Democracy

On political participation

by kurto

In response to Niall Ferguson, ‘Biden Says Democracy Is Winning. It’s Not That Simple‘:

* Agree Ferguson’s view that democracy vs autocracy is silly of Biden. The case for the non-state actor, made in FT by Ganesh, is more compelling. I also concur Zakaria’s typology of illiberal democracies is more useful than Diamond’s democratic deficit

* Agree Ferguson’s view that prudent Western leaders (ie, USA) will necessarily ally w illiberals against the real bad guys, whomever they may be. The same was necessary during the Cold War (e.g., Chile, South Africa)

* Ferguson skips past domestic threats to ‘democracy’ – which as a civic characteristic is better understood as ‘political participation’. See WSJ essay ‘How our democracy became undermocratic‘, which usefully distinguishes between democracy and republicanism, meaning delegation by result of voting. More specifically, Swaim observes:

… In the ’90s and early 2000s, [democracy’s] most prolific users had begun to mean something else by it: Democracy was, for them, something closer to a technocracy — a system run by experts that maximizes equality. The franchise was important, sure, but the essential good of liberal democracy consisted in its social outcomes.

More specifically ‘democracy’ no longer means equality of opportunity, but equality of outcomes. See Sotomayor’s dissent in the Harvard-UNC college admissions case

Borne of Hegel, latter-day Progressives decry as ‘populists’ those who ignore what ‘everybody knows’. Much of the time, these are merely voters who dislike bureaucrats. Ferguson is vastly learned and surely knows this – perhaps he’s intentionally stepping past, since populist sympathies are verboten among policy elites

Tocqueville retrospectives

by kurto

Alexis de Tocqueville was among the first to grapple with socioeconomic equality as a necessary outcome of emerging societies, most famously Jacksonian America. For Guy Sorman, ‘Democracy in America is, in fact, a meditation on how the contradiction between equality and liberty might be overcome, or at least eased, by American society’s civil and religious institutions—schools of self-governance in Tocqueville’s famous interpretation.’

Tocqueville missed industrialization and underplayed slavery. ‘…he sees a civilized man as someone who is attached to the land and cultivates it, transforming it by his labor and making it more valuable—the American pioneer, in other words. Tocqueville has the greatest respect for such an entrepreneur of the soil. Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman would agree: if I did not fear the anachronism, I would qualify Tocqueville, for all his lack of focus on industrial transformation, as a free marketeer.’

Concerned also with French Algeria and British India, Tocqueville is a liberal struggling to enshrine checks on the state: ‘A democratic government is such a dangerous machine that, even in America, we are obliged to take a great many precautions against the errors and the passions of democracy: two chambers, veto by governors, and judicial institutions.’

‘Nations in our day can do nothing to prevent conditions in their midst from being equal. But it is up to them to decide whether the equality of conditions leads to servitude or to freedom, to enlightenment or to barbarism, to prosperity or to misery’, Tocqueville added.

Having earned precious fame, his later studies of the 1848 revolution and the fall of the ancien regime, as well as his refusal to participate in Bonapartist politics, meant his views were those of the bypassed aristocrat, according to Carl Schmitt. He was restored only in the 1960s by Francois Furet and Raymond Aron.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/tocqueville-then-and-now

Mansfield, conversely to Schmitt and Brogan, sees Tocqueville as alive to democracy’s sources of liberty in aristocracy. In a review of Lucien Jaume’s

    Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty

, Mansfield points to nobles as establishing desire for self-rule, trial by jury, associations as derived from public obligations of feudal lords, and most prominently, desire for greatness and acclaim independent of the state. Tocqueville was alive to these and their dynamics, whereas Jaume sees only writing for Tocqueville’s contemporaries, only context and commonplace, leading to nostalgia for aristocracy, thereby discounting the author’s fundamental creativity.

21. Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville (12 November 2023)

