As we digest the very strange French Presidential election (which ended with huge abstentions and, I believe, a record number of spoiled ballots) I thought it might be a good moment to reflect once again on the strange and in my view failed experiment in universal suffrage democracy which has troubled the free and unfree worlds for about a century.

In the free world this has sometimes destroyed freedom. In Weimar Germany a democratically-agreed constitution, employed by a democratically-elected President supervising a democratically-elected Parliament, was used to snuff out liberty in a matter of months. I suspect there are other instances of this, such as the Italian Parliament's passage of the Acerbo Law in November 1923, a law whose only and obvious purpose was to ensure a Fascist majority in the elections which followed soon afterwards.

Of course in the unfree world the difficulties of universal suffrage are made very much simpler by making sure that only one party stands, or that rival parties are bound to lose. In the free world, other ways have to be found to frustrate the popular will - elaborate lies, fiddled statistics, unfair media, advertising, unfair funding, you name it. Even where these things operate, the fact that the result cannot be wholly fixed, and that there are at least two adversarial parties, creates a pocket of liberty in which many good things survive. But that, of course, was the case before we ever had universal suffrage (which only really arrived here in 1950 after the abolition in 1948 of the old University seats).

I’ve discussed this liberty versus democracy problem before, prompted in my mind long ago by a nagging doubt which grew in my mind as I pondered the seeming anomaly of Hong Kong

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/06/is_democracy_th.html

Note my remarks on the Muslim Brotherhood, rather prophetic for 2007, though I would now (in the light of later research) revise some of my thoughts about Singapore and the Battle of Britain.

I then found that the history of free countries was by no means a story of perfect congruence between universal suffrage and liberty. As usual, what I had stumbled on was not new at all, but an old debate, largely forgotten.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/06/what-is-so-good-about-democracy-whats-wrong-with-libertarianism-and-who-has-the-right-to-review-what.html

Yesterday(Sunday 7th May) I came across another aspect of this anomaly, in an old programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Pick of the Week’ and drawn to my attention by an later reader:

At seven minutes into this http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08p5kym#play you will find the late Alistair Cooke explaining how the USA comes to have an electoral college, which takes the formal decision on who becomes President.

He notes of the constitutional convention which came up with it 'Of all the forms of government they were considering,[in the spring of 1787] democracy was the one they most wanted to avoid'. 'George Washington said : "Accounted by civil societies it [democracy]is the worst and nastiest kind of government"’.

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton devised the original Electoral College (of independent and incorruptible , thus wealthy men of virtue and merit) as a precaution against ‘the worst of democracy’s threats, tyranny and majority rule’. Thus was founded the nation now regarded as the world's greatest democracy.

A few years ago, during a BBC Question Time programme, I encountered alarm and scorn among fellow guests, when I mischievously suggested that total democracy might not be a good thing, and said I was pleased that there were restraints on it in our constitution.

These days, now that the Left have been badly bruised by universal suffrage in the EU referendum and the Donald Trump election, I find that I have more sympathy on this subject than I want or need, from people who would once have regarded my opinion as ‘fascist’. ( I should point out here that the USA’s electoral college did *not* play the active restraining role envisaged by Madison and Hamilton in this choice. It just passively let arithmetic do the job. Likewise, the English courts offered the shadow of Parliamentary supremacy, not its substance, when judging Parliament's duties after the EU referendum. Who now dares defy the gods of democracy?).

You might think Emmanuel Macron’s victory (not really a surprise) over Marine le Pen puts an end to all this left-wing moaning about the people's will being pretty awful. But I don’t think it does. Five years hence we will see the whole thing again, and then what?

France’s story is far from over. I cannot see how Emmanuel Macron’s Presidency can be anything other than a failure. He comes from exactly the same elite school as all the other recent failures, he is in fact a strong supporter of France’s EU-loving metropolitan left, which has made such a mess of things for the past 20 years or so, and he largely owes his position to the uncritical support of France’s elite left-wing media, which applauded him into office and savaged his only mainstream conservative rival, Francois Fillon.

Fillon, interestingly, was not part of the French elite of ‘Enarques’, graduates of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, France’s closest equivalent (though a much more tightly-knit group) to studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford. A few years at the ENA is generally the precondition for high office for Left and Right alike. Fillon, an unashamed Christian and also a supporter of a rapprochement with Russia, was not supposed to win the Republican primary against Alain Juppe ( an Enarque) . I am fairly sure that this was why Fillon was destroyed by scandals of the sort which are overlooked in most French politicians. Had the more conventional Juppe been selected by the Republican Party, , I also wonder if Emanuel Macron would have gained the approbation of the French media.

Macron, though he has been a Minister (for economy and finance) in a Socialist government and worked very closely (as deputy secretary general of the Elysee Palace staff) with the outgoing Socialist president Francois Hollande, is officially non-party. Now what will he do? He has no party in the National Assembly, so he will need to pay his debts to the Socialists and others whose support he must have to run any kind of government. This does not seem to give him very much freedom of movement, even if he has any serious plans to change anything fundamental.

