On the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, it might be tempting to assume that we’ve run out the clock on a democracy’s life expectancy. The catalog of ills is familiar. We have a president whose unilateral powers—over war making, over administration, over emergency authorities—would have astonished the founding generation; a legislature that has proved unable or unwilling to constrain the executive; and gerrymandered congressional districts that produce safe seats by the hundreds, and leave far too many voters without a meaningful voice. We’ve had two decades of wars whose ends remain elusive and whose costs are rarely tallied.
Looking back to the Age of Revolution, and across the sea, can offer some useful perspective. Although the fact is often forgotten, the American colonists were not the only people who faced a political crisis in the late 18th century. The British people did too. And, ironically, the United States finds itself in a situation today very similar to the one Britain faced back then.
The diagnostic checklist that an attentive observer might have drawn up in Britain in the 1770s seems very familiar. The constitution was out of balance, and the executive—at this time still the King—was accumulating powers and patronage at the expense of Parliament. The system of representation had degenerated into the absurdity of “rotten boroughs”—sparsely inhabited areas that returned members of Parliament chosen by local magnates and their political masters while whole swaths of the country, such as the rapidly growing industrial cities, went almost entirely unrepresented.
The King had at his disposal something called the Civil List, which disbursed stipends, pensions, and other emoluments at the monarch’s discretion, sometimes in the form of specific jobs (for instance, Lord of the Bedchamber), sometimes to provide sinecures (Rousseau was offered one just for being Rousseau), and sometimes to spread favor and influence. Between the Civil List and the ability in essence to buy parliamentary seats in rotten boroughs, the King in the 1770s could command loyalty from about 200 of the 558 members of Parliament—enough to ensure that the legislature was dependent on him.
As a result, the King was able to push Parliament and strain the bounds of established law. Members of Parliament were stripped of traditional legal protections. An elected member was blocked from being seated. The Crown put newspaper publishers on trial for sedition. Meanwhile, the nation was entangled in costly foreign wars whose justifications seemed far removed from the immediate safety of Britain. Society was divided religiously, regionally, and economically.
The structural pathologies of late-18th-century Britain are not perfectly analogous to ours, but they rhyme.
In Britain, three figures from that era had a clear view of the governance problems that the nation faced. The first was King George III himself, a monarch often caricatured but in fact more attentive to the British constitutional tradition than his American detractors allowed. George believed that the system was under strain and that some adjustment was necessary, even as his instincts pulled him toward defending royal prerogative.
The second and third figures were unlikely political allies: Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, a reformer within the British political establishment who argued early and persistently for universal male suffrage, and his extraordinarily talented amanuensis, Thomas Paine, then a corset maker, an excise officer, and a journeyman essayist. In the 1760s and ’70s, these two men collaborated with a secret radical network to counter the King—laying out the case for the restoration of British liberties in a series of newspaper essays under the pen name Junius.
Each man sought to establish “the people”—through their legislature—as an effectual counterweight to the monarch. They considered legislative supremacy necessary to ensure that a population would not be subject to the arbitrary whims of a single individual. To get there, though, Richmond and Paine ultimately proposed different paths.
Paine, who had sailed from London to America in 1774, proposed revolution, and then constitution writing. Common Sense, which appeared in January 1776, was the first essay to argue that the Americans should seize their independence from the Crown. That summer, he had a hand in drafting the Pennsylvania Constitution as the colony turned itself into a state. A decade later, he would help James Wilson prepare for the U.S. Constitutional Convention, where the Americans sought to ensure a strong legislature and drafted a document that explicitly designated Congress as the first branch of government. They accepted the need for an executive, after having tried to do without one in the Articles of Confederation, but they wanted that executive properly tied down.
Meanwhile, in Britain, Richmond considered and rejected the path of revolution. Despite defending the Americans in Parliament and ultimately endorsing American independence, he sought an alternative way to put limits on the King and achieve legislative supremacy at home.
The radicals in Britain pursued two chief goals: reform to the Civil List, and the establishment of universal male suffrage. Both had the purpose of reining in corruption. The former would dramatically reduce the King’s ability to dispense patronage. The latter would make it harder to buy seats. You could easily pay off the six voters in a rotten borough. Paying off an entire constituency once the entire male population had the right to vote would be more difficult.
The first of these goals was the great achievement of Edmund Burke. His bill—the Establishment Act of 1782, also known as the Civil List and Secret Service Money Act—placed the finances of the royal household under the control of the treasury department, overseen by Parliament. The second goal took longer to meet. In a letter explaining his commitment to suffrage reform, Richmond wrote that “the experience of 26 years,” in and out of government, had convinced him that restoring a genuine House of Commons by renovating the rights of the people was the “only effectual remedy” against the corrupt system that had brought the nation to disgrace and poverty and had threatened it with “the loss of liberty.” Years later, Abraham Lincoln expressed the same insight when he declared at Gettysburg that government would be for the people only when it was also by the people. Richmond introduced a suffrage bill in 1780. Although it failed, it became the basis for political efforts that built consistently over the next 50 years.
William Pitt the Younger, a 24-year-old prime minister when he was first appointed, in 1783—the year that American independence was legally recognized by Britain—became the next to take up the challenge. Pitt, who laid the groundwork for the modern Tory Party, introduced suffrage bills several years in a row. When he eventually succumbed to the King’s objections and desisted, a younger politician, Charles Grey, a Whig, took on the task. Starting in the early 1790s, Grey introduced an election-reform bill in Parliament every year for decades, keeping the reform idea alive.
