DEFINITION OF TRUE DEMOCRACY
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Democracy as goal and democracy as technique are distinct. The techniques can be used, with some success, in a very limited sphere, with no thought of extending their benefits to all humanity, or even to the people next door or downstairs in the servants' quarters. Free discussion, voting, and the rest can and often have been used to regulate the internal affairs of oligarchies. Oligarchs who use democratic techniques in their dealings with each other can be antidemocratic and oppressive in their treatment of outsiders -- can be, perhaps, slaveowners or enthusiastic patrons of the gladiatorial games. Indeed, democratic techniques, such as voting in referenda, can be used to impose social unanimity, to validate decisions made by a few in the name of all, without real choice entering into the process at any time.
Democracy as goal and democracy as technique are nevertheless related. There is a logic inherent in democratic practice that calls for its extension to larger and larger circles. Every extension of democratic practice has come in response to the demands of excluded people that they be recognized as full members of their community. The logic of democracy, that individuals and their interests must be taken into account, may be resisted; but if it is, the only alternative is retreat from whatever degree of democratic practice has been achieved. The result will be rigid oligarchy, hereditary aristocracy, dictatorship, monarchy.
The collapse of democratic arrangements in societies where those arrangements applied only to a small number of "citizens" is a common story in history, because there have been a large number of such societies. One can take the existence and failure of such quasi-democracies in either an optimistic or pessimistic sense. We simply hope that this phenomenon can be recognized as an important part of human history.
Likewise there is a history of democratic societies, at least of societies where many people, in part through the use of democratic techniques, have striven to realize the larger democratic virtues. None has ever reached the goal of the perfectly democratic and free society, and none is ever likely to. Perfection is not a human possibility. Yet the striving has not been worthless, and it has left its trace on the historical record. This, too, is part of our story.
Finally, our intention is to write a world history of democracy. There is a long-standing and tenacious idea that democracy is a European (or European-American) notion, which has evolved out of purely European (or "Western") values. This idea is one component of "European exceptionalism," an uncritical doctrine which traces the accomplishments (or sometimes the vices) of the modern era back to supposedly unique features of western European culture. The application of the doctrine to the development of democracy has led to a distortion of history long overdue for correction.
There is no doubt that large-scale democracies in the modern era first emerged in western Europe and areas settled by western Europeans. Certainly, unique circumstances helped produce this situation. To go beyond that, however, and identify democratic ideas and techniques as unique products of one regional tradition, applicable only within the culture of that region, is to go too far.
We believe that the techniques of democracy are the common heritage of humankind, and that democratic values are applicable anywhere. We do not think this is merely a matter of personal faith. Rather, there are good historical arguments to justify that view. We have in the past offered such arguments, and hope to do it more systematically in the future. -
The failure of democracy
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter" --Winston Churchill
"Democracy is two Uzi-armed sheep and a wolf discussing who's for dinner"
"Democracy" is one of the most loaded words in politics today. Whatever problems we have, they must be due to an absence of democracy. Lack of freedom ? Too much freedom ? It's because there isn't enough democracy. If only everyone could have their word, and we could all work together, we'd finally solve all our problems and empower ourselves. Right ?
Wrong. After taking over Republicanism's track record, democracy has proven time and again that it is not the solution for administrating a country. In fact, democracy has now become intimately associated with socialism.
Please note that I will be covering a lot of ground in this article. Many of these things are already covered in other texts that I have written. I hope this will give you an overview of the case that I am describing here. -
The epistemic failure of democracy
But first, we must define what we mean by democracy. A short definition could be : the rule of the many over the few. A democratic system is one where voting is the source of decision-making, either thru direct vote or elected representatives.
In practice, this means a mixed political system, and therefore a system where pressure groups and popular opinion lead the way. This is the politics of compromise and temperance, not defined as the just middle, but as a muddle of positions in order to attract votes.
The failure of democracy is obvious in the light of our current societies. Gun control, attacks against freedom of speech, social programs, all sorts of evils exist simply because people have desired for them to exist. In North America, we have voted for representatives that have desired to implement them, as opposed to politicians who did not want to implement them. Of course there is more than the simple fact of electing people, but rather that they also have the power to do what they desire.
The end result is death by democracy : dozens of thousands of people who die every year because of gun control, the war against drugs, pharmaceutical regulations, and other measures. The end result is also hundreds of thousands of people imprisoned for victimless crimes, more and more poverty and joblessness, as well as a miseducated, unhealthy, miserable society. Everything good and noble in society has been twisted to fulfill the government's ambitions and to get handouts from said government, from the corporate world to individual action. -
Epistemologically, this failure is childishly simple to explain. We know that reality is objective, and that therefore personal opinion alone does not make truth - "fifty million frenchmen can be wrong". To find reality, we must go beyond our opinions and reach out to the existants around us.
To adopt a democratic system means that we hold personal opinion as a standard of truth. Therefore, the contents of people's minds, and not reality, becomes our standard. For that reason, any such system or process cannot insure the rights of its people, for the simple reason that it is based on an irrational standard. To have a system based on reality, one must limit it with reality, which is to say, rational thought.
People, considered as a mass (that on which democracy relies on for agreement), are unfit to rule, for the simple reason than people in general are unfit to be dentists, or programmers, or plumbers : politics is an area of study which requires thought and knowledge. In real life, there is, and can be, only a minority of people who have solid knowledge of politics, despite what they might like to think. Therefore, the mind of the would-be politician citizen is left to its own devices.
We know from epistemology that, when left to its own devices, the human mind will usually fall back on culture, common knowledge, and instinct. The laws of a democratic country reflects far more the psycho-epistemology of its people (including the given culture and taboos of a society) than it does reality. This is what we observe in reality. As social engineering became popular early in the last century, we assisted to institutionalized Prohibition and eugenics, which faded away from the scene. Then, as government continued to expand, society started to slow down, and people became dissatisfacted with what they thought was a failure of freedom. This gave way to the emergence of today's mixed economies and constant threats against social exchange.
The decline of the American Republic has clearly demonstrated that even moderate amounts of excess democracy, kept in check by state divisions and a strong constitution, will eventually lead to a socialist state. Historically, the American government has used the pretext of wars, real or imagined, and catastrophies in order to get people to give it power. Of course, that's also how Hitler got elected, albeit under more dire circumstances.
In my opinion, the two biggest problems with the American constitution were the state governements being body corporate and to a certain extent independant from the federal government, and the power of the federal government to amend the Constitution, which was too great. With more strict standards, the 16th Amendment, for example, would never have passed.
One may object to this by mentioning the democratic nature of free markets. It is true that the success of a company depends primarily on its customer base. However, companies do not, in a free society, vie for political power. Furthermore, pragmatically speaking, customer choice is actually the most efficient way of determining necessity, because value-judgments are by necessity personal. The context of each individual changes the value of a product, so that, for example, a glass of water which may be invaluable for someone stranded in the desert might be worthless to someone else. While the person might not necessarily be most habilitated to determine his own needs, he is still more capable of doing so than a complete stranger might be able to evaluate his needs, let alone the needs of everyone. -
A more comprehensive solution
The basic facts on which rights are based do not change. A free and dynamic society will always be the optimal state for any society to be in. However, this does not mean that we cannot make mistakes in establishing those rights. In correcting mistakes, a democratic process may have some merits. Furthermore, the initial advantage of democracy was that it lessened the possibility of revolt. If we can keep the majority happy on the issues, so the argument goes, we can have more public satisfaction in the government in place. Therefore, there is certainly a way in which democracy can be useful, if we understand its proper role.
Political power is, in the end, the crucial factor which determines the amount of influence humans can have on a system.
The role of democracy is not, as we have seen, to establish the general mode of government of a country. So far the best system that we have found to do so is the use of a Constitution - a formal document that defines the structure and limits of the government. These things may be established on a rational basis, and thus we have a structure which will follow rational principles.
The problem with having a Constitution is that it is a document, nothing more. It does not ensure its own safeguard. Any political system must, at least until Artificial Intelligence manages to somehow gain power, be manned by human beings - and even then, artificial beings would still be programmed by humans. Where there are human beings, there are stupid human tricks. It is inevitable that a large majority of the population will come to rebel against its own laws and desire to take away the freedom of one or another group.
These poignant desires are usually temporary. Therefore, we might do better by providing a safety valve in the Constitution in the form of amendments, as the US Constitution provides, and making it a democratic system. However, it should be considerably more difficult to ratify one than to nullify one, in order to keep such safety valve for only as long as necessary.
