June 15, 2006
American Democracy II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:30 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, regarding my previous post on democracy, that “I see his basic point, but the question is probably a little more complicated than that.” I’m afraid I don’t see how. Democracy is any system of government in which the ultimate source of political power is the people as a whole rather than some small subset of the people, as in an oligarchy, or a single individual, as in a tyranny. The fact that the people in different democratic states make different choices regarding policy is neither here nor there.
He writes, “In most of Western Europe, ‘democracy’ is generally understood to include social-democratic rights like health care, old-age pensions, and a free college education. Many of my European friends are stunned that Americans regard themselves as the world’s leading democracy, yet some 50 million or so Americans are without health care.”
Those are policy choices, not attributes of democracy. The fact that these countries have chosen to socialize medicine, pensions, and college education (which is no more “free” in Europe than it is in the United States, just paid for indirectly through taxes) do not make them more democratic; it makes them more socialist. These decisions have their costs (health care is rationed, for instance, with long waiting lists and denial of treatment), just as the decisions this country has made have costs (many people are without health insurance, which is not the same thing as being without health care, of course). Europe’s very high unemployment rate is an artifact of Europe’s decision to have very inflexible labor markets.
Nor does the use of different political mechanisms make one system more “democratic” than another. In Britain the people do not vote for either the head of state (the office is hereditary in one family) or the head of government (who is chosen by the majority party in the House of Commons). But Britain is most certainly a democracy. The Queen may reign by the grace of God in theory, but in fact of course she reigns by the grace of the people.
And I certainly don’t see how proportional representation is an attribute of democracy. It is, in my view, a terrible idea. With proportional representation the people do not vote for individuals, with all their individual quirkiness, but for a set of political ideas shaped, inevitably, by intellectuals, who are notoriously lousy politicians. This fosters political fragmentation, as often dozens of parties pursue ideological purity and often one single idea. As a result, political compromises are made after the election, as coalitions are assembled, and governments not infrequently are held hostage by a crackpot party whose handful of votes are needed to make a majority. This makes for political instability. Just look at the political history of postwar Italy.
In the English-speaking world, first-past-the-post elections foster big-tent parties (i.e. the political compromises are made before the election), which then win a majority and a mandate to govern on their own. This, in turn, fosters political stability, as the party in power wants to stay in power. The English-speaking countries, especially those whose populations are descended in substantial part from Britain, are the most politically stable countries in the world. Want an example? In 1789 the United States Constitution went into effect and the French Revolution began. 217 years later, we still have the same constitution, amended fewer than thirty times, while France has worked its way through three kingdoms, two empires, and five republics.
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