by kurto

A scholarly but anachronistic biography dwelling on what the 19th-century pioneer ought to have written were he a 21st-century academic. Tocqueville was a brilliant mind ‘trammeled’ by Catholic, aristocratic background; Brogan is regularly unhappy he cannot be conscripted into the march of history, the telos of egalitarianism. Though the author seems to have read and re-read not only major works but surviving letters, it’s sometimes difficult to hear Tocqueville through the academic criticism. The Frenchman’s original identification of problems in democratic political philosophy is dismissed or denigrated.
Fundamentally a Norman aristocrat-cum-19th-century French nationalist, Tocqueville was born to lead as Brogan demonstrates in a thorough telling of his life. Upended by the French Revolution, schooling ‘failed’ to produce bourgeois manners, though his electoral politics in La Manche were painstaking. Primary intellectual influences included Montesquieu, Chateaubriand (source of the US sojourn), Guizot, Mill and to a less extent Pascal. He always opposed Bonaparte as representing tyranny.
By 1830, he had rejected his Catholic Norman heritage, eventually siding with the democratic age, but remained nostalgic for aristocracy. As a budding lawyer, he dealt with émigré / dispossession claims which provoked sympathy but also acknowledgement of the finality of French Revolution. The cataclysm had liberated man of tyranny of class, but exposed liberty to equality of ends. During his US tour he grasped the dynamics of entrepreneurialism and popular self-government, but missed the importance of cotton and didn’t address political parties. Subsequently, as a writer, his great themes became equality, liberty, and the Revolution.
As a politician, though seen by Bourbons (‘legitimists’) as a traitor and Orleanists as a time server (which exposure helped prompt his American sojourn), he most valued independence of party, and further advocated local self-government versus France’s traditional centralism. Liberty entailed the right to call power to account. Though he helped write the 1848 constitution, he opposed Louis Napoleon as tyrannical.
Tocqueville in Democracy in America emphasized the effects of equality, in The Old Regime and the French Revolution of liberty (or its loss). The secret to making men do good is appealing to high purposes. Society’s institutions reconcile liberty and equality. Democratic society (often) may prefer equality to liberty as a security. One of the French Revolution’s notorious legacies was dissolving freedom of association, in contrast with the American tendency of establishing voluntary associations. Having had little experience of politics, ancien French aristocrats had little knowledge of how to avoid catastrophe. ‘The general level of hearts and minds will never cease to decline while equality and despotism are partners’ (p. 567). It’s vital to understand the balance and the trend (tendency) – indicative of his contribution to what’s become sociology.
Brogan thinks Tocqueville a brilliant mind ‘trammeled’ by Catholic, aristocratic background, and considers his understanding of tyranny of the majority his ‘most serious mistake’. The Frenchman is criticized for consulting only American elites while ignoring the middle classes (notwithstanding his official mission of reviewing prisons and, separately, his rough-and-ready travels). He lived through a great epoch of arts but didn’t enjoy it.
He was a Romantic, drawn more to the old order (Old Regime) than the exemplar of the new (Democracy). Tocqueville ‘refused to admit’ the privileged, instrumental role of parties: power is the object of politics, each side pressing its case to have the better claim, not high purpose. His economic theory was antiquated and ‘obsessed’ by concern for property and the consequences of mob rule.
Tocqueville could not ‘admit’ that Algerian colonization would end badly, and ‘tritely’ predicted the US and Russia would predominate a future era. Repeatedly, the ‘game is given away’ when the subject’s conclusions don’t match the author’s. (Relatedly, Brogan dismisses Berlin’s theory of two liberties without explanation.)
In all, a frustrating read. See further Daniel Mahoney in Claremont Review of Books: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/a-noble-and-generous-soul/

13. Kagan, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (20 Oct 2012)

by kurto

Demonstrates the Athenian statesman’s commitment to popular (democratic) governance in the face of monarchical and (uber)aristocratic tradition as well as the Peloponnesian War’s tribulations. As summarized by Thucydides, his leadership aspired ‘to know what must be done and to be able to explain it, to love one’s country, and to be incorruptible’. His successes are portrayed against the backdrop of the Athenian empire and regional conflagration, which broke both the city’s power and its experiment with representative government. As so often with Kagan, the bygone era’s realities are comprehensible to the modern reader.

14. Manville, Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens (28 Aug 2018)

by kurto

Traces the evolution of Athenian citizenship in the late seventh and early sixth centuries. The Kleisthenian reforms catalyzed Attica’s transformation to a powerful democratic state. The author begins by sketching Aristotelian concepts of the polis and democracy: justice is the essential condition of the state, and citizens are shareholders in a company whose purpose is moral excellence. Poetry, archaeology, and other remnants of Ancient Athens demonstrate these ideas, but citizenship lacked precise, shared understanding. Kylon’s attempted coup d’etat in 630 provoked aristocratic defense of privilege, as well as Drakon’s subsequent codification of customs such as penalties for killing Athenians (versus foreigners). But interstate warfare played a greater role than socioeconomic factors; scarcity of land was more important in undermining tribal affiliations. The reforms of Solon initiated more precise ideals of membership, inheritance, immigration; he also canceled debt, thus ending the possibility of citizens being sold into slavery, which won many different adherents. Further, several of Solon’s laws transformed formerly private concerns such as marriage, orphanage, weights and measures, and public festivals into public concerns. Yet his foremost concern was the process of justice: the well-ordered society is the just society. His controversial policies, particularly the cancellation of debt, led to tripartite factional warfare and the dictatorship of Peisistratos. The overall effect of his 25-year rule was positive for democratization (a la Pinochet or Kirkpatrick). Then followed 510’s diapsephisis, the judgment of fitness for citizenship on the basis of tribal descent. Kliesthenes’ rise to power dispelled this reign of terror; further, good order became equal order. He revised definitions of citizenship and enhanced participation in the legal system, and his reforms benefitted from foreign threats. Citizens were encouraged to work together domestically and in warfare. The inclusion of anthropology elongates the study, relegating some interesting material to the footnotes. In all, a useful historical work.