There are certainly objections to such a view. For example, some people seem to think that human stupidity is an argument against a limited government - that is, that people left to their own devices would degenerate society. However, this is a ridiculous argument because it presumes that politicians are not human. This is obviously not true ! Politicians are as stupid as the people in general, especially so since they are chosen by the people. Indeed, it is an argument in favour of a limited system, because even ignorant representatives would have to work very hard to sink the system, in comparaison to a social-democracy, where politicians have a lot more power. -
Political power can come in many forms. The most usual one is the power to change the laws, and to change the "rules of the game" - how these laws are accepted. There is also the power to influence public opinion, thru handouts or biaised laws, in order to get re-elected, the power to vote oneself a higher salary, and many other things.
Political power is, in the end, the crucial factor which determines the amount of influence humans can have on a system. The more power the least people have, the more devastating it will be. This is why the concentration of power in dictatorships and superstructures leads rapidly to the use of force. On the other hand, a system like the United States, where the power is more diffused and limited, leads to the use of force much more slowly.
There are therefore two main characteristics of political power : its concentration and limitations. The more concentrated and unlimited power is, the more evil will come from it. The more diffused and limited by natural rights power is, the least evil it will be able to do.
A case in point would be the American system of state governments. It may seem that the separation of powers between state and federal governments makes power more dispersed and limited, and that therefore the American system is superior. However, state governments are not bound by the US Constitution except in a few trivial ways (such as having a Republican type of government), and can be considered for practical purposes to be unlimited in power, as a whole. Taken individually, state governments are a typical instance of quasi-unlimited, concentrated power. Historically, this was for a good reason, but we can see the consequences today.
In essence, it does not matter whenever the total governmental power is broken down in many body corporates or not. What is important is the limitations and concentration of each political entity, because each of these entities have a direct influence on their citizens' rights.
And this brings me to the last explanatory concept, which is power flow. The interplay between the different political entities, which is itself determined by the initial configuration of power, entails a certain power flow between entities. For example, in the American government, the power flow is basically divided between citizens, city governments, state governments, and the federal government. Given that the initial configuration of power was determined by national and state constitutions, we can then observe throughout history the changes in power flow which have led to the current configuration.
We observe, for example, that democratic systems have the effect of twisting the relationship between politicians and the people. While they are dependant on the people to get re-elected, and therefore enact various measures or promises in order to get more votes, they have no interest in being honest about their actions. In effect, every element of the government, justified or not, becomes graded on its ability to draw votes, compared to corporations, where things are valuable because of potential profits. This leads to an inherently flawed way of governing. Tyler's quote, while perhaps not accurate, reflects this state of affairs. In short, people can vote themselves other people's money, and politicians give it to them so they can get votes. Of course, this leads to the pressure groups game that we know today, and the degeneration of general welfare. -
One must not understate the importance of culture, education, societal conditions, in which the system we examine evolves. To take the always handy but exaggerated example of Hitler, a radical fascist preaching segregation and war could not get elected today. Adolph Hitler was elected in Germany because the situation was radically negative and was screaming for change. Not only had the German people retained their independance, but the Treaty of Versailles was a heavy burden on the German people, and the Weimar Republic was a weak, democratic system - probably one of the worst scenarios one can imagine. The National Socialists' policy of semi-capitalist led the country out of a recession and its anti-social, anti-Jew policies pleased the people.
In New Zealand, the democracy there, in the nineties, turned towards a smaller government for a brief period, during which it went to considerably higher economical freedom. After a while, it then turned back to its old ways, judging that they had attained too much freedom. We do not observe these general reversal tendancies in other democratic societies, or quite rarely.
We cannot, therefore, start exclusively from political premises if we are to examine the power flow in a given society. We cannot say that democracy will lead to one and only one "solution", or that totalitarism will lead to one and only one "solution". Indeed, we cannot say as such that there are "solutions", only different power flows.
One last use of democracy which is worthy of discussion is electing officials. Here what we face is not a safety valve but a straightforward problem. Even if most officials can be appointed, we need people to start up the system. How will these people be chosen ? Here, democracy is usually used, but a few other options can be chosen.
For example, one might adopt plutocracy - the reign of the rich. This is a more serious option than it might seem. While most people would resent being ruled by Bill Gates, or Larry Elison, there is a certain merit in the idea that successful people are more apt to rule than unsuccessful ones. However, there is still the problem that being rich is not a guarantee of political merit any more than being voted in is not a guarantee of merit.
Which brings us to meritocracy. It sounds like the perfect idea, in theory - the rule of the most meritorious. But there are immediately many problems with this idea. What does merit mean in this context ? How do we choose the most meritorious people ? Who will choose them ? If the people who choose the most meritorious are chosen by merit, we are merely being circular. Such a line of thought is unfruitful. -
Unfortunately, we still have no practical way of electing people except by popular vote. Agreed, there are various modes of popular voting. The most realistic one that we have is called "approval voting", that is, a system where everyone can vote for as many candidates as desired. It is more realistic because many candidates can be judged as "worthy" of an office in any given election. One may argue that weighted voting may be even more realistic, since some can be considered more "worthy" than others, but it's already difficult enough for the uneducated population to deal with little check marks.
Democracy, therefore, is not the most efficient way to determine truth. However, in situations where decisions must be taken dynamically, it seems we have little choice but to rely on democratic processes, while making them as rational and limited as possible. It seems that we cannot, in general, have a free society without having an educated citizenry, however limited the government is. -
A Weakness of Democracy
Cecil Hook
During the recent presidential election squabble, it became evident that many of the citizens of our great country do not understand our own democratic system, not even the newly elected senator from New York. In the election the majority vote did not prevail, and that brought forth angry cries of protest. The value of an Electoral College system was challenged by some, even the senator from New York. There has been a growing sentiment in our nation that we do not need a representative government, or a Supreme Court for that matter, but that a majority vote of the population should create all laws and decide all issues.
Our founding fathers were much wiser than the untaught of this generation, including the senator. They knew that rule by majority vote would open the floodgate for unjust decisions born of ignorance, emotion, and prejudicial reactions stirred by leaders.
As an example, earlier in our history, I am confident, a majority would have voted against permitting a Jew or Catholic holding office. Today, the majority might vote to expel all Muslims, to fine a person for telling a racist joke, to do away with most taxes, or to confiscate the wealth and property of all millionaires (except for athletes and entertainers, of course). The drastic possibilities are endless.
The founding fathers, realizing the weakness of pure democracy - rule by majority vote - established a democracy limited by a Constitution and its Bill of Rights to protect individuals, institutions, and less populated states. As defined by the Constitution, it would be a government by the people through representatives elected by vote as the Constitution specifies. The Constitution authorizes a system of checks and balances for the good of both the system and the individual.
If all citizens were fully informed and totally unselfish, most any form of government would work well. But therein lies the weakness of any form of government, even true democracy or representative democracy. Elected officials may grasp for power to control, and individuals or tiny minority groups may selfishly limit the privileges of the general population.
More and more, our society is now being controlled by minority rule. We have been impressed by this during the Christmas season which has just passed. An individual or a very few can undermine the culture of a community because they object to its religious origins and overtones. That is selfishness. If I lived in a country where the Buddhist religion is dominant, as an illustration, I would expect many facets of their society to reflect that culture. As a good citizen, I would not seek to destroy the privileges of the vast majority. I would be constrained to "render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar," even though it might be oppressive. Even though I may work for peaceful change, it would be blatant selfishness for me to demand the elimination of a culture because it does not fit my desires.
Legally, the Bill of Rights is one of the treasured features of our government. However, morally, a person should have concern for others rather than demanding that they give up everything he disapproves. Liberties must always be exercised with due respect to other people. Law gives privilege but morality is voluntary compliance to principle.
My purpose here is not to teach a course in government. I claim no qualification for that. I am using civil government as an illustration of some things that prevail in the society of believers. The principles upon which the founders of our nation built are those set forth in the Scriptures affecting our relationship in God's community of believers. They are meant to direct effective leadership and to safeguard the welfare of the association while also protecting the liberty of the group and each individual within it. -
Although all are equal in the local community of believers, all do not function in the same capacities. For the benefit of all Corinthian disciples Paul urged, "Now, brethren, you know that the household of Stephanas were the first converts in Achaia, and they have devoted themselves to the service of the saints; I urge you to be subject to such men and to every fellow worker and laborer" (1 Cor. 16:15f). Leadership in service, rather than authority, and willing submission to unselfish leadership are the principles set forth by Paul, yet we can foresee the vulnerability of such an arrangement because of the ignorance and selfishness of individuals.
Lack of regard for these principles by leaders or by those being led may result in stagnation, disunity, or even tyranny. Too often, minority rule is developed by leaders who rule without consent of the majority, or objector rule is imposed when those of negative attitudes prevail.
