June 16, 2006
More Democracy! Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:20 AM EST At the risk of initiating a war of words—and I hope it doesn’t come to that, since at the end of the day I’m sure he and I are both all for “democracy”—I think John Steele Gordon is missing the point. That’s probably my fault, as my last post might have been clearer. So let me try to elaborate by addressing some of his assertions:
1. “Democracy,” Mr. Gordon writes, “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.”
The problem, of course, is that “the people” has long been a contested term, in and outside of America. And it still is. How a country defines its polity—not its policy, but its polity—goes a long way in determining how it shapes and understands its particular brand of democracy.
Does “the people” include only male property holders (as was widely the case in America until the age of Jackson)? Does it encompass women (some states initially allowed women to vote but then stripped them of that right in the early nineteenth century; other states allowed women to vote in local but not state elections; today, some countries deny women the vote)? Does it include racial minorities (until 1870—and, arguably, 1965—racial minorities had only a tenuous grasp on the franchise in America)? Permanent residents, or only citizens? Ex-felons? How old must one be to be part of the polity? 21? 18?
2. A propos of my discussion of social democracy, Mr. Gordon writes: “Those are policy choices, not attributes of democracy. The fact that these countries have chosen to socialize medicine, pensions, and college education . . . does not make them more democratic; it makes them more socialist.”
But no. “Social democracy” is a widely understood term and concept; it may not be part of the American definition of democracy, and it may not be central to (or even part of) John Steele Gordon’s definition of democracy, but it is quite familiar to people in other parts of the world. In Western Europe, most people assume that health care and education are democratic rights, just as in America (and Western Europe), most people assume that free speech is a democratic right. One needn’t be a liberal or socialist to recognize that this is so. In her book on the creation of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, Mary Ann Glendon, a conservative constitutional scholar, locates two brands of democratic discourse—an Anglo-American democratic theory grounded in negative liberty (that is, liberty from the tyranny of the state), and a continental theory grounded in positive liberty (that is, entitlement from the state).
More to the point, I never suggested that Western European social welfare states make their countries “more democratic.” I just pointed out that these states, and their citizens, define democracy differently from us. Two very different ideas.
3. Along the same lines Mr. Gordon continues, “Nor does the use of different political mechanisms make one system more ‘democratic’ than another.” Quite right. I’m not sure why he felt compelled to assert this, however, as I never argued otherwise. Different does not mean better; different does not mean worse. Different just means different—as in, not the same. And my overall point is that democracy comes in different varieties.
4. Mr. Gordon writes, “And I certainly don’t see how proportional representation is an attribute of democracy. It is, in my view, a terrible idea.” Good for Mr. Gordon. And too bad for a large swath of the democratic world. Yet whether PR works or not is utterly beside the point. PR rests on an understanding of democracy that sees the polity as a unitary entity. This idea hearkens back to the republican political discourse of the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on organic community and disinterested government. Systems like the one by which the British parliament and U.S. Congress are elected assume that different localities have distinct interests that require representation. Both systems are democratic, but they rest on different assumptions about the nature of the polity, the state, and the relationship between the two.
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