'The Future of Freedom': Overdoing Democracy

Sun Apr 13 19:28:13 PDT 2003

<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/books/review/13FERGUST.html?tntemail0=&pagewanted=print&position=top>

The New York Times

April 13, 2003 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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