VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 1
Voter Enfeoffment and Military Enfeoffment
Last chapter we looked at enfeoffing land and enfeoffing office, both handed down from above. This section looks at two kinds that run in very different directions. One lifts a position up from below, the bottom-most people doing it with their votes, and it is called voter enfeoffment. One wins a position by the obedience of the gun, and it is called military enfeoffment. One looks the most modern, the other shows the most raw force, and both still turn inside those five laws.
Voter enfeoffment takes this shape. An office, president, governor, mayor, legislator, is decided by the ballots of citizens with the right to vote. Over a stretch of time each candidate shows the voters his positions, his ability, his character. The voters vote by their own judgment. The one with the most votes gets the office. This system is the basic frame in many countries today, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, India, Japan, Brazil, differing on the surface as parliamentary, presidential, semi-presidential, but one skeleton beneath, the position decided by the vote. It is a kind of enfeoffment worth a close look, so wipe both its sides.
Voter enfeoffment has some real things. First, peaceful handover. Under the enfeoffment of land the position passed down a bloodline, and each succession could spark a fight over the seat. Under the enfeoffment of office it was granted from above, and each appointment could spark a faction fight. Voter enfeoffment has terms, and at term's end the person changes without blood, so a country can run dozens of changes of government across decades with not one civil war, which is rare in human history. Second, a sense of taking part. Everyone with a vote feels a part of the political body, feels his ballot decides the next few years, and identifies with it more. Third, a check on the person in the position. He knows he must face the voters again in a few years, so within his term he cannot go too far, because if he does he will lose the position next time. Fourth, it can hold many views. Conservative and liberal, left and right, all can compete in the open, so that no single voice covers all the others. Fifth, errors can be corrected. Choose wrong, and next time you can choose someone else, giving society a floor of chose wrong, can still fix it.
But the other side is real too. First, the voters' judgment has limits. Economy, foreign affairs, the military, technology, each field takes expert knowledge to truly understand, yet voters often vote by instinct, by feeling, by a media image, by short-term interest, and not by a deep grasp of policy. Second, what a candidate is good at is winning elections, not necessarily governing. Speaking, debating, shaping an image, handling the press, these are not the same as running a country. A man very good at winning is not always good at governing, and the reverse holds too. Third, the pull of money. A campaign costs a great deal, for ads, staff, media time, and much of the money comes from the wealthy and from organized interests, so that a candidate, in raising it, has already formed a quiet promise to those funders, and in office must tend their interests. Fourth, the lure of populism. An election is a contest of vote counts, and the more inflaming, the more extreme, the more a hard question is flattened into a slogan, the easier it pulls votes, so that populism is almost a twin born alongside voter enfeoffment. Fifth, short sight. A leader cares most about the next election, and so leans decisions toward what pays off at once, letting slow-yielding things, the environment, education, long infrastructure, go cold. Sixth, the fragility of minority rights. Under majority rule, the rights of minority peoples, minority faiths, minority trades have to be guarded by law and by institution on purpose, because the arithmetic of ballots alone cannot guard them.
Add a real note here, one often raised. In some very small towns in the United States, residents have at times used their ballots to give the office of mayor to a cat or a dog. In one Alaska town a cat named Stubbs served twenty years as honorary mayor. A small town once elected a goat. In another town several mayors in a row were dogs. These are real, not figures of speech. The townsfolk vote this way for various reasons. Some for humor, the town having little going on, so it hardly matters whom you pick. Some for irony, a cat or a dog being no worse than certain politicians. Some out of real affection, this cat having grown up in town where everyone knows it. These towns are usually tiny, tens or hundreds of people, and the mayor's office is largely honorary, doing no real governing, so a cat or dog brings no real harm. But the thing forces an honest question. If a cat or a dog can be mayor, then what is the essential difference between a human mayor voter enfeoffment produces and a cat or dog? This is not a debating trick. If a townsperson is willing to give the title of mayor to a cat, on the reasoning that the office does not really do anything, does that not show the office itself has been hollowed out? And if a voter can vote on the candidate looks agreeable, then how far is that from voting on the cat looks adorable, a difference of degree and not of kind. This stroke is not to deny voter enfeoffment. It is to see both its sides truly. Voter enfeoffment is one concrete shape of enfeoffment, not a sacred truth. Any view that lifts it up absolutely as advanced, or pushes it down absolutely as hollow, is using one side to cover the other. Both sides are real.
