Recently while rereading John Stuart Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government, a tract published in 1861 by a self-described political “Radical,” an early feminist, and an advocate of “economic democracy,” it dawned on me that Mill’s defense of a “universal franchise” in the context of  representative democracy would be condemned today as pure fascism. Although Mill thought that the franchise should be extended to include both sexes and should function without a property requirement, he insisted that representative government could only work if sensible restrictions were maintained. First of all, “the receipt of parish relief should be a peremptory disqualification for the franchise.” Further, “it is important that the assembly which votes their taxes, either general or local, should be elected exclusively by those who pay something toward the taxes imposed.” This did not mean, Mill qualifies, that the inadvertent payment of an excise tax should permit someone to vote. Rather Mill called for a capitation tax that should fall on every elector. He thought it was entirely proper that an elector “might feel that the money which he assisted in voting was partly his own and that he was interested in keeping down the amount.”  Although Mill favored something like a modern welfare state, he believed that by limiting the vote to those who paid direct taxes of a certain amount, one could keep the “gross expenditure” of one’s city or country from getting out of hand.

Equally important from Mill’s perspective was to restrict the vote to those who could read and write and demonstrate proficiency in these skills: “No one but those in whom an a priori theory has silenced common sense will maintain that power over others, over the whole community, should be imparted to people who have not acquired the commonest requisites for taking care of themselves -- for pursuing intelligently their own interests.” The operative term here is “intelligently. “ Mill thought that those who couldn’t read as well as those who had no financial investment in what government did were unfit for the vote. He would also have limited the voting requirements to those who had mastered among other things “the elements of general history and of the history and institutions of their own country.” These too seemed “indispensable to an intelligent use of the suffrage” but Mill didn’t believe it advisable in 1861 to add to his minimal list of voting requirements.  

I won’t hide my own belief that there is a growing incompatibility between an increasingly expanding suffrage and the preservation of an established (in the traditional nineteenth-century sense) liberal constitutional order. A point has now been reached in which the government exists less and less to protect property, religious liberty, and an independent civil society. The state operates more and more to satisfy the appetites and internecine grievances of a mass electorate. Moreover, it is impossible to withdraw the suffrage once it has been given to any group (perhaps felons and illegal immigrants will soon be authorized to vote in order to express their newly invented “human right.”)

The suffrage continues to expand in the name of democratic equality. What would have seemed perfectly reasonable preconditions for voting in the past, like residence requirements, poll taxes, and literacy tests can no longer be legally applied. If some such tests were applied at one time in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment, then surely it would have been possible to make them work in a less invidious way, without sacrificing the principle. But reasonable restrictions on the vote have become impossible, and “voting fraud,” which Mill feared would occur with an indiscriminately granted suffrage, is still very much a reality. It has now become proof positive of discrimination to require nonregistered voters to provide identification showing that they’re eligible to vote -- or that they truly are who they say they are. Large voter turnout by minority groups whose grievances are especially compelling to the media and (let’s not be coy) the Democratic National Committee have come to be seen as essential for holding “democratic” or nondiscriminatory elections. And even when the announced number of votes in urban precincts with large minority populations look suspiciously inflated, one can only challenge the results at one’s peril. (After all, not even I would welcome being in the crosshairs of our PC media.)

Lest I be viewed as an insensitive old guy, let me explain that those who applaud our expanding suffrage do have a moral case. They believe passionately in universalism and equality and can’t abide the idea that what is given to X should not be given to Y. All bipeds, and especially members of designated victim groups, I would gather from reading the national press, should be allowed to vote and be granted American citizenship -- either before or after they cast their votes for the appropriate, morally sensitive candidate. One should not underestimate the effect on the contemporary Left and those within its orbit of what German sociologist Arnold Gehlen described as “hypermorality.” Such people definitely have “values,” contrary to what our “conservative” publicists say about them, and from what I can see, act resolutely on the basis of what they claim to believe.

Unfortunately what the Left believes and implements is totally incompatible with living in a stable constitutional republic or monarchy, of the kind that has made Western freedoms possible and that has allowed traditional intermediate institutions to function. The Left and whoever support its moral and social agenda want to supplant the inherited order with one of their own and have used an expanding franchise to achieve this result. Dennis Prager explains who’s up (and by implication who’s down) in this battle for political and cultural control:

The most dynamic religion of the last hundred years has been leftism. Not Christianity, and not Islam, but leftism. Leftism has taken over the world’s leading educational institutions, the world’s news media, and the world’s popular entertainment, and it has influenced Christianity (and Judaism) far more than Christianity (or Judaism) has influenced anything.

I’ve no antidotes that I can propose for dealing with the problem that Prager underscores.  But there is no reason to imagine that our present suffrage, which has been extended beyond anything that the feminist and democrat Mill thought was reasonable, is producing greater leadership at any level than what existed in earlier, less “democratic” times. Are Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and Donald Trump more fit national leaders than Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, our first four presidents who we are reminded were elected by a suffrage restricted to white male property holders? Is there any reason to think that by expanding our suffrage we have improved the quality of our leadership? Yes, we have become more egalitarian since the American Founding and some might argue, more just, but our march toward democratic equality looks grimmer and grimmer each passing day.