Paul exhorted disciples "to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love for their work." Those laborers, in turn, through loving concern are to "encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with all. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all" (1 Thes. 5:12f). This mutual respect must be what Paul was calling for when he instructed, "Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ" (Eph. 5:1).
Those who are strong must not look with contempt on the weak nor trample them under foot. Those who are weak must not condemn the strong and demand to rule the group or other individuals in it by their objections. That is the message of Paul in Romans 14 - a message so commonly ignored. There he explains that people of differing convictions are honoring the Lord as they serve respecting each other. "Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding" (v. 19). It is a sad commentary that few of our congregations go for five or ten years without a serious unity problem or a real blow-up. And it is always "their fault," rather than "ours."
The exhortations in Chapter 14 are concluded with, "We who are strong ought to bear the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves; let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to edify him" (15:1). If this were to be put into practice in a congregation, there would be no friction between different persons or segments among them. "Who is ruling the congregation?" would not be a topic of conversation with the group.
Where proper attitudes do not prevail, there can be minority rule of two types. First is the Diotrophes type, though nobody ever admits to being like him. This type may be an individual or a group like "Diotrophes, who likes to put himself first . he refuses himself to welcome the brethren, and also stops those who want to welcome them and puts them out of the church" (3 John 9-10). The "leadership" tactic of this type is that of over-powering, demanding conformity to their desires and judgments. Anyone who refuses to bow to their "authority" is squeezed out or put out. The congregation is "purified" by rejection and division.
The second type of minority rule is "objector rule." Actually, this type often involves persons of the Diotrophes type. Seldom are these the "weak brothers" that Paul writes about in Romans 14. They are more likely those who claim to be protecting the congregation from any innovative practice or interpretation of wider views. Their devotion is to keeping everything in "the old paths." They object to anything that differs from the teachings and practices of the church of their earliest remembrance - the old paths..
Either type of minority rule is destructive, but the latter is the most commonly practiced. Objection by a minority tends to keep a system frozen in time. Progress is defeated, simplistic interpretations prevail, and legalistic, ritualistic works become the unchanging pattern. A few unbending people who demand that they not be "offended" stifle and demoralize the whole congregation.
In our democratic form of government, a minority with selfish attitudes which refuses to "live and let live" can become its Achilles heel. In our congregations, minorities with selfish attitudes who refuse to "bear and forbear" can reduce the group to the lowest common denominator of being "the strictest sect of the Pharisees. (February 1, 2001) [] -
Now natural is freedom? How useful is freedom? Is freedom something that, in itself, always is good? We know freedom shouldn't be taken as granted, but does freedom in a state lead to a better state? Or is democracy a weakness, something that will inevitably perish?
These issues I'm left with after reading the Republic. Plato was a man of efficiency, the state should be a well-oiled machine, with the wisest men at the controls. Every man should do one job, and do it well. Every woman should be able to do a man's job. Art, music and poetry should only be allowed if it would benevit the state and the upbringing of its children. You live to work. Freedom is a weakness.
This is ofcourse a very clinical view of a society, and a negative view on his perfect state. The ruling class also didn't have any possessions, and the equality between the sexes is something we should admire, even today. The rulers weren't born to rule, but had to be brought up with the highest care. Also, it was possible to move between the layers of society. Education was a central part of society, and everything had to be done in order to form the next generation of philosophical rulers.
Even so, Plato looked down at democracy in his day. This was far off from our present-day democracy (in his day, there was no parlement and actions had to be taken with a majority of votes throughout the whole population. See it like a referendum for every action the state could take, or a 365-day/year election period). Politicians would only follow the will of the people, and sometimes measures need to be taken that would harm the people, or at least would be in contrary to the popular vote. With freedom, society desintegrates as everyone will stand for himself, and persue his own goals and desires. Chaos and anarchy are a result.
In our current-day society, polls and referenda are becoming more and more important. Great Britain might drop out of the EU if a majority of the people don't agree with the EU consitution. I don't think many british would mind, but the consequences might be pretty severe for both the union and Britain. In the future, voting via the internet will probably be realized, but what will be the consequences? Can John Doe handle freedom? Does John Doe benevit from freedom?
What we also shouldn't forget is that the city-states of ancient Greece were small (so a form of popular-democracy was possible), but also that war and strive between these states was commonplace. Plato laid out rules of 'contact' between states, as war shouldn't be allowed within Greece. The victor should only take with him a years harvest, and shouldn't burn or pillage the defeated. In order for a state to survive, a strong military was of the upmost importance (hence Plato's admiration of Sparta, a militaristic state, or timarchy). Freedom was a blessing and a bane, but it was a bane a state could not afford if it would want to survive. It lead to a weak government.
With war more-or-less abolished and the possibilities of a popular-democracy, can we afford to move toward the democracy of the ancient greeks? Or will it lead toward the downfall of society?
When we look at the USA, we can hardly call it a democracy anymore. It's a capitalistic state, an oligarchy. Money decides the votes, as money controls the media. If our John Doe wanted to become president of the USA, would he have a chance? Of course not. You need a well-funded machine behind you. Nader has felt this again and again, he just doesn't have the capital to move public opinion. Both republicans and democrats receive insane amounts of funding from companies. Propaganda? Ofcourse, I can't think of any other word that would cover the situation. The flaw of an oligarchy, however, is greed. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. The rich are overthrown by the poor, and you get a democracy again. This isn't typical for the USA. Italy, pre-11/03/04 Spain and Russia are examples of these false democracies.
The question then arises: how can you give freedom of press while not allowing the rich 'to become more equal'? Being a technologist, I do see a possible partial technical solution to this issue: DVR. Without having to watch sponsered commercials, people will have the freedom to skip adds. Maybe. We still can have a biased media...
Will the internet save our freedom? Or will it too be enslaved by capitalism? Will a philosopher-state ever be viable? I don't think so, at least not with a generation that sees freedom as a natural right. It also won't work with the size of societies we live in now. It is, however, the strongest form of society when faced with external threats. I'm hoping it won't be necessary, and that we can continue to cherish our freedom and individualism. Efficiency should never be the goal of a society, except when there is no other possible alternative. -
Capitalism and the Suicide of Culture
Not long before he died, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin somberly summed up his, and our, age: "I have lived through most of the twentieth century without, I must add, suffering personal hardship. I remember it only as the most terrible century in Western history." What made it so horrific is politics or, more precisely, the secular religions of National Socialism and communism that violently sought to transfigure the bourgeois economic and political condition of modern man. The exact number of people killed by these dark political adventures is lost to time, though surely it exceeds 125 million.
The secular religions are now gone, leaving behind only loss and ruin. Communism, as an ongoing political experiment, expired with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989; National Socialism didn’t survive its crushing military defeat during World War II. As the twenty–first century dawns, it is difficult to imagine a serious ideological challenger to what communism and National Socialism wanted to destroy: prosaic bourgeois liberal democracy—what social theorist Michael Novak calls democratic capitalism.
Despite the fall of the political messianisms, however, the future of democratic capitalism is by no means unclouded. Perhaps this is as it should be, since all things merely human are flawed. The hubris of the secular religions was to think that they had solved "the political problem." Properly understood, democratic capitalism makes no such claims. It has been a virtue of the richest current of liberal democratic thought, from James Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville to Irving Kristol and Pierre Manent, to explore bourgeois society’s inherent limitations and failings without losing sight of its basic decency and relative justness. Three important recent books allow us to confirm the relevance of that anti–utopian tradition and gain a better understanding of what troubles democratic capitalism today.
François Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press) provides striking insights into the political tensions of democratic capitalism. While most nations have awakened to the economic merits of the free market, John Gray’s False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (New Press) proclaims the post–Marxist era of the new global economy a human disaster. He’s mostly wrong, but enthusiasts of unleashed markets would be foolish simply to ignore the dissatisfactions he gives voice to. And Francis Fukuyama’s ambitious The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (Free Press), which seeks to explain the social chaos that has plagued the economically advanced democracies for several decades, helps illumine—though not in a way the author intends—the biggest danger to democratic capitalism: the growing alliance between the free–market economy and a culture of moral libertinism. Politics, economics, culture: in each sphere, democratic capitalism faces deep challenges.
