutional principles which formed the bedrock of future stability. The revolution was not directed against a feudal ancian regime but against the most liberal and progressive monarchy of Europe whose oppression of the colonist had consistent in recent and limited infringements on long established rights.

The greatest advantage of America, said Alexis de Tocqueville in a profound insight, lay in not having had to endure a democratic revolution. The American experience has thus had the appearance but not the reality of a society built by fire to the specifications of rationalist philosophy. We have been permitted the romance of imagining ourselves revolutionaries when in fact our democracy is the product of long tradition and evolution. The mischief of our rationalist illusion is that it leads to erroneous inferences about our own free society and about the prospects of government by the people elsewhere in the world. Most notably it blinds us to the powerful limitations on human action imposed by history to the incalculable difficulties of building a free society and to the basic incapacity of man to create viable institutions out of the abstractions of pure reason.

Society said Edmund Burke is indeed a contract but as the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are dead and those who are to be born. Of all the schools of anti-democratic thought that is sprung up in the last century and a half non-including Marxism has struck more deeply at classical democratic theory than that of the irrationalists who contested not only the intrinsic rationality of man but the power of education as a liberator of human reason. Irrationalism was a dominant strain in the late 19th century political thought.

Walter Baggard analyzed nation making in terms of historical processes of non-rational imitation and custom building leading in most nations to a stagnant traditionalism and only in a favored few to an age of discussion. In which man's frail powers of reason are at last liberated for self-government. Graham Wallace assailed the British tradition of benthamite rationalism as immature and naive contending that the average man was already victim of symbolism and superstition in a political jungle of irrationality. Robert Michaels pointed to tendencies toward oligarchy that he considered inevitable in a democratic society. The Port Yates expressed the new view of man with his this harsh pronouncement, the best lack all conviction, the worst are filled with passionate intensity. The descent from democratic optimism in western political thought was more than born out by events. As a result of the great conflicts of the 20th century, the worldwide dominance of the western democracies has been lost.

30 years after Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the world's safe for democracy, the North Atlantic democracies find themselves preoccupied with the defenses of western Europe, a chaotic Latin America, and the fringes of the Eurasian land mass against a powerful totalitarian adversary. The conflicts and upheavals of the 20th century have thrown the democracies on the defensive and generated powerful strains within the free western societies themselves. There has developed Wright's Walter Lippmann, a functional derangement of the relationship between the mass of the people and the government. The people, he writes, have acquired power which they are incapable of exercising, and the governments they elect have lost powers which they must recover if they are to govern. The impact of mass opinion on vital issues of war and peace in Lippmann's analysis is to impose a massive negative at critical junctures when new courses of policy are needed.

Lying disastrously behind the movement of events, Lippmann contends public opinion forced a vindictive peace in 1919, then refused to act against a resurgent Germany in the interwar years, and finally was aroused to paroxysms of hatred and unattainable hopes in a second world war that need never have occurred. The impact of public opinion, says Lippmann, has been nothing less than a compulsion to make mistakes. For a politician who serves at the pleasure of his constituency, the course of prudence is to adhere to prevailing views. To be prematurely right is to court what to the politician at least is a premature retirement. We come at last to the ironic inversion of the classical democratic faith in the will of the people. Not only does public opinion fail to hold the politician to the course of wisdom and responsibility, but on the contrary, to take the right course requires a singular act of courage

on the part of the politician. A few might share the will Sony in view that there is nothing more honorable than to be driven from power because one was right. But far more prevalent is the outlook of Lloyd George, who on more than one occasion quite candidly rejected proposals, whose merit he conceded on the ground that he did not wish to be crucified at home. In the Lloyd George view, which is a prototype and not without some merit in my opinion, there is little glory and still less constructive purpose in being defeated for failing to do the impossible. Can we reconstruct the excessively optimistic democratic thought of the 18th century into a chastened but more realistic philosophy of government by the people? I believe we can, and this belief I think is prevalent among the wisest of statesmen and scholars.

