With his two recent speeches advocating a forward strategy to promote democracy in the Greater Middle East, President Bush has placed the concept of democracy at the very center of American political controversy. It was, of course, already on its fringes. Three debates over democracy at home and abroad have been roiling the intellectual world for several years now. One of those debates — the controversy over the place of democracy in U.S. foreign policy — is being fought out between neoconservatives and conservative “realists.” The other two debates . . . well, let me draw a temporary veil over them except to say that they are as much about democracy at home and in Western Europe as about Iraq and the Third World.

A presidential speech trumps any number of books and learned articles because it implies a change of government policy. When a president promises to promote democracy in the Greater Middle East, he is announcing that the U.S. will transform its relations with the local powers there. In this instance, Bush is plainly urging democracy not only on hostile powers such as Syria and Iran but also on traditional “friends” such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. How is this to be accomplished? That is less clear. But we will presumably nudge them toward democracy with economic favors; coerce them with sanctions if they resist; and seek to undermine and replace them if they remain obdurate.

To describe this as ambitious is to be guilty of understatement. If such a grand strategy were to be pursued without extreme care and subtlety, it would risk producing regimes hostile to the U.S. and hospitable to terrorism — in between periods of anarchy — in a vital strategic and economic region. Admittedly, such regimes already exist, and periods of anarchy occur there from time to time. But prudence should warn us against adding to the problem. Nor is it sensible to inform such regimes they have nothing to lose by opposing us since we are determined to overthrow them in any event.

PRUDENCE AND OTHER VALUES

Before embarking on his democratization drive, therefore, Bush might want to examine the debate earlier this year between conservative realist Fareed Zakaria and neoconservative Robert Kagan. “Debate” is perhaps too mild a word to describe Kagan’s sulphurous review of Zakaria’s book, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, in the pages of The New Republic and the subsequent exchange of barbs between the two writers. This exchange was, however, a serious confrontation between the leading proponents of the two schools. Kagan is the leading neoconservative advocate of promoting democracy. He outflanks even Bush on this topic, since he wants to promote democracy worldwide, including in China, rather than merely in the Middle East. Kagan seemed to take Zakaria’s skepticism about the wisdom of promoting democracy in all circumstances as a personal affront; he interpreted Zakaria’s warning that democracies not securely rooted in well-established liberal traditions and institutions would either develop authoritarian features or collapse altogether as inspired by a personal preference for aristocratic rule. If this made the debate occasionally bitter, it also meant that Kagan’s critique was unusually thorough.

Who won? Kagan scored a number of effective points — for instance, that some of the regimes cited by Zakaria to demonstrate the failings of illiberal democracy were not democracies under any definition. On the whole, however, Zakaria won on the main points relevant to the current debate:

One. Democracy needs social, economic, and political underpinnings in order to flourish. These include the rule of law, a tradition of free speech and free inquiry, the concept of a loyal opposition, a private sector, and the development of a middle class used to making independent decisions.
Two. Democratic governments without these underpinnings tend to go off the rails. Zakaria stresses the tendency of such governments to develop illiberal features — as in today’s Russia. Sometimes democracy collapses altogether. Latin America and the Middle East furnish examples — Argentina, Brazil, Lebanon, Iraq — in which elected governments have been overthrown in military coups. Kagan responds by arguing that democracy cannot be blamed for the sins of “failed democracy.” But what if a democracy fails at regular intervals — as Argentina and Brazil have both done?
Three. Liberal institutions and practices can exist without democracy and elections. Once a country reaches a certain stage — a certain level of prosperity, or the acceptance by the government of legal restraints on itself such as a bill of rights — then pressure builds for democratic as well as liberal rights. Liberalism actually can be promoted from outside more readily than democracy. For instance, the U.S. is more able to persuade an authoritarian regime to release political prisoners or to respect academic freedom than to dissolve itself by holding elections.

So the U.S. government should be ready to offer various types of assistance: diplomatic pressure on a regime to abandon torture, public support for crowds demonstrating against a shaky despotism, mediation to persuade a dictator to go into exile. And that in fact is what the U.S. has traditionally done. One of the main points in Bush’s recent speeches was an erroneous admission that the U.S. had put and kept despotic regimes in power because of Cold War priorities. This argument, originally advanced by the Cold War Left but now adopted by younger neoconservatives, greatly exaggerates U.S. responsibility for Third World despotisms and endorses the idea of American omnipotence that is these despotisms’ standard excuse for their own failures.

Question: If the U.S. is omnipotent, why is Fidel Castro still in power? The prosaic truth is that, with a handful of exceptions, Third World despotisms were put and kept in power not by the U.S. but by domestic forces such as the army and local elites. (Not a single existing Mideast despotism was installed by a pro-American coup.) If Washington wasn’t prepared to overthrow them in a series of Iraqs — which, reasonably enough, it was unwilling to do — it had to deal with them. Sometimes that meant forging military alliances, sometimes merely recognizing and trading with them, sometimes pressuring them to moderate their human-rights abuses.

There were cases — e.g., Zaire — in which U.S. relationships with odious regimes were too close and too prolonged. Even so there was no guarantee that if the U.S. expressed disapproval of Mobutu, he would fall from power. In the end it took foreign invasions to oust him. And the people of Zaire are no better off for his departure. In the more numerous cases where domestic popular opposition to dictators reached serious levels — in, among other countries, the Philippines, Korea, and Chile — the U.S. supported their overthrow. Sometimes that help was crucial at the margin; but in almost all such cases, the overwhelming impetus toward democracy was domestic. The U.S. merely helped local people.

