A Weak Regime Cannot Hold the Social Contract Together

Every state has minorities that would rather not be fully in it. Not minorities that want to leave, which is a different and simpler problem, but minorities that want to stay inside the borders, draw on the common resources, and run their own affairs by their own rules. Their own schools. Their own courts, formal or informal. Their own account of what is true and what a good life is.

The ultra-orthodox communities in Israel are the example I know best. Some immigrant communities in Europe show a similar pattern. There are others, and the pattern is not confined to any religion or region. The structural fact is the same in every case: a group inside the state has negotiated a partial exit from the social contract, and the state has let it.

I want to be careful here, because this subject attracts ugly writing. The argument I am making is not about the worth of any group, and it is not that the groups in question are behaving badly. They are behaving exactly as any group behaves when it is offered a deal: they are taking it. The argument is about why the deal is on offer at all.

Why the Deal Is on Offer

A representative regime is weak. I have argued this in various forms on this blog, and here is one more form of it.

The regime governs through a small number of elected people who need coalitions to do anything. A well-organised minority with a clear set of demands and a disciplined vote is the most valuable thing such a regime can have on its side, and the price of its support is autonomy: leave our schools alone, leave our institutions alone, fund us, and do not ask what we teach.

So the regime pays. Not out of tolerance, which is the story it tells, but out of need. And it pays again at every election, because the need does not go away. Over decades the partial exit becomes permanent, the community's institutions grow, and a generation is raised that has never been fully inside the contract and has no reason to feel bound by it.

The weakness of the regime is the cause. The autonomy of the minority is the effect. Reverse the two and you get the usual bad-faith version of this argument, in which the minority is the villain. It is not. It is a rational actor facing a regime that cannot say no.

Why It Weakens the Democracy

The harm is not that a community lives differently. Communities living differently is most of what a free society is for.

The harm is specific. A state whose citizens are educated in several incompatible pictures of the world, some of which teach that the state's own founding principles are illegitimate, is a state that is slowly losing the shared ground its institutions stand on. Democratic procedures assume that most people accept the procedures. When a growing fraction is raised to see them as a foreign imposition to be worked around, the procedures still run, but they run on a shrinking base.

In the extreme case, which is not hypothetical in every country, the fraction becomes large enough to change the regime from within. A democracy that has let itself be partitioned into value systems can be voted into something that is no longer a democracy, by people who were never taught why it was one. That would be a catastrophe, and it is a catastrophe that arrives politely, one exemption at a time.

What Strength Would Look Like

A direct democracy is stronger than a representative one in the specific sense that matters here: there is nobody to buy.

Under representation, the minority extracts autonomy by selling its votes to whoever will pay, and there is always someone who needs to pay. Under direct decision, the questions are put to the whole public, and the public has no coalition to hold together. It can decide that every child in the country learns the same core: how the state works, how knowledge is established, what the shared rules are. It can decide that public money buys public standards. And it can decide this without the deal-making that makes it impossible today, because the leverage that made the deal necessary has gone.

This does not mean uniformity of belief, and I would oppose any attempt at that. Communities can keep their faith, their customs, their languages, their way of life. What they cannot keep, under a regime that can actually enforce its own contract, is a separate education system that teaches the next generation to reject the contract. The distinction is between living differently, which is a right, and raising children outside the shared ground, which is a partial secession the state has been too weak to refuse.

Pulling People Back In

There is a hopeful reading of this, and I think it is the correct one.

Minorities leave the contract when the contract is not enforced, and they stay in it when it is. That is not a claim about any group's character; it is how incentives work. A regime that could hold the line would find, I suspect, that most members of most communities are perfectly willing to be inside a state that treats them as full participants and expects the same in return. The partial exit was never a deep preference. It was the best available deal, offered by a regime that could not afford to offer anything else.

Change the regime and the deal changes with it. That is the argument: not against anyone, but for a state strong enough that nobody needs to negotiate their way out of it.