Has Democracy a Future? – Bankwatch

By Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

September/October 1997Revealed on September 1, 1997

Solidarity founding chief Lech Walesa throughout his presidential marketing campaign in Plock, Poland, Might 1989Leszek Wdowinski / Reuters

Supply Overseas Affairs 1997

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

The 20th century has little doubt been, as Isaiah Berlin has mentioned, “essentially the most horrible century in Western historical past.” However this horrible century has—or seems to be having—a cheerful ending. As in melodramas of outdated, the maiden democracy, sure by villains to the railroad monitor, is rescued within the nick of time from the onrushing prepare. Because the century attracts to a detailed, each main villains have perished, fascism with a bang, communism with a whimper.

A season of triumphalism has adopted. Two centuries in the past Kant argued in his Concept for a Common Historical past that the republican type of authorities was destined to supersede all others. Eventually the prophecy appeared on the best way to achievement. Savants hailed “the tip of historical past.” “For the primary time in all historical past,” President Clinton declared in his second inaugural deal with, “extra folks on this planet reside underneath democracy than dictatorship.” The New York Instances, after cautious checking, authorised: 3.1 billion folks reside in democracies, 2.66 billion don’t. In keeping with end-of-history doctrine as expounded by its prophet, the minority can look ahead to “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the ultimate type of human authorities.”

For historians, this euphoria rang a bell of reminiscence. Didn’t the identical radiant hope accompany the transition from the nineteenth to the 20th century? This most horrible hundred years in Western historical past began out in an environment of optimism and excessive expectations. Individuals of excellent will in 1900 believed within the inevitability of democracy, the invincibility of progress, the decency of human nature, and the approaching reign of cause and peace. David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford College, expressed the temper in his turn-of-the-century ebook The Name of the Twentieth Century. “The person of the Twentieth Century,” Jordan predicted, “will likely be a hopeful man. He’ll love the world and the world will love him.”

Wanting again, we recall a century marked a superb deal much less by love than by hate, irrationality, and atrocity, one which for a protracted darkish passage impressed the gravest forebodings in regards to the very survival of the human race. Democracy, striding confidently into the 1900s, discovered itself nearly without delay on the defensive. The Nice Struggle, exposing the pretension that democracy would assure peace, shattered outdated buildings of safety and order and unleashed offended energies of revolution—revolution not for democracy however towards it. Bolshevism in Russia, Fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, militarism in Japan all despised, denounced, and, wherever they may, destroyed particular person rights and the processes of self-government.

In one other decade the Nice Despair got here alongside to show the pretension that democracy would assure prosperity. A 3rd of the best way into the century, democracy appeared a helpless factor, spiritless, paralyzed, doomed. Contempt for democracy unfold amongst elites and much alike: contempt for parliamentary dithering, for “talking-shops,” for liberties of expression and opposition, for bourgeois civility and cowardice, for pragmatic muddling by way of.

In one other decade the Second World Struggle threatened to manage the coup de grace. Liberal society, its again to the wall, fought for its life. There was appreciable defeatism within the West. The title of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s 1940 bestseller proclaimed totalitarianism The Wave of the Future. It was, she wrote, a “new, and maybe even finally good, conception of humanity attempting to return to start.” Hitlerism and Stalinism had been merely “scum on the wave of the long run . . . The wave of the long run is coming and there’s no combating it.” By 1941 solely a couple of dozen democracies had been left on the planet.

The political, financial, and ethical failures of democracy had handed the initiative to totalitarianism. One thing like this might occur once more. If liberal democracy fails within the twenty first century, because it failed within the twentieth, to assemble a humane, affluent, and peaceable world, it’s going to invite the rise of different creeds apt to be primarily based, like fascism and communism, on flight from freedom and give up to authority.