The philosophers of the age of reason emphasize the hopes and possibilities of a free society, but the strength and viability of democracy rests not only on its aspirations, but also on its accommodations, to the limitations of human wisdom, to man's inability to perceive the infinite. Democracy, Winston Churchill once said, is the worst formal government, men of every devised, except for every other form. Or in Jefferson's words, sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? If men are often irrational in their political behavior, it does not follow that they are always irrational. And what is more important, it does not follow that they are incapable of reason.

Whether in fact a people's capacity for self-government can be realized depends on the character and quality of education. It seems to me an astonishing distortion of priorities that the American people and their government gladly spend billions of dollars for space exploration while denying desperately needed funds to their public schools. I do not believe that a society which has shamefully starved and neglected its public education can claim to have exploited its fullest possibilities and found them warning. The case for government by elites is irrefutable insofar as it rests on the need for expert and specialized knowledge. The average citizen is no more qualified for the detailed administration of government than the average politician is qualified to practice medicine or to split an atom.

But in the choice of basic goals, the fundamental valued judgments that shape the life of a society, the judgment of trained elites is no more valid than the judgment of an educated people. The knowledge of the navigator is essential to the conduct of a voyage, but his special skills have no relevance to the choice of whether to take the voyage and where we wish to go. The distinction, of course, is between means and ends. The experience of modern times shows us that when the passengers take over the navigation of the ship, it is likely to go on the rocks. This does not mean that their chosen destination is the wrong one or that an expert would have made a better choice, but only that they are unlikely to get there without the navigator's guidance. The demonstrated superiority of democracy over dictatorship derives precisely from its refusal to let ruling elites make the basic moral decisions and valued judgments of society.

The Western democracies have made grave mistakes and suffered grievously for their error in allowing decisions of policy to be dictated by transitory popular emotions, but the absolute monarchies of the past and the dictatorships of the 20th century have brought far greater calamities upon themselves by committing their peoples to the pursuit of utopian dreams and barbaric myths. I include in this judgment the ruling dictatorships of Russia and China which have required their peoples to sacrifice individual will and judgment in the pursuit of goals that are neither rooted in human nature nor oriented to human happiness. The core of classical democratic thought is the concept of free individuality as the ultimate moral value of human society, stripped of its excessive optimism about human nature.

The core of classical liberalism remains valid and intact. The value and strength of this concept are its promise of fulfillment for man's basic aspirations. The philosopher and the psychoanalyst agree that whether it issues from reason or instinct, man's basic aspiration is for fulfillment as a free individual. A reconstructed philosophy of self-government accepting the weaknesses as well as the strengths of human nature must place heavy emphasis on the development of the human capacity for rational moral choice. The challenge to public education is nothing less than to prepare the individual for self-government, to cultivate his capacity for free inquiry and his more humane instincts, to teach him how rather than what to think. In short, to sustain democracy by what Ralph Barton Perry has called an express insistence upon quality and distinction.

A reconstructed philosophy of self-government must replace an ingenuous faith in human nature with a realistic faith in human capacity, recognizing that self-government, though the best form of political organization that men have devised, is also the most difficult. Democracy in short must come to terms with man's weaknesses and irrationalities while reaching out for the best that is in him. Such a revised approach to democracy has certain implications for the way in which we organize our government and conduct its affairs, as Americans with our deeply rooted and fundamentally healthy distrust of government power. We might start by at least re-examining certain long-held convictions based on this distrust of power. We might at least consider the proposition as expressed by Lord Radcliffe, that liberty looked upon as the right to find and to try to realize the best that is in oneself is not something to which power is necessarily hostile.

That indeed such liberty may even need the active intervention of authority to make it possible. To return to my earlier metaphor, we must guard against allowing the navigator to determine our destination, but we must allow him to steer the ship without amateur supervision of every turn of the wheel. A political leader is chosen because of his supposed qualifications for his job. If he is qualified, he should be allowed to carry it out according to his own best judgment. If his judgment is found defective by his electors, he can and should be removed. His constituents, however, must recognize that he has a duty to his office, as well as to them, and that their duty and turn is to fill the office but not to run it. We must distinguish between the functions of representation and government, requiring our elected leaders to represent us while allowing them to govern.