At the time of his death in 1997, François Furet was France’s foremost historian and the world’s preeminent authority on the French Revolution. Though once a Marxist himself, Furet broke with the Marxist view of the French Revolution—long dominant in French historiography—which saw it as an economically determined bourgeois warm–up for the Russian Revolution of October 1917. In the Marxian optic, 1789 was the inevitable result of a rising bourgeoisie overthrowing the ancien régime and the agricultural society tied to it. Furet rejected the notion of historical inevitability and gave human political actions a central explanatory role. In a Tocque villian register of melancholic liberalism, he also claimed that the revolution released utopian hopes for a humanity reconciled with itself and in control of its destiny that neither liberal democracy nor any other political regime, including socialism, could ever satisfactorily fulfill. -
The Passing of an Illusion, which appeared in France in 1995 and quickly became a controversial best–seller across Europe, shifts the focus to the twentieth century and to the rise and decline of the Communist idea, the inheritor of those profound but—when directed into politics—destructive longings. Disabused, attentive to the complex interactions of "ideas, intentions, and circumstances" that give meaning to history, Furet’s final testament is written on the far side of the revolutionary passions of the epoch. It serves as a kind of warning about expecting too much from politics.
CommunismÂ’s seductive appeal, Furet argues, came in considerable part from coupling the inherently incompatible ideas of human volition and the science of history. The Russian Bolsheviks showed the true capacity of manÂ’s revolutionary will, which, in the most backward nation of Europe, promised the achievement of human liberation first announced by the French Revolution. To this "cult of volition," Furet explains, "Lenin would add the certainties of science, drawn from MarxÂ’s Capital." History has a predetermined outcome, and thanks to Marxist "science," we know exactly what it is, the revolutionaries claimed. Knowledge would transform Proletarian man into the Lord of Time, ushering in the classless society.
It was never clear how a science of historical in evitability could be reconciled with the allegedly Promethean will that forged the Russian Revolution, but no matter. Isaiah Berlin describes the emotional lure: "There is a curious human feeling that if the stars in their courses are fighting for you, so that your cause will triumph, then you should sacrifice yourself in order to shorten the process, to bring the birth pangs of the new order nearer." Will and science: "By combining these two supremely modern elixirs with their contempt for logic," Furet stringently notes, "the revolutionaries of 1917 had finally concocted a brew sufficiently potent to inebriate militants for generations to come."
However intoxicating communism’s blend of revolutionary will and pseudo–science, it inebriated as many as it did because it both grew out of and exploited a two–fold political weakness of the bourgeois regime. The first weakness: liberal democracy set loose an egalitarian spirit that it can never fully tame. The notion of the universality and equality of man, which liberal democracy claims as its foundation, easily becomes subject to egalitarian overbidding. Equality constantly finds itself undermined by the freedoms the liberal order secures. The liberty to pursue wealth, to seek to better one’s condition, to create, to strive for power or achievement—all these freedoms unceasingly generate inequality, since not all people are equally gifted, equally nurtured, equally hardworking, equally lucky. Equality works in democratic capitalist societies like an imaginary horizon, forever retreating as one approaches it. -
Communism professed to fulfill the democratic promise of equality. Real liberty could only be the achievement of a more equal world, a world, that is, without the bourgeoisie. And if what the Communists derisively called the "formal" liberties of expression and political representation had to go in order to establish the true freedom of a classless society, well, so be it. Thus was set in motion, Furet ruefully observes, the "egalitarian apocalypse."
The second weakness is more complex, though its consequences are increasingly evident: liberal democracy’s moral indeterminacy. The "bourgeois city," as Furet terms it, is morally indeterminate because, basing itself on the sovereign individual, it constituted itself as a rebellion against, or at least a downplaying of, any extrahuman or ontological dimension that might provide moral direction to life. For all the inestimable benefits of the bourgeois city—its three–fold liberation, in Michael Novak’s formulation, from tyranny, from the oppression of conscience, and from the grinding material poverty of the premodern world—its deliverance from the past has come at a price.
As the "self" moves to the center of the bourgeois world, Furet suggests, existential questions—what is man? what is the meaning of life?—become difficult to answer. Communism, usurping the role of religion in checking the individualizing excesses of democratic modernity, falsely promised to resolve such pressing existential questions, to provide a political articulation—monstrously perverse, as it turned out—of human ends.
The two political weaknesses of the bourgeois order, Furet adds, have a psychological corollary: self–doubt and self–hatred. The bourgeois man finds himself unsettled by a guilty conscience and spiritual dissatisfaction. "Self–doubt," Furet writes, "has led to a characteristic of modern democracy probably unique in universal history, the infinite capacity to produce offspring who detest the social and political regime into which they were born—hating the very air they breathe, though they cannot survive without it and have known no other." Hatred of the bourgeoisie, on the right and the left, is a tale as old as bourgeois modernity itself, of course, but it is jarring to realize how much ire has come not from aristocratic revenants or fiery proles, but from the cerebral sons of bourgeois fathers. Historian Perry Anderson points out that most of the leading Marxist thinkers originally came from bourgeois money: Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Herbert Marcuse, even Marx himself—all had fathers who were bankers, bureaucrats, lawyers, manufacturers, or merchants.
The end of World War I—a bourgeois war motivated by bourgeois concerns and supported by the bourgeois class—left middle–class Europe exhausted. Into the breach stepped the Soviet Union, the antibourgeois society with all the answers. In the interwar years, the liberal democratic societies seemed powerless to control their fate while the Soviet Union’s "five year plans," constructing the socialist future, appeared the very model of human rationality. But as credible reports of purges, political terror, and starvation began to leak from Stalin’s totalitarian netherworld during the 1930s, doubts about the Communist system began to arise.
The chaotic aftermath of the war also spurred the rise of fascism, a second and rival critique of bourgeois modernity. Where communism embraced the universal ideals of 1789, fascism drew its revolutionary force from the nation and—with its darkest star, National Socialism—from racial ideology, making it what Furet calls the "pathology of the particular." Although professed mortal enemies, communism and fascism shared many affinities, including a loathing of the bourgeoisie, which is our concern here. -
Despite the failures of communism and fascism, the political weaknesses of the bourgeois democracies—their susceptibility to egalitarian overbidding and their moral indeterminacy—are with us still. Nor are we free from hatred of the bourgeoisie; it remains virulent in both high and popular culture. The liberal democratic regime, Furet observes, by its very nature "creates the need for a world beyond the bourgeoisie and beyond Capital, a world in which a genuine human community can flourish"—a need, his book persuasively shows, that will never be met. With the fall of communism, "The idea of another society has become almost impossible to conceive of, and no one in the world today is offering any advice on the subject or even trying to formulate a new concept." "Here we are," Furet concludes, "condemned to live in the world as it is."
Is this strange antinomy of the human political condition—between the utopian impulse and prosaic reality—sustainable? Though communism and fascism have exited the stage of history, one should resist the temptation to conclude that the history of politics culminates in the bourgeois regime. New political monsters may yet arise from the unstable and ultimately dissatisfying bourgeois world. More likely, liberal democratic societies will continue their plunge into a generalized moral nihilism subversive of bourgeois order—a concern I will return to later. The task of political thought is to guard against these threats, whatever shape they might take, through what Furet terms "the sad analysis of reality."
If the political future of democratic capitalism remains uncertain, requiring both vigilance and reconciliation to this–worldly imperfections, what about its economic prospect? Though communism now rests in history’s dustbin, anticapitalism is not without influential adherents, as evidenced by British political theorist John Gray. Gray is not of the traditional left. But having moved from Margaret Thatcher’s camp in the 1980s to become a fierce critic of Thatcher’s legacy during the 1990s, he is certainly no longer the free–market conservative he once was. His recent book False Dawn is a blistering assault on the global capitalism of competitive free markets, fast–moving entrepreneurs, and volatile stock exchanges.
Gray brusquely dismisses the assumption that global capitalism will spread wealth across the planet. Inverting Montesquieu’s dictum that "commerce . . . polishes and softens barbarian ways," Gray believes that capitalism is leading inexorably to a new late–modern barbarism. Indeed, Gray argues, the project of creating a world market is as utopian as Soviet communism—both are Enlightenment ideologies, he stresses, wedded to the cult of reason and blind to history—and threatens "to rival it in the suffering that it inflicts."
For Gray, the project for a world market is utopian because it seeks to transplant a U.S.–forged "unfettered" capitalism, characterized by flexible labor markets, low taxes, spirited competition, and relatively restrained welfare benefits, to cultures with radically different, "embedded" markets in which man’s desire to barter and trade is constrained. The transplant will never take, since unfettered markets are humanly unsatisfying; but global capitalism’s "gale of creative destruction"—Gray borrows the language, though not the sobriety, of economist Joseph Schumpeter—will erode social cohesion by destroying settled ways of life, ignite fundamentalist movements that will struggle to restore order by force, and lead rival powers to exploit natural resources ruthlessly until the earth is left cracked and barren. The world will face the "return of history," Gray solemnly warns, "with its familiar intractable conflicts, tragic choices, and ruined illusions."