In spite of everything, democracy in its fashionable model—consultant authorities, celebration competitors, the key poll, all based on ensures of particular person rights and freedoms—is at most 200 years outdated. A majority of the world’s inhabitants could also be residing underneath democracy in 1997, however democratic hegemony is a mere flash within the lengthy vistas of recorded historical past. One wonders how deeply democracy has sunk roots in beforehand non-democratic international locations within the years because the collapse of the totalitarian challenges. Now the democratic journey should confront large pent-up energies that threaten to blow it off beam and even drive it onto the rocks.

THE LAW OF ACCELERATION

A lot of this vitality is pent up inside democracy itself. Probably the most fateful supply in america is race. “The issue of the 20th century,” W.E.B. Du Bois noticed in 1900, “is the issue of the colour line.” His prediction will come to full flower within the twenty first century. Minorities search full membership within the bigger American society. Doorways slammed of their faces drive them to protest. The revolt towards racism has taken time to assemble energy. White America belatedly awakens to the cruelties lengthy practiced towards nonwhite peoples, and the revolt intensifies. As Tocqueville defined way back, “Patiently endured as long as it appeared past redress, a grievance comes to look insupportable as soon as the opportunity of eradicating it crosses males’s minds. For the mere indisputable fact that sure abuses have been remedied attracts consideration to others, and so they now seem extra galling; folks could endure much less, however their sensibility is exacerbated.”

There are different pent-up energies. Trendy democracy itself is the political offspring of expertise and capitalism, the 2 most dynamic—that’s to say, destabilizing—forces unfastened on this planet right now. Each are pushed ever onward by self-generated momentum that strains the bonds of social management and of political sovereignty.

Expertise created the clock, the printing press, the compass, the steam engine, the ability loom, and the opposite improvements that laid the inspiration for capitalism and that in time generated rationalism, individualism, and democracy. At first technological advance was unsystematic and intermittent. Quickly it was institutionalized. “The best invention of the nineteenth century,” mentioned Alfred North Whitehead, “was the invention of the tactic of invention.”

Within the twentieth century, scientific and technological innovation elevated at an exponential price. Henry Adams, essentially the most good of American historians, meditated on the acceleration of historical past. “The world didn’t double or treble its motion between 1800 and 1900,” Adams wrote in 1909, “however, measured by any normal . . . the stress and vibration and quantity and so-called development of society had been absolutely a thousand occasions higher in 1900 than in 1800;—the drive had doubled ten occasions over, and the pace, when measured by electrical requirements as in telegraphy, approached infinity, and had annihilated each area and time.” Nothing, Adams thought, might gradual this course of, for “the legislation of acceleration . . . can’t be purported to chill out its vitality to go well with the comfort of man.”

The legislation of acceleration now hurtles us into a brand new age. The shift from a factory-based to a computer-based financial system is extra traumatic even than our great-grandparents’ shift from a farm-based to a factory-based financial system. The Industrial Revolution prolonged over generations and allowed time for human and institutional adjustment. The Pc Revolution is way swifter, extra concentrated, and extra drastic in its influence.

HYPERINTERACTIVE STATE

The computerized world poses issues for democracy. The place the Industrial Revolution created extra jobs than it destroyed, the Pc Revolution threatens to destroy extra jobs than it creates. It additionally threatens to erect new and inflexible class boundaries, particularly between the well-educated and the ill-educated. Financial inequality has already grown within the United Stares to the purpose the place disparities are higher in egalitarian America than within the class-ridden societies of Europe. Felix Rohatyn, the funding banker and rescuer of a bankrupt New York Metropolis, speaks of the “large transfers of wealth from lower-skilled middle-class staff to the house owners of capital property and to a brand new technological aristocracy.” Those that skip or flunk the pc will fall into the Blade Runner proletariat, a snarling, embittered, violent underclass.

The pc will even have an effect on the procedures of democratic politics. James Madison in The Federalist Papers distinguished between “pure democracy,” by which he meant a system through which residents assemble and administer the federal government in particular person, and a republic, by which he meant a system through which the bulk expresses its will by way of “a scheme of illustration.” For many of American historical past, “pure democracy” was essentially restricted to city conferences in small villages. Now the interactivity launched by the Pc Revolution makes “pure democracy” technically possible on a nationwide scale.

