[Reader-list] Fareed Zakaria on the world's excess of democracy

[Rana Dasgupta]

I think one's instinctive antipathy to these arguments is the most
interesting thing about them.  He is writing in the realm of the
unthinkable.

R


'The Future of Freedom': Overdoing Democracy
By NIALL FERGUSON


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/books/review/13FERGUST.html?8bu=&pagewante
d=print&position=top


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
THE FUTURE OF FREEDOM
Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.
By Fareed Zakaria.
286 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----


It is evident to all alike that a great democratic revolution is going on
among us,'' the great French liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville declared
in ''Democracy in America,'' published in 1835. It was, he continued, an
''irresistible revolution, which has advanced for centuries in spite of
every obstacle and which is still advancing in the midst of the ruins it has
caused.'' Tocqueville had visited the United States, seen the future and
decided that it worked. Today he stands vindicated. Something like 62
percent of the world's countries are now democracies.

To be sure, Tocqueville was not blind to the defects and potential hazards
of American democracy. Political parties were ''an inherent evil of free
governments.'' The press was prone to gratuitous muckraking. The electorate
tended to vote mediocrities into high office. Above all, there was the
danger of the ''tyranny of the majority.'' But that risk, he believed, was
held in check by the vitality of some distinctively American institutions
that tended to preserve individual freedom: the decentralization of
government, the power of the courts, the strength of associational life and
the vigor of the country's churches.

The big question was whether similar safeguards would operate in Europe when
democracy made its inevitable advance there. By the time he published ''The
Old Regime and the Revolution'' in 1856, Tocqueville had grown deeply
pessimistic. In France, despite several attempts, it had proved impossible
to introduce democracy without an intolerable diminution of freedom. The
aristocracy and the church -- against which the revolutionaries of 1789 had
directed their energies -- had, he argued, been bastions of liberty. Once
these had been swept away there was nothing to check the twin processes of
centralization and social leveling, which Tocqueville had come to see as the
sinister confederates of the democratic revolution. Under French democracy,
bureaucracy and equality trumped liberty. The result was a new Napoleonic
despotism.

In his brave and ambitious book, Fareed Zakaria has updated Tocqueville.
''The Future of Freedom'' is brave because its central conclusion -- that
liberty is threatened by an excess of democracy -- is deeply unfashionable
and easily misrepresented. (''So, Mr. Zakaria, you say that America needs
less democracy. Doesn't that make you some kind of fascist?'') It is
ambitious because Zakaria seeks to apply the Tocquevillian critique not just
to modern America but to the whole world.

In some ways, the book is a magazine article that just grew. In 1997
Zakaria -- now the editor of Newsweek International -- published a brilliant
article in Foreign Affairs entitled ''The Rise of Illiberal Democracy.'' His
argument was that the ''wave'' of democracy that had swept the world in the
1980's and 1990's had a shadow side. Many of the new democracies -- Russia
under Yeltsin and Putin, Venezuela under Chavez -- are routinely,'' as he
puts it in ''The Future of Freedom,'' ''ignoring constitutional limits on
their power and depriving their citizens of basic rights.'' Just holding
elections did not make them free.

He develops this point further in the book by adding some background
history: why England prospered under aristocratic rather than democratic
institutions, why democracy failed in interwar Germany. He also draws on the
extensive literature on the relationship between democracy and economic
growth, buying -- perhaps rather uncritically -- the deterministic argument
that democratic institutions are likely to succeed only in countries with
per capita income of more than $6,000. Many poor countries that democratized
prematurely in the era of decolonization, the argument goes, ended up
lapsing into dictatorship and deeper poverty. Conversely, it is no
coincidence that ''the best-consolidated democracies in Latin America and
East Asia -- Chile, South Korea and Taiwan -- were for a long while ruled by
military juntas.'' The moral of the story is simple: first get rich (thereby
acquiring a middle class, civil society and the rule of law), then
democratize. Memo to the Arab world: getting rich on rents from natural
resources doesn't count.

