To sum up: the corruption of politics is due largely to the conception of the people as a crowd. To change this idea is, I believe, the first step in the reform of our political life. Unless this is done before we make sweeping changes in the mechanism of government, such changes will not mean progress. If the people are a crowd capable of nothing but imitation, what is the use of all the direct government we are trying to bring about, how can a “crowd” be considered capable of political decisions? Direct government gives to everyone the right to express his opinion. The question is whether that opinion is to be his particularist opinion or the imitation of the crowd or the creation of the group. The party has dominated us in the past chiefly because we have truly believed the people to be a crowd. When we understand the law of association as the law of psychic interplay, then indeed shall we be on the way towards the New Democracy.
Direct government will not succeed if it is operated through the party organization; it will not succeed even if separated from party control if it means the crowd in another guise. To be successful direct government must be controlled by some method not yet brought into practical politics. When we have an organized electorate, we shall begin to see the advantages of direct government.
At the beginning of this chapter three closely related movements in American politics were mentioned. The third must now be considered—the introduction of social programs into party platforms.
We have had three policies in legislation: (1) the let-alone policy,78 (2) the regulation policy, and now (3) the constructive policy is just appearing.
In order to get away from the consequences of laissez-faire, we adopted, at the end of the nineteenth century, an almost equally pernicious one, the regulation theory. The error at the bottom of the “regulation” idea of government is that people may be allowed to do as they please (laissez-faire) until they have built up special rules and privileges for themselves, and then they shall be “regulated.” The regulation theory of government is that we are to give every opportunity for efficiency to come to the top in order that we shall get the benefit of that efficiency, but at the same time our governmental machinery is to be such that efficiency is to be shorn of its power before it can do any harm—a sort of automatic blow-off. Gauge your boiler (society) at what it will stand without bursting, then when our ablest people get to that point the blow-off will make society safe.
But the most salient thing about present American politics is that we are giving up both our let-alone and our regulation policies in favor of a constructive policy. There has been a steady and comprehensible growth of democracy from this point of view, that is, of the idea of the function of government being not merely to protect, to adjust, to restrain, and all the negative rest of it, but that the function of government should be to build, to construct the life of its people. We think now that a constructive social policy is more democratic than the protection of men in their individual rights and property. In 1800 the opposite idea prevailed, and Jefferson, not Hamilton, was considered the Democrat. We must reinterpret or restate the fundamental principles of democracy.
But why do we consider our present constructive social policies more democratic? Are they necessarily so? Has not paternalistic Germany constructive social policies for her people? Social legislation in England and America means an increase of democracy because it is a movement which is in England and America bound up with other democratic movements.79 In America we see at the same time the trend towards (1) an increase of administrative responsibility, (2) an increase of direct control by the people, (3) an increase of social legislation. Not one of these is independent of the other two. They have acted and reacted on one another. Men have not first been given a more direct share in government and then used their increased power to adopt social policies. The two have gone on side by side. Moreover, the adoption of social policies has increased the powers of government and, therefore, it has more and more come to be seen that popular control of government is necessary. At the same time the making of campaign issues out of social policies has at once in itself made all the people more important in politics. Or it is equally true to say that giving the people a closer share in government means that our daily lives pass more naturally into the area of politics. Hence we see, from whichever point we begin, that these three movements are bound together.
Thus in America there is growing recognition of the fact that social policies are not policies invented for the good of the people, but policies created by the people. The regulation theory was based on the same fallacy as the let-alone theory, namely, that government is something external to the structural life of the people. Government cannot leave us alone, it cannot regulate us, it can only express us. The scope of politics should be our whole social