Gray paints global capitalism in lurid colors. "Already it has resulted," he writes, "in over a hundred million peasants becoming migrant laborers in China, the exclusion from work and participation in society of tens of millions in the advanced societies, a condition of near–anarchy and rule by organized crime in parts of the post–Communist world, and further devastation of the environment." In the U.S., where the market is most free and its unyielding logic most visible, the technological innovation and cutthroat competition that creative destruction lets loose has "proletarianized" the middle classes by eliminating stable careers and suppressing income growth, undermined the family, bred resentment over fast–rising inequality, and pushed innumerable uprooted and alienated individuals into criminality. The dismal realities of the U.S. economy, he predicts, will soon consume the world. Supporting his contention, Gray interprets the crisis of Asian capitalism as a harbinger of a "fast developing crisis of global capitalism," a sign that global free markets have become ungovernable.
Gray sees no truly viable political response to global capitalism. He hopes for what I would call a "market pluralism," encouraging various ways of articulating markets within different cultural and political forms. But his hope burns dimly since he sees no world power that will put a brake on the market. The U.S., which has the power, is the global marketÂ’s chief sponsor. Socialism is dead, Gray acknowledges, and for good reason: "The legacy of socialist central planning has been ruinous." But Gray thinks that his preferred social democracy, too, has gone into "final retreat," unable to resist the capitalist storm. Global markets, obeying a "New GreshamÂ’s Law" in which bad forms of capitalism drive out good, punish governments that borrow too much money or boost taxes to achieve full employment. A "race to the bottom" ensues, with governments stripping away social protections in order to remain economically competitive and firms relocating to the global backwater with the cheapest labor costs.
As for the neoconservative belief that markets can be tied to traditional morality, Gray is contemptuous. The free market, he says, by celebrating individual choice above all other goods, necessarily erodes traditional forms of life. Global capitalism will proceed without a humanly appealing economic and political alternative until it sets itself, and the world, aflame. -
Most of False Dawn’s description of contemporary capitalism, it is easy to show, is wildly exaggerated. Gray overestimates the degree of the historical ascendancy of American–style capitalism and the destructive effects of economic globalization. Market pluralism is, in fact, a fairly accurate way of describing the global economy, and is likely to remain so. To the "unfettered" capitalism of the U.S.—itself a caricature, since the U.S. economy is regulated heavily—we can contrast Japanese capitalism, which, despite the turmoil that has roiled the Asian markets in the last year, still features long–term employment and tight relations between banks and other firms; the German social–market model, with generous welfare benefits, powerful trade unions, and high taxes; and the touted "Third Way" of Tony Blair’s Labor Party in England. One needn’t stake a claim on the merits of any particular capitalism to grasp the reality of market pluralism.
Each kind of capitalism entails unavoidable trade–offs. German worker protections, for example, come at a cost: negative job growth over the past five years and high unemployment. The U.S.’s freer market has led to booming job growth and low unemployment but greater disparities in wealth. Economic globalization, pace Gray, hasn’t made these difficult social choices irrelevant. It does, however, punish exceedingly foolish economic programs, like President François Mitterrand’s 1981 nationalization of large swaths of the French private sector, which sent $3 billion a day in capital flooding from the country until his government was forced to change course. We may be witnessing the "final retreat" of extreme forms of social democracy, though even that I doubt, since the pull of egalitarianism will always be powerful in bourgeois societies. But, contrary to Gray, more moderate versions remain viable, albeit at the cost of low job growth and high taxes. There is no wide–ranging "race to the bottom."
Only on two counts does Gray’s analysis deserve deeper scrutiny. First, there is capitalism’s tendency to erode stable careers. The U.S., where the project to establish the global market originated, is the best place, Gray feels, to measure the insecurity creative destruction brings with it. The rest of the world will soon feel it. "In their ever greater dependency on increasingly uncertain jobs," Gray contends, "the American middle classes resemble the classic proletariat of nineteenth–century Europe." Today, he holds, the prospect of a career is becoming obsolete.
That overstates the situation. Many people still have long–term, even lifetime, careers. The U.S. employment turnover rate has shifted in the direction of mobility, but more from individuals willingly changing jobs (or even careers) than from being fired or laid off. Nevertheless, beneath Gray’s inflammatory rhetoric lies a truth. For much of the post–World War II period, technological changes came relatively slowly. Industry in the developed world grew used to fixed ways of doing things. Now, as competition from an increasingly international economy liberates ever more creativity and technological innovation, the insecurity of employees will continue to grow as whole industries become redundant and are replaced with new industries, perhaps unimagined a short time before. How much call is there, in the year 2000, for vinyl record albums or typewriters? Who knows what new industries lie just beyond the horizon? The Italian philosopher Rocco Buttiglione puts it sharply: in the future we will have myriad "work opportunities" but fewer lifetime "jobs." Flexibility will be the key to prosperity, both nationally and individually.
Though we shouldnÂ’t exaggerate its extent, this transformation, inseparable from global capitalismÂ’s creative destruction, can lead to a social weakness comparable to democratic capitalismÂ’s political weaknesses of moral indeterminacy and vulnerability before egalitarianism. Some people will have a hard time adapting to the more flexible work world. Not everyone, after all, is cut out to be one of Tom WolfeÂ’s Masters of the Universe. A life of constant anxiety about oneÂ’s future is a diminished life. Gray is right about that much. Political thinkers need to think imaginatively about how to reduce such insecurity -
One option, IÂ’m convinced, is a dead end: the agenda of the traditional social democratic left. Social democracy, at least in its extreme forms, massively swells the welfare state, makes government power omnipresent, and drains economic life of its vitality. Unfortunately, many on the left donÂ’t see, perhaps canÂ’t see, what neoconservative social theorist Irving Kristol calls the "spreading spiritual malaise" of the welfare state. Writing in 1840, Tocque ville imagined a society consumed with such a malaise, in which government, compassionate toward its subjects,
provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances. . . . It does not break menÂ’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with government as its shepherd.
TocquevilleÂ’s nightmare of tutelary despotism, a world without risk or human excellence, is the result toward which a certain kind of social democracy tends. It solves the problem of insecurity at the cost of restricting initiative.
More promising are the recommendations of Michael Novak in his 1996 book Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life. First, Novak argues, policymakers should move to establish personal ownership of benefit packages (especially health care benefits, which companies carry only by historical accident) that can move from job to job with a worker should he be displaced by creative destruction or choose a new career path. Second, as a way of combating labor’s decline in an era of flexible economies, Novak proposes that visionary unions reconstitute themselves as independent business corporations, supplying trained workers, as needed, to other firms. Neither of these suggestions would eliminate insecurity, but they would be pragmatic, nonutopian ways of lessening the anxiety an open society causes while preserving its opportunity–creating dynamism.
A more flexible economy also will require new habits, and new ways of teaching them. Buttiglione has made this point repeatedly: "People must learn to learn, but not learn just technical knowledge, because this changes easily." Instead, Buttiglione argues, individuals must be willing and able to adapt. If once one knew how to make vinyl albums, one must learn today how to operate the machines that make compact discs; tomorrow, one will probably have to learn to do something else as technology continues to evolve. EuropeÂ’s stagnating welfare states have been, for decades now, more set on consuming wealth than creating it. Thinking primarily of them (though the lesson holds for all advanced economies), Buttiglione calls for an educational renewal that will again make work a central virtue in our democratic societies.
Responsible thought—Furet’s sad analysis of reality, not Gray’s phantasmagoria—also has, then, an essential role to play in the economic realm. It must weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the plurality of market models. And it must seek to temper the disadvantages of each. The market, we need to remember, is an instrument (a point Gray does grasp) and we can always try to make it more effective in securing human flourishing. It can be viewed as an Enlightenment ideology comparable to communism—a secular religion, in effect—only if profit becomes a society’s regnant deity. I don’t think things are that bad yet, but democratic capitalism’s economics, like its politics, are imperfect, far from utopian shores. -
In his most recent book, The Great Disruption, Fukuyama blames the social chaos of the democratic world of the past thirty–five years—spiraling crime, rising divorce, tragically high abortion and illegitimacy rates, and worsening levels of trust and citizenship—on the transition from an industrial to a postindustrial economy, a process that began during the 1960s. "Was it just by accident," Fukuyama rhetorically asks, "that these negative social trends, which together reflected weakening social bonds and common values holding people together in Western societies, occurred just as economies in those societies were making the transition from the industrial to the information era?" Fukuyama’s answer: no. The Great Disruption is the poisonous fruit of the economic trends of the past three decades.