There are a few oddities here. It will strike some readers as surprising
that an Indian-born author should have such harsh words to say about his own
country's democracy and such kind words to say about the benign despotism of
Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, to say nothing of Gen. Pervez Musharraf's less
than benign rule in Pakistan. Still, the range of Zakaria's knowledge is
impressive. His chapter on the failure of democracy in the Arab world is
superb. And I could not agree more that whenever the United States
intervenes to overthrow ''rogue regimes,'' at least ''a five-year period of
transition . . . should precede national multiparty elections.''
(Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that his call for a ''serious, long-term
project of nation-building'' in Iraq will be heeded.)

Which brings us to the short time horizon of American politics, one of a
number of weaknesses Zakaria detects in the biggest of the Western
democracies. Is the United States imperceptibly becoming an illiberal -- or
at least a dysfunctional -- democracy? The argument is that the Madisonian
system of republican government, which Tocqueville so admired, has been
hollowed out in the name of ''more democracy'': ''America is increasingly
embracing a simple-minded populism that values popularity and openness as
the key measures of legitimacy. . . . The result is a deep imbalance in the
American system, more democracy but less liberty.''

Since the 1960's, as Zakaria shows, legislatures, parties and other
administrative agencies have sought to make their workings more transparent
and responsive to the popular will. Yet the unintended consequence of this
''democratization of democracy'' is that all these institutions have become
prey to the activities of professional lobbyists. Open committee meetings in
Congress; primary elections to select delegates to national political
conventions; changes to the system of campaign funding; the rise of
referendums in state and municipal politics -- together, these
well-intentioned innovations have tended to debase the political process.

Nor has the process of ''overdemocratization'' been confined to the realm of
politics. In finance, the law and even religion, the power of the masses has
grown at the expense of the elites who once ruled the United States.
Tocqueville based his confidence in American democracy on the existence of a
professional ''aristocracy'' dividing its time between private work and
public service. Zakaria convincingly shows how deregulation has undermined
the old American elites, enslaving C.E.O.'s, law partners and evangelical
ministers alike to the tyranny of the mass market. Our best hope, he
concludes, is to delegate more power to impartial experts, insulated from
the democratic fray. Today's independent central banks provide a possible
template. Zakaria would like to see a chunk of federal fiscal policy handed
to an equivalent of the Federal Reserve -- an autonomous I.R.S. that sets
rather than merely collects taxes.

A book so wide in its scope is bound to have its flaws. Zakaria follows
Mancur Olson and others in embracing a cartoon version of British political
development that Herbert Butterfield long ago dismissed as the ''Whig
interpretation of history.'' There is also a strangely sketchy quality to
Zakaria's political thought. After all, the aristocratic critique of
democracy was not Tocqueville's invention. It is one of the central notions
of classical political philosophy and history. In Book 3 of his Histories,
for example, Herodotus set out the case against democracy in terms
remarkably similar to Zakaria's:

''In a democracy, malpractices are bound to occur . . . corrupt dealings in
government services lead . . . to close personal associations, the men
responsible for them putting their heads together and mutually supporting
one another. And so it goes on, until somebody or other comes forward as the
people's champion and breaks up the cliques which are out for their own
interests. This wins him the admiration of the mob, and as a result he soon
finds himself entrusted with absolute power.''

Zakaria's critics will doubtless denounce him for looking backward. Indeed
he is -- but not just to the 1950's, or even the 1850's. This is a book that
looks back as far as 450 B.C.

Whether, in our hyperdemocratic age, there is a market for such a classical
defense of aristocratic rule must be doubtful. (Indeed, it would rather
undermine Zakaria's own thesis if ''The Future of Freedom'' were to be a
runaway best seller.) Yet it deserves a wide readership. Those who fear that
while seeking to impose its will on far-flung countries the American
republic may unwittingly follow Rome down the path to imperial perdition
will read it with a mixture of admiration and unease.


Niall Ferguson is the Herzog professor of financial history at the Stern
School of Business, New York University. His latest book is ''Empire: The
Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global
Power.''