Content area
Full Text
To the eyes of a European historian, the United States in 2007 vividly resembles England in 1640 and France in 1787. In 1640s England, King Charles I was trying to raise funds for his wars by manipulating and evading the will of Parliament, a bastion of privilege and special interests. Reinforced by disputes over religion and royal prerogative, the confrontation soon escalated into civil war. The king lost his crown and his head in 1649. In the France of 1787, King Louis XVI was trying to raise funds to meet war-accumulated debt by manipulating and evading the will of the country's sovereign courts, bastions of privilege and special interests. The confrontation soon escalated into revolution. The king lost his crown in 1792 and his head in 1793.
In early 2007, U.S. President George W. Bush was trying to raise funds for a disastrous war in Iraq by manipulating and evading the will of Congress, a bastion of privilege and special interests. The conflict looked to escalate into a great confrontation. As in 17th-century England and 18th-century France, each side claimed to be defending time-honored rights. President Bush will no doubt relinquish his crown, and save his head, in January 2009. He's no king and this is no monarchy. But in the meantime we rehearse an ancient drama: Rulers demand funds for military activity from reluctant, powerful institutions that claim to speak for a wronged nation. Under these circumstances, the most a ruler can hope for is grudging consent.
Let's not underestimate the political value of grudging consent, however. In the short run, it means that citizens and their representatives remain properly wary about the harm that rulers may do. In the short run, democracy thrives on bargained compliance rather than on either passive acceptance or uncompromising resistance. In the long historical run, furthermore, grudging consent opens the path to democratization itself, a path that depends critically on how rulers acquire the means to rule. But how-how do the conditions giving rise to grudging consent do that?
Democracy as a Verb
All systems of rule, whether democratic or undemocratic, survive by finding stable supplies of the basic resources it takes to run a government: means of coercion, administration and patronage. Of course, the mix of...