Ms le Pen has meanwhile seized , probably permanently, a large chunk of the old Communist and Socialist vote, and allied it to rural conservatism. If she were not burdened with the squalid associations of the French right, she would have got much further. I should say here that this is a genuine problem. French anti-Jacobin conservatism, tested during the Hitler era, mostly failed that test. It was already tainted by its Judophobia and injustice during the Dreyfus affair, when a Jewish army officer was wrongly convicted of espionage for Germany, and the French right sided with the injustice because of its strong Judophobic tendencies. But its support for Petain was far, far worse than mere stupidity and injustice. The Vichy state’s enthusiastic adoption of anti-Jewish measures (more than the Nazis asked for) remains the irremovable stain on that part of the French Right.

Marine le Pen was born into that part of the French Right, and so was her party. The years cannot wipe away the problem. Her father’s crass opinions are well-known. She has, reasonably, denounced him and distanced herself from him. But I cannot see how she can ever escape from that ancestry, though she is obviously trying very hard to do so, denouncing her own father and distancing herself from the Front National in the final stages of the poll.

Assume this is sincere, as it is only fair to do, and you are still left with a movement stuffed with apologists for Vichy, or people who at best want to avoid the subject of the Jewish roundups or claim they were not really the actions of a true French state. Countries that have been occupied by Nazis are countries in which patriotic conservatism is all too often tainted by the war years (see also Belgium, especially Flanders)

And yet it is that movement which has now won a near-monopoly of French discontent with the failures of the 5th Republic, the evaporating jobs, the mass unemployment among the young, the stifling bureaucracy and regulation, the petty crime, the stagnant economy, the increasing submission to an almighty Germany, and to an almighty USA, the uncontrolled immigration and the unassimilated Muslim minority.

Unless Emmanuel Macron really does have some brilliant plan for coping with all these difficulties, Ms le Pen (or someone like her), and the Front National (or something like it) will be waiting for him five years hence, bigger, more discontented, more experienced. Its day may well come.

And here’s the problem. Under universal suffrage democracy, there has been a collusion between leaders and voters for a long time. We, the voters, have pretended to believe that our chosen party will liberate us from our woes, make genuine and profound changes for the better in our lives. They have pretended to do so. In truth, for many years, they have not fulfilled their promises, and we have not really expected them to do so. But in the long calm prosperity that endured from 1950 till about 2000 it didn’t matter very much.

Now it does. That prosperity is evaporating. How will we afford homes? Where are the secure jobs? Will our children end up as coolies, toiling in sweatshops for pittances like their Chinese coevals? Will anyone be able to afford to retire? Can the welfare state, which we have grown used to, survive? Will we be replaced by robots, or by a new immigrant from the Middle East? Will the annual holidays we have taken for granted still be affordable? And what about these wars of choice our leaders keep starting? Nothing, large or small, looks secure. And so the ‘we’ll pretend to believe your promises’ arrangement is breaking down.

Worse, what I have long regarded as the idolatrous false religion of politics, under which governments took over from God as the object of petitions and the main source of bounty, is actually collapsing. It is morally unsustainable. The voters, repeatedly deceived by false election pledges and having had their hopes repeatedly raised and dashed, now assume not only that they are being lied to but that their leaders are mostly in it for the money.

They see the enormous fortunes amassed by the Clintons and by Anthony Blair since they left office, they see that Barack Obama, for a single speech to a Wall Street concern, can be paid as much as he earned in a year as President of the USA, and they feel a righteous disgust.

When Harry Truman left the White House in 1953, he had nothing to live on but his old U.S. Army pension of $112-56 a month, earned during his World War One service. Had it not been for some property inherited from his mother, and a book deal modest by today's standards, he would have had to seek welfare payments to survive. It was only after this that an official US presidential pension ( now about $200,000 a year) was introduced. Most British premiers likewise went off into modest retirement. Not any longer. (I make a strong exception here for Gordon Brown, who, as far as I know, passes his speaking fees to charitable bodies) .

I think the contract between rulers and electors which has sustained universal suffrage democracy for the last century or so is breaking down. It was fundamentally cynical. At its highest level it involved people agreeing to be bribed with their own money, and of course with the money of others too. Now that money has run out, the bribes are dwindling and the promises have to be vaguer and more poorly costed, or they just have to be broken(like the absurd Tory pledge on limiting immigration, a zombie of a promise, which still grimly walks the earth long after it ought to have been buried six feet under).

It ends with the election of Donal Trump in the USA, an election which can’t and won’t deliver what it promised. What then? How will the illusion of choice be preserved at the next US presidential election? Likewise the presentation of leaving the EU as a simple, swift act, which somehow took hold during the referendum. And now, the growing shadows around the French Fifth Republic, which surely cannot survive in this form much longer?

Perhaps we will end up with the German system, where they have elections but the same group of people always end up in office with the same policies, and nobody can be in the government until he or she has already been in the government. But would anyone but the Germans, once described by John le Carre as having quite a bit of democracy but not many democrats, put up with this? Or perhaps we will wonder afresh why we ignored the wisdom of the ages, and took this strange route in the first place.