Here is the British political theorist Walter Bagehot
writing in his The English Constitution
(1867), the same year as the Second Reform Bill which expanded the franchise to
a portion of urban male working classes in England and Wales for the first
time, doubling the vote from one million to two million, still quite shy of ‘one
man, one vote.’ Bagehot’s latent fear is
that the Vox populi will descend into
a form of Vox diaboli, and here he
echoes John Stuart Mill’s and Alexis de Tocqueville’s concern with “tyranny of
the majority.” But what is notable in Bagehot
(quoted below) is the emphasis on the “responsibility” of leading statesmen to
give “the manly utterance of clear conclusions … in a felicitous way”[1]
and not to raise questions which are “antagonistic to the whole interest of the
state.” Donald Trump’s unprecedented claim
that the American elections are “rigged” – and his refusal to deny this in
American debate No. 3 - bringing into question the 240-year-old America tradition
of peaceful transition of governments should he lose – is his clearest
abdication of responsibility yet and more characteristic of demagoguery than anything
else.
… our statesmen have
the greatest opportunities they have had for many years, and likewise the
greatest duty. They have to guide the
new voters in the exercise of their franchise; to guide them quietly, and
without saying what they are doing, but still to guide them. The leading statesmen in a free country have
great momentary power. They settle the
conversation of mankind. It is they
who, by a great speech or two, determine what shall be said and what shall be
written for long after. They, in
conjunction with their counsellors, settle the programme of their party – the
‘platform’, as the Americans call it, on which they and those associated with
them are to take their stand for the political campaign. It is by that programme, by a comparison of
the programmes of different statesmen, that the world forms its judgement. The common ordinary mind is quite unfit to
fix for itself what political question it shall attend to; it is as much as it
can do to judge decently of the
questions which drift down to it, and are brought before it; it almost never
settles its topics; it can only decide on the issues of those topics. And in settling what these questions shall
be, statesmen have now a great responsibility. If they raise questions which
will excite the lower orders of mankind; if they raise questions on which these
orders are likely to be wrong; if they raise questions on which the interest of
those orders is not identical with, or antagonistic to, the whole interest of
the state, they will have done the greatest harm they can do.[2]
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