We face an assault on the idea of democracy. Take Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister: ‘For the first time in many years a real competitive environment has emerged in the market of ideas between value systems and development models’. As some authoritarian states have done well economically they have sought – tentatively at first, then with more confidence – to ‘giv[e] new life to the old idea that dictatorship is better than democracy at producing socio-economic development’ says democracy-promotion expert Thomas Carothers. And, of course, radical Islamism rejects democracy tout court as sacrilegious.
How should we meet this ideological challenge?
Yes, we must remain the artisans and partisans of democracy-promotion. David Miliband is right about that. But we must learn the lessons of Iraq. For whatever view one takes of the intervention (I did not support it) the aftermath has been exploited by the new authoritarians. In 2006, Putin stood next to President Bush at a press conference and, in response to some very mild urgings that Russia uphold democratic rights, mocked the president by saying, to much laughter and even some applause from the assembled journalists, ‘We certainly would not want to have same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, quite honestly.’ http://thinkprogress.org/2006/07/15/putin-jab/
To respond effectively to Putin’s cynicism we must also register the force of his point.
Did some of the problems in Iraq stem from a particular way of thinking and feeling about democracy? We can call it ‘democracy as faith’. It was there in the soaring rhetoric of President Bush. And it has much going for it. Its universalism, its fierce commitment to freedom for everyone, its moral clarity, its optimism, and its can-do spirit. Above all its spurning of a pseudo-realism that is deeply unrealistic after 9/11.
But it differs – in its carelessness and insouciance about the obstacles to building democracy – from an older approach that we could call ‘democracy as a political philosophy’ which understood democracy to be a complex human achievement dependent upon (a) a new ‘science of government’ (b) civic virtue among the people. This older approach was preoccupied with the inherent fragility of both and from that grew a canny prudentialism we can learn from today.
Can Barack Obama recapture an older canny prudentialism without losing too much of the faith-based view of democracy? Can he marry the democratic imperative to effective interventions?
The older approach is better at facing up to the structural conditions that threaten or enable democracies. The academic Gerard Alexander points to three: polarised conflict is bad, an over-powered state is bad, a too-weak state is bad. The older approach looks to measures – complex, difficult to introduce, often needing partnerships, rolled out over the long-term, involving from-below as well as from-above thrusts – to ease polarisation, weaken over-powered states and strengthen weak states. The older approach knows that figuring this out is really difficult. It worries a lot, assumes things will not be easy, and is always on the look-out for obstacles.
In other words, how one believes in democracy is as important as whether you believe in democracy. It determines whether you recognise these structural obstacles, how you set about promoting counter-measures, the time-scale you set yourself, and your response – as a member of a government or as a citizen – to the excruciating setbacks you will undoubtedly face.
Failing to think of democracy in this way caused many problems in Iraq. John Agresto was in charge of the development of higher education in Iraq in 2003-4 for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). His frustrations are set out in the remarkable book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone (2007) by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Agresto says:
‘The problem with democracy-building is that I think we think democracy is easy – get rid of the bad guys, call for elections, encourage “power-sharing”, and see to it that somebody writes a bill of rights. The truth is exactly the opposite – government by the few, or government by one person is what’s easy to build, even putting together good autocratic rule doesn’t seem to be hard. It’s good stable and free democracies that are really the hardest thing.
America’s been so successful at being a free and permanent democracy that we think democracy is the natural way to rule – just let people go and there you have it: Democracy. But all the ingredients that make it good and free – limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, calendered elections, staggered elections, plurality selection, differing terms of office, federalism but with national supremacy, the development of a civic spirit and civic responsibility, and above all the breaking and moderation of factions – all this we forget about. We act as if the aim is ‘democracy’ simply and not a mild and moderate democracy. Therefore we seek out the loudest and most virulent factions and empower them … We, as a country, don’t have a clue as to what made our country work… ‘(pp. 319-320)
I think one source of this ‘cluelessness’ was ‘Emersonianism’.
The critic Irving Howe observed that in the 1830s and 1840s the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson reshaped the intellectual climate of America until his idea became ‘the dominant spirit in the national experience … the very air we breathe’.
Emerson had ‘an unshakable faith in the “natural” (what was once called “divine”) wisdom of the sincere individual, an incorruptible allegiance to one’s own “inner light”‘, says Howe. Sovereignty itself was transferred from the Bible first to the Church and finally to the individual’s self-reliance and ‘soul’.
Going to your own heart from being ‘right with your God’ to being ‘right with yourself’. This is, as Howe says, a wager on personal authenticity as the source of truth, or perhaps even a wager on the superiority of personal authenticity to truth.
When I interviewed the New York writer Paul Berman for Democratiya he identified this Emersonianism as one important source of the fiasco in Iraq.
‘The[re] is a kind of naivety [that] is very American; it’s a Protestant idea that what matters is our inner soul. If our inner soul is good our outer actions must, by definition, be good. This is a naïve idea in the extreme and the source of a certain kind of American nationalism. The person who expresses this idea with intuitive ease is George W. Bush. He said after the 7/7 bombings, while he was in Britain: “If they could only see into our hearts they would know how good we are”, and he honestly believes that. He looks into his own heart and believes he is a good man and therefore his policies must be good, and everything the US does must be good. (…) Like everyone I have been dumbfounded at the stupidity of many of the things that have been done, and I struggle to understand how they could have thought things through so poorly. I think there was a simple faith that everything was going to work out for the best. Bush thought his intentions were good in his own heart and therefore the results were going to be good.’
Or, as Emerson wrote ‘On the lintel of my doorpost I write “whim”‘.
The irony is this. It was the first generation of neoconservatives who had alerted us to the difference between democracy-as-faith and democracy-as-political-philosophy, and who raised the alarm about a transcendentalist idea of democracy: see any number of Irving Kristol’s writings in the 1970s.
The insight was forgotten for three reasons. The post-1989 euphoria gave the sense that the people yearning for freedom could trump all, the unipolar moment gave credence to the idea that the US could achieve all, and then 9/11 gave the sense that absolute evil threatened all. These things converged until people began to think and feel and talk about democracy in new, Emersonian ways
The challenge for Barack Obama – whose audacity of hope message is pure Emerson, by the way – will be to reclaim and update an older prudential tradition of thinking about democracy without collapsing back into the cynical pseudo-realism that gave us 9/11.