When the Tories collapsed, in 1830, and the Whigs had a fresh shot at power, a massive working- and middle-class movement—sending petitions by the cartload to Parliament—made Grey the prime minister. Richmond had rightly predicted that the cry of the people would be needed to achieve reform. This moment of crisis was Grey’s to seize, and he did, in 1832, winning passage of a Reform Act that significantly expanded male suffrage and changed how parliamentary seats were distributed. Parliamentary authority was in the ascendant. Grey’s government soon won passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which ended enslavement in most of the British empire. The government also ended the economic monopoly of the East India Company. In the end, over the course of nearly a century, there would be four Reform Acts. The last, in 1918, finally delivered universal male suffrage, as well as suffrage for many women. A decade later, the vote was extended to all women.
Richmond is scarcely remembered today, even in Britain. His descendant the 11th Duke of Richmond, a photographer and patron of motorsports and the arts, is far better known. Grey, for his part, is not one of the few British prime ministers Americans tend to be aware of. But he would become world famous in another context after he inherited an earldom and assumed the title Earl Grey, his name associated with a popular tea.
When the Age of Revolution arrived, the British Parliament represented sectors, not people: the Church and the aristocrats (in the House of Lords) and a limited subset of property holders (in the House of Commons). To propose universal male suffrage was to transform the basis of governance fundamentally. Advancing the proposal required inventing for the modern era the idea of geographical districts and rediscovering the notion (with its ancient Athenian roots) that one should count the population to achieve constituencies of equivalent size. It is hardly a coincidence that Richmond created the British mapping service to produce maps of the whole country. Districting and census taking for electoral purposes were 18th-century reinventions devised to counterbalance the power of the King with the power of the people.
The fact that something as familiar as electoral districts had to be invented is a reminder of one of the great insights of 18th-century reformers: Representation can be thought of as a kind of technology, and an evolving one. A legislature is not a fixed institutional form delivered once, at a single founding moment. It is a set of practices, rules, and devices that must be redesigned as conditions change—something that may be easier to do in a nation whose constitution is a quilted aggregation of law and tradition, as Britain’s is, rather than an operating manual expressed in one written document.
Think of all of the basic things that have to be figured out, not to mention the fine print: Who is permitted to vote? Do you vote on one day or over many? In person or also by mail? How do you define what the boundaries of a district should be? Who makes that decision? Can you win a district with a plurality of the vote, or do you need a majority? How many members should a legislature have? In Britain, some of the reforms following the first expansion of suffrage were redesigns of a technological kind: for instance, the introduction of the secret ballot for voters to reduce the likelihood of coercion, and the introduction of salaries for members of Parliament to reduce financial opportunism and conflicts of interest.
All of this is bound up with the meaning of representation—what it is for. Representation serves a number of purposes. It provides authorization, giving legitimacy to the exercise of public power. It ensures that the diverse social composition of a polity is mirrored in its deliberative bodies. It brings local knowledge and varied perspectives into contact with one another, so that policy can be informed and refined. It channels the political activity of citizens into collective action. It enables a polity to achieve outcomes that no individual or faction could secure alone. And it provides what 18th-century theorists called “republican safety”—the systemic protection against tyranny that comes from dispersing power across multiple representative bodies and accountable officials. When the technology of representation degrades, the system as a whole begins to lose legitimacy.
This isn’t the place for a laundry list of everything that needs to be done to restore representation to health in the United States. The problems we face and the measures we might adopt to confront them have been discussed for decades. In the most general terms, those measures include restrictions on political spending, federal action to prevent partisan gerrymandering, and an expansion of the House of Representatives. They include transparency and accountability standards for digital platforms, to help restore the media ecosystem to health. Congress, for its part, needs to remember that it is not a junior partner, much less a lapdog, but in fact the place where, in the view of the Founders, democratic power chiefly resides. It must assert that power—indeed, doing so is the central task of democratic renovation. All of this aside, lower levels of government—states and communities—can do much by way of experimentation, nurturing democratic practice at the grass roots.
It looks impossible—a mountain too steep, every means of ascent impeded. Scaling the mountain will take perseverance and a long time horizon—qualities that 18th-century reformers possessed. They did not stumble into the renovations they achieved, and they did not expect miracles. They had three interlocking goals: Fight corruption, broaden suffrage, upgrade the technology of representation. They organized, argued, persuaded, and built the political coalitions that made structural change possible. Richmond did not abolish rotten boroughs by writing a single letter and leaving it at that. The reformers did the hard work, year after year, for decades—as like-minded people did after them—until the work bore fruit.
Britain today faces some of the same grave problems of representation that we do. No British government has come to power with a majority of the popular vote since World War II. The British and American approaches to governance are also different. Britain’s parliamentary system muddies the distinction between executive and legislature; at the same time, it keeps the prime minister tethered to an electoral leash that is often being tugged. But taking the long view: The British evolved from King George III to King Charles III, producing a constitutional monarchy that, whatever its symbolic eccentricities, performs its restrained constitutional functions with relative stability. American democracy, founded on Revolutionary principles and a written Constitution that has proved enormously difficult to amend, finds itself producing presidents who test the limits of constitutional restraint and a politics in which the structural mechanisms of representation more and more fail to reflect majoritarian preferences. It’s fair to ask: Which approach succeeded more completely in keeping control of the executive?
Last month, King Charles addressed an American Congress that over a period of decades has failed to exercise its powers. He stood as the representative of a nation that had taken a different path from that of the United States, though aspirationally in the same general direction—a path that has not run in a straight line and is hardly at an end. The King nodded to the kinship when he said of the Founders that “they carried with them, and carried forward, the great inheritance of the British Enlightenment”—a conception of rights and values that long predate the American Revolution. It was impossible to miss the irony of a British monarch, a direct descendant of George III, reminding Americans—needing to remind Americans—that a democratic society advances “not by the will of one, but by the deliberation of many.”