Government Systems & a New Form of Tyranny

The convergence of the American and British presidential and parliamentary systems on a new form of tyranny poses a serious threat to what scholar Walter Bagehot called “government by discussion,” the only civilized hope of free government known to mankind today.

Introduction

In his classic 1867 book The English Constitution, the great Economist editor and scholar Walter Bagehot offered a trenchant comparison of the British parliamentary and American presidential systems of what he called “government by discussion.” Since then, many scholars have pointed out ways in which the British system has become more presidential, and some are now suggesting that the American system is becoming more parliamentary. A careful analysis confirms that this assessment is accurate in several ways, but it is also true to say that both systems are moving in the direction of a new form of tyranny—a term that was familiar, not only to Bagehot but also to the American framers and to the ancient Greek and early modern political theorists on whom our founders relied in their act of constitutional creation.

The Greatness of Bagehot and the Relevance of His Analysis

Classical scholar Henry Paolucci pays tribute to Bagehot in his Brief History of Political Thought and Statecraft:

He is the man who first made the London Economist the great financial magazine it has since remained. Everyone in England who writes about the English parliamentary system of government and everyone in America who writes on the American presidential system of government is greatly in his debt.[1]

Paolucci reminds us that Bagehot lived and wrote during the time of our Civil War, which was also the time of the unification of Germany and Italy and of the Reform Bills which revolutionized the politics of Victorian Britain. After an early career in banking and literary criticism, Bagehot began writing for the Economist, serving as its editor for sixteen years.

Unlike the ancients who observed three main forms of government—by one, few, and many—Bagehot saw four types of regime available to mankind. The first, on one extreme, was the traditional or hereditary form, which he said was likely to be stable because succession was assured by birth but also inefficient because birth is no measure of competence. On the opposite extreme, Bagehot said, was the revolutionary type of government, which usually took the form of leadership by a dictator or dictatorial elite. Such a form was correspondingly unstable but very efficient, as dictators only tend to hold on to power as long as they are able to maintain their positions with clever schemes.

Bagehot also said that, between these traditional and dictatorial forms of government lay a number of types, of which, in modern times, those of the United States (presidential) and Britain (parliamentary) are most representative. He stresses this point in the Introduction to the revised 1872 edition of his English Constitution:

I do not apologize for dwelling at length upon these points, for the subject is one of transcendent importance. The practical choice of first-rate nations is between the Presidential government and the Parliamentary; no State can be first-rate which has not a government by discussion, and those are the only two existing species of that government. It is between them that a nation which has to choose its government must choose. And nothing therefore can be more important than to compare the two, and to decide upon the testimony of experience, and by facts, which of them is better.[2]

In making this comparison, Bagehot strips away what he calls the “literary theory” of the way the constitutional systems are supposed to work and exposes the reality of their true operation.

This method greatly influenced Woodrow Wilson, the founder of contemporary American political science as well as the man who led the first twentieth-century war to end wars.

It also led to the writings of a whole school of scholars in the American pluralist tradition, from Arthur Bentley to David Truman, James Q. Wilson, and beyond. Lord Balfour, Prime Minister of Britain at the turn of the 20^th century, commented on this great contribution of Bagehot in his Introduction to a 1928 edition of Bagehot’s classic:

His method can perhaps best be understood from a judgment which, in one of his essays, he passes on the author of an unsuccessful political biography, namely that he ‘did not look closely and for himself at real political life.’ Bagehot … did look closely and for himself at real political life. Hence his ceaseless endeavors to discover how public business was in fact transacted, as distinguished from the way in which its transaction was officially described; hence the contempt with which this master of political writing regarded what he called the ‘literary’ view of constitutional procedure.[3]

Bagehot’s Comparison

Bagehot begins his analysis by dividing the institutions of the English constitution into two classes or parts. The first are the dignified parts, “which excite and preserve the reverence of the population.” Here, Bagehot means principally the monarchy and the House of Lords.