Brian Beedham in an article within the December 21, 1996, Economist applauds this growth, claiming consultant democracy is “a half-finished factor.” Each citizen, Beedham argues, is entitled to an equal say within the conduct of public affairs. The rise of public opinion polls, focus teams, and referendums suggests fashionable demand for a completed democracy. With a nation of computer systems plugged into data and communication networks, “full democracy” is simply across the nook. Full democracy, pure democracy, plebiscitary democracy, direct democracy, cyberdemocracy, the digital city corridor: underneath no matter title, is that this a fascinating prospect?

Maybe not. Interactivity encourages on the spot responses, discourages second ideas, and affords shops for demagoguery, egomania, insult, and hate. Hear to speak radio! In too interactive a polity, a ‘”frequent ardour,” as Madison thought, might sweep by way of a folks and result in emotional and ill-judged actions. Remembering the explosion of fashionable indignation when President Truman fired Normal Douglas MacArthur, one is grateful that the digital city corridor was not working the nation in 1951. The Web has completed little so far to foster the reasoned exchanges that in Madison’s phrases “refine and enlarge the general public views.”

UNBRIDLED CAPITALISM

Whereas the onrush of expertise creates new substantive issues and guarantees to revise the political system by way of which we cope with them, the onrush of capitalism could have much more disruptive penalties. Allow us to perceive the connection between capitalism and democracy. Democracy is unattainable with out personal possession as a result of personal property—sources past the arbitrary attain of the state—offers the one safe foundation for political opposition and mental freedom. However the capitalist market is not any assure of democracy, as Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan Yew, Pinochet, and Franco, to not point out Hitler and Mussolini, have amply demonstrated. Democracy requires capitalism, however capitalism doesn’t require democracy, at the least within the quick run.

Capitalism has proved itself the supreme engine of innovation, manufacturing, and distribution. However its technique, because it careens forward, heedless of little past its personal earnings, is what Joseph Schumpeter known as “artistic destruction.” In its financial principle, capitalism rests on the idea of equilibrium. In observe, its very virtues drive it towards disequilibrium. That is the dilemma of latest conservatism. The unfettered market conservatives worship undermines the values—stability, morality, household, group, work, self-discipline, delayed gratification—conservatives avow. The glitter of {the marketplace}, the greed, the short-termism, the exploitation of prurient appetites, the benefit of fraud, the devil-take-the-hindmost ethos—all these are at battle with purported conservative beliefs. “Stationary capitalism,” as Schumpeter mentioned, “is a contradiction in phrases.”

Even premier capitalists are appalled by what runaway capitalism has wrought. If understanding of capitalism may be measured by success in earning profits out of it, nobody understands modern capitalism higher than the financier and philanthropist George Soros. “Though I’ve made a fortune within the monetary markets,” Soros writes, “I now worry that the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the unfold of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society.” The “uninhibited pursuit of self-interest,” Soros continues, ends in “insupportable inequities and instability.”

The Pc Revolution affords wondrous new potentialities for artistic destruction. One objective of capitalist creativity is the globalized financial system. One—unplanned—candidate for capitalist destruction is the nation-state, the standard web site of democracy. The pc turns the untrammeled market into a worldwide juggernaut crashing throughout frontiers, enfeebling nationwide powers of taxation and regulation, undercutting nationwide administration of rates of interest and alternate charges, widening disparities of wealth each inside and between nations, dragging down labor requirements, degrading the atmosphere, denying nations the shaping of their very own financial future, accountable to nobody, making a world financial system with out a world polity. Our on-line world is past nationwide management. No authorities exist to supply worldwide management. The place is democracy now?

