appears in today’s Washington Post under the title America’s democracy has become illiberal. He starts by referring to an essay he wrote several decade ago about the rise of illiberal democracies around the world. We saw dictators overthrown and election held
But in many of the places where ballots were being counted, the rule of law, respect for minorities, freedom of the press and other such traditions were being ignored or abused.
Zakaria’s concern is that we are now seeing trends in this direction in our own nation.
He frames his discussion by the content of this paragraph:
What we think of as democracy in the modern world is really the fusing of two different traditions. One is, of course, public participation in selecting leaders. But there is a much older tradition in Western politics that, since the Magna Carta in 1215, has centered on the rights of individuals — against arbitrary arrest, religious conversion, censorship of thought. These individual freedoms (of speech, belief, property ownership and dissent) were eventually protected, not just from the abuse of a tyrant but also from democratic majorities. The Bill of Rights, after all, is a list of things that majorities cannot do.
For a liberal democracy to actually exist requires the intertwining of both traditions, a balancing act that one might argue is never completely settled. We have seen the the separation of the traditions in countries that maintain the trappings of democracy — elections, for example — but without the balance of rights of minorities. Examples Zakaria cites include Turkey, Russia, the Philippines, and Hungary. He writes
In these countries, the rich and varied inner stuffing of liberal democracy is vanishing, leaving just the outer, democratic shell.
Why? Because liberty is under siege.
What the evidence is that all the constitutions and laws are insufficient to protect liberty:
It turns out that what sustains democracy is not simply legal safeguards and rules, but norms and practices — democratic behavior. This culture of liberal democracy is waning in the United States today.
Certainly any reflection of populism will note that the strong majoritarian impulse on which it depends can be antithetical to the notion of the protection of rights of minorities, particular those minorities seen as alien in some fashion, be it by religion, race, sexual orientation, national origin or political persuasion.
Zakaria argues that in our history both Founders like Hamilton (and I would also argue Madison with both his notion of the multiplicity of factions and his ultimate strong willingness to constitutionally support the protection of rights by restricting the powers of government) and astute foreign observers like de Tocqueville recognized that there were a variety of informal and/or non-governmental institutions that served as a check on the both the possible imposition of power by a national government and of a tyranny by popular majority.
What Zakaria argues is that our tendency towards increased democratization and openness, especially when combined with the notion of efficiency in economic (market) terms has served to weaken those non-governmental institutions that have served as key elements in keeping the balance he thinks is necessary between democracy and liberty. He crams this all into one paragraph:
The two prevailing dynamics in U.S. society over the past few decades have been toward greater democratic openness and market efficiency. Congressional decision-making has gone from a closed, hierarchical system to an open and freewheeling one. Political parties have lost their internal strength and are now merely vessels for whoever wins the primaries. Guilds and other professional associations have lost nearly all moral authority and have become highly competitive and insecure organizations, whose members do not — and probably cannot — afford to act in ways that serve the public interest. In the media — the only industry protected explicitly in the Constitution — a tradition of public interest ownership and management aspired to educate the public. Today’s media have drifted from this tradition.
Certainly the most recent election clearly demonstrates how the reshaping of the media with the emphasis on profitability has distorted the role the media should be playing in informing the public. While it is true that we have always had partisan media — one can see that clearly were one to go reread the newspapers at the time of the two elections between Adams and Jefferson, for example — we also had a history where the media demonstrated it commitment to serving the public interest. We can think of television documentaries, investigative reporting, etc., and for one of my generation (I am in the leading edge of the Baby Boomers) our lives were influenced by both: think of “Harvest of Shame” on CBS, or the Watergate reporting of The Washington Post, or the investigative reporting of people like Bartlett and Steele. Go back further if you want to the Muckrakers and the influence they had on public policy.
Zakaria is not being naive: he explicitly recognizes that media and the kinds of institutions nowadays often derided as “elites” have not always acted in the public interest writ large. One can add to his observations that many of the elites were shaped by prejudices and ignorance that could well be pointed at as obstacles to the balance between democracy and liberty.
