[Mb-civic] The limits of modern democracy - Anatol Lieven

[Alexander Harper]

 Good article
 AL Baraka

The modern limits of democracy 
By Anatol Lieven
Published: January 11 2005 20:35 | Last updated: January 11 2005 20:35

Every state has to act on the principle that, in the old English legal formulation, "the king can do no wrong" - in other words, that the source of sovereign authority, and indeed national sovereignty itself, cannot commit crimes or be seriously deranged. For to admit otherwise would be to question the integrity of the state itself. When the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that the Communist party and ideology had been guilty of monstrous crimes, the collapse of the Soviet state soon followed. 
>From this point of view, however, there is one thing to be said for the old hereditary monarchical systems: namely, that everyone recognised the pious fiction. Even under autocratic monarchies, no one at heart believed that the monarch could do no wrong, or even had to pretend to believe it in private. This was only required of courtiers attending the monarch - and if the monarch retained some measure of wisdom, he or she did not actually demand such slavishness. It is quite otherwise when the sovereign is a democratic people. Of all unacceptable things in a democracy, the most unacceptable is the idea that the sovereign People may be fundamentally flawed and incapable of wise judgment. 
That the People can do no wrong is no mere legal fiction. In modern democracies, not only do the People impose crushing penalties on politicians who treat them with public disrespect; more importantly, the belief in the basic innocence and wisdom of the People is genuinely and passionately held; so much so that it has come to be almost a fundamental political principle. The People can do no wrong; at most, like kings, they can be misled by wicked advisers. 
This is not a position with which America's founding fathers would have had much sympathy. Overwhelmingly composed of patricians, they had a deep distrust of the passions and ignorance of the mob. The American constitution is full of elements designed to create checks and balances not only against a potentially autocratic executive but against unrestrained majority rule. If institutions like the US electoral college or the Senate itself look undemocratic, it is because they are and were meant to be undemocratic. 
The left of course grew up with a belief in the innate virtues of the masses; but for most of the left's history, this was coupled with a belief that the masses also needed to be educated in order to exercise power responsibly, or at very least to avoid falling prey to the wiles of their capitalist masters. To put it another way, the left believed that the advance of political power for the masses would be and should be combined with growth not only in their education but in their culture, their dignity and self-worth and in their sense of civic responsibility. This was not a paternalistic programme in the spirit of the Victorian middle classes' desire to civilise the masses; but it certainly did not involve a belief that working-class culture should be left in the debased state of early industrialisation. 
One reason why the left believed in education for the masses was in order to escape domination by religious superstition. In recent decades, revival of the teaching of "creationism" in US schools owes a great deal to the democratisation of American society and decline in the cultural hegemony of the elites - a process also symbolised by the voluntary transformation of George W. Bush from a hereditary New England patrician to born-again Texan populist. 
For a literal belief in the Book of Genesis has always been widely present in the American heartland. It only appeared to decline because, from the 1920s to the 1970s, it became mocked among the US elite, and their social power was such that Creationism's proponents were essentially laughed into silence. In the past three decades, by contrast, when laughed at by the elites, they have come back swinging in the name of defending the decent, God-fearing common man against patronisation by the godless and decadent elites. An advance in reason and culture? Hardly. An advance in democracy? Without question. 
For the past generation and more, western democracies have been engaged in a great experiment, with unregulated television and the tabloid press as the chief instruments. We are testing how long liberal democracies can survive if their peoples, like so many hereditary monarchs in the past, become ever more lazy, ignorant and prone to irrational beliefs. Up to now, this has not mattered so much because material prosperity and physical safety have provided a cushion against tendencies to political excess. But the results of the September 11 terrorist attacks should be an early warning in this regard. God help the political system in which a thoroughly addled sovereign is faced with a real crisis. 
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