The second are the efficient parts—the House of Commons and the cabinet—“those by which it, in fact, works and rules.” Both parts are essential to the operation of the system, he avers:

The dignified parts of Government are those which bring it force—which attract its motive power. The efficient parts only employ that power. The comely parts of a Government have need, for they are those upon which its vital strength depends. They may not do anything that a simpler polity would not do better, but they are the preliminaries, the needful prerequisites of all work.[4]

The dignified parts of the English constitution, Bagehot says, “are very complicated and somewhat imposing, very old and rather venerable; while its efficient part … is decidedly simple and rather modern.” With a view to the long development of the English constitution, Bagehot adds that “we have made, or rather stumbled on, a constitution.”[5]

The “literary theory” of the English constitution—a view adopted by Blackstone as well as by Montesquieu, who greatly influenced the American framers—described it as characterized by separation of powers and balance among the divided branches. Nothing could be further from the truth, Bagehot claims: “The efficient secret of the English Constitution may be described as the close union, the near complete fusion of the executive and legislative powers.”

Far from being divided, the legislature and the executive are joined in the British system, and the “connecting link is the Cabinet, … a committee of the legislative body selected to be the executive body.” This Cabinet is, in Bagehot’s words, “a combining committee – a hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens, the legislative part of the State to the executive part of the State. In its origin, it belongs to the one, in its functions it belongs to the other.”[6]

By contrast, Bagehot stresses, the American presidential system has no such fusion:

The characteristic of it is that the President is elected from the people by one process, and the House of Representatives by another.  The independence of the legislative and executive powers is the specific quality of Presidential government, just as their fusion and combination is the precise principle of Cabinet government.[7]

The American framers, Bagehot later goes on to say, thought they were copying the English model, but in reality they created the opposite system:

Hobbes told us long ago … that there must be a supreme authority, a conclusive power, in every State on every point somewhere…. But there are two classes of governments. In one, the supreme determining power is upon all points the same; in the other, that ultimate power is different upon different points – now resides in one part of the Constitution and now in another.  The Americans thought they were imitating the English in making their Constitution upon the last principle – in having one ultimate authority for one sort of matter, and another for another sort. But in truth, the English Constitution is the type of the opposite species; it has only one authority for all sorts of matters.[8]

The differences between presidential and parliamentary are evident, Bagehot says, both in quiet times and moments of crisis. In quiet times, the parliamentary system speaks with one voice.  The presidential system is given to division and deadlock. One can only think of the stalemates between the White House and Capitol Hill on issues ranging from the budget to gun control in contemporary times when one reads Bagehot’s words: “Accordingly, when a difference of opinion arises, the legislature is forced to fight the executive, and the executive is forced to fight the legislative, and so very likely they contend to the conclusion of their respective terms.”  In times of crisis, the parliamentary system can quickly change the head of government, just as Britain would later turn out Neville Chamberlain to put in Winston Churchill as premier at the start of the Second World War—turning “out the Quaker” and putting “in the pugilist,” as Bagehot says:

Under a Cabinet Constitution, at a sudden emergency, this people can choose a ruler for the occasion… [W]e often want, at the sudden occurrence of a grave tempest, to change the helmsman—to replace the pilot of the calm by the pilot of the storm.

The American system, Bagehot insists, has no such flexibility:

The American Government calls itself a Government of the supreme people; but at a quick crisis, the time when a sovereign power is most needed, you cannot find the supreme people… [Moreover], you have a President chosen for a fixed period, and immovable during that period; all the arrangements are for stated times. There is no elastic element, everything is rigid, specified, dated. Come what may, you can quicken nothing, and can retard nothing. In a country of complex foreign relations it would mostly happen that the first and most critical year of every war would be managed by a peace Premier, and the first and most critical years of peace by a war Premier.[9]

In short, it is, in Bagehot’s view, this tendency to division and deadlock and this lack of flexibility that makes the presidential system, in both quiet and crisis times, inferior to its parliamentary counterpart.