What was it, though, about the postindustrial economy that led to such dire consequences? The first key for Fukuyama is the transformation it wrought in the nature of work. In the industrial era, most work was labor intensive. Men were more suited to it than women, simply because of their greater physical strength. But the postindustrial economy, Fukuyama explains, "substitutes information for material product." In an information economy, instead of the muscular assembly–line auto worker getting big rewards, it’s the brainy programmer designing the car’s computer system who draws the sizable salary.
Such far–reaching change in the nature of work opened the way for women to enter the workforce in large numbers. Women leaving home to compete for jobs put unprecedented pressures on the family by, among other things, diminishing the father’s traditional role as breadwinner. The decline of the family, Fukuyama notes, correlates with many of the social pathologies, including crime, that have afflicted the economically advanced Western societies since the sixties. Intensifying the strain on the family, he continues, was a technological invention of the post industrial era: the Pill. The Pill encouraged the "liberation" of women from the constraints of the hearth, Fukuyama stresses. But it also had an effect on men’s behavior by altering their attitude toward the risks of sex. It helped turn them into cads by separating sex from obligations toward child rearing. Men’s ties to family life, already fragile since they have fewer natural bonds toward their offspring than do women, became precarious.
The postindustrial economy drives the Great Disruption in a second way, Fukuyama suggests, and here his argument exactly mirrors that of Gray and sociologist Daniel Bell, who famously wrote in the 1970s of the "cultural contradictions of capitalism." The breathtaking innovation of the information economy, and the kaleidoscope of choices it allows, "spills over" into moral and social norms, corroding authority and weakening the bonds of family, neighborhood, and nation. When I can choose from one hundred different brands of breakfast cereal, Fukuyama seems to be claiming, I will want one hundred different sexual partners, too, and be angry if my priest or my mother frowns on my desire. We begin to choose our moralities, our pasts, and even our sexualities in the postindustrial bazaar. Faced with such individualizing forces, small wonder that the moral order has been badly damaged. -
All this makes the end of history sound very unsatisfying. Not to worry, Fukuyama reassures us, for the Great Reconstruction has begun. Man can’t live in the rubble of anarchy for long. His social nature and his self–interested reason lead him to "renorm" social life, to invent new moral rules for getting along with his fellow man. Along with nature and reason, the ongoing turbulence of the postindustrial economy itself encourages the reemergence of social norms—or "social capital," as Fukuyama calls it. "A modern, high–tech society," he writes, "cannot get along without [social norms] and will face considerable incentives to produce them." We’re already seeing the signs of the new order, Fukuyama notes: safer streets as crime drops, falling illegitimacy and divorce rates, an increase in the level of neighborly trust. Fukuyama draws on game theory and a formidable range of recent research in the life sciences, including evolutionary biology and primatology, to make his point, but the upshot is clear: the end of history marches on, with just a thirty–five–year cultural disruption to slow it down. If Gray is Cassandra, Fukuyama is Pangloss.
What should we think of Fukuyama on democratic capitalismÂ’s recent history? The Great Disruption contains a wealth of data that will be mined for years to come. But FukuyamaÂ’s argument is fundamentally flawed.
His explanation of the Great Disruption, first of all, is unsatisfactory. There is a stronger cultural component to moral breakdown in the West than Fukuyama concedes. If the transition from an industrial to a postindustrial economy undermined moral life throughout the Western democracies, as he claims, why didn’t the same change lead to disorder in Japan and South Korea? As Fukuyama admits, nothing comparable to the divorce and illegitimacy of the Western democracies exists in these Asian societies; crime rates in Japan have actually dropped over the period of the Great Disruption. Apparently, their thicker communal and familial cultures have staved off social disorder. But this would indicate, against the thrust of Fukuyama’s argument, that culture moves with a strong degree of independence from economics. Moreover, the Pill didn’t drop out of the sky one day on unsuspecting bourgeois societies, but grew out of profound cultural and moral shifts—in particular the rise of feminism—that thus far have had less resonance in Asia.
Nor does Fukuyama sufficiently stress the role of law and policy in the West’s social woes. Would divorce have increased so dramatically had Western societies not liberalized divorce laws? Would crime have so ravaged America’s cities in the absence of laws coddling criminals? Would the number of abortions have skyrocketed had liberal regimes not legalized abortion? Of course not. Yet a postindustrial economy didn’t force these changes in law and policy, which occurred in varying degrees throughout the West over the past three decades. Rather, they too grew out of profound cultural and moral shifts—in particular the triumph in elite circles of a desiccated form of liberal thought—that thus far haven’t penetrated Asian societies to the same degree. In short, culture and politics seem to be the primary explanatory factors for the Great Disruption, not capitalist economics. -
Culture and politics are the principal realms of man’s liberty and reason. Fukuyama’s refusal to grant them a major place in his analysis isn’t just the product of his quasi–Marxist economism; it follows from his reductive conception of human nature, which, despite his claims, is anything but Aristotelian. The new age sciences he employs are rigidly deterministic. Fukuyama protests that he’s no determinist, but I wonder if it’s possible to embrace these life sciences uncritically, as he does, and still leave a place for freedom. Evolutionary biology, for example, with its theory of the "selfish gene," interprets a mother’s sacrifice for her child not as a free act of love but as a quest to propagate her genetic heritage. This interpretation is untestable, a matter of belief. Yet if it’s a matter of belief, why believe it? Doing so renders our moral vocabulary vacant and makes the human world literally senseless. If his notion of freedom is thin, Fukuyama’s understanding of human reason isn’t any thicker: his is not the proud reason of Kant, let alone Aristotle, but is purely instrumental. It teaches us the most efficient way to get from a to b, and that’s about it.
Given Fukuyama’s reliance on untenable economic and scientific reductionisms and his pinched view of reason, I find his optimism about moral renewal in liberal democratic societies no more convincing than his account of its breakdown. Man’s nature limits his freedom, but within those limits experiments in living can take him far from recognizably good ways of life, where his faculties can flourish, toward ways of life that diminish his spirit and lead, in the long run, to social breakdown. Who can say how long a society can continue running—and in some ways improving—while its spiritual life declines? Furthermore, why should we expect the same postindustrial economy Fukuyama thinks led to the Great Disruption to help heal it? Simply because an economy "needs" something doesn’t mean human beings will supply it.
Fukuyama’s good news is also more ambiguous than it first appears. "If the rate of divorce has fallen," observes historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, "the rate of cohabitation has almost doubled in the past decade alone, and couples living together without benefit of marriage can separate (and do so more frequently) without benefit of divorce." If the rate of out–of–wedlock births has decreased, the ratio of such births to all births has only leveled off, and done so at a high level. If abortions are fewer, in part it is due to the new respectability of unmarried motherhood. And so on. As Himmelfarb testily puts it, "For almost every favorable statistic, an ornery conservative can cite an unfavorable one."
The democratic capitalist societies, then, still have a cultural problem. And here’s where things get tricky, because both Gray and Fukuyama brush up against the truth. When moral nihilism dominates the culture, as it does in Western societies—especially in the U.S.—free markets can radicalize it by shouting it, so to speak, from the rooftops. Not long ago, a television commercial for Mastercard featured pallid–faced kids who looked like junkies, with nose rings, tattoos, and the whole range of alienation’s disfiguring equipment. The message was simple: if you have money (or at least credit), who cares what your attitude toward life might be? And Mastercard is not alone: there’s Nike’s famous "Just Do It" ad campaign extolling release from constraints (which Fukuyama himself mentions), Calvin Klein’s kiddie–porn, and Time–Warner’s continuing depredations (the most recent being a rap song about killing New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani). In such cases, we witness the corporate world bottom–feeding for profit, and it’s disgusting.
The greatest threat to the future of democratic capitalism, I believe, lies in this growing association of capitalist power and moral libertinism. A few years ago, Buttiglione made a pregnant observation. "Libertinism," he said, "is in a certain sense more dangerous than Marxism, because it penetrates more deeply." Instead of crushing man’s reason and his passions, as did communism, moral libertinism turns man’s passions against the truth. Marxism, as we’ve seen, was a religious atheism, a secular religion that hubristically proposed to build utopia only to open the gates of Hell. Libertinism, Buttiglione maintains, is a "negative atheism"—it "corrupts societies and is unable to offer the values needed for a society to live." Not everyone can "just do it," or else society crumbles. In the long run, Buttiglione thinks libertine capitalism "is existentially unbearable." But in the short run, and that can last a long time, it coarsens the human world and intensifies the Great Disruption.
