Fabrizio Mejía Madrid: From fear to voting

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Pure universal suffrage has shown itself to be a torrent of turbulent waters, wild and untamed, sweeping away everything in its path. It is urgent to find a formula for a peaceful democracy, capable of resisting the excesses of numbers.

“Our elections are a lottery in which we put not the people, but a multitude. We put into it all kinds of individuals, from whom we strip them of their quality and profession, and it is chance that shuffles the bag and from there we obtain the winning numbers, that is, our deputies. Let us try to find the people in this chaos of the multitude.

There are no more corporations in the State. There is now only the particular interest of each citizen and the general interest, the great error of the Revolution. What must be represented is not opinions, but corporations, the family, the city, which are the links of every order.

These three phrases may have been uttered by the Mexican right during the past month, but they were written after 1848 by French conservatives after the adoption of suffrage. universalwhich in those years was only for men over 21 years of age. It is curious that the right reacts with the same arguments to the inclusion – an irruption, in the Mexican case since 2018 – of a plebeian majority that is viewed with distrust and even fear. The rejection of the majority vote alone as the channel for the destiny of a nation gave rise almost 170 years ago to a series of barriers that forged what we understand today as democracy.

To protect the elites of a majority, conservatives invented, on the one hand, that this was an ignorant mass that could even empower a tyrant, and on the other, that it should not be guided by the general interestbut by a fragmentation of group interests, among which were, of course, the elites. These interests were naturalbecause they came from the social class and the profession. In fact, there are several proposals to leave the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate as dominated by a majority, but to organize a third, of professionals, which would save the children of educated families.

Saint-Simon himself proposed a Chamber of Invention, composed of 300 engineers and artists; another of Examination, where mathematicians and physicists would decide the viability of each project, and finally, the Chamber of Representatives, who would see that its execution was carried out. Thus, among all the technocracy, there was only one body of political representation that was not in charge of creating public policies, but only of their making. A little later came the idea of ​​professional intermediaries between the people and the State, the origin of unions, but also of what we call today autonomous bodies.

Another creation that would prevail over time was proportionality, that is, ensuring that minorities always had representatives. There was much talk of dominated minorities, but never of dominant ones. Electoral proportionality, invented by a mathematician, Joseph Diez, in 1820, was based not on professional activity or social class, but on opinions. Thus, if some people thought the same thing, they could join together, and if they reached 200, they could access a deputation. A campaign was immediately organised throughout Europe to adopt proportionality: Ernest Naville in Switzerland, John Stuart Mill in England, Émile Durkheim in France.

It is interesting that the father of sociology was an enthusiast of proportionality because, in essence, what he was trying to do was to describe societies from a new science that very soon began to have tools such as surveys and opinion polls, almost nostalgic for when nations were organic: the king, the subjects, the court, the knights, the guilds. Democracy as a form of a society to describe itself began to take precedence over popular democracy of mandate, universalism and political equality that precedes all economic and social equalization.

Universal suffrage was seen by the elite as a false democracy, where an anonymous, faceless mass, without notable attributes, without professional credentials, could decide the national destiny. This is what Stuart Mill writes to argue in favor of proportionality: There is a danger that the body of representatives will be very mediocre in intelligence and there is a danger of class legislation by a numerical majority composed entirely of the same class.. He does not say so, but he is referring to the class struggle within a democracy where universal suffrage and political equality can crush the elite, even though the opposite is almost always the case. The harshest criticism against it is that the majority is an expression of trust and that the minority only brings to politics a method of selection. But proportionality will also be used by dominated minorities and will give way, with identities, to phenomena such as worker or peasant representation and, much later, to that of women.

From professional chambers to proportionality we will go, not without work and bitter debates, to the party system, which seems to be a solution between the particularities of democracy as a sociology – which today we would call identities– and as a policy, that of the general interest. The idea was to organize opinions as ideologies: there is left and there is right. The debate has been going on since the old 19th century: the parties confiscate popular sovereignty because they become intermediaries of professional politics, a notion foreign to and even contrary to democracy. Since then, the idea of ​​being factions, brotherhoods that seek their own interests, not those of the people, has also been attributed to the parties. In fact, the French Revolution banned them as early as 1789, because their assembly members had the idea that they represented an entire nation and not a guild, that society should be a political construction and that there is no need to fear that its organization is not given in advance.

I thought it was appropriate to discuss how the conservatives’ panic over universal suffrage ended up creating new ways of organizing, thinking, and feeling emotions. But that was 170 years ago and, now, as Marx said, repetition is a miserable farce.