The dangers of democracy

This season's intellectual pinup, Fareed Zakaria, author of "The Future of Freedom," explains why the romantic myth of freedom could harm Iraq -- and why power elites aren't so bad.

By Michelle Goldberg

Apr 21, 2003 | Since Sept. 11, hawks in the Bush administration have presented themselves as evangelists for democracy. The absence of democracy, in the neoconservative analysis, creates the climate of desperation and frustration that breeds extremism. Democracy's introduction into the Middle East, via regime change in Iraq, would bring a bracing new spirit of liberty to the region, undermining the stagnant authoritarianism of Iraq's neighbors.

Yet were it implanted tomorrow, democracy in most of the Middle East would bring to power the very totalitarian theocrats who most menace us. Indeed, argues Fareed Zakaria in his incisive new book "The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad," democracy isn't necessarily the opposite of tyranny. From Venezuela to Kazakhstan, the last decade has seen a rise in elected autocrats, challenging American bromides that posit universal suffrage as the answer for all the world's ills.

The book and its 39-year-old author, the editor of Newsweek International, is getting an extraordinary amount of attention. In New York magazine, Marion Maneker gives him the movie star treatment, writing, "Dimple-chinned, with expressive eyebrows and a thick head of black hair, Fareed Zakaria could easily be the Indian reincarnation of Cary Grant." He may be the first of a new, post Sept. 11 breed -- the policy wonk as sex symbol.

For all the buzz he's generating, Zakaria's ideas about democracy's failures aren't that new -- in much of the foreign-policy establishment, they've become a kind of conventional wisdom, popularized by writers like Robert Kaplan and Amy Chua. It's clear to anyone who's been paying attention, after all, that the heartening triumph of democracy around the world in the last decade has coincided with brutal outbreaks of ethnic nationalism, civil war and genocide.

Yet Zakaria's book goes further than others, scanning the history of Western culture and identifying a series of fallacious assumptions about the roots of liberty that threaten not just fledgling Third World republics, but America as well: "Western democracy remains the model for the rest of the world, but is it possible that like a supernova, at the moment of its blinding glory in distant universes, Western democracy is hollowing out at the core?"

Freedom, Zakaria argues, comes not from politicians' slavish obeisance to the whims of The People, divined hourly by pollsters. It comes from an intricate architecture of liberty that includes an independent judiciary, constitutional guarantees of minority rights, a free press, autonomous universities and strong civic institutions.

In America, all of these institutions have been under consistent attack for the last 40 years from populists of the left and right seeking to strip power from loathed elites and return it to the masses. "The deregulation of democracy has ... gone too far," Zakaria writes.

Much of what Zakaria writes will anger liberals. He criticizes 1970s reforms that opened up the closed workings of Congress to the public, arguing, "The purpose of these changes was to make Congress more open and responsive. And so it has become -- to money, lobbyists, and special interests." The World Trade Organization is opposed by anti-globalization activists in part because of its secretive, unresponsive nature, but Zakaria argues that's precisely why it works.

"If trade negotiations allowed for constant democratic input, they would be riddled with exceptions, caveats, and shields for politically powerful groups," he writes. The current system, he says, has produced "extraordinary results ... The world has made more progress in the last fifty years than in the previous five hundred. Do we really want to destroy the system that made this happen by making it function like the California legislature?"

To this, many progressives would likely answer yes. Yet they'd be wise not to disregard Zakaria's argument, since it also does much to illuminate the social trends that most trouble them. After all, vitriolic attacks on intellectuals and artists for being "out of step with the American people" are a symptom of the populism run amok that Zakaria is criticizing. When the right attacks Supreme Court rulings that prevent state legislatures from banning abortion, it does so in the name of democracy. Fox News gets its bombast from the notion that The People, in all their provincial, jingoistic glory, are intrinsically wiser than the aloof elites at CNN.

Zakaria's book is in part a defense of elites, of expertise and leadership over poll-driven pandering. It's a rejection of John Dewey's claim that, "The cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy."

This certainly doesn't mean he argues for authoritarianism. On the contrary, "The Future of Freedom" is an eloquent defense of constitutional liberalism, of the institutions that sustain unpopular liberties. Zakaria is a democracy advocate, but he asks readers to take a more expansive view and see that elections are just one element of a free society. His book, measured and centrist as it is, is a brief against tyranny, including the tyranny of the majority.

It's also a book with immense relevance for the immediate future of the Middle East, since in the short term, the West will have to choose whether to hold elections Iraq and possibly let the ayatollahs dominate, or to impose liberalism, possibly against the will of the people. Westerners rebuilding Iraq will have to realize that, despite America's rhetoric, giving all citizens a vote isn't the same as giving them freedom.

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