In a time of continuing international crisis with the danger of nuclear war never far removed, it may be well questioned whether the enormously complex and slow-moving procedures of the American government are adequate to meet both the dangers and opportunities of our foreign relations in particular. Too often decisions of principle are postponed or neglected in opportunities lost because of the obstacles to decision imposed by our policy processes. The source of this malady is the diffusion of authority between and within the executive and legislative branches and the accessibility of all of these centers of power to a wide variety of pressures and interests. The problem is compounded by the durable myth of Jacksonian democracy, the view that any literate citizen can do almost any job and that a democracy can do without a highly trained administrative elite.

Foreign politics wrote the talk field, demands scarcely any of those qualities which a democracy possesses, and they require, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all those faculties in which it is deficient. A democracy is unable to regulate the details of an important undertaking to persevere in a design and to work out its execution in the presence of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy and it will not await their consequences with patience. These qualities which are more especially belong to an individual or to an aristocracy. At least since 1917 the ability of the United States to advance its national interests internally as well as externally has come to depend upon our ability to cope with worldwide revolutionary forces. These dynamic forces to understate the matter have not readily lent themselves to treatment through the leisurely deliberative processes of the American constitutional system.

My question is not whether we might wish to alter our traditional foreign policy making procedures but whether in fact we have any choice but to do so in a world that obstinately refuses to conduct its affairs under Anglo-Saxon rules of procedures. The source of an effective foreign policy under our system is presidential power. This was never more clear than in the Cuban crisis of October 1962 when decisions of the utmost gravity were made by the president with the assistance of only his most intimate advisors in the executive branch. The circumstances were such that it was quite impossible to seek the counsel of the leaders of Congress who in fact and quite properly were informed but not consulted. Congress had in fact implicitly acknowledged the unfeasibility of consultation in an emergency by adopting in the summer of 1962 resolutions authorizing the president to use force if necessary to our vital interests in both Cuba and Berlin. There are major areas of foreign policy. Those relating more to long-term problems than to immediate crises where in presidential authority falls short of presidential responsibility as a result of the diffusion of power between executive and legislative branches and within the latter.

The foreign policy powers of Congress under the Constitution enable it to implement, modify or thwart the president's proposal, but not itself to initiate or to shape policy. These powers move over a widely dispersed within Congress among autonomous committees, each under a chairman whose old little if any anything in the way of political obligation to the president. The defects of Congress as an institution reflect the defects of classical democratic thought. These pertain primarily in our case to foreign policy. In domestic matters it seems to me the Congress is as well qualified to shape policy as the executive and in some respects more so because of the freedom of at least some members from the particular electoral pressures that operate on the president. The frequency of elections and the local orientation of party organizations however do not encourage serious and sustained study of international relations.

Congressmen are acutely susceptible to local and regional pressures and to the ways of fear and emotion that sometimes sweep over public opinion. The legislator in short is under constant and intense pressure to adhere to the prevailing tendencies of public opinion however temporary and unstable. Public opinion must be educated and led if it is to bolster wise and effective foreign policy. This is pre-eminently a task for presidential leadership because the presidential office is the only one under our constitutional system that constitutes a forum for moral and political leadership on a national scale. Accordingly I think that we must contemplate the further enhancement of presidential authority in foreign affairs. The prospect is a disagreeable and perhaps a dangerous one but the alternative is immobility and the paralysis of national policy in a revolutionary world which can only lead to consequences immeasurably more disagreeable and more dangerous.

The pre-eminence of presidential responsibility is in no way an implied license for the legislator to evade national and international responsibility and to surrender to the pressures of local and parochial interest. I can find and recall no better statement to define this responsibility than that of Edmund Burke in his classic statement to his constituents Bristol in 1774 with which all of you are familiar I am sure. As a freshman senator in 1946 I attempted in a speech at the University of Chicago to define the proper role of the legislator in relation to his constituents to the nation and to his own conscience. After 16 years I see no reason to alter the views I then expressed as follows.

