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Literary Review
Anxieties about democracy
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The Future of Freedom is refreshingly unembarrassed in its acknowledgement that democracy, in order to deliver its promises, needs to be located in a complex amalgam of values and institutions, says PRATAP BHANU MEHTA.
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WHEN Edmund Burke, no enemy of constitutional representative government, described the "most perfect democracy as the most shameless thing", he was plagued by at least five anxieties. First, why should we always assume that democracy would produce outcomes conducive to liberty? As he memorably put it, "the forms of a free and the ends of an arbitrary government can often be combined." As Fareed Zakaria, in his elegant essay reminds us, there is no reason to assume that practices of popular authorisation, elections, will always produces regimes or ideologies that are friends of liberty: fascism and fundamentalism, ethnic nationalism and destructive populisms can also be outcomes of democratic procedures. Second, as every 19th Century democrat worried, democracy can be a threat to individuality. The mere demand that all actions be justified on the altar of public opinion may produce a kind of conformity and threat to individual liberty; power intoxicated majorities can put minorities at risk. Third, democracy is not synonymous with the rule of law. Practices of popular authorisation can be deeply entrenched without that leading to an institutionalisation of the rule of law. Fourth, democracy requires mediation of all sorts. It best works through representatives, not directly. It requires institutions that can fragment power so that it does not become overwhelming or tyrannical. It requires institutions and leaders that can take a long term, deliberative view rather than succumb to any passing fancy. And finally democracies need to counteract their own levelling tendencies, to preserve a space for the pursuit of genuine distinction and excellence that is often antithetical to its own egalitarian impulses.
The Future of Freedom is a return to these anxieties about democracy. Most modern democracies are liberal, constitutional, representative democracies and Zakaria urges us to take the first three components of this amalgam at least as seriously as we take the last. We ought to be more attentive to the fact that democracy, the regular subjecting of rulers to popular authorisation, is neither synonymous with, nor necessarily produces liberalism (respect for individual freedoms and property), constitutionalism (rule of law that takes certain norms to be authoritative) or representation (institutions of proper deliberation).
What follows from this argument? Institutions embodying all the elements that go into the making of constitutional representative government cannot simply be created at will. They are the product of complex histories that Zakaria eruditely recounts with an enviable lightness of touch. Competitive elections might be easier to export, but the United States' naïve belief that it can create democracies as a matter of will, ignores the complexities of history. In a searching discussion of the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, Zakaria concludes, rather unexpectedly, that Iran may be the first major country in the region to move towards democracy, mainly because it is a move that will be a product of its own inner struggles, not imposed. Second, even long established democracies, like the U.S. and India are vulnerable to illiberalism. India's liberal traditions are fraying and the U.S. is experiencing an unprecedented diminution in the quality of its democracy. And third, more democracy is not always a panacea for all our ills; rather we should look at institutions that delegate and diffuse power to preserve liberty and the rule of law.
Curiously enough, Zakaria's wonderful chapter on the weaknesses of democracy in the U.S. seems to work at cross-purposes to his overall argument. Many of his worries about the U.S. are worries about excess democracy: the democratic obsession with public opinion has reduced democracy to an affair of plebiscitary temperature taking and polls, crowding out long-term imaginative thinking. Transparency often leads to the undermining of all authority rather than the discovery of truth, and obnoxious groups such as the Christian right all wear the mantle of democracy. But the real culprits turn out not to be democracy at all: growing inequalities of wealth, the links between money and power, risk turning democracy into "a system, open and accessible in theory, but ruled in reality by organized or rich or fanatical minorities, protecting themselves for the present and sacrificing the future." It seems that Zakaria runs together two rather distinct worries: the ruin of deliberative representation by reliance on popular will and majoritarianism on the one hand; and the ruin of politics by the usurping power of commercial interests on the other. While most of the book is about the first, much of the discussion of America invokes the second worry. The first requires, as Zakaria argues convincingly, that democracy needs to be "tempered." The second requires, in some instances an expansion of democracy rather than its curtailment.
The Future of Freedom is learned without being ponderous, elegantly written and convincingly argued. It can be faulted on many counts: for underestimating the U.S.'s complicity in propping up all kinds of authoritarianism; for sometimes attributing to democracy the ills that come from badly regulated markets and for not adequately acknowledging the degree to which so many of the fundamentalisms of the modern world are a product of authoritarian regimes. But it is refreshingly unembarrassed in its acknowledgement that democracy needs to be situated in a complex amalgam of values and institutions: a diffusion of power, a passion for individual liberty, institutionalisation of law and above all an ability to discriminate, where democracy is appropriate and where it is not. Its rare defence of high politics is not a snobbish elitism, but a reminder that levelling impulses of the friends of democracy are more dangerous to democracy than the striving for distinction. Zakaria is a friend of freedom, not an enemy of democracy and he has learnt well the lesson Tocqueville, the greatest writer on democracy ever, taught: to love democracy well you have to love it in moderation.
The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and abroad, Fareed Zakaria, Viking Books, p.286, Rs.395.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta is Professor of Philosophy and of Law and Governance, JNU.
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