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Will you ever find that recipe again?

Was it Adams senior who said that democracy ends up committing suicide? He’s wrong, of course. Democracy doesn’t get a chance to commit suicide, because it is stillborn. It is a cake with three ingredients, which you can find in the mottos of France and Haiti (they’re the same): freedom, equality and brotherhood. Now, the democracy that many people are champing after is somewhere in there, but it feels a little nebulous: “the way things used to be.” Even if you ignore primitive dentistry techniques, how things used to be never was all that great. How things used to be is in fact how we ended up here. So, we can’t go back to that, unless we’re prepared for Groundhog Day.

Plato was against democracy because (and he was right) the freedom accorded to all tends to a process of governance that “carves out” exceptions for favoured parties. That creates inequalities, which only multiply, the greater the consensus becomes that they are “inevitable”. We’re not talking VIP lounges and security details, but even things like the simple idea of a joint stock corporation, freeports, tax holidays, foundations, insider trading, the presumption of innocence, no tax without representation, jury trial, AML and much more: familiar concepts that we think of as part and parcel of democracy, but which actually work to disadvantage democracy. We learn to call our systems democratic because we’re told to. And the bogeyman is identified less as a system that allows manipulation and duress and more simply as being “the enemy”: communism. So indelibly attached do the words “enemy” and “communism” become that we can see no positive in communism. And we then persuade ourselves that a population that blindly follows the definitions laid down by its leaders is democratic.

Another naysayer of democracy was English philosopher Thomas Hobbes—in Leviathan. On the basis of the simple empirical knowledge that the least arguments over what to watch on television arise when I am the only person watching, there are two conclusions: either I lock the door, or I zip my mouth. That is essentially what democracy has become: we call it democratic and we people it with endless committees and consultations in order to give a semblance of involvement. But, time and again, pledges are given that are walked back, laws announced that never get passed and laws passed that never get enforced. And a democratic system that is ineffective is not democratic, unless the desired effect were as if it were autocratic, and autocracy is what Hobbes advocated.

Locking the door is also an option, but it comes with a temptation: “Sod them.” “L’état c’est moi.” It’s questionable whether Louis XIV of France ever said it. But it’s less uncertain whether any future demagogue might not say it, or words to its effect.

It was Robespierre (in his pamphlet “On the Organisation of the National Guard”) who coined the term liberté, égalité, fraternité. Why those three words? If you look at the motto of Cameroon, it is also good—even if Cameroon’s problems are many: work, peace, fatherland. Or Belgium: union makes strength. The motto of France is much more than good advice, however, or avuncular encouragement. It is a key.

We know what freedom and liberty are, but let’s revisit them: freedom is the ability to do lawfully that which does not impinge on the freedom of another. By that definition, the entire United States is founded not in liberty, but in oppression. Because the founding of America’s freedoms cost the indigenous population their homes and livelihoods. And it is not acceptable to exercise freedom without duly compensating him whose own freedom is thereby materially curtailed.

Equality I have touched on above. The outliers from the simply principle of equality are too numerous to list. Not even restricting it to de facto inequality—wealth—can contain the objections to our inequalities in law and practice (especially of criminal justice in the US). They are so manifest as to confound explanation and result in a blanket assumption that the US’s constitutional pledge to equality is paper cover for a system inherently designed to be unequal. The reason why they’re unequal, why their bid for liberty ends up constraining equality, and their bids for equality (DEI, for instance) end up constraining freedom (which is why it’s just been abolished) is the third element, which gets swept under the carpet, like some optional ashtray in a car—nice to have, but not very important. Wrong, it is not unimportant, it is the key to making the whole thing work. It is because it is seemingly imprecise in definition (albeit ultimately no less so than concepts like freedom and equality) that people, be they in Haiti, France or the US, will not spend time trying to define it: brotherhood.

First, it’s non-U? Sorry, sisterhood was all about nuns in 1789, but brotherhood is not even about brothers. It derives from a concept that was relatively new in 1789, which had indirectly even led to the French Revolution, and for which Robespierre saw the Revolution as the great vehicle for its incorporation within the new model state of France, unlike any that had existed before. The problem was it was hard to convey as a motto. So he remodelled it on a more accessible word. The French word was Lumières, which means Enlightenment. However, in French it also translates as “lights”, and Robespierre didn’t think that “liberty, freedom, lights” sounded very much like a political idea. But “brotherhood” has a ring to it and, in the end, means the same thing: loving your neighbour as much as you love yourself.

People are now bemoaning the fact that the US government doesn’t seem to care. It seems to be bending over backwards to insist that it indeed doesn’t care. At least we know where they stand. What people want is a return to an administration that enjoys a wide consensus, even from its opponents, that it is “running things properly” and, to do that, governments have always needed (owing to the conflicts identified by Plato and Hobbes) to convey the sense that they care enough to be seen to mean it, but not too much to be called communists. And how much that is, is not exactly defined, nor is it definable.

Even God did not decree to Moses that “Thou shalt care”. The closest he got was the Fifth Commandment: “Honour thy mother and thy father.” And honouring is different from love, to which Jesus emended it. But caring is out there, bobbing around in the Gulf of America. The gulf that divides the US down the middle.

How do you define caring enough to make people think that things are how they used to be, whilst avoiding the accusation that you’ve become communists, and still convince lobbyists that you will cock an ear to them? Nixon said it: the president cares enough about the people to flout the law at his will, and to resign if he’s caught. That is the wafer-thin standard of caring that was, until Mr Trump, the standard of the US: “Don’t get caught.”

But embracing caring—and that in a nation of 350 million—requires community, belonging, and consideration of everyone. Not only has the US now got rid of that (plus designing their cities around cars, which does not foster community), but it is the third element that ensures freedom and equality remain where they are put. Because any decision to make an inroad on either of the first two must satisfy an honest appraisal of the measure’s effects in terms of brotherhood. In steam engine terms, brotherhood is the “governor” that stops the engine from accelerating excessively.

America has always been an exception to the rule that autocracy favours the large, constitutional monarchy favours the small. For 250 years they bucked that rule. And now they have bent to it. After signing the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin emerged from the hall and was accosted by a Philadelphia socialite who asked, as if here were a doctor birthing a child, “Well, good doctor, do we have a monarchy or a republic?” “A republic,” he replied, ruefully adding, “If you can keep it.” They can still keep it. But not without brotherhood. Yes, I know: it smells of communism. But I think it’s what many Americans now want.