Gray and Fukuyama are right, then, to see a link between contemporary capitalism and nihilism, but they get things backward: nihilism is first imported into the market, not exported from it. Nihilism results, Buttiglione says, from the "suicide of culture," and here he means culture in the sense of Bildung, not as an anthropological term as IÂ’ve been using it. Our elite spiritual enterprises (Buttiglione mentions philosophy and theology, and I would add art and literature) have become ever more corrupt. In their main variants, they no longer even bother to seek the true, the good, and the beautiful, however plural and difficult to attain these ends might be. The suicide of culture sends its tenebrous signals throughout the human world; the market receives the signals, dumbs them down or brightens them up, and then seduces whomever it can. The bourgeois regimeÂ’s moral indeterminacy weakens its capacity to resist.
The connection between nihilism and capitalism is accidental and need not last. But the struggle against it requires, not reconciliation to this–worldly realities, as with democratic capitalism’s politics and economics, but something inspired: the rebirth of culture. Here should be directed the spiritual longings that Furet worried might again find their way into politics. We will need to paint again with the grace of Tintoretto; write with the humanity of Shakespeare; philosophize with the love of truth of Aristotle and Aquinas; and educate our best in the riches of our dual heritage of faith and reason. Our religious bodies should be at the forefront of this struggle, which is both moral and aesthetic. (Fukuyama laughs at the idea of a religious revival that might heal the Great Disruption, describing it as "a Western version of Ayatollah Khomeini returning to Iran on a jetliner." But this merely indicates his limited grasp of human possibilities.)
Politics, too, will have a crucial role, though not as a secular religion. Statesmanship can help set societyÂ’s moral and aesthetic tone, and shame the powers that have bargained with nihilism. And postliberal policies, like those New York City has successfully implemented in fighting crime, can chip away at the decisions that fed the Great Disruption.
These three important books, then, help illumine the democratic capitalist prospect. Here is what it looks like at the dawn of a new millennium: in politics, it finds itself haunted by moral indeterminacy and weak before egalitarian demands; in economics, troubled by the anxieties of the rapid change that creates wealth; and in culture, suffering from the suicide of the elevated pursuits that should protect man’s highest ends. Not pretty, until you realize the alternatives—some undreamed of political monster arising from bourgeois discontents, a spirit–sapping tutelary despotism, or a radicalization of libertine capitalism.
Working a slight change on an old truism: democratic capitalism is still the worst regime, except for all the others. Perhaps, if we’re both vigilant and lucky, the twenty–first century will not rival Berlin’s twentieth as "the most terrible in Western history." -
Originally posted by crazy monkey:
[b]Pros and cons
QUOTE:Traditionally, the purpose of democracy is to prevent the accumulation of too much authority in the hands of one or a few. It rests on a balance of giving enough power for what Alexander Hamilton called "vigorous and energetic government" and avoiding giving out so much power that it becomes abused. Democracy is believed by some, such as Winston Churchill, to be the "least bad" form of government. By creating a system where the public can remove administrations, without changing the legal basis for government, democracy aims at reducing political uncertainty and instability, and assuring citizens that however much they may disagree with present policies, they will be given a regular chance to change those who are in power, or change policies with which they disagree. Democracy is also related to the idea of constitutional government, setting limits beyond which a current majority in government may not step.UNQUOTE
REPLY: Winston Churchill has therefore confirmed that democracy offered the least-bad form of government. It is clear that it is not democracy as a system that is at fault for any problems in government. More often it is the people elected to represent them who might cause problems. When people become self-centred, they can resort to amending laws of election etc to perpetuate their rule. It is this possibility that causes the most problems to democracy.
Therefore one should draw a line in criticizing democracy and not get carried away into blaming the whole system. It is all the more urgent and crucial to redress the problems by establishing good corporate governance to carry democracy further to bring up the best of its practices and possibility to serve the people. It is easy to understand that autocracy will seek to put out all the blames for any perceived problems on liberality of democracy to convince citizens of self-centred convenience.
There is a need to provide practical safeguards or good corporate governance for greater accountability in every major aspect of government covering election processes as stated in the 7 points of democracy. This will help us to evolve our particular governance to move it forward to be more competitive in the future. This evolvement will require good citizenry who understand the goodness of choice and freedoms and will support change for the better.
Where the constitutions and the election laws, are too general or non-committal to processes amendments may be made for apparently good reasons but at the end may compromise on basic principle of freedoms of choice and accountable judiciary, legislative or executives to provide pro-people and progressive governance.
Over time autocracy may result in one-sided high-cost tax-and-recover governance with the only concern to build up government fiscal efficiency to the neglect of considerations of citizens plight.
The government may then become richer giving a good account of itself while the majority of citizens suffer. This may be the worse problems with democracy as it can be changed to result in government being interested in its own agenda as against people's actual wishes and aspirations.
Practical safeguards are essential to ensure that democracy will not be doctored or changed to suit particular one-party domination.
I therefore agree that basic democratic processes as suggested e.g. freedom to vote, to criticise and to participate in election, in the first part of the thesis to be specifically and fully established as a corporate governance to avoid gerrymandeering of election processes to suit the convenience of any one-party rule.
QUOTE:Nonetheless, some people believe that there is no system that can ideally order society and that democracy is not morally ideal. These advocates say that at the heart of democracy is the belief that if a majority is in agreement, it is legitimate to harm the minority. The opponents to this viewpoint say that in a liberal democracy where particular minority groups are protected from being targeted, majorities and minorities actually take a markedly different shape on every issue; therefore, majorities will usually be careful to take into account the dissent of the minority, lest they ultimately become part of a minority on a future democratic decision.
The threat of coercive power is still the main cause for concern. A historical example would be Hitler in pre-Nazi Germany, who was "elected" in 1933 by the German people with the largest minority vote. For this reason, some countries have created constitutions/laws that protect particular issues from majoritarian decision-making. Generally, changes in these constitutions require the agreement of a supermajority of the elected representatives, or require a judge and jury to agree that evidentiary and procedural standards have been fulfilled by the state, or, very rarely, a referendum. This means a majority can still legitimately coerce a minority (which is still ethically questionable), but such a minority would be very small and, as a practical matter, it is harder to get a larger proportion of the people to agree to such actions. On the other hand, proponents of broader democracy wonder what gives a small minority of people (such as those who drafted the US Constitution, or other constitutions/laws) the right to impose their will on the majority.
In addition to constitutional protections for citizens' rights (such as the right to stay alive, express political opinions and form political organizations, independent and regardless of government approval), some electoral systems, such as the various forms of proportional representation, attempt to ensure that all political groups (including minority groups that vote for minor parties), are represented "fairly" in the nation's legislative bodies, according to the proportion of total votes they cast; rather than the proportion of electorates in which they can achieve a regional majority.
This proportional versus majoritarian dichotomy is a not just a theoretical problem, as both forms of electoral system are common around the world, and each creates a very different kind of government. One of the main points of contention is having someone who directly represents your little region in your country, versus having everyone's vote count the same, regardless of where in the country you happen to live. Some countries such as Germany and New Zealand attempt to have both regional (majoritarian) representation, and proportional representation, in such a way that one doesn't encroach on the other. This system is commonly called Mixed Member Proportional.
The democratic peace theory claims that democracies never or almost never make war against each other. A related but slightly different concept is Rummel's Law, which states that the less freedom a people have, the more likely their rulers are to murder them. UNQUOTE
REPLY: The example given of how Hitler came to power and how he eventually doctored the election process to put himself up as the supreme leader to do what he likes only serves to confirm that democracy is liable to hijack by anyone or any party by making change to laws governing election processes and checks and balances among branches of government to give rise to autocracy and perpetuation of one-party rule.
The Rummel's Law serve to confirm the validity of the 7 points of democracy to ensure due diligence in respect of freedoms of speech, association and judicial administration. Practical safeguards will make the leaders think hard and long before engaging in gerrymandeering of election processes leading to murder of freedoms, progress and competitive good corporate governance.
It is true that some people may continue to lament that democracy is full of problems and there is no ideal system. But it is an irony that democracy is being taken to task by political writers who should know better when it offers safeguards (least-bad) against exploitations, oppressions, injustices, abuses and uphold the wishes and aspirations of the people. The problem probably lies in the fact that it is the champion of political system and as a champion it becomes a constant target of attack.
Fortunately, the champion still survives all these attacks from all and sundry. People must nevertheless stay viligant that the people who attack democracy might not have more effective or progressive system to offer.
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The CrazyMonday's thesis offers a good historical rundown and examples showing views and comments on problems in implementing democracy.Originally posted by pikamaster:CrazyMonkey,
Kudos for such a brilliant essay, though i shall say\
a discussion forum like this one is not a place to write/publish a university thesis or assignment.
