Excerpts from "The Consent Of the Governed" 1963
Excerpts from "The Consent Of the Governed" by John C. Livingston AND Robert G. Thompson
Sacramento State College
1963

Perhaps the most challenging and disturbing analysis of modern society lies in the view that recent develoments in Western democracies reflect a total cultural crisis.
In this view, the basic assumptions and values which have sustained democratic societies in the past are no longer operative. The basic belief in a moral order, discoverable through reason or religion (from which such values as human dignity, progress, reform, or individualism might be derived and defended), has been irretrievably shaken by the specters of the concentration camp and nuclear terror. So also has the possibility of believing that the cumulative growth of science and technology is inherently beneficent. An age which promised unlimited and almost inevitable progress ushered in the possibilities of almost unlimited inhumanity and brutality.

At the same time that science was alienating man from nature, secularism was making him a stranger to God, and the forces of industrialism and urbanism were depriving him of a sense of identity and making him a stranger to himself. The result, these critics argue, has been the elimination of all possibility of reliable guides to human conduct and all traditional restraints on human selfishness and inhumanity. Individual, social and political life are without a rudder and a norm.

One of the spokesmen for this "small but growing critical minority" has drawn up a bill of particulars under the following five headings.

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First, we are convinced as a nation "that a multitude of material goods, standarized, furiously and expensively advertised by appeals to greed and vanity, will in themselves make life worth the living."

Second, our culture seems to be based on the conviction "that animal appetites are mighty and to be sacrificed unto if we would enjoy a satisfactory existance; and the chief of all the appetites is sex."

"Our culture, in the third place, seems based upon a conviction that to be comfortable is utterly indispensable if man is to fulfill his destiny. It occurs only to exceptional people that the whole cult of comfort is petty, ignoble, unworthy of human nature, absurd."

The fourth root of our cultural malaise is "a ridiculous notion that whether a man be good or bad, wise or foolish, matters less than that he should conform to pattern. The pattern to which we are expected to conform is that set by the overgrown and depersonalized megalopolis."

Finally, "our crowd-mindedness renders us suggestible, manipulatable, easy meat for almost any propaganist who is willing to flatter, to encourage animality, to promise ease and opulence with a minimum of labor expended to get them, and freedom from responsibility."

Applied directly to politics, this diagnosis leads to the conclusion that democracy operated effectively only in an intellectual climate characterized by a consensus on certain fundamental truths.
Specifically, democratic political institutions were built on the belief in "natural law" and "natural rights."
The growth of secularism, relativism, and skepticism has undermined the capacity to believe in any sort of "higher law" which stands above men's customs and desires.
As a consequence, the symbols of democracy have tended to become empty words which no longer serve as criteria for justifying and judging its political institutions. There no longer exists that common belief in the ultimate "truths" of a "public philosophy" which serves to both unite the citizens of a body politic and to guide and restrain the men's passions in the struggle for political power.

One variation of this diagnosis holds that the democratic ideal of equality is the root of the problem. Under its sway the masses have come to political power. Culturally, "the revolt of the masses" is a revolt against competence and excellence, an acid test which dissolves all traditional and civilized standards of human conduct. Where the tastes and judgements of the masses become the arbiters of public life the result is the standardization of taste and judgement at the lowest common denominator and conformity to the average of attitudes and opinions. Politically, the ascendancy of the masses means a glorification of the capabilities of the average man which, if allowed to continue, will result in the paralysis of political life.
It distorts the role that the masses of "the people" are qualified to play, assigning them tasks of initiating and judging policies which are beyond their experience,wisdom, or interest.

Competent government requires governors who can "assert a public interest against private inclination and against what is easy and popular. If they are to do their duty, they must often swim against the tides of private feeling." Mass opinion has come to dominate democraticgovernment, and the result is "a morbid derangement of the ture functions of power." Politicians must truckle to the current crop of popular prejudices, and the vital role of leadership on which any political system depends cannot be performed.

A different group of critics holds that our difficulties lie not in the traditional democratic dogmas but in their corruption...
...The argument here is that "the failures of democracy are due not to the sovereignty accorded to the electorate, but to the frustration of that sovereignty by power groups and elites greedy to retain their privileged status." The weak politician, seeking only to get or hold office, does not really truckle to a mass electorate, so much as he yields to "a press campaign, to a lobby, to a party caucus, to a financial backer, or even to experts."

In this analysis, the problem is not the natural perversity of the average man but the absence of an organisation of political power which would make possible effective leadership and a responsible electorate. The dominance of interest groups and of the techniques of psycological manipulation robs the citizen of his role as governor and makes a mockery of the ideal of government by the consent of the governed. That ideal has meaning only where consent is freely and independently given by citizens. Under modern conditions of advertising and manipulation, it has become possible to talk of the "engineering of consent" by an elite of experts and professional politicians. Consent which is thus "engineered" is difficult to distinguish in any fundamental way from the "consent" which supports nondemocratic governments. The manipulated voter has become the normal voter, and the government he supports can hardly be said to rest on his consent in any meaningful sense of that word.

1963 - First edition copy