The average legislator early in his career discovers that there are certain interests or prejudices of his constituents which are dangerous to try for with. Some of these prejudices may not be of fundamental importance to the welfare of the nation in which case he is justified in humoring them even though he may disapprove. The difficult case is where the prejudice concerns fundamental policy affecting the national welfare. He sounds sense of values the ability to discriminate between that which is of fundamental importance and that which is only superficial is an indispensable qualification of a good legislator. As an example of what I mean let us take the poll tax issue in isolationism regardless of how persuasive my colleagues or the national press may be about the heavals of the poll tax. I do not see its fundamental importance and I shall follow the views of the people of my state although it may be a symbolic of conditions which may many deplore it is exceedingly doubtful that its abolition will cure any of our major problems. On the other hand regardless of how strongly opposed my constituents may prove to be to the creation of and participation in an ever stronger United Nations organization I could not follow such a policy in that field unless and until it becomes clearly hopeless.

In conclusion I should like to reiterate a theme of these remarks that government by the people despite its failures and shortcomings remains the one form of political organization that offers the promise of fulfillment for our highest aspirations. Although we have been compelled to qualify the unlimited optimism of classical democratic thought we remain convinced that the core of that thought the belief in the moral sanctity of the free mind and the free individual remains the most valid of human philosophies. In Karl Becker's words although we no longer have the unlimited and solvent backing of God or nature we're still betting that freedom of the mind will never disprove the proposition that only through freedom of the mind can a reasonably just society ever be created.

You have heard Senator J. W. Fulbright recorded by W. R. V. R. in New York at the 10th anniversary Convocation of the Fund for the Republic the Center for Democratic Institutions. Next Charles Frankel who has written among other books the Golden Age American philosophy and the democratic prospect. He is principal author of the power of the democratic idea and his Carnegie Research Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University where he earned his PhD degree. Dr. Frankel has lectured at the Universities of Paris and Dublin the New York School of Social Work and Bennington College. He is the recipient of the Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships and the Woodbridge Prize. Now to introduce Charles Frankel Mr. Ashmore. Charles Frankel teaches philosophy at Columbia University and a wider audience through a series of notable books the most recent of which is the democratic prospect as a practicing philosopher he is of course a universalist and if you have any doubt of that I suggest this brief biographical note.

He has been a Fulbright Fellow he has been a resident professor at the University of Paris he has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Dublin Charles Frankel. Ashmore has given me a chance to say in public what I've long wanted to say that there's any man who has ruined my life by raising my standards it's Senator Fulbright. I find myself in so much agreement that like Father Murray I too am embarrassed because a philosopher has a conditioned reflex as you know and the reflexes to disagree one definition of a philosopher is the man who thinks differently. I find myself very very greatly in sympathy with Mr. Mendez France's suggestions as to the pivotal importance of participation and the very great desire for participation and representation in contemporary democracy I think one of the most crucial issues that we do face in assessing our present condition in future prospects is the issue.

Of participation the issue of the degree to which ordinary citizens can take an effective relevant and useful part in the affairs of the Commonwealth I would say not so much in criticism of Mr. Mendez France's paper as in suggestion as to what I should like to see him do next. It is our speak of participation I think it is very very important to try to distinguish between types and levels of participation and I shall try in the remarks I'm going to make to at least indicate how I would think on that subject. With Senator Fulbright I thoroughly agree that I shall avoid the word classical inherited democratic theory badly needs revision my own view is that we in fact don't behave very well but behave a lot better than our theory leads us to lead us to suspect inherited democratic theory leads us to criticize as diseases in contemporary democracy.

What is often a very effective adjustment to the realities I would only say this if I may indulge myself for a moment as a professor and speak to an erstwhile professor I don't think the inherited theorists of democracy the older theorist democracy was quite so foolish and certainly not nearly so optimistic as Senator Fulbright lets on James Madison just take one example was nobody's fool. And what he took for granted I think as the perpetual problem of all political situations of all political systems I think it's the problem which democratic theory old and modern faces most squarely is the problem of continued disagreement continued rivalry continued competition between interests between persons between opinions. Marxist theory would like to imagine that there was some magic some alchemy by which in a future good society this could be done away with if you assume as Mr. Mendez France made very plain.

