Fareed Zakaria's best-seller
The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad
is a marvelous history of the global evolution of civil and economic versus
political liberties, which exposes as myth the precept of many political
scholars, and many in the Bush regime, that democracy is a precondition for
a healthy economy and a stable and constitutionally liberal state.
In fact he argues the opposite: that constitutional and economic liberalism
(rule of law, separation of church and state, earned and reasonably distributed
wealth, as calculated by the Gini
index, defensible civil liberties and especially balance of power) are
preconditions for the success of democracy. Even worse, he demonstrates
that countries whose wealth is natural (the oil states especially) are disadvantaged
in the search for democracy, since such wealth removes the urgency to generate
and distribute earned wealth (wealth generated by labour, innovation and
human productivity), and worsens the temptation for autocrats to hoard power
and buy off opponents.
Zakaria backs up his claims with examples from all over the world, where
premature political democratization, in the absence of constitutional and
economic liberalism, has been astonishingly unsuccessful and short-lived,
and where dictatorships like Singapore with liberal constitutional and economic
institutions thrive.
He has harsh words for America, the
advocate of unrestrained democracy abroad. What is
distinctive about the American system is not how democratic it is but rather
how undemocratic it is, placing as it does multiple constraints on elected
majorities. The Bill of Rights is a list of things the government may not
do regardless of the wishes of the majority. The Supreme Court is headed
by nine unelected men and women with life tenure. The US Senate is the most
unrepresentative upper house in the world. The less formal constraints, however,
that are the inner stuffing of liberal democracy are disappearing. They are
all threatened by a democratic ideology that judges every idea and institution
by one simple test: Is power as widely dispersed as it can be? Congress has
become more responsive, more democratic, and more dysfunctional body. Or
consider America's political parties. They serve merely as vessels to be
filled with the public's taste of the moment. Americas professions have lost
their prestige and public purpose, becoming anxious hucksters. The forces
that guided domocracy are quickly being eroded.
I wrote before
about Zakaria's prediction that democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq will
take generations to evolve successfully, and of the utter failure throughout
history of any foreign occupying power to introduce constitutional and
economic liberalism in an occupied territory. These states will therefore
inevitably and violently decline into brutal, and illiberal autocracies,
religious or secular.
Zakaria cites some remarkable data about the slow pace of introduction
of democracy, even in the countries where it has prevailed the longest.
In the UK in 1832 less than 2% of the population could vote, rising slowly
to 12% in 1884 and full suffrage only in 1930. In the US in 1824, a half-century
after independence, only 5% of adults could vote. Women got suffrage there
in 1920, and blacks in the South effectively only in the 1960s.
Predicted future democracies, where there is sufficient distributed GDP
per capita and sufficient economic and constitutional liberalism to sustain
it: Romania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Malaysia, Turkey, Morocco,
Tunisia, and, if Bush keeps out of the way, Iran. Zakaria holds the US
and the IMF responsible for the failure of democracy in Indonesia, where
demands for hasty, premature economic and political reforms precipitated
financial disaster and led to the downfall of a flawed but functioning constitutional
liberal state, raising the risk of that country becoming another Islamist
theocracy.
The problem in America, Zakaria claims, is now too much democracy.
The American system has been subverted, he says, by the crippling of political
parties and the filling of the power void by moneyed lobbyists and organized,
single-issue fanatics. He cites the fact that government-hater Bush's spending
has risen 11% over Clinton's, ignoring the increases in defense and
security spending. He quotes Jonathan Rauch:
The American government has evolved into about
what it will remain: A sprawling, largely self-organizing structure that
is 10-20% under the control of politicians and voters and 80-90% under the
control of countless thousands of interest groups ("mischiefs of faction").
This is the heart of America's dilemma today, and the reason the American
people believe they have no real control over government [and hence why
participation in the political process has dropped precipitously].
I had not realized that the US government, unlike most Western governments
whose spending is largely on social services and interest on debt, spends
such a huge proportion of its budget on programs that are neither social
nor defense, but rather subsidies to special interest groups. Zakaria claims
this tyranny of minorities extends beyond economic interests, and, for example,
explains why anti-Castro forces in swing states New Jersey and Florida have
sustained sanctions against Cuba that the vast majority of Americans would
prefer to see ended. He quotes George Stephanopolis on how the decline of
the power of political parties has changed the political process:
There is no Democratic Party. If [a candidate]
wants to run, he has to raise the money, get good publicity, and move up
in the polls, which will get him more money and better press. What party elders
think is irrelevant because there is no party anymore. Political parties have
no real significance in America today. The party is, at most, a fund-raising
vehicle for a telegenic candidate.
Zakaria also takes shots at the primary system (only 18% of eligible voters
participate), and points out that, in contrast to the public's disdain for
democratic political institutions like Congress, they hold three institutions
- the Supreme Court, the Fed, and the armed forces, all of them undemocratic
- in high esteem, because, he says, Americans admire institutions that
lead rather than follow.
While Zakaria has, in my view, an overly sentimental affection for the
unelected power elites of the past, arguing that they were surprisingly
responsible, open and even altruistic, you have to like his view on bloggers,
at the end of the book:
In the world of journalism, the blog was hailed
as the killer of the traditional media. In fact it has become something
quite different. Far from replacing newspapers and magazines, the best blogs
- and the best blogs are very clever - have become guides to them, pointing
to unusual sources and commenting on familiar ones. They have become new
mediators for the informed public, a new Tocquevillean elite.
And, Fareed, sometimes we even present some original ideas of our own.
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