20. Dunn, Breaking Democracy’s Spell (4 Nov 2018)

by kurto

Democracy has successfully established itself worldwide, but its record is poor. The author contends democracy is a formula for ‘direction of legitimate coercion’ over territory and population, for the citizen’s subjection to power without sacrificing dignity. Its good name owes to success of Western governments, particularly the USA, and its strengths are in the capacity to harness sociopolitical struggle; monarchy and aristocracy cannot allow for the possibility of conflict. However, democracy as commonly understood ‘equivocates’ between authoritative standard of right conduct and describing the political character of the regime. In an extended treatment of authoritarian China’s coming to terms with democracy, he shows that Chinese hierarchy includes an obligation to instruct the population. But his alternate example of good government rests on the country’s post-1980 economic growth (the real cost of which is not yet known to the West), and ignores that hierarchy has no tides to the commonweal. (Separately, he adds the true exemplar of democracy is India because of its size.) Dunn does not like democracy’s lack of alignment to egalitarian and leftist outcomes, which he dresses up as ‘reliable’ ties to justice and utility. He equates self-government with egalitarian outcomes, instead of opportunity. Ultimately, he seems to dislike Western (especially American) democracy because Americans don’t listen to their betters. He laments the failure of progressives to make the case for the folly of the Iraq invasion or the necessity of climate-change legislation, and proposes the university can steer the world out of its problems. He shows no concept of Thucydidean (or Lincolnian) persuasion (i.e., to know what to do and to be able to explain it), of knowing and representing the group. Dunn appears most concerned power that elites don’t hold power; it’s revealing that his critique lacks Fukuyama’s treatment of accountability and order (i.e., rule of law). The polemic scores a few points but abstruse language muddies the argument, which at any rate fails to really address the important questions of who should rule in the 21st century.

17. Mitchell, Democracy’s Beginning (10 Sep 2020)

by kurto

Describes the birth and evolution of democratic Athens, circa 500-325 BC, the world’s first experiment in radical self-government. In the Archaic Age (~ 750-500 BC), aristocrats lost exclusive hold on power owing to the changing nature of warfare (i.e., greater value of hoplites), trade, and cultural exchange foster by colonization. Solon’s 6th-century reforms abolishing lending against personage and slavery for debt, and establishing equality before the law (but not land redistribution), and particularly Cleisthenes’ moves to provide political power to the demos and the use of ostracism to reign in factions prefigured the transition. The conversion may be traced to 503 BC, and passed the test of the Persian War, which nonetheless demonstrated democratic government requires leadership and decision making. By the Periclean era, as a matter of course selections for (minor) office were by lot and the demos voted for its generals. It was a libertarian era: individual freedom (Isaiah Berlin’s ‘freedom to’) was seen to originate in human nature (versus modern rights), and husbandry was the state’s obligation. Even as the Athenian empire grew, all the member states including oligarchies most valued freedom to set their own rules. The rise of democracy and empire coincided with flourishing arts, public building, public rhetoric: elegance crowned eminence. But the Peloponnesian War revealed the public’s incapacity for strategic decisions (as well as the persistent failures of aristocratic elites). Further, rhetoric and specifically sophism worked to sever faith in the laws as divinely inspired; might makes right evidenced itself in demagogic leadership and imperial ambition. The war was lost, oligarchic coups toppled the demos; but democratic loyalties, always strong among the hoplites) recovered power in 404. Chastened, Athens enacted reforms such as separating laws from decrees, to distinguish between the Assembly’s decision making and officeholders’’ administration, ultimately extending democracy another 80 years. So to test the appellation, the author outlines the processes of voting, administration (financial offices holding much formal power in the 4th century), justice and the courts, and so on. About 6,000 attended the Assembly or the courts, particularly after the introduction of payment for participation. While women were admittedly excluded, he finds slavery was not the basis the city’s economy. Despite its shortcomings – notably the will to power of the 5th-century demos, social excesses such as the Herms affair, imperialism, and susceptibility to demagogues – democratic Athens marked an unprecedented commitment to individual freedom and equality before the law. For Aristotle, too much so: extreme freedom and equality undermine merit and telos. The bigger question is whether such conditions promote or undermine loyalty to the constitution?