Enemies of Democracy Assess It

A recent review of several books with the grand topic of the future of democracy has appeared in The Nation by Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk. The argument has arisen that federalism, the indirect government by representation --democracy once removed--was a practical decision mandated by time and distance and not a philosophical one. The farmer could not go to the voting place every time a question was raised. So the origins of the federal structure in the Constitution comes not from the founders' anxiety of populous tyranny as the specifically state in the papers they wrote at the time but rather an unspoken logistical travel problem. Now, with computers, that logistical problem can be solved but perhaps we don't want to do it; perhaps we want to defer those decisions--and that privilege--to others. Gee, one wonders, who might that be? One writer opined, "democracy was once a comforting fiction. Has it become an uninhabitable one?" Having confused American federalism and democracy, the reviewers move on.

The Powers-That-Be see three areas where we--read "THEY"--must rise above democracy:

    1. Economics should be isolated from shortsightedness and influence so prevalent in government structure.

    2. Expectation--and the belief in opportunity--should be made more realistic.

    3. Democracy has not traveled well. Some solutions, as always top-down, are suggested.

The authors discuss these three areas where the practical, the ideal and the new all challenge the old notion of democracy. Federal banks look after us, revolutionary economists look after us and the ethnic and national identities are sagely condemned.

Experts, of course, always trump the average guy so the nation's finances should obviously be in other hands. The notion of equality of results is a new one un-thought of by Jefferson and Monroe; some gentle accommodation must be made for that. So the response that writers Judt and Rosanvallon call for is simple: have the courage to reassert the primacy of politics over economics by creating a more equal society, in essence to make the trade for equality over liberty. Enter Piketty with his new, read OLD, solution of income redistribution. This would require taxation of people by governments unknown to them, a difficult task the average guy may not be up to.

Habermas tries to merge the already merged European countries with some new, unified sensibilities although the European ethnic conception of nationhood remains much more fundamental to their identity than Habermas cares to admit.

There are a number of confusing elements here. Debt emerges as a significant factor in decision-making, even superior to public wishes; but whose fault is that?  Sometimes democracies do something not in the best interests of their neighbors--like Palestinians voting for Hamas or Germans for Hitler; is that a failure of the system or its participants or it neighbors? Democracy does not seem to travel well; but it is a system of government, not a religion or a virus.

The reviewers end with the Tocqueville remark that democracy is a faith-based regime that holds its grip as long as people believe in it. They ominously add, "He forgot to say what happens when they stop." A better question would be, "What happens when democracy is suggested or imposed from the position of authority rather than decided upon and won by the very people themselves?" The unity of such a people is based upon their belief in the concept of liberty, not equality or ethnicity. When the democracy is successfully reevaluated by elitists, economic idealists and ethnic nationalists democracy was probably not believed in much in the first place.