THE ASIAN SHIFT

The top of the Eurocentric period raises additional issues for democracy. Self-government, particular person rights, equality earlier than the legislation are European innovations. Now the age of the Pacific is upon us. The breakthrough of Japan within the century coming to an finish heralds the breakthrough of China and India within the century forward. The financial magnetism of Asia is already altering the contours of the worldwide financial system, and foreshadows historic shifts within the planetary steadiness of energy.

I’m not vastly involved in regards to the “conflict of civilizations” that worries some considerate analysts. Civilizations are hardly ever unified. International locations throughout the identical civilization usually tend to combat with one another than to hitch in monolithic assaults on different civilizations. However the influence of the rise of Asia on the way forward for democracy is value consideration. The Asian custom, we’re instructed, values the group greater than the person, order greater than argument, authority greater than liberty, solidarity greater than freedom. Some Asian leaders, notably Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore and Mahathir bin Mohamad of Malaysia, like to distinction Asian self-discipline and stability with the dysfunction and decadence they impute to the individualistic West. They denounce the try to carry Asian international locations to Western democratic requirements as the brand new type of Western imperialism.

However, each India and Japan are functioning democracies. If the declare that human rights are common is proof of Western conceitedness, the restriction of these rights to Europe and the Americas manufacturers non-Western peoples as lesser breeds incapable of appreciating private liberty and self-government, and that’s certainly Western conceitedness too. In actual fact, many Asians combat for human rights, and on the threat of their freedom and their lives. “Why will we assume,” asks Christopher Patten, the final British governor of Hong Kong, “that Lee Kuan Yew is the embodiment of Asian values slightly than Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,” the brave opposition chief underneath extended home arrest in Burma? A pre-Tiananmen Sq. wall poster in Beijing proclaimed: “We can not tolerate that human rights and democracy are solely slogans of the Western bourgeoisie and the Jap proletariat solely wants dictatorship.” Within the phrases of the Indian economist Amartya Sen, “The so-called Asian values which can be invoked to justify authoritarianism usually are not particularly Asian in any important sense.” Chris Patten concludes, “I feel the Asian worth debate is piffle. What are these Asian values? If you dwelling in on what one or two Asian leaders imply by them, what they really imply is that anybody who disagrees with me ought to shut up.”

Nonetheless, the brand new salience of Asia on the world scene, the absence of historic predilections for democracy, and the self-interest of rulers who see democracy as a menace to their energy counsel a interval of Asian resistance to the unfold of the democratic concept.

CULTURE LASHES BACK

That resistance will likely be bolstered by the defensive response across the planet to relentless globalization—a response that takes the type of withdrawal from modernity. The world right now is torn in reverse instructions. Globalization is within the saddle and rides mankind, however on the identical time drives folks to hunt refuge from its highly effective forces past their management and comprehension. They retreat into acquainted, intelligible, protecting models. They crave the politics of id. The sooner the world integrates, the extra folks will huddle of their non secular or ethnic or tribal enclaves. Integration and disintegration feed on one another.

A militant expression of what Samuel Huntington calls cultural backlash is the upsurge of spiritual fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism appears particularly hostile to freedom of expression, to girls’s rights, and, opposite to historic Islam, to different religions. Neither is the fundamentalist revival confined to the Third World. Many individuals residing lives of quiet desperation in fashionable societies starvation for transcendent which means and switch to inerrant religion for solace and help.

In keeping with a 1995 Gallup ballot, greater than a 3rd of American adults declare that God speaks to them immediately. One hopes it’s the God of affection slightly than the God of wrath on the opposite finish of the road. Fundamentalism, carried too far, has ominous implications for democracy. Those that imagine they’re executing the need of the Almighty are notably harsh on non-believers. A fanatic, because the Irish-American wit Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley as soon as noticed, “does what he thinks th’ Lord wud do if He solely knew th’ info in th’ case.” Fanaticism is the mortal enemy of democracy.