That disagreement is factionalism is in some way or other a fundamental decision of all sophisticated human societies then you have got to figure out some way for reasonably and peacefully modifying and regulating these disagreements I think the classic democratic theory held these views and in this respect very very far from utopianism. Now with respect to Father Murray's remarks I find myself in thorough agreement with his emphasis on virtue and with his very I think a stoop remarks about the difficulty of defining the phrase the people I cannot resist saying however as one who happens to know some languages in which there are no definite articles and no indefinite ones as to say languages in which there is no word the and no word a. That it is very hard to make a distinction between the tradition and the a tradition or between the tradition and received opinions the tradition is certainly a set of opinions received from past I am not quite sure by what political means

Commence it with democracy we could define what the tradition is I myself feel that I live in a society in which there are many traditions and I choose my own received opinions occasionally I have some own of my own that aren't received. I should take like take the time that's left to me to talk just a bit about the problem of elite and electorate as I see the issue and as a philosopher it seems to me to be my place to try to define terms with a little precision because I think a good deal of our difficulties about theory go back the fact that we aren't thinking carefully about the meanings of terms. Let me turn first to the word elite. I would point out in the first place that in the context of modern specialized expertise and in the context of large your critically organized government the word elite is not used in its classic form the word

elite in its classic form stood for a class class with a homogeneous background presumably with a common social outlook we are now talking about people who acquire positions of authority or people who acquire positions of great advisory importance due to some specialized kind of knowledge or some specialized kind of experience. Now with respect to discussions of elites as so newly defined it seems to me that we habitually make certain assumptions which we very rarely bring to the surface when we bring them to the surface I think they very quickly can be shown to be in fact are almost immediately seen to be erroneous. One of the questions for example it's often raised is why the people in their passion and in their foolishness should be allowed to rule when people who know better when they get in the way of people who know better.

One of the assumptions here is that technical experts agree those of you who are economists or those of you who are lawyers or for that matter those of you who are doctors will know that this is just not so technical experts do not agree perhaps the range of disagreement is a little narrower and it is for the rest of us but it is not the case that and the those who occupy elite positions in modern society can be held to hold some one position. It's partly for this reason that I find Mr. Walter Lippmann's book a little difficult to follow it seems to me that he assumes all the way through that the elite groups that would govern foreign policy would have an easy way of coming to agreement. My own view is that there would be elites holding different points of view and we would still need some mechanism for determining which set of leaders will regulate our policy. A second assumption that seems to me to be extremely important is the notion that the decisions that are made in the political field by so-called experts or the elite are technical decisions they are but within extremely narrow limits.

I can think of very few important political decisions that do not involve the weighing and assessing of evidence from a wide variety of different specialties. Now this means that each of us even those who of us who are experts in one field become very quickly layman the moment we move into another field. The view that expertise is a prerequisite for holding competent opinions on public affairs is a view which does not disqualify just some of us known as the people. It disqualifies all of us. No one today can be an expert in the fields. He ought to ideally be an expert in in order to make public decisions. What is called for in making public decisions accordingly is not omniscience or omnicompetent knowledge but something closer to wisdom and common sense and an understanding of when and where and for what reasons to rely on the advice

of experts. This is all the trua where questions of morals are concerned as Senator Fulbright quite rightly pointed out and as I should wish to underscore I think that there are no experts in morals. Plato had to justify the view that there were experts in morals in order to justify the notion that philosophers should govern society. I am grateful to Plato for without him I would not have a discipline but I disagree with that view. Therefore when we turn to the problem of elites it seems to me the crucial question for all modern society is the Soviet Union as well as the United States is that you have competition among the elites and the problem is to work out some system for regulated competition, some system for choosing leaders which will govern this process. From a pragmatic point of view I think democracy is one system for choosing those who will lead.