Robert and Elfred,
Both fo you should read what CrazyMonkey has posted in detail. I'm sure, Elfred, that you would be able to mroe clearly understand what advantages democracy has that autocracy doesn't after reading CrazyMonkey's substantial repllies.
ya, thx.
the pikamaster (who is sick of elitism in Singapore)
I don't see there was any faults with democracy from the examples or views given. In fact Winston Churchill only said that democracy was the least-bad of political systems. Anyway, democracy as is known today has been well established over the past four centuries in USA, UK or Western Europe.
These countries have been stable and progressive even if there were some problems. The thesis confirmed this: Democracy is not perfect and is liable to be abused or altered. It is the poeple who should at the end ensure the elected representatives or parties do not abuse or change democratic basic practices of good corporate governance. The latter is not perfect and people themselves should apply themselves diligently to uphold democratic processes to serve the wishes and aspirations of all.
The thesis has agreed to the establish basic processes governing freedoms of speech election and accountability and transparency. In other words finally it is up to the people to uphold democracy and not whether there should be democracy. -
CrazyMonkey,
I have a request...
could you pls type out your entire thesis in a nice word document and email it to me at [email protected]?
thx.
the pikamaster (who's running for Student Council in HC) -
Originally posted by crazy monkey:
This conceptual subdivision of democracies into (1) Social Democracy and (2) Democratic Socialism is useful for greater appreciation by academics and analysts.
[b]Democratic socialism
Democratic socialism is a political movement propagating the ideals of socialism within the framework of a parliamentary democracy. Thinkers, writers and activists such as Robert Owen, Karl Marx, George Orwell, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb can all be said to have contributed to "democratic socialist philosophy". However, popular movements such as the growth of trade unionism, the Chartists and the Labour Party (UK) (a "democratic socialist party" according to the first line of its constitution) or the SPD in Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, are equally critical to understanding Democratic Socialism.
It should be noted, however, that many of those who describe themselves as "socialists" often argue that socialism necessarily implies democracy, thus making "democratic socialism" a redundant term. The fact that one specific movement is called Democratic Socialism does not mean that other branches of socialism must be any less democratic.
The terms "Democratic Socialism" and "Social Democracy" have often been used interchangeably, and, indeed, they could be considered synonymous until recently. Today, however, they usually denote two different things: Social Democracy is more centrist and supports a broadly capitalist system, with just a few socialist elements to make it more equitable and humane. Meanwhile, Democratic Socialism is more left-wing and it supports a fully socialist system, seeking to establish that socialist system by gradually reforming capitalism from within. Thus, Democratic Socialism is an evolutionary socialist movement.
Democratic socialists and social democrats both typically advocate at least a welfare state, although social democrats, being influenced by the Third Way, are now less committed to this. Democratic socialists maintain a commitment to the re-distribution of wealth and the nationalisation of major industry, and some believe in a planned economy; these are all concepts which social democrats have largely abandoned. In addition, many democratic socialists retain a Marxist analysis (though sometimes a reformist one), while social democrats reject Marxism.
Democratic socialist parties appeared before the First World War, when no single country could be described as democratic in the modern use of the term, because of electoral discrimination on the basis of gender, race or wealth. What distinguished democratic socialists from others was a willingness to work through a parliamentary democracy (even if people were still disenfranchised) to both improve the lives of working classes and win the vote, rather than resort to revolution (the overthrow of the state).
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Perhaps, in practice, there exist wild swing from one to another within democracy whether it is called one or another. Common men and women involved in politics do not necessarily stay committed to socialism or left-wing or democratic socialism as such.
Singapore, according to its supreme leader Lee has considered socialism in the beginning but abandoned it after some time because socialism was not practical. Who move my cheese is the more important element in democracy.
So in the modern context of today, it is not progress to emphasise on social democracy. More important, democracy offers a practical framework or minimal criteria should be further evolved to protect it from abuse. Election processes should be suitably and well-documented in basic constitutions and election laws so that they cannot be amended or altered to perpetuate one-party or one-man dominance.
Masses or people should be the centre of enterpreneurship and creativity. This latter aspirations can be suitably brought about by having positive legislative programs introduced from which to strive for aspirations and wishes of the ordinary people.
But democracy is liable to abuse because its principles and practices even if laid down with the best will may be set aside through legal interpretations by incumbent judiciary partitioned to or beholden to the party in power to suit the latter's convenience.
As long these main processes are incorporated suitably, there is no reason why leaders cannot pay more attention to socialist aspects of governance and then be given more administrative power to govern the country in implementation areas which will then correct the errors or shortcomings in pure freedom-oriented democratic model called liberal democracy by many.
Singapore can grow its own democracy to make it more practical and insipient in regard to competitiveness. It can and should evolve its autocratic pseudo-democracy (benevolent initially) to one more progressive, sustainable and representative of people's aspirations. -
Originally posted by crazy monkey:
We live in a time when the call for freedom and democracy echoes across the globe. Eastern Europe has cast off the totalitarian governments of almost half a century, and the republics of the former Soviet Union are struggling to replace the Communist regime of almost 75 years with a new democratic order, something they could never before experience. But the drama surrounding the extraordinary political changes in Europe obscures the remarkable degree to which the promise of democracy has mobilized peoples throughout the world. North and South America are now virtually a hemisphere of democracy; Africa is experiencing an unprecedented era of democratic reform; and new, dynamic democracies have taken root in Asia.
REPLY: This summary of democratic advance in various continents east and west serves to confirm earlier replies to skeptics of democracy who often resorted to calling democracy liberal or source of instability without regard to the oppressions and human plights often associated with undemocratic regimes everywhere. There must be something right about democracy if one by one including the most all-powerful former communist Soviet Union is turning to democracy for remedies of diverse problems affecting human societies.
This worldwide phenomenon belies the skeptics who have contended that modern liberal democracy is a uniquely Western artifact that can never be successfully replicated in non-Western cultures. In a world where democracy is practiced in nations as different as Japan, Italy, and Venezuela, the institutions of democracy can legitimately claim to address universal human aspirations for freedom and self-government.
Yet freedom's apparent surge during the last decade by no means ensures its ultimate success. Chester E. Finn, Jr., professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University and director of the Educational Excellence Network, said in remarks before a group of educators and government officials in Managua, Nicaragua: "That people naturally prefer freedom to oppression can indeed be taken for granted. But that is not the same as saying that democratic political systems can be expected to create and maintain themselves over time. On the contrary. The idea of democracy is durable, but its practice is precarious."
REPLY: The above-mentioned serves to confirm earlier posting under this thread that it is not democracy as a system that is at fault for any shortcomings seen in democracy or newly democratised countries as skeptics have pointed out. Rather it is the people elected as representatives or the people's particular social or cultural qualities that will determine successful implementation or not of democracy. Many forummers too have pointed out the same distinction.
Democratic values may be resurgent today, but viewed over the long course of human history, from the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century to the rise of one-party regimes in the mid-20th century, most democracies have been few and short-lived. This fact is cause for neither pessimism nor despair; instead, it serves as a challenge. While the desire for freedom may be innate, the practice of democracy must be learned. Whether the hinge of history will continue to open the doors of freedom and opportunity depends on the dedication and collective wisdom of the people themselves--not upon any of history's iron laws and certainly not on the imagined benevolence of self- appointed leaders.
REPLY: The above-mentioned point may be subjective in its assumptions of success of democracy. The benchmark of success was unclear. If comparison is made across the system or sporadically? Is comparison based on tangibles like freedoms to elect the good people and decide people's own routes of economic and non-economic attainments, or material progress in a before and after manner of particular countries assessed? For all we know, the success rate for democracy as against other systems or forms of government might then be quite different from the opinion given that only a handful has succeeded as democracy"
Contrary to some perceptions, a healthy democratic society is not simply an arena in which individuals pursue their own personal goals. Democracies flourish when they are tended by citizens willing to use their hard-won freedom to participate in the life of their society--adding their voices to the public debate, electing representatives who are held accountable for their actions, and accepting the need for tolerance and compromise in public life. The citizens of a democracy enjoy the right of individual freedom, but they also share the responsibility of joining with others to shape a future that will continue to embrace the fundamental values of freedom and self-government.
REPLY: Collective wellbeing or organizational efficiency is decimated by claims of personal efficiency or talents. A new mindset is urgently needed if countries practising democracy are to succeed in many tasks. Individualism or personal efficiencies are often obtained at the expense of good corporate governance or organizational efficiency. Organizational efficiency is attained not from collections of individual efficiencies but from coordination and practical knowledge application by each and every citizen. Processes must be established to provide coordination and knowledge application. This proviso is not conceptual or tedious; it is practical as posted at "Practical Guide to Efficiency and Productivity" in this forum.
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