Yet, as he writes, we are now in a very different place:
But we are now getting to see what American democracy looks like without any real buffers in the way of sheer populism and demagoguery. The parties have collapsed, Congress has caved, professional groups are largely toothless, the media have been rendered irrelevant.
Here I would disagree somewhat — in this past election it was not that the media became irrelevant, it is that how they chose to operate in pursuit of eyeballs and clicks and revenue distorted what the American people got to see and understand in a way that clearly undermined the public interest, and influenced the outcome of the election as much as did the actions of FBI Director Comey, the machinations of the Russians, or even some level of incompetence within the Clinton campaign.
Zakaria closes his piece with a paragraph that is a question:
What we are left with today is an open, meritocratic, competitive society in which everyone is an entrepreneur, from a congressman to an accountant, always hustling for personal advantage. But who and what remain to nourish and preserve the common good, civic life and liberal democracy?
I would argue somewhat with his framing of this — being competitive in everything does not necessarily make the outcome meritocratic, unless you argue from closed and circular reasoning that the fact of “success” in one’s own terms proves and justifies the actions done to get you there. In a religious sense, it becomes the perversion of the worst kind Calvinist double predestinarianism which has unfortunately played too great a role in our history not only in religion but in our public policy as well.
I have spent most of my life in some way identified with religious traditions that could be considered minority. With the exception of a few years in the Episcopal Church, whose membership is increasingly tiny but who access to the levers of power economically and politically has always been disproportionate, I have been part of groups that in extreme majoritarian situations, of uncontrolled democracy, would have made me subject to discrimination. Perhaps that shapes my response to the kinds of questions with which Zakaria is trying to wrestle. Also shaping my response is an awareness of the general historical trend of attempting to move in the direction of both more democracy and greater liberty. Of the former we can note the constitutional changes that with the possible exception of the 22nd Amendment’s limitation on Presidential terms have always been in the direction of more democracy — think of the 15th, 17th, 19th, 23rd, 24th and 26th Amendments. While we did try to restrict liberty in the 18th Amendment, we have in general seen the interpretation of the Constitution and the creation of Federal legislation and institutions move in the direction of more liberty — this sometimes affects democracy as it did in voting rights actions and related constitutional interpretations by the Supreme Court, but it was also far more basic in notions such as women’s rights to own property, the notion of Equal Protection as established in the 14th Amendment which led to extension of Bill of Rights protections against state (and thus also local) government interference. It has led to bans on discrimination based on race, on gender, to some degree on age, and increasingly greater rights for sexual minorities in general. We have seen the notion of marriage as a fundamental right overturning bans on interracial marriage in Loving v Virginia to the more recent decisions such asWindsor and Obergfell extending that notion to same sex couples.
And yet we have also seen a rise of a kind of populism that unfortunately sees the extension of liberty and protections to others as somehow meaning a diminution of its own liberties.
It is certainly true that it was only a clear minority of voters who chose Mr. Trump, but that has been true of many of our presidents, including perhaps our greatest in Abraham Lincoln. Trump however could not even claim a plurality of the popular vote. That is because we still have an electoral college that in some ways was set up as a check against the popular will — and yes, also as a protection of slavery, but anyone who remembers their pre-1860 American History will recognize the long struggle over what to do with that noxious institution, and the many compromises that kept it protected even when on other grounds it should have been erased.
We have no one set of values that binds all of us together. We do not agree on what America is, on what it should be. We do not share a common religion or a common culture. The institutions that in some ways forced us to come together are no longer the same -we have no compulsive military service (which was, of course, only for men) and we are dismantling our public education system at the K-12 level and perverting it to the benefit of corporations and the wealthy at the post-secondary level.
Franklin told a woman who had inquired that the kind of government we were getting was a republic if we could keep it. That republic has, for all of its problems historically, tended to moved in the direction of being what political scientists describe as a liberal democracy. It is no longer clear that such is the direction of the nation today. Although certainly the nation has not YET irrevocably changed for the worse, there are danger signs, which require serious attention on the part of all of us.
I would be interested in your thoughts, which is why I wrote this post.