And in these terms we should now turn to the question of the electorate. The most important thing that I would wish to say about the electorate is this. In so far as the mass of the people are effectively involved in the political processes of their country they are already organized in groups and are usually led by professional leaders. The political process is not in fact a process in which they are opposed to we. It is a process in which some groups with leaders are in and other groups with leaders are out. The most important modification that I would add to this two simple formula I have very little time as you know. The most important qualification is that there are also some groups that are way out that is to say they are not in the competition at all. One of the great problems for democracy indeed the evolution of democracy has been largely the growth of a political community in which more and more groups of people have moved to an organized status and have become legitimate members of the political community with leaders who could effectively voice their interests.

At the present time in the United States we are fighting that battle over the Negro groups. The Negro groups are seeking to gain legitimacy. They are seeking to gain the same voice as the white groups. When people talk about opinion in the South it is generally meant to be white opinion. When the Negroes wish to be regarded as legitimate so that Negro opinion also figures in statements about Southern opinion. The only important issue particularly in a society as vast as our own is the problem of reaching the unorganized, the invisible. In the United States today for example the old people do not have effective organized representation. The interests of the urban groups are not effectively organized. Very often it is necessary for government, a democratic government to take a lead in organizing the unorganized in providing the voiceless with a voice.

But the problem of the relationship of the electorate to the elite is essentially I think a problem of association and organization. Well this brings me to my conclusions and I would state them very briefly. First of all I think we have to reappraise the standards which inherited theory has told us to use in judging democracy. With regard to the competence of citizens for self-government it seems to me these are the questions that are relevant. Have they the requisite ability to judge human beings? Are they shrewd enough to tell the genuine article from the charlatan? Are they shrewd enough to tell the demagogue from the honest man? Now the obvious answer to that is certainly not always. Very often not. But it seems to me that over the history of democracy you can give a pretty good statement to the effect that the people haven't made all that many mistakes. Moreover you must remember that they can only choose between the programs presented to them by leaders. They can only choose between the candidates presented to them by the elite groups.

Very often as a voter I have sometimes wished wondered why I had to choose between Mr. A and Mr. B. Was not my preference for Mr. A that led me to vote for him. It was my dispreference for Mr. B. Now that isn't entirely my fault. This is the failure of elite groups. But I think on the whole we have to ask whether human beings have enough shrewdness. I'm not served and by the way I think television here is helpful. It seems to get underneath a man's skin and tell you who's speaking from the heart and who isn't. I think the second thing that is important is that the electorate understand not the details of the issues but the general spirit, temper, drift of the issues. They have to have some understanding of history. They have to have enough understanding of scientific methods, enough understanding of intellectual discipline to be able to see that arguments have come out of a certain context and have a certain background. Finally I think an extremely important issue once again is the question of leadership. If I were to say what the most serious defect of received democratic theory is I would say it's tendency to suppress the significance of leadership in a democracy.

The crucial question is recruitment, distribution of the recruitment and distribution of leaders. Are the best people in a given society willing to go into politics? Do they find the public life a satisfying and rich one? Is it too punishing? Is the morality the code of politics one which they would retreat from? These are very difficult questions but they are issues on which the character government turned. Secondly, what is the distribution of leadership? Is leadership of labor unions as effective, as talented, as educated, as the leadership of great corporations? Where are the leaders for those who are voiceless? Where are the moralists? Where if you will, are the poets? The question of the distribution of talents in the community greatly affects these problems. Finally I would turn to the issues that Monsieur Mendez France particularly emphasize questions of participation.

I would say the crucial issue to my mind is the way in which voluntary organizations and not to avoid a dirty word it's not as dirty as we make it. Pressure groups are organized. In the next 10 years it seems to me we shall have to move very very strongly in the direction of guaranteeing rights to individuals within great voluntary organizations. The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions has turned out some very interesting material on this subject. The second great question is how we empower groups, particularly groups in areas where people now do not have effective representation. Finally I would say a very important issue is an issue of decentralization. Now I do not wish to be misunderstood here. I do not think we are going to get myself. I do not think we are going to get decentralization in the United States without a plan. Planification in the French sense. I think only coordination of plans at a center is likely to produce the necessary decentralization which can give individuals the chance to work on the local and regional level at issues they have the competence to deal with.