Parliamentary Government Since Bagehot: Is Britain Becoming More Presidential?

Some changes in British parliamentary government since 1867 have only confirmed Bagehot’s analysis. For example, he said that the monarchy and the House of Lords are the dignified parts of the system which operate only to attract public respect and not to get things done. That is even more true now.  It is certainly still the case that, as Bagehot said, the monarch’s role is limited to “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn.”

As Bagehot colorfully put it, “she must sign her own death warrant if the two Houses unanimously send it up to her.”[10] Bagehot also called the House of Lords a ceremonial body that serves as an “index that revolution is unlikely”:

So long as many old leaves linger on the November trees, you know there has been little frost and no wind; just so while the House of Lords retains much power, you may know that there is no desperate discontent in the country, no wild agency likely to cause a great demolition.[11]

Any power that the Lords had to defeat legislation evaporated with the Parliament Act of 1911, in which then Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, assisted by a very eager young Winston Churchill, ensured that the Lords could only temporarily delay, not prevent, a tax on the rich designed to pay for new dreadnought battleships for use against Germany. Under legislation passed after the second world war, if a bill passes the Commons in two successive sessions, it becomes law despite the opposition of the upper House. The Lords is also today more reflective of the general view of the electorate, since the Life Peerages Act of 1958 and subsequent legislation ensured that only about half of its members are there by inherited titles; the rest are appointed by successive governments.[12]

In his Introduction to a 1963 edition of Bagehot’s classic, R.H.S. Crossman, a member of Parliament, writes of changes in the century since Bagehot—in particular of the “transfer of effective power from the floor of the Commons to the great party machines and the bureaucracy in Whitehall.” He adds that “the book in which he achieved such an exact separation of political myth from political reality became a part of the dignified façade behind which a new ‘efficient secret’ would operate.”[13]

The first major change is in the role of political parties. Bagehot described party organization as weak and Parliament as a body of “independent MPs, collectively able to make and unmake ministries.” All this started to change around the turn of the twentieth century, with the rise of the disciplined Labour Party. Later, the Conservatives were forced to copy Labour, and their party was, in Crossman’s words, “transformed from an old-fashioned caucus… into a modern, carefully disciplined mass party.” Today, this sort of mass party has become “a centralized, extra-parliamentary machine, constantly seeking to impose its discipline and its doctrine on the Member of Parliament.”

Party changes have meant a complete change in the way Parliament operates. While for Bagehot, the Commons was the scene of great debate “where ministries are made and unmade,” today it is merely a forum for the clash “between well disciplined political armies.”  In Bagehot’s time, the member of Parliament could defy his whip and vote his conscience. Now, Crossman writes, “the prime responsibility of the member is no longer to his conscience or to the elector, but to his party.” Consequently, “the debate on the floor of the House becomes a formality, and the division which follows it a foregone conclusion. It is what is said and done in the secrecy of the party meeting which is now really important.”

These changes make the British system more presidential in important ways.

Bagehot contrasted the House of Commons with the American Congress, where “the debates are prologues without a play” and cannot do anything. That description now fits Parliament.

As Crossman puts it, “government control of Parliament and its business becomes absolute.”

The public can still see the Prime Minister and his government subjected to questioning from the Opposition. This drama really is mere pageantry now, however, because “any modern government can survive, whatever the Opposition may do, until the Prime Minister decides to dissolve.” Crossman continues:

That is why a government tends to pay much more attention to the private approaches from its own back benchers than it does to the public onslaught of the Opposition. For even if the Shadow Cabinet triumphs in the debates day after day, the Government knows that it cannot be brought down except by disloyalty among its own supporters.[14]

Bagehot celebrated the openness of Parliamentary debates which educate the nation and contrasted them with the secrecy of American congressional committees, which does not.

