What the 18th Century Can Teach the 21st

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