Democracy Not a Birthright

The Christian Science Monitor has a rather pathetic op-ed by a disillusioned liberal (Tim Hackler) bemoaning the failure of democracy to take root across the globe. Don't get me wrong - he deserves props for recognizing this stubborn fact of life, but he's still trying to vainly have it align with his world view, and it doesn't fit.

The Iraq war is opening many eyes - not just those of conservatives' - by the base nature of its savage conflicts. It's opened his eyes:

I think most of us have moved at least slightly toward Hamilton's darker view of human nature. Can we still believe, for example, that Jeffersonian democracy will one day arrive and then survive throughout Africa and the Middle East? The painful failures of the Iraq war have sowed substantial doubts: "Looking back, I felt secure in the knowledge that all who yearn for freedom, once free, would use it well," wrote Danielle Pletka in The New York Times recently. "I was wrong. There is no freedom gene...."

He takes this insight one step further:

History suggests that culture, not genetics, determines fitness for democracy. And history suggests we can pinpoint what kind of culture is required – a culture of the Enlightenment.

Well, maybe it's just culture and maybe not - the evidence is a little more mixed than he thinks. He's really twisting Occam's razor here:

Here is a thought experiment to put things in perspective. Imagine a map of the world in 1800. Color in all the countries that took part in or were directly influenced by the Enlightenment (let us say, England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, the US, Canada, and the Scandinavian countries). Now jump forward two centuries and color in all the countries with working democracies...It is virtually the same map. And how many countries have a fully functional democracy but were not among, or did not spring from, those 22 countries? Just one – Japan.

Wouldn't it be a lot easier to say "let's look at all the countries with fully functioning democracies - with one exception, they are all Western European or settled by Western Europeans"? Or perhaps he could note that when you look closer at these countries and note which ones have had the least trouble with their democracies over the last 60 years, democracy appears to be generally more stable as you move north (Portugal, Spain, and Greece were all ruled by juntas into the seventies, and Italy turns over her government every two years). Wouldn't that suggest genes could be a factor?

And what does the Enlightenment have to do with it? Sure, the ideals promoted by the America's Founding Father's owed a great deal to John Locke, but the revolution itself was really just an exercise in militant home-rule combined with anti-monarchism. What about Germany, that land of composers, poets, and philosophers? There wan't a trace of functioning democracy there until their nation was nearly wiped off the map 63 years ago. That finally convinced them to try something different. (The same thing happened across the globe in Japan, of course.) Austria - the Austro-Hungarian Empire ring a bell? That was just 90 years ago. France? The home of Mr. Enlightenment himself, J.J. Rousseau - need we go into the bloody details of how democracy fared in that enlightened land?

No, democracy was not the product of the Enlightenment. It was (with the isolated exception of Switzerland and perhaps Iceland) the product of England, nurtured over the course of 500 years under a constitutional monarchy, before it took root firmly in its erstwhile colony across the Atlantic as well as on its own soil in the 18th century. It spread from there across Europe (much like the Industrial Revolution, but much less evenly and firmly), but did not predominate until it was imposed on the razed continent by the victorious Anglosphere powers after WWII (in the West, that is - in the East the other winner imposed its own brand of "democratic" government).

Hackler then reveals the real target of his despondent anger - the true enemy of democracy in the world today - Republicans!

Why do I take a darker view than I did 16 years ago? Today, we have a coarser public discourse and lower standards, and we have suffered the consequences of a political party that quite openly set about to divide Americans into hostile camps because it believed that strategy would give them a narrow electoral advantage. The result is an atmosphere in which it is almost impossible to have a mature, adult, logical national debate about important issues.

He has a real knack for spotting a problem and looking at it from exactly the wrong vantage point. There's another significant quality Hackler failed to notice among his list of democracies - they all represent one people under one flag - with one significant exception: Belgium, which is even now considering splitting up. The U.S. now has two significant minorities (one of them growing rapidly) recognized as such by federal law (Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act) - not a pattern conducive to effective democratic government. Granted, today's Republican Party rhetoric is not going to be confused with the Federalist Papers, but is Hackler blind to the growing factionalism at large in the public arena? Was he out of the country during the Jena 6/Columbia Noose farces? Anyway, it's good to see a liberal get hit with a bad case of pessimism (the essence of conservatism), even if he does completely misdiagnose it.