Today, as Crossman notes, “the struggle for power … has also been hidden from the public eye” of the British electorate:

In the classic parliamentary system, the debates were public, the issues were known, and the personal struggle for power could take place on the floor of the House….In our modern system, all [the voter] can see is the shadow fight between the selected champions of the two party phalanxes…. Thus he can never know for certain why … a policy defended for years is now dropped, and what importance should be attached to the various items in a programme.[15]

Parliament today “does not govern…. Its legislative role amounts to rubber stamping the government’s proposals.”[16] As in the American Congress, policy debates do not matter, and most legislation is proposed by the government—in American terms, by the President.

Another respect in which the British system is becoming more presidential is in the decline of the importance of the Cabinet and the rise of the power of the Prime Minister.

Bagehot described a Cabinet of collective responsibility in which the Prime Minister was little more than primus inter pares. That started to change with Lloyd George’s centralized rule during World War I. As both Prime Minister and Minster of Defense during World War II, Churchill personally controlled the war effort. After the war, in Clement Atlee’s Labour government, there was no return to traditional Cabinet responsibility. There was, instead, a concentration of power around the Prime Minister. When Churchill again became the Premier in 1951, he announced that the first British atomic bomb had been successfully tested – the result of decisions made without any prior consultation of Cabinet whatsoever.[17]

American Presidents have, of course, relied more on their staffs than on their cabinet. Richard Nixon, for instance, let his National Security Advisor Kissinger dominate foreign policy in his first term, not his Secretary of State William Rogers. Presidents of both parties from Carter and Reagan to Obama and Trump have often ignored their cabinet. In Britain, both Thatcher in the 1980s and Blair in the 1990s governed “from the center,” with little regard for collective cabinet responsibility. As one MP recently put it, a “cabinet meeting has no chance of becoming a grave forum of statesmanlike debate.”[18] Policies are set by the Prime Minister’s office. There are no formal constitutional limits on the Prime Minister’s power;  as with the American President, the focus of the media and the public is on the Prime Minister, who is seen as representing and governing Britain.[19] As Crossman summarizes, we are witnessing “the final transformation of Cabinet Government into Prime Ministerial Government.”[20]

American Presidential Government Since Bagehot: Is America Becoming Parliamentary?

As in the case with Britain, America has witnessed changes in the last century and a half which have confirmed Bagehot’s analysis. It is still true that there is nearly always a tendency to stalemate and deadlock between Capitol Hill and the White House. The Electoral College is still, as Bagehot calls it, a “farce.” Today too, the elector “never chooses or thinks of choosing. He is but a messenger—a transmitter; the real decision is in those who choose him—who chose him because they knew what he would do.” Considering what the Democratic Party did to nominate Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, we can certainly say, with Bagehot, “the President is chosen by a machinery … too complicated to be perfectly known…. He is not the choice of the nation, he is the choice of the wire pullers.”[21]

The power of the press has certainly changed in America, however. Bagehot describes a weak press that is powerless to effect a change of government:

It can do nothing. It cannot change the administration…. If a Washington newspaper could have turned out Mr. Lincoln, there would have been good writing and fine argument in the Washington newspapers. But the Washington newspapers can no more remove a President during his term of place than the Times can remove a lord mayor during his year of office. Nobody cares for a debate in Congress which ‘comes to nothing,’ and no one reads long articles which have no influence on events. The Americans glance at the head of news and through the paper. They do not enter upon a discussion. They do not think of entering upon a discussion that would be useless.[22]

Ever since Watergate, however, the press—and the media more broadly—certainly does have the power to turn a President out of office, and they used it very effectively to destroy the presidencies, not only of Richard Nixon, but also of Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Donald Trump.

There are also ways in which the American system is becoming parliamentary.

The increased use of impeachment—once against Bill Clinton and twice against Donald Trump—suggests an executive that is at the mercy of the legislature, as in the British system. The disciplined unity of the Democratic Party under Pelosi can remind one of party government in Britain. And debates over some issues in the Congress—issues such as the impeachment of the President or the confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice—can rivet the public’s attention, as Bagehot said debates in the Commons do and those in Congress do not.