Again to the query: Has democracy a future? Sure, Virginia, it does, however not the fantastic future predicted within the triumphalist second. Democracy has survived the 20th century by the pores and skin of its tooth. It won’t get pleasure from a free experience by way of the century to return.

In America, democracy should run a gauntlet of challenges. Probably the most essential remains to be Du Bois’ colour line. A lot is determined by the supply of jobs, particularly within the interior metropolis. If employment stays excessive, political motion will mitigate racial tensions, notably when minorities perceive that within the longer run ethnic gerrymandering will cut back, not enhance, their affect. Stress will likely be mitigated much more by intermarriage. Intercourse—and love—between folks of various creeds and colours can most likely be counted on to arrest the disuniting of America.

The nationwide capability to soak up and assimilate newcomers will stay highly effective. The decision of the mainstream will attraction excess of linguistic or ethnic ghettos, above all to the younger. English will proceed the dominant language. Certainly, in necessities the nationwide character will likely be recognizably a lot because it has been for a few centuries. Individuals looking for clues to the American thriller will nonetheless learn, and quote, Tocqueville.

Expertise will rush on in accordance with Adams’ legislation of acceleration. However for all of the temptations of interactivity and all of the unpopularity of elected officers, I doubt that Individuals will sanction the degradation of consultant democracy right into a system of plebiscites. Capitalism too will careen on, by way of downs in addition to ups, however laissez-faire ideology will most likely wane as capitalists uncover the vary of troubles the unfettered market can not clear up, or makes worse. Unbridled capitalism, with low wages, lengthy hours, and exploited staff, excites social resentment, revives class warfare, and infuses Marxism with new life. To maneuver alongside constructive strains, capitalism should subordinate short-term plans and earnings to such long-term social requirements as funding in schooling, analysis and growth, environmental safety, the extension of well being care, the rehabilitation of infrastructure, the redemption of town. Capitalists usually are not seemingly to do that by themselves. Lengthy-term views demand public management and affirmative authorities.

On the planet at massive, can capitalism, as soon as unfastened from nationwide moorings, be held to social accountability? Will worldwide establishments purchase the authority to impose, for instance, a worldwide SEC? This gained’t occur subsequent week, however persevering with abuse of energy will construct a constituency for reform. Wars will nonetheless disturb the tenor of life, however the place prior to now they typically arose from aggression throughout nationwide frontiers, the wars of the twenty first century will extra seemingly be between ethnic, non secular, ideological, or tribal factions throughout the identical nation. Such wars are tougher to outline and to regulate. Allow us to pray that no factional zealot will get maintain of an atomic bomb.

Nation-states will proceed to say no as efficient energy models: too small for the large issues, because the sociologist Daniel Bell has mentioned, and too huge for the small issues. Regardless of this decline, nationalism will persist as essentially the most potent of political feelings. Whether or not democracy, a Western creation, may be transplanted to components of the world with completely different cultures and traditions is way from sure. But I might count on a gradual growth of democratic establishments and beliefs. It’s laborious to imagine that the intuition for political and mental freedom is restricted to a cheerful few across the North Atlantic littoral.

Democracy within the twenty first century should handle the pressures of race, of expertise, and of capitalism, and it should deal with the religious frustrations and yearnings generated within the huge anonymity of worldwide society. The good energy of democracy is its capability for self-correction. Clever prognosis and steering are important. “Maybe no type of authorities,” mentioned the historian and diplomat Lord Bryce, “wants nice leaders a lot as democracy.” But even the best of democratic leaders lack the expertise to persuade violent, retrograde, and intractable humankind into utopia. Nonetheless, with the failures of democracy within the twentieth century in the back of their minds, leaders within the century to return could do a greater job than we’ve completed of constructing the world secure for democracy.

ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR., is a author, historian, and former Particular Assistant to President Kennedy. This text is predicated on the James Bryce Lecture on the American Commonwealth, to be delivered on the Institute of United States Research of the College of London in September.
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