I do not myself think there is any great intrinsic virtue in participation as such. People have their own personal lives to live. If they do not wish to participate my own conception of a man's rights such that he should not be asked to or forced to. But the tragedy of contemporary democracy is that many people wish to. Many people have their interests involved in participating but cannot find the channel, cannot find the avenue through which they can make their voices heard and their energies felt. This seems to me to require the application of perhaps the United States's greatest creation in politics and that is the federalist principle. I remember reading just last month an article by Herbert Luther on Switzerland. He said the success of Switzerland is that in the past people's liberties in small things and particularly in small things were regarded.

I myself do not feel terribly disenfranchised that I am not present every day or decisions about Cuba or something else are being discussed. I want a chance to choose the leaders who will make those decisions and throw them out if I can if I don't like the answer. But I do feel disenfranchised when in my own neighborhood or my own professional association I cannot, I can of course but I would feel disenfranchised if I could not get up and speak and if necessary walk out loud enough, slamming the door loud enough so they knew I'd left. I think the sense of impotence at the local level is the crucial issue. I think you've had a busy day, I'd like to end with a parable which to me seems to me very important to all of us as citizens as we try to judge our responsibilities. The story of a young couple that was considering divorce and they went to the marriage councilor said well before you go ahead with it why don't you go down the block and talk to Mr. and Mrs. Jones who have been married 40 years and our perfectly married couple.

Find out what the secret of their success is, maybe to do you some good. Well down they went to see Mr. and Mrs. Jones were happy to see them. And they sat down, Mrs. Jones stood in the corner, Mr. Jones held the floor and he said well tell you the secret of our success at the very beginning of our marriage we clearly divided responsibility. It was determined that I would handle all the big problems and Mrs. Jones would handle the little problems. They said thank you very much that may help us start it on the way out when suddenly they turned around and said well just to be sure what are the big problems and what are the little problems. He said well Mrs. Jones determines where we should live and what schools the kids will go to and how to plan the family budget and if I get an offer of a new job whether I should take it. I determined what should be done about disarmament, international monetary regulation and the hydrogen bomb.

Charles Frankl spoke on elite and electorate is government by the people possible at the 10th anniversary convocation of the Fund for the Republic, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Heard earlier was Senator J. W. Fulbright. This has been the fifth in a series of 12 programs concerned with challenges to democracy in the next decade. On the next program you will hear Walter P. Ruther, head of the AFL CIO and A.A. Burley, Jr., a director of the 20th Century Fund and of the Accord de l'Europe in France. Speakers at the 10th anniversary convocation of the Fund for the Republic. If you would like to know more about the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, you are invited to write to Dr. Robert M. Hutchins, Box 4068, Santa Barbara, California. This recorded program was produced by Riverside Radio WRVR, the Metropolitan FM Station of the Riverside Church in the City of New York.

For broadcast by the Educational Radio Network, the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, the Voice of America and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The National Association of Educational Broadcasters, Box 4068, Santa Barbara, California. The National Association of Educational Broadcasters, Box 4068, Santa Barbara, California. The National Association of Educational Broadcasters, Box 4068, Santa Barbara, California. This is the Educational Radio Network. This is the Educational Radio Network.

This is the Educational Radio Network. This is the Educational Radio Network. This is the Educational Radio Network.

This is the Educational Radio Network. This is the Educational Radio Network. This is the Educational Radio Network.

This is the Educational Radio Network. This is the Educational Radio Network. This is the Educational Radio Network.

This is the Educational Radio Network. This is the Educational Radio Network. This is the Educational Radio Network.

This is the Educational Radio Network. The Educational Radio Network. The Educational Radio Network.

The Educational Radio Network. The Educational Radio Network. The Educational Radio Network.

The Educational Radio Network.