A Convergence on Tyranny

Crossman warned of future trends in British government half a century ago:

It has often been observed that when they were plunged into total war in 1940, the British people readily put their democratic Constitution into cold storage, and fought under a system of centralized autocracy. The Nazi totalitarian state was defeated because we were ready to accept a more far-reaching system of voluntary totalitarianism. What is not so often noticed is the extent to which the institutions and the behavior of voluntary totalitarianism have been retained since 1945.[23]

The same is true of the United States. The roots of presidential tyranny can, of course, be seen as far back as Jefferson with his Louisiana Purchase, about which, he wrote, the less said of the constitutional difficulties, the better, and Jackson, who, like Jefferson, asserted a right to defy the Supreme Court. Bagehot himself was very aware of what Clinton Rossiter later called Lincoln’s “Constitutional Dictatorship,” and he would have noted the increased war-time powers of Wilson, who had more authority delegated to him than the Russian Czar or the German Kaiser, and FDR in both the Depression and the Second World War. Since 1945, however, in both Britain and America, there has been a more permanent concentration of power in the executive. In Britain, Prime Ministers like Thatcher and Blair governed without regard to Cabinet because there are no formal constitutional limits on the prime minister’s power to govern.

In America, there are such formal constitutional limits, but they are mostly ignored.

The Constitution says the Congress makes laws, and, as Justice Black wrote for the Court in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v Sawyer, the President’s role in law making is constitutionally limited to the recommending of laws he thinks advisable and the vetoing of those he does not.

Modern Presidents of both parties, however, have used Executive Orders as if they were going out of style. The Constitution also says that the Congress declares war and must ratify treaties.

Presidents from Truman to Bush have made war without a declaration of war by Congress and have entered into binding executive agreements with heads of government of other nations without congressional oversight or approval. When that growth in executive power is combined with a genuine censorship of ideas and opinions that run contrary to the accepted majority view, the recipe for an effective voluntary totalitarianism in America is clearly set.

Bagehot knew about and despised tyranny.  He condemned the dictatorial rule of one man or of an oligarchic elite as unworthy of a free people. So too did Aristotle more than two millennia ago when he distinguished between political rule and the rule of a master over slaves.

So too did Polybius, who warned of the tendency of regimes to move in a cycle from government of one to few to many and then back to the rule of one. So too did John Locke, who calls absolute government “no form of civil government at all” and who espouses checks and balances to guard against the abuses of prerogative. Most important of all, our founding fathers understood well the vital importance of preserving liberty and guarding against tyranny.

The convergence of the American and British presidential and parliamentary systems on a new form of tyranny poses a serious threat to what Bagehot called “government by discussion,” the only civilized hope of free government known to mankind today.

The author gratefully acknowledges his Office Assistant, Noel Santiago, for his help in the planning of this article.

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Notes:

[1] Henry Paolucci, Brief History of Political Thought and Statecraft, Griffon House, 1979, p. 65.

[2] Walter Bagehot, Introduction to the Second Edition of The English Constitution, in The English Constitution, Cornell University Press, 1963, p. 310.

[3] Introduction to World Classics Edition of The English Constitution, Oxford, 1928.

[4] Bagehot, English Constitution (Cornell), 61-2.

[5] Ibid., 65.

[6] Ibid., 65-68.

[7] Ibid., 69.

[8] Ibid., 214-5.

[9] Ibid., 78-80.

[10] Bagehot, 111 and 98.

[11] Ibid., 132-33.

[12] The British Political Process, ed. By Tony Wright (Routledge, 2s000), pp. 201-2.

[13] Crossman, Introduction, p. 36.

[14] Crossman, 44.

[15] Ibid., 44-45.

[16] Wright, 195.pr

[17] Crossman, 48-55.

[18] Lord Lawson, The View From Number 11:   Memoirs of a Tory Radical.

[19] Wright, “Has the Prime Minister Become a President” in British Political Process,  272-4.

[20] Ibid., 51.

[21] Bagehot, 75-77.

[22] Ibid., 74.

[23] Crossman, 56.

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