The Consent of the Governed Is Not Given, It Is Assumed

The phrase does a great deal of work in the West. Democracy, we are told, is government by the consent of the governed. It is in the founding documents, it is in the civics lesson, and it is the sentence that gets produced whenever someone asks what makes our arrangement legitimate and the arrangement next door not.

I want to take the phrase seriously, because taken seriously it says something its users do not intend.

What the Phrase Concedes

Notice the word. Not rule of the governed. Consent.

A person who consents to something is not doing it. He is permitting someone else to do it. The phrase quietly acknowledges that the public does not govern; it concedes to being governed by some body, and the legitimacy of the whole system rests on that concession being real.

So the entire theory hangs on one empirical question: is the concession actually given? Not whether it is written down, not whether we recite it, but whether the public in fact has a way of consenting and a way of withholding consent that means anything.

There are supposed to be two such ways.

The First Way: You Are Free to Leave

The first is a set of liberties granted to each person. You may protest. You may publish. You may, if it comes to that, emigrate. The theory is that a population which could leave and does not, which could march and does not, has thereby consented.

Look at what this asks of a person. To withhold consent from a policy you dislike, you are to abandon your home, your language, your family, your work, and your friends, and go and live among strangers. Almost nobody does this in response to policy, and the ones who do are fleeing famine or violence, not disagreement about the tax code. The exit is real in the way a fire escape on the fortieth floor is real: it exists, and using it is not a choice anyone makes over a grievance.

Protest is the cheaper version and its record is the evidence against it. Governments have learned to wait out demonstrations. A march is noted, reported, and forgotten, and the policy proceeds. There are exceptions, and they are famous precisely because they are exceptions. A signal that changes nothing in the ordinary case is not a mechanism of consent. It is a pressure valve.

The Second Way: You May Vote for Someone Else

The second way is elections. Every few years you are handed a ballot, and your consent is registered by your choosing between the options on it.

Three things are wrong with this.

The options are few, usually two that matter, assembled by other people, and they agree with each other on most of what the public would want to withhold consent from. If both parties support the arms sales, the surveillance programme, and the bailout, there is no square on the ballot that says no. You can consent to one bundle or the other. You cannot decline.

Second, the ballot has no line for non-consent. There is no option that registers I do not accept being governed in this way by any of you. Spoiling the paper is counted as an error. Staying home is counted as apathy. Every available action is read as a form of participation.

And that is the third problem, the one that closes the trap: participating is itself taken as consent. You voted, therefore you accepted the outcome, therefore you accepted the system that produced it. The election is the mechanism by which consent is supposed to be given, and it is constructed so that any use of it counts as giving it.

What Is Left

Put the two ways together. The liberties offer an exit nobody can afford and a voice nobody heeds. The elections offer a choice between two similar bundles, with no way to refuse both, and treat the act of choosing as endorsement of the whole.

Under those conditions, saying the public consents is like saying a passenger consents to the route because he did not jump from the moving train and did not shout at the driver loudly enough. The word is being used for something that was never asked and could not have been refused.

The honest conclusion is that the public does not even concede. It is governed, and afterwards it is told that it agreed. The phrase is not a description of how legitimacy is produced. It is a description of how the absence of legitimacy is dressed.

Why This Matters Beyond Wordplay

I am not making a point about vocabulary. If consent were really the basis of the system, the system would have to contain a working way to withhold it, and the design of that mechanism would be the central question of political engineering. Nobody works on it, because everybody senses it is not really there.

A system in which the public decides questions directly does not need the fiction. You do not consent to a decision you made; you made it. Consent is the concept you need only when someone else is deciding for you, and it is worth noticing how thin the thing is that we have been asked to accept in its name.