Someone will ask, voter enfeoffment looks so modern, is it really one bloodline with the pride, with the lords of Zhou? It is. Lay the five laws against it and it clears. A position must exist. Someone must sit in the president's or the mayor's seat, and voter enfeoffment only changes the way the pivot is produced. A position must be accepted. The ballot is acceptance turned into a count, but the vote does not finish it. Once in office, he must still be accepted by the legislature, by opinion, by one wave of public sentiment after another. Acceptance is dynamic. The polls change by the day, approval high today and low tomorrow, and voter enfeoffment in fact shows most plainly that acceptance is dynamic, because it turns public sentiment into numbers you can measure every day. When acceptance drains past a point the position vanishes. A failed reelection, an impeachment mid-term, a recall, all are this law, and the day a leader leaves office he is head of state one moment and a private citizen the next, no different in kind from Dessalines, from the old lion king. A new position necessarily arises. This one steps down, and the next term necessarily lifts up another, the position empty not one moment. Five laws, not one missed. So voter enfeoffment is not the exception to enfeoffment. It is enfeoffment in modern dress.
Now the second kind, military enfeoffment. Its shape is this. One person, or a group, holds command of the army, and by the army's obedience wins the front-most position in the state. Samples past counting. The Roman legions raised up emperors, a legion at the front declaring for some general, and that general became a candidate for emperor. The palace guards of the Five Dynasties drove changes of dynasty, Zhao Kuangyin's mutiny at Chenqiao turning him overnight from commander to emperor. The military governments of modern South America changed hands every few decades, generals ruling in turn. But the true axis of military enfeoffment is not the army itself. It is who commands the gun. The army is a tool of great force, tight in its discipline, rank, obedience, training, but a tool has no direction of its own, and the direction is set by whoever uses it. So the first thing to ask of a country's army is not how good the gear, how large the force, but whom the army obeys. Gear and size are the surface. The command relationship is the skeleton.
There have mainly been six ways to command the gun, each with its own good and bad. When a general commands the gun, soldiers are loyal to the general himself, and this personal loyalty makes execution very high, with startling force on the field, but once the general turns to seize the state, little can stand in the way, and the late Roman era, the Five Dynasties, modern South American history all pour much of their turmoil out of this. When the state commands the gun, the army is loyal to the state, checked by a constitution and a civilian system, the split of military and civil clear, internal turmoil avoided, but the state is made of concrete people, and once those people split, whom the army obeys becomes the question, as in the American Civil War, when the army split, southern officers with the South and northern with the North, the state torn in two in that moment. When a party commands the gun, the army is loyal to a party, led by the party's organization and discipline, the direction clear, not made private by any one general, and China's ability in the modern era to mobilize vast military force to win wars is directly tied to the firmness of this principle, while its inner challenge is that the army's fate is bound deep to the party's political fate, so that a split of line within the party may pull the army in. When money commands the gun, the mercenary, it fights for pay and leaves when the pay stops, flexible and easy, but such an army has no loyalty, and a higher bidder can lure it away at any time, and at the key moment it may turn on the one who hired it, as the mercenaries of the Italian city-states turned again and again in the Renaissance. When a religious head commands the gun, the army is loyal to a religious leader, its cohesion very strong, soldiers willing to die for a higher purpose, and early religious expansion, the crusades, certain military orders all showed this force, but it falls easily into the logic of holy war, casting the foe as heretic, so that compromise grows hard. When a family commands the gun, the army is loyal to a family, bound by blood, marriage, and generations of debt, the loyalty firm and bone-deep, the Japanese samurai's loyalty to the house one example, but once the family declines and splits the army declines and splits with it, and it is easily drawn into the family's private quarrels. Six ways to command the gun, not one of them perfect, each with its good and its bad.
So here is the position this section lays down. We set down two kinds of enfeoffment. Voter enfeoffment hands the position to the ballot, with real goods, peaceful handover, popular participation, a check on the ruler, room for many views, correctable error, and real ills, limited judgment, skill at elections over governing, the pull of money, populism, short sight, fragile minority rights. Military enfeoffment hands the position to the gun, but the axis is not the army, it is who commands it, general, state, party, money, religious head, family, six ways each with good and bad. Both turn inside the five laws, and both get both sides laid out. Hold one measure. Any view that lifts voter enfeoffment up absolutely as advanced, or pushes it down absolutely as hollow, uses one side to cover the other. And looking at military enfeoffment, do not fix on gear and size, look at the command relationship. There is no perfect enfeoffment, only a fitting one, and whether it fits depends on the group, the age, the conditions.
Two kinds of enfeoffment remain unspoken. One sets the position inside a bloodline to pass down the generations, dynastic enfeoffment. One twists scattered people into a single strand, lifting a leader up on a platform and a discipline, party enfeoffment. One the oldest, one the most modern, and the next section looks at them together.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.