- Click here for the article.
Its worth reading. Here are some nuggets from it.
On the nature of American democracy:
- Democracy, of course, means rule by the people. But the devil is in the details. By one count, the number of democracies quintupled in the second half of the twentieth century, but there are freedom-loving and freedom-disdaining democracies. Fareed Zakaria calls the latter "illiberal democracies." Among them are Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Ukraine, and Venezuela.
The number of democratic regimes has grown rapidly in the last several decades, but what has grown is not like American-style democracy. Though most democracies have certain things in common--popular elections, the rule of law, and rights for minorities--we should never suppose that what we hope will appear in the Middle East and elsewhere will look like American government any more than Britain, France, Germany, India, Japan, or Turkey look like us. Recall that American democracy contains some strikingly undemocratic features, such as an Electoral College, two senators for each state regardless of state populations, and an independent judiciary.
On the consequences of separated powers and winner take all elections:
- America was slow to adopt welfare programs, social security, unemployment insurance, and government supported health care, while Europe adopted these policies rapidly. We have kept our tax rate lower than it is in most of Europe. The central difference is not that Europeans are either smarter or dumber than we, but that a parliamentary system permits temporary popular majorities to make bold changes rather quickly, whereas a presidential system with a powerful, independent, and internally divided Congress requires that big changes undergo lengthy debates and substantive accommodations. On occasion America does act like a parliamentary system, as it did under Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression and under Lyndon Johnson when he commanded extraordinary majorities in both houses of Congress.
The system a country uses to elect its rulers also makes a difference. In a recent study, political scientists Torben Iversen and David Soskice have shown that, among 17 large democracies, those that elect their legislators using proportional representation (PR) are three times more likely than those electing them by majority vote to have leftist governments that redistribute income from rich to poor.
On federalism and the states as "laboratories of democracy:"
- When welfare reform began at the national level, it built on new ideas being tried in several states. When limits on aggressive medical malpractice suits began, they came first in states and are only now being considered in Washington. These changes confirm the argument by Justice Louis Brandeis that federalism is valuable because it creates "laboratories of democracy." He was explaining why much good comes from political alternatives. Not only can government choose what to do, people can choose among states where it is done. People who want medical marijuana, tough environmental laws, lenient criminal justice penalties, and alternative life-styles can live in one place; people who prefer the opposites of these can live elsewhere.
On the benefits of not having an established church:
- for most people, religion is a reality, not a dodge. Tocqueville understood that, contrary to the prediction of European philosophers, freedom and enlightenment would not extinguish religious zeal. On the contrary: here freedom largely explains our persistent religiosity.
That is because a nation that never had an established church and did not grant money or privileges to existing churches left religion in the hands of spiritual entrepreneurs. These people were sometimes domestic missionaries and sometimes local citizens eager to create and govern a religious organization. Protestant churches had to compete in a spiritual marketplace, with many new churches emerging every year, people changing their affiliations frequently, and a few mega-churches emerging under the guidance of the most successful ministers. The system of natural liberty that Adam Smith said would benefit the economy has also aided religion.
On the growth of the power of the judiciary:
- . . . it is true that we have, in proportion to our population, three times as many lawyers as does Great Britain and 25 times as many as Japan.
But we are not more litigious because we have more lawyers; we have more lawyers because we are so litigious. Not even the framers of the Constitution anticipated this. As Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist Number 78, "the judiciary…has no influence over either the sword or the purse, no direction of either the strength or the wealth of the society, and can take no active resolution whatever." As a result, "the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power." Things turned out a bit differently than Hamilton supposed. The courts have become immensely powerful for two reasons: the existence of an independent judiciary and the beliefs Americans have about the foundation of their government.
Courts that are independent of the legislative and executive branches will inevitably become the referee that determines when a law or order violates the Constitution. That document did not say this, but it did say that it was the supreme law of the land. That being so, there must be some organization that will defend that claim. Early on, the Supreme Court under the leadership of John Marshall became that entity, and since then no one has doubted it. As the federal government grew in size and authority, more and more issues arose that implicated the Constitution, and so more and more often the Court decided how that document should be read. Since 1789, the Supreme Court has declared more than 160 laws to be unconstitutional.
On what countries can and cannot become democracies:
There are many different kinds of democracy that can be spread, and Americans should never suppose that what may take hold in another country will closely resemble what has grown up here. A few may be illiberal ones, many will be elitist ones, but most will enhance the freedom of their people, change governments peacefully after an election is held, and refrain from the use of force to conquer other nations.
Some Americans are skeptical that democracy can be exported, especially to the Middle East. These countries lack what we had: a successful war against a colonial power, wise statesmen who drafted our Constitution, and a political culture that will sustain democratic authority and protect human freedom. But most nations that have become democracies lack some or all of these traits: there was no revolutionary war, few wise statesmen, and no democratic political culture in France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. England, the nation that became democratic a few decades after the United States was created, did have many helpful precursors: no feudalism, many independent farmers who owned their own land, and an early experience with an independent judiciary. England's former colonies--not only America, but Australia, Canada, India, and New Zealand--became the leading democracies of the world.
But other countries have become democratic despite internal terrorism (France), domestic autocracy (Germany), a weak political culture (Japan), a lack of territorial integrity (Italy) and a Muslim population (Turkey and increasingly Indonesia). The fact that not all democracies (in fact, almost none) will look like ours and that radicalism and despotism will make democratic progress painfully slow in many countries are not arguments against encouraging the spread of democracy; they are only arguments against hoping that our system can be exported intact and that we will see democracy in the most resistant nations in our (or our children's) lifetimes. Though American democracy got off to a good start in 1789, we had to fight a bloody civil war before much more progress could be made.
But we have left a legacy that many people wish to emulate. When people in Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, and Indonesia are asked whether western-style democracy can work in their countries, the overwhelming majority say "yes.
