Legitimacy (Political Concepts Chapter 2)

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(Introduction and Table of Contents)

Legitimacy is the belief that the people who make decisions for a society have the right to do so. It includes how those people are selected, as in democracy or monarchy, as well as how they are selected, what sort of decisions they can or should make (a monarch is not supposed to violate feudal rights, the US Constitution says they can’t make laws regulating speech or assembly), and what sort of people they are.

Legitimacy is a result of feelings. A constitution can say something is OK (slavery, perhaps) and in time that may become unacceptable. Whether written or unwritten, what people believe and feel is paramount, written constitutions simply set bright lines so one can say “this was not intended by those who wrote the constitution.”

For most of America history all politicians were male and of European descent. Those were the people who should be in charge. During the post war period you almost couldn’t get elected if you weren’t for New Deal style policies, since Reagan it’s nearly impossible to be elected if you are for those policies.

Legitimacy is important even in the rawest and most despotic of regimes: if power comes out of a barrel of a gun or at the edge of a sword, then the enforcement class, at least, must feel the government is legitimate. Often this is done by making the enforcement class the government: in feudal areas the armed nobility are in charge; in Athens the electorate essentially amounted to those males who were militarily useful, and Roman citizenship was similar: Senators fought, during the early and middle Republic even more than commoners, When Hannibal wiped out a Roman army at Cannae, killing seventy-thousand men, about one-third of the Senate was wiped out.

When Russia fell to the Communists, the Cossacks which the government had been expecting to save them chose not to relieve the besieged government, and their own guards, military cadets, mostly did not fight, though they were sufficient in number that they might have held off the attackers. Meanwhile the attacking forces were swollen with navy sailors who had gone over to the other side.

More recently, the USSR’s communist regime certainly had enough soldiers to stay in power, but even the ruling class felt they didn’t have the legitimacy to use them.

This points to the fact that legitimacy varies by group. Different groups have different ideas (ideologies) about legitimacy: what it is, who should have it and so on. The French revolution happened, in large part, because the Philosophes had spent almost a hundred years undermining the legitimacy of France’s monarchy: even many nobles could not make the case that they deserved to rule and no other group in France solidly believed it, though many were largely agnostic to the issue, which was almost as bad, since when push came to guillotine, they would not fight for the Ancien Regime.

Revolution is generally a result of splits in the elite classes, with some opposed to the government taking resources from them; an unwillingness of the enforcement class to prop up the state, often, but not always because a fiscal crisis has left the under or short-paid, and a rising from below of commoners.

Declines or increases in how legitimate elite and enforcer sub-groups feel the government is are most important for revolution, but not all losses of legitimacy lead to revolution, per se. In such cases the split is usually between elite factions, each mobilizing support from commoners.

The elections of Thatcher and Reagan can be seen as sub-ideological transitions: from post-war capitalism, which optimized for increasing wages and for equality, to neo-liberalism, which optimized for asset price increases and keeping increases in non-elite wages below the rate of inflation. In neither case was the government overthrown, but in both cases there was a switch in natural ruling party (from Labour to Conservative in the UK; from Democratic to Republican in the US) and the second party, under Clinton and Blair, accepted the newly legitimate ideology. Thatcher said that her greatest victory was when Labour agreed with how she ran the government and economy.

In both cases, support was bought: Thatcher let Brits who lived in council housing buy it for below its value; Reagan’s policies (primarily carried out thru the Federal Reserve & the Treasury) led to multi-generational faster-than-inflation increases in housing and stock prices, meaning anyone who already had a house or could get in in the first couple decades; or who could afford to buy stocks and hold, did very very well.

Legitimacy changes over time, in both smaller ways (sub-ideological transitions, like the ones in 79/80 and 1932) and in larger ways. Feudalism was entirely legitimate in most of Europe for almost a thousand years, even most revolutionaries would set up a new feudal regime and not overthrow feudalism. Monarchism, though not identical to feudalism, was still the default for most of Europe in the early 19^th century: when Napoleon was defeated, he was replaced by a monarch in the Bourbon restoration.

A hundred years later, when the allies defeated the Germans and Austrians in World War I, they forced the monarchs of those nations to step down and set up democratic states.

Legitimacy thus changes over time and differs between different groups in society and different nations in the world. The Japanese did not feel that their Emperor was illegitimate, they just lost World War II to a country which did.

It’s also important to understand the difference between legitimacy of a system and legitimacy of incumbents. Perhaps a king is illegitimate, but monarchy is not: many wars were fought over this. Perhaps a party is no longer considered legitimate and is wiped out, as happened to the American Whig party. The Republican party  replaced it: anti-slavery and pro-industrialization and financial industry. In Britain the Whig party was not wiped out, but it became the third party, and Labour replaced it as one of the two primary parties who switch power with each other regularly.

The type of person who should rule also changes. At one time even in most democratic states, most of those in the legislature belonged to the old aristocracy. In time they were replaced by members of the bourgeoisie. Long before that the old urban elites of the Roman empire mostly lost their power (outside of Italy) to landed feudal nobility.

Once a group stops feeling a way of governing or a governing group is legitimate, they stop supporting that group or that way. Because force is inefficient (we’ll discuss this later), states where large groups don’t agree with the legitimacy of the rulers or government become less and less powerful.

When enough people and groups controlling enough resources: economic, violent and ideological no longer believe in the legitimacy of government, it is only a matter of time before that government falls, and if they don’t believe in the type of government, before that type is replaced.

A recent example of loss of legitimacy is that, as of August, 2021, about two-thirds of Republicans think that the 2020 US election was stolen. One-third felt violence was justified.

This makes total sense from an ideological legitimacy point of view: in a Democracy, an election is legitimate if, and only if, the candidate who takes power won by the rules, which includes all the votes being fairly counted. If the candidate didn’t, then the President (in this case) is not legitimate: they don’t have the right to power, or to make rules or enforce decisions.

The American state came about because of “taxation without representation”, and the revolution was violent. Violence is part of the American founding mythology and is justified by not having democratic representation.

That you only have the right to rule if fairly elected is an idea, and so also is that violence is acceptable to overthrow someone who wasn’t legitimately elected. That many people argue that Biden was fairly elected, makes the point: the argument isn’t about whether elections should be fair, but whether this election was.

Whether the US government has enough legitimacy to continue to rule is something that will be determined in the future, that it lost legitimacy in the 2020 election is clear, and that it has been losing legitimacy for some decades also seems clear.

Legitimacy is ultimately a result of ideas and identity: groups form because of identity, and ideas tell those groups whether or not rulers or ruling regimes are legitimate. While ideology is not separate from material circumstances or technology, ideas are the immediate cause of loss of legitimacy and the proximate cause of real changes in politics.

Which leads us, then, to ideology, which rules so much of the world even as we moderns pretend it doesn’t and that only other people have ideologies, while we are simply practical.

Next: Ideology

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