In short, America is neither so powerful nor so wicked as it is depicted in the Cold War leftist critique that was swallowed by the president and regurgitated at Westminster. So the first lesson for President Bush is to be aware of the limits of American power; the second is to recognize when other societies are ready for democracy and capable of benefiting from our help; the third is to offer the right kind of help rather than suggesting democratic elections as the universal remedy; and the fourth is otherwise to do no harm.

That last lesson is no mere platitude. Some U.S. support for authoritarian regimes is entirely defensible in terms of American interests — including moral interests. For instance, the annual U.S. subsidy to Egypt was incurred, among other reasons, in order to prise Egypt out of the anti-Israel coalition and into a peace treaty. If abolishing that subsidy were to produce a “rejectionist” Egyptian regime, we would not advance human welfare by doing so. So, in addition to the other qualifications to the policy of promoting democracy, we must add such considerations as peace and, yes, the “stability” that is essential to prosperity.

UNDERMINING THE BALLOT BOX

If Zakaria is fundamentally correct in the first debate (over democracy abroad) he is more vulnerable to attack in the second debate (over democracy in America). The main paradox of current politics is that we are uncritically promoting democracy in the Middle East without apparently noticing that it is increasingly constrained at home by the transfer of power from elected bodies such as Congress to unaccountable institutions such as the courts, federal agencies, and international organizations. Not only does Zakaria not notice this transfer, but — following the traditional conservative suspicion of unrestrained populism — he calls for even more power to be transferred to institutions run by elites, on the grounds that democracy is in danger of running amok. This invites criticism not only from neoconservatives such as Kagan but also from unmodified conservatives such as the Hudson Institute’s John Fonte who argue that traditional understandings of liberal democracy are being subtly transformed into a new hybrid multicultural regime of post-democracy that illegitimizes the concept of majority rule. In other words, Zakaria’s diagnosis and prescription for the ills of American democracy is literally perverse: He calls for more power to the elites to cure the problems caused by the elites’ exercising too much power. This leads him into a number of questionable stances:

One. Thinking that many problems are too difficult for the voters and their representatives to understand and solve, he proposes they be transferred to specialist agencies like central banks. But the reason that we leave central banks to set interest rates and monetary policy is that we now believe these to be technical questions capable of expert resolution. In the 1970s, when there was a serious dispute between Keynesians and monetarists, there was necessarily a political battle over monetary policy. Only when that expert debate was largely settled were the rest of us content to leave it to central banks. And if ever the experts agree on welfare policy, tax policy, or public spending, we may do the same. But until then, the public will demand to choose among expert solutions through the political process.
Two. Zakaria points out that democratic referenda, such as California’s Proposition 13, tend to produce simplistic reforms that generate unexpected problems because they have not undergone the careful compromises of legislative crafting. But the same criticism could be made, at least as strongly, of judge-made “rights” legislation such as Roe v. Wade. From both these cases one might reasonably conclude that representative democracy is generally the best method of solving political problems. Judicial lawmaking should be rare; but as the decision of the Massachusetts supreme court establishing gay marriages illustrates, non-democratic legislation by the courts has changed American life far more thoroughly and controversially than the occasional referendum (which anyway is quite likely to be overturned by the courts). Yet it is referenda and not the courts on which Zakaria trains his fire.
Three. In a powerful and persuasive chapter of his book, Zakaria laments the decline of authority and the falling quality of the elites — their greater selfishness, their lack of public spirit, and their disconnection from most Americans. His criticisms strike home. What he does not seem to realize, however, is that these criticisms are far more disabling to his argument for non-democratic restraints on democracy than to democracy itself. After all, it is the elites who wield the non-democratic restraints. And the more they use their powers to correct democracy rather than merely to restrain or delay it, the more sinister their failings must appear and the more dangerous the weakness of mechanisms to correct them. Democracy generates its own authority in the voting booth, and wields its own correction in the form of throwing the rascals out. But professional standards are weaker than two generations ago, and — as the American Bar Association among other bodies illustrates — they have become much more politicized. Elites were once relied upon by conservatives like Zakaria (and me) to restrain mobs; today they are often distinguishable from mobs only by their credentials.

Nor is the rise of unaccountable elites in nominal democracies a purely American problem. Indeed, in most respects the U.S. is lagging behind Western Europe in the degree of power that it allows elites to exercise undemocratically. Recent elections and referenda in several European countries reveal a growing resistance to remote and unaccountable bureaucracies. This is the theme of the third debate — namely, what is the democratic legitimacy underlying those international structures that increasingly influence our lives? This issue has been misrepresented, in discussions about such questions as the Kyoto accords and the International Criminal Court, as a conflict between nationalism and internationalism or between European multilateralism and American “unilateralism.” It is, in fact, a conflict between two opposing kinds of internationalism: the American concept of an internationalism in which power flows upwards from the democratic nation-state and the European vision of a trans-nationalism in which power flows downwards from “the international community.” And as Francis Fukuyama pointed out last year, the European vision is another way of transferring power to elites: “The very idea that this legitimacy is handed downwards from a willowy, disembodied international level rather than handed upwards from concrete, legitimate democratic publics on a nation-state level virtually invites abuse on the part of elites who are then free to interpret the will of the international community to suit their own preferences.” Until the U.S. begins to present the choice in this clear-sighted way, however, it will continue to be wrong-footed in these debates.

To sum up, then, we risk promoting democracy in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rather than a wholesale push for democracy in the Third World — where promoting liberal institutions would be a more prudent policy — we should focus our attention on protecting traditional concepts of liberal democracy in the United States and on defending a democratic internationalism in foreign affairs. And to do so will mean refining and even abandoning the conservative attachment to elite restraints on democracy that once served us well but that now privilege our enemies and our opponents.