The typical form of human government moved from absolute monarchy, to oligarchy, to democracy, but it did not stop there. As government grew, popular control over it declined, while its own bureaucracy became the principal factor determining its direction. We have now reached the stage where to term the result a “democracy” is laughably in error. We have entered the era of the Bureaucrat State, and the mechanisms for restoring popular control are very limited indeed.
Two centuries ago, governments had almost no bureaucracy. Under Lord Palmerston in the 1830s, the foreign policy of the world’s greatest power was managed by a total of about 30 clerks, with Palmerston himself reading and signing, and in many cases writing by hand, every dispatch that went out. Such a system required an energetic Minister at the top – under some lazy early 19th Century occupants of Ministerial offices, official business clogged up completely and the department descended into complete stasis.
That system also provided excellent links between the government and the electorate’s wishes. While an individual minister might be in the House of Lords, or MP for Old Sarum, where the electorate consisted largely of sheep, he was also a member of a small Cabinet, generally no more than 12 people, who were collectively responsible for justifying government policy to the electorate. That justification took two forms: elections every few years and defending individual policies and actions to a rowdy House of Commons and a powerful and intelligent House of Lords, both almost unbound by party discipline and with members taking close account of what was said in debate.
The electorate itself was wildly mixed between constituencies, with some being democratic while others were either tight oligarchies or “nomination boroughs” subject to the whim of the local landowner. Thus, electoral opinion was not always completely matched to mass opinion; in particular the electorate was more suspicious of welfare schemes than the overall populace. Still, popular control over government’s activities was strong, and popular support for the government was also strong except in periods of exceptional economic difficulty.
In the United States at that time, the direct connection between ministers and the public was less direct, because the ministers were appointed by the President, and so responsible to him on policy, and maverick Presidents like Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson governed quite differently than they had campaigned. Still, legislation was drafted by Congress, and Congress was exceptionally responsive to its constituents, more so than in Britain, with Congressional districts small enough in population that they generally represented closely the predominant economic activity in the area.
