From Popular to Personal Democracy

American democracy was once the creation of its citizens. They enabled a relatively small government to rule a big nation. As citizen soldiers, they secured their country’s autonomy, cleared it for European settlement, and preserved its unity against secession. As citizen administrators—what are now disparaged as patronage appointees—they extended the government’s authority across a continent and energized the political parties that transformed a complex, disjointed institutional design into a workable government. As taxpayers and bondholders, they financed wars, paid for the purchase of new territories, and underwrote economic development projects such as the Erie Canal. In return, they received a variety of benefits, among them legal rights, pensions, and perhaps most important the right to vote. Popular sovereignty was directly related to the government’s reliance upon the active support and cooperation of its citizens. Today that reliance has diminished, and the era of the citizen is coming to an end. The contemporary means for raising armies, collecting taxes, public finance, and government administration do not demand as much citizen cooperation and consent as they once did. Government has made other arrangements. The supposed lesson of Vietnam, for example, was that the nation could not wage war without the overwhelming support of the people. In fact, however, Vietnam taught our government that it had to reinvent war so that it could be fought even when the public was cool to hostilities. Professional soldiers, smart weapons, and drone aircraft have all diminished the role of citizens in military security and foreign policy. American democracy is not dead, but it has undergone a transfiguration, and so has American citizenship. These changes are not the results of some vast conspiracy to deprive the general public of its place in politics. In fact, twentieth